#6 "The Future" -- Don

“We are living in the future; I'll tell you how I know.  I read it in the paper fifteen years ago.” – John Prine

“And all this science I don't understand; it's just my job five days a week, a rocket man.” – Elton John

When I was a kid, one of my favorite cartoons was The Jetsons.  The Jetsons, which debuted in the fall of 1962, came as a response to Hanna-Barbera’s previous success with The Flintstones, which hit primetime TV two years earlier. While The Flintstones was basically a version of Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners set in a mythic prehistoric past when humans and dinosaurs lived together at the same time (not only did humans never coexist with dinosaurs, people never kept wild boars under their sinks to use as garbage disposals neither – but I digress), The Jetsons was basically a futuristic reworking of the comic strip Blondie.  Like Dagwood, George Jetson was a family man who worked for a short, tyrannical, temperamental boss who fired him regularly but never seemed to put him out of work for very long.   What made The Jetsons fun to watch was the technology the writers and animators imagined a typical American middle-class family would have a hundred years into the future (the series was ostensibly set in the year 2062).

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t want people to think that my life has been a huge disappointment, but as I look ahead at the approaching decade when I spend the next ten years in my 50’s, I just want to say, “Dang, where’s my rocketcar?”  If there’s a general melancholy of people from my generation, it’s probably because we all grew up with the expectation that long before now we’d all have our own personal spaceships to zoom around in. 

It doesn’t matter how infeasible this idea is – even if Ford or Toyota were able to crank out little flying cars that we could all afford without selling a kidney, we’d still all end up crashing into each other at lethal speeds; egad, people can’t even figure out how to navigate the new roundabout in Athens and it comes with signs painted on the ground.  Nonetheless, I think most people my age had the genuine expectation when we were kids that by the time we reached adulthood, we’d all have The Jetson’s spacecar hovering in our driveways (or, at the very least, a James Bond style backpack in our closet that we could strap on and whoosh off to work).

Perhaps it’s my generation’s disappointment over the flying car that has tarnished how we feel about the “gee-whiz” technology that really has come along during our lifetimes.  Back in the 70’s when I was in junior high, none of us would have imagined that someday we’d all be carrying around phones the size of candy bars that we could use not just to call anyone from anywhere but that we could also use as portable jukeboxes, video cameras, calculators, newspapers, encyclopedias, cookbooks, mail-order catalogs, flea markets, game arcades, and global positioning units (and I’ll stop there, currently more than a quarter of a million iPhone apps are now available from Apple’s iTunes store).  And yet, even with this amazing cornucopia of technology at our fingertips, people my age are still not overly excited by it because, when you get right down to it, we’re not going to be satisfied until we get the flying cars we were promised when we were seven.

And now, youngsters, lean in closer because I’m going to tell you a secret.  My generation’s dissatisfaction with technology goes well beyond our disappointment over the whole flying car business due to something dreadful that happened to us back in the 1980s.  As young adults, everyone who is close to my age learned to mistrust the bright promise of new electronics when in mass, (almost simultaneously) every single one of us was made to feel like an idiot because we could not get our VCRs to stop blinking 12:00.  I have no hard data to back up this theory, but I imagine vast fortunes were created for the lucky individuals who invested in all the duct tape the rest of us used to cover up that relentless, blinking 12:00, 12:00, 12:00.

And now it can be told; the younger generation can know my generation’s deepest, darkest secret: duct tape doesn’t just fix everything, it also hides our shame.  For those of you who grew up in the 90’s and who wondered why every VCR you ever came across at the Goodwill store had a little patch of grey tape over where the clock should be, now you know: that endless blinking 12:00 wasn’t just a green LCD version of Chinese water torture, it was an entire generation’s refusal to admit that we actually needed that manual we threw away when we first opened the box.

Don’t be surprised, Dear Readers, if I’m not here next week; it’s only a matter of time before the AARP sends out one of their Death Squads to deal with me for finally revealing the whole blinking VCR secret to the younger generation.  I only hope when their thugs do arrive that I have the stamina to outrun their Hoverrounds®. 

Notice, by the way, how insidious the manufacturers of these scooters were in naming their motorized chairs “The Hoverround.”  They don’t hover.  They roll around on wheels.  Do you see what I mean?  Some dreams just won’t die even if we do.

When I’ve finally shaken off this mortal coil and drawn my last breath, if by some miracle I find myself on the right side of The Pearly Gates, I hope no one is offended when I tell them that I don’t want a pair of angel wings.  I want a Jetsonmobile!  Zoom! Zoom! Amen!

Olivia says:

I'm not going to lie, Dad.  I wish you had a flying car too. 

And also, I feel your loss, but perhaps on a smaller scale.

Ellie use to watch the Disney channel a lot when we were younger.  I would join her mostly for the movies.  Ellie loved a movie called Zenon: Girl of the 21st century.  There was a sequel too, I think.  (Wiki-research informs me that there was a third one too.  Ellie, did you know about this??)

Anyway, Zenon always gets into these space hijinks. And we all know space-hijinks are the best.  She wore cool space clothes, and her bedroom on the space station was extra cool because it was built not only for convenience but for practicality so everything had a cool compartment.  This is pretty much all I remember about this film. 

But the reason why I feel robbed is that I can no longer just enjoy technology aesthetically.  I can't look at ridiculous space shoes and think, "That's just cool."

Not that there was any effort to include realism, but Zenon's world was set in 2050.  And having seen 2010, I have different expectations.

Even watching Minority Report, which is among my favorite films, I notice techology flaws and suddenly I'm less impressed.  At least a little bit.

Sigh.

By the way, you crack me up, as always.