January 2011

“It was like a science fiction movie—,” wrote the late curator and art critic Henry Geldzahler, “you Pop artists in different parts of the city, unknown to each other, rising up out of the muck and staggering forward with your paintings in front of you.” Geldzahler’s lines, with their playful lugubriousness, were apt. When the innovators of pop embarked on their mature work, much of which was uncannily similar and all of which explored the same terrain—American consumer culture—almost none knew what any of the others were doing, or even that they existed. Pop arose spontaneously, an authentic movement, an organic response to new realities.

The St. Johns County Visitors & Convention Bureau offers visitors countless pamphlets on St. Augustine (800-OLD-CITY or 904-829-1711 or www.visitoldcity.com ). Some of them reflect the city’s history as an early tourist attraction (“The World’s Original Alligator Farm,” founded in 1893, and “The First Permanent Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” which dates from 1950). You’ll find several “oldests,” like the Oldest Store Museum, the Oldest Wooden Schoolhouse, and the Oldest House.

As for the fountain of youth, don’t expect miracles. Over the centuries the imagined site of the mythic waters has shown up in several parts of town. The present location was “discovered” in 1909 by Louella Day McConnell, who had lived in the Yukon and claimed to be the poet Robert Service’s “lady that’s known as Lou.”

In mid-December of 1999, a grand hotel in St. Augustine, Florida, opened its doors for the first time since 1932. It was originally called the Casa Monica; then, with an early change of ownership, it became the Cordova. Now once again the Casa Monica, it has been renovated to the tune of millions of dollars by Richard Kessler, an entrepreneur who specializes in hotels with a history. Last winter, almost as soon as I came across a brochure promoting the sprawling Moorish fantasy of towers and battlements, I was on my way.

Marvin Minsky, the head of the artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT, proclaimed in I 1967 that “within a generation the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will be substantially solved.” He was cocky enough to add, “Within 10 years computers won’t even keep us as pets.” Around the same time, Herbert Simon, another prominent computer scientist, promised that by 1985 “machines will be capable of doing any work that a man can do.”

That’s hardly what they’re saying nowadays. By 1982, Minsky was admitting, “The AI problem is one of the hardest science has ever undertaken.” And a recent roundtable of leading figures in the field produced remarks like, “AI as science moves very slowly, revealing what the problems are and why all the plausible mechanisms are inadequate,” and “Today, it is hard to see how we would have missed the vast complexities.” How did we come—or retreat—so far?

Edward Heath, Britain’s prime minister from 1970 to 1974, recently announced that he intended to retire from the House of Commons after serving there for more than 50 years, half of them after he was prime minister. Such lingering is unheard of these days in the United States, and no doubt the departure of William Jefferson Clinton from the White House will evoke continuing editorial lamentations about how we, as a nation, tend to squander the experience and sagacity of our former Presidents (as well as lamentations from the other side about any political involvement he does maintain). The fact is, though, that men who have run the greatest power in the world like to be in charge, not merely whispering advice.

No, in recent years the accepted procedure for former Presidents has been to retire to the archives their friends, their admirers, and the American taxpayers help them construct and there compose memoirs justifying what they have done in office. We can expect Bill Clinton to do the same—provided, of course, that he escapes indictment.

The parallels are obvious. Both men are the same-named sons of single-term Presidents who had served eight years as Vice President, and both won controversial elections against candidates from Tennessee. Is George W. Bush the next John Quincy Adams? If so, it’s good news for Al Gore, since the losing candidate in the 1824 election, Gen. Andrew Jackson, got his revenge the next time around. A closer look, however, suggests that Bush is much closer in spirit to Jackson, and Gore to Adams.

A popular anti-Adams slogan in both the 1824 and 1828 campaigns was, “John Quincy Adams, he can write / Andrew Jackson, he can fight.” George W. Bush has shown no great talent for either of these things, while Al Gore, as an Army journalist in Vietnam, arguably did both. Still, the slogan highlights something that has remained true of presidential elections since our modern two-party system coalesced around Jackson: A regular guy, real or fake, will beat an egghead every time.