New year's Devolution

by Aaron Wells

Copy editor

1-30-2001 Sagebrush

It's 2001. Where the hell is my hover-car?

No hover-cars. No computers that talk like therapists. No shining graphite and chrome wheels in space populated by skinny people in red spandex. No hard-on pills.

Well, okay, we do have hard-on pills. The guys with lab coats and glasses full of foaming neon green liquid did manage to come through on that. But in between all their designing of hard-on pills, allergy pills, mice with human ears growing on their backs, electronic networks for the distribution of pornography and mutant fruit flies, would it have been too much to ask for a simple hover-car?

It's 2001, and already the year's disappointing. Neither this year nor last did the world bother to come to an end, despite a growing demand for apocalypse. One clear sign that the end should be near is that they can't think of anything more to put on TV. Jackass, Survivor, Temptation Island? They don't even have actors. They're just real people, doing real stuff. What next, a channel with nothing but 7-11 surveillance cameras?

And still, no hover-cars! Not only are we without hover-cars, we're having trouble just supplying electricity to California! California, the high-tech capital of the US, and we can't keep it in juice. I feel like I'm in 1910, for God's sake.

2001, and the disenfranchised hover-car-less masses of the earth are taking revenge on the eggheads by passing Frankenstein Laws against biotech. Maybe when I was watching 2001, they were watching Omega Man, or Gattaca, or Earth Girls Are Easy, or just TNN. Sure there are environmental risks, but isn't it worth it to grow mice that don't have to have ears spliced onto their backs, who just grow them naturally? And what about those six-legged frogs created by pesticides back in the 1980s? Don't you want to see just how many legs we can get them up to? Imagine playing Frogger with a 20-legged frog. This, too, can be possible, with biotech.

It's 2001, and the vast majority of frogs still have to make due with two legs. For the next year I'll be walking on two legs also, in protest.

2001, and the world stubbornly refuses to end. No second comings of Jesus, despite both the start of the millennium in 2000 and the real start of the millennium this year. No earth-shattering asteroids despite dozens of made-for-TV movies on the subject. No killer plagues despite millions of genetically-altered yellow-corn taco shells consumed by innocent Taco Bell patrons. Sure, there were some allergic reactions, but, come on, that's hardly the 99% population extermination we've all been eagerly hoping for.

And no nuclear devastation. Like a lazy student putting off writing that big essay until finally it's too late, both sides of the Cold War kept procrastination on launching the missiles, until we woke up one morning and realized that the Berlin Wall had come down. We tried to get Iraq to do it, but the most deadly thing to come out of the Gulf War was CNN. Now we're supposed to expect it from the lazy governments of China and South Korea? The only way it'll happen is if we do it ourselves, but President Bush Jr. is spending more money on fictional anti-missile satellites than on the missiles themselves. It seems we'll have to sit through another 2000 years of human history most likely, and even then the world will probably still be here, and TV programming will have gotten so bad that they'll probably bring John Ridder back to life just so they can put Three's Company back on the air.

And I bet we still won't have any hover-cars.