Olaf Stapledon And Governor Sanford

Olaf Stapledon wrote a book called Last and First Men. It covers the history of man from the end of World War I to about 100 million years into the future. I came across it when I was in grade school, and it blew me away. It included man's concept of the Holy even as it moved through the centuries; most works of fiction that deal with such future fantasies do not, or they handle religious sentiments as being the same as something we are already familiar with from our take on history - only sent into the future.

You may think this my peculiar interest; you may think, ah, there he goes again with that spirituality guff. However, spirituality was much on the mind of a 13 year old who had just entered puberty, and who wondered if his relatively safe and minor sensual pleasures were sins of the greatest magnitude.

As I stood before the gates of adulthood, I was not well counselled as to the legitimacy of my feelings, my impulses, and the religious implications of my actions. The book was prefaced by someone who mentioned that even though Stapledon had gotten the history immediately after World War I wrong - say the era from 1920 to the then present; somewhere in the 1950's - the book was still a magnificent diorama of history, and blah-blah-blah. In the book, Stapledon has a US President, who happens to be the top world leader, head of some vast international comity of nations - League of Nations type thing - have an affair with a Eurasian beauty on some tropic isle.
Of course, the puritanical streak of America howls for his head, while the rest of the world finds this weakness makes the President more human, and therefore, more likable - he being one of those stiff, D.C. types, awash in privilege, money and power.

The President turns the affair to his advantage by saying his affair made him more aware of the complexity of all humankind in all its various races and creeds and types. His affair, instead of rendering him unfit, actually was a kind of baptism which made him more able than any other man to be the world-wide President.

Now, consider how Governor Sanford could have played his long distance Argentinian affair: something like the above, something about links with Hispanic culture, any number of things. But we get the same old crap. In five years, he'll be scrounging around, looking for action, seeking another dismally tawdry affair - closer to home, though, than Argentina. Stapledon also traced the downfall of this world. The First Men - of whom we are - essentially exhausted all hydrocarbon fuels by aviation. They had normal air transport, plus an unusual amount of religious ritual aviation. First Man fell because he ran out of fuel. Back to the Stone Age. I always thought Stapledon was spot on, Mr. Preface-writing-hack.