Books, Arts & Manners

Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era By Zbigniew Brzezinski Viking, 350 pp., $7.95 Three years ago, when Zbigniew Brzezinski and I were serving as honorably underpaid “resource persons” to a week-long seminar of millionaires gathered at Aspen, Colorado to ski and cerebrate, he began sending up trial balloons for this book. Brzezinski (hereafter ZB) was then one of LBJ’s Policy Planning Counselors, so a few of his aerostats were concerned with how his mob was going to salvage the cities.

They were exquisite Montgolfieran balloons from the edge of the Enlightenment, riots of flamboyant intellectual color painted in bewilderingly intricate fiscal patterns on a background of pale pink, trailing ribbons of such captivating idealism that I was actually reaching into my pocket to contribute five dollars toward the millennium, when I realized that these balloons were rising aloft on hot air and several hundreds of billions of tax dollars. “Zbiggy,” I said gently (we called him Zbiggy), “You’re overlooking something. You folks ain’t gonna be in office come next election to do any of this stuff.”

JG

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John Greenway

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Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era By Zbigniew Brzezinski Viking, 350 pp., $7.95 Three years ago, when Zbigniew Brzezinski and I were serving as honorably underpaid “resource persons” to a week-long seminar of millionaires gathered at Aspen, Colorado to ski and cerebrate, he began sending up trial balloons for this book. Brzezinski (hereafter ZB) was then one of LBJ’s Policy Planning Counselors, so a few of his aerostats were concerned with how his mob was going to salvage the cities.

They were exquisite Montgolfieran balloons from the edge of the Enlightenment, riots of flamboyant intellectual color painted in bewilderingly intricate fiscal patterns on a background of pale pink, trailing ribbons of such captivating idealism that I was actually reaching into my pocket to contribute five dollars toward the millennium, when I realized that these balloons were rising aloft on hot air and several hundreds of billions of tax dollars. “Zbiggy,” I said gently (we called him Zbiggy), “You’re overlooking something. You folks ain’t gonna be in office come next election to do any of this stuff.”