TOO JADED? A stop in Spokane prompted a question about world's fairs. Virginia Postrel has the answer.

Americans long ago consigned world’s fairs to the toy box of history. Once celebrated as showcases of world cultures and windows into the future, these grand expositions lost their glamour sometime during the Johnson administration. Like Space Food Sticks and Jonny Quest, they are fondly remembered — at least by those over 50 — but a bit ridiculous: all that ethnocentricism, naive internationalism, and technological good cheer. The last one to warrant much attention was Montreal’s Expo ’67, from which the now-defunct baseball team took its name. (Sorry, Seville ’92.) Our cynical culture is done with world’s fairs.

The essay continues, though, by suggesting that prospertity, not cynicism, is the cause.

The more affluent, well-traveled, and media-saturated the audience, the harder it is to impress. World’s fairs are designed for people from homogeneous cultures who are still impressed by electricity and foreigners. In 2010, that means the Chinese.

With a fair in progress in Shanghai. For those of us with disposable income, electricity and foreigners are a mouse click and a Fed Ex box away.

The second draw is cool stuff: the celebration of recent material advances and a glimpse of those to come. In the words of those who organized the Century of Progress world’s fair in Chicago in 1933, expos try to “tear away the veil that shrouds the future.” Over the years, world’s fairs have introduced visitors to such new technologies as neon lights, x-ray machines, nylon, television, and various robots, not to mention ice cream cones and Belgian waffles.

They’ve also reminded visitors how far living standards have risen. In its famous 1964 Carousel of Progress (later relocated to Disneyland), General Electric depicted vignettes of American homes from the 1880s, before electric conveniences, concluding with a gadget-filled contemporary Christmas. In Shanghai, the Chinese and Irish pavilions make the same point with the same basic technique, walking visitors through Chinese living rooms from 1978 to 2008 and Irish kitchens from rural farmhouse to luxurious urban home. The scenes may show the past, but they portend a better future — what the Carousel of Progress song called a “Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.” For Chinese fairgoers, as for earlier generations of Americans, the gee-whiz enthusiasm that cynics dismiss as naiveté is actually a rational response to recent experience.

That vibrant future, however, was planned, rationalized, top-down (much as the arrangement of exhibits on the midway is). As far as the Carousel of Progress, there was something sad about the 1960s vintage home, in which Mom and Dad and the kids had all sorts of General Electric appliances, but they'd packed the grandparents, who, as residents of the earlier vintage homes, delivered a line about things being as good as they ever could get, setting up the appliance commercial in the final act.

Here the [Shanghai] Expo betrays another reason Americans gave up on world’s fairs. Their vision of progress started to seem both socially obnoxious and empirically false.

Twentieth-century expositions increasingly embodied fashionable ideas of social planning. They came to stand for a controlled and predictable version of progress: the dream of a civilization built from scratch, designed — or at least rearranged — according to an expert ideal of order. Or as the Century of Progress motto put it, “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.”

General Motors’s Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair turned this idea into a seductive and memorable experience, as visitors soared over a miniature world of superhighways and high-rise, self-contained cities. “No matter what I had heard about the Futurama,” recalls the protagonist of E.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair, “nothing compared with seeing it for myself: all the small moving parts, all the lights and shadows, the animation, as if I were looking at the largest most complicated toy ever made! . . . It was a toy that any child in the world would want to own. You could play with it forever.” The Futurama was enticing because visitors never considered what it might feel like to be someone else’s toy.

That vision did give America interstate highways and a trip to the moon. But it also sparked a backlash. In the 1960s, the New Left and the Goldwater Right, hippies and hackers, personal liberation movements and historic preservationists all rebelled against the tyranny of expertise. Within a few years, Robert Moses, the New York infrastructure and planning czar who ran the 1964 World’s Fair, had gone from city-building hero to neighborhood-wrecking villain.

Suffice it to say there is no Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution stop on the Carousel of Progress. Note also that the 1964-1965 Futurama was not that much different from its 1939 incarnation. Was General Motors going stale even then?