In 1982, Donald Fagan, of the rock band Steely Dan, released a solo album entitled The Nightfly. The lead track is a catchy tune entitled "I.G.Y. (International Geophysical Year)." The song lyrics depict a buoyant, optimistic view of technology, progress, and patriotism in the late 1950s, with references to space travel, Spandex, undersea high speed rail, and solar power. The songs is a dream about dreams. Here is a video montage. Fagan wrote in the liner notes of The Nightfly "The songs on this album represent certain fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city during the late fifties and early sixties, i.e., one of my general height, weight and build." The world of Fagan's young dreamer is that of Walt Disney's Tomorrowland. 
As the second part of the song title indicates, I.G.Y. stands for International Geophysical Year, 1957-1958. It was an international scientific effort funded by the independent International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). A good history of the I. G. Y. can be found here. The goal of I.G.Y. was to allow scientists to engage in coordinated observations of earth and space, in an apolitical, nonnationalistic, and purely scientific fashion.
The late 1950s were, at least for this young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city, a time of technological dreams and of a nationalistic optimism; he sings of the "Stars and Stripes," American toughness, and of the coming bicentennial. (Full lyrics are here)
Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we'll be A.O.K.
(chorus) What a beautiful world this will be, what a glorious time to be free
In a later verse, Fagan writes:
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young.
I love this song, both for the catchy music and arrangement, and for its American optimism. But I also find it poignant and rather sad, particularly in light of what the song ignores, the Cold War and the deadliness of the "greatest" technological invention, the atomic bomb, and for the Faustian bargain we continue to make with technology, as oil pollutes our Gulf Coast.
To begin, the Cold War. I first heard this song in 1982, when I was 21 years old and a young private (U.S. Army) stationed in what was then West Germany. I loved the song for the same reasons I do now. At the time, however, I had no idea what I.G.Y stood for, and I don't remember caring. My comrades and I lived the Cold War everyday. We were poised for war. We had monthly alerts, and while we expected them, we were never really completely sure that Ivan wasn't invading from the East. Our mission was to prevent the Soviet bad guys bursting through the Iron Curtain and destroying Democracy, Capitalism, and the American Way. We were trained to fight and even supposedly to survive "Nuclear, Biological and Chemical" warfare, although we joked that if we did see a mushroom cloud, we would "put our heads between our legs and kiss our asses goodbye." The Cold War was very real to me as a young soldier, so real it felt natural, the given way of the world. Even now, as I stand at the brink of my fifth decade, the geopolitical changes of the past 25 or so years simply take my breath a way. The world I was socialized into as a very young adult simply does not exist anymore. Military service in a potential theater of war, even in times of non-combat, is an experience difficult to explain to others. Sometimes I feel like a refugee of history. Fagan's dream hadn't come true in 1982, and it certainly hasn't come true now.
The Cold War was well underway by the start of the International Geophysical Year, 1957, yet the young dreamer in Fagan's song doesn't mention it. It would be a five years until the Cuban missile crisis would bring the possibility of mass human extinction by nuclear technology crashing on the heads of the American people. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson made political hay of the fear of nuclear war with his Peace Little Girl (Daisy) campaign ad. But back in 1957, during the International Geophysical Year, Americans were shocked out of their complacency about American technological superiority when the Soviet Union launched the first human-created satellite, Sputnik I, in October of that year. Sputnik I was followed by Sputnik II, carrying the first living earth creature, the doomed canine Laika, only three weeks later. Guess what. The Reds have rockets, too, and they know how to use them. The Soviets launched Sputniks I and II during the I.G.Y. intentionally, as a strategic move in the Cold War, belaying the nonnationalistic and apolitical nature of I.G.Y.
Looking back from the second decade of the third millennium, the Nightfly's dream has not come true, and I don't believe it will. Technology has not brought about a wonderful world. Yes, we do have Spandex, and yes, we do have undersea rail, (even if it is not from New York to Paris but under the English Channel). We have computers, but they are not "just machines to make big decisions, programmed by fellows with compassion and vision." We are not eternally free and eternally young. And as oil washes up from a blown oil well onto the shores of Louisiana, we are obviously not clean.
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