Where's My Food-A-Rac-A-Cycle?

Let me just say, I don't want this to be the anti-Fox News, anti-Glenn Beck blog. I have no desire to be that guy. For one thing, I don't know any of those Fox guys personally, and I'm sure they're perfectly decent people in real life (or, ya know, not). Also, I fully realize that I don't have to watch anything on TV I don't like and nobody's forcing me to sit through Glenn's rants. Sometimes though, I just feel like Fox is baiting me.

Just a little while ago, during a Monday Night Football commercial, I flipped briefly over to the Hannity Hysteria Hour. I didn't stay long, but in the short amount of time I was there, I heard Sean bitching about how President Obama has yet to do a lot of the stuff that Sean doesn't want him to do. Just before that, Dick Morris was out from under his bridge, lurking around the studio, and he and Sean were both complaining about the President sending more troops to Afghanistan. Of course, if the President had decided to not send more troops to Afghanistan, both of these guys would have set themselves on fire. But somehow, President Obama doing exactly what these two wanted him to do is still a valid reason for the usual whining and general contempt.

As usual though, nothing beats Beck. He's the Shakespeare of incoherence. Last Wednesday, I came home from work and flipped around the news networks a little before I started my long weekend. As is his usual custom, Mr. Beck was on the verge of tears while waxing poetic about America's founders. In about 20 minutes, Glenn's show progressed in the following way.

First, when I got there, he was on some sort of nonsense about the myth of separation of church and state. I don't want to go into a whole thing on this, so I'll just say, if you think you can avoid laws respecting an establishment of religion, as Glenn's buddies the founders said we have to, without keeping religion separate from the state, then you might be what I'd call "reality challenged".

It seemed I'd stumbled into the middle of one of Glenn's tangential adventures, because the topic of the show didn't have anything to do with church and state. Eventually we got back to his point, which was property rights. First, Glenn pointed out how smart the founders were to replace property in the Declaration of Independence with the pursuit of happiness. Once again, Glenn's assertion is that the founders' strategy of ignoring slavery and hoping it would go away was genius. I also enjoyed how Glenn was able to talk for basically the whole show about how important the founders thought property rights were without ever mentioning how they screwed the people who already lived here out of all their land. I'm sure this was an oversight on Glenn's part. Glenn wouldn't ever willfully omit the fact that the founders weren't so wild about property rights for people who had, let's say, a certain lack of whiteness.

So what do Fox's usual adventures into fantasy land have to do with food-a-rac-a-cycles? Two things, we'll get back to the second one in a minute. But first, Glenn's ranting about our founders reminded me that independence was our first big, bold idea as a country. It was a good idea and it turned out pretty well, but it took some courage at the time, it's not like winning the war was a slam dunk. Since then, you can follow a series of big ideas through the timeline of America. The story of our bold advances is the story of our nation, and this brings me to the Jetsons.

I feel like my generation was implicitly promised, by the Jetsons, a great, technologically advanced future. As best I can remember, the Jetsons lived in a big building on top of a giant pole. I don't remember anyone in that show ever using the ground for anything (looking back, this was probably the result of some kind of matrix-style catastrophe that blocked the sun below the clouds, but I didn't think of things like that when I was six, so it just seemed cool). How awesome would a groundless society be?

The Jetsons also had a robot maid. I know we have robots now, but Rosie, the Jetsons' maid, she had wheels. When I see robots on the news, they rarely have wheels, and a maid on wheels is much better. Also, Rosie was sassy, these robots we have now aren't sassy.

Most importantly, the Jetsons had a food-a-rac-a-cycle. George could go up to a machine in his apartment, push some buttons or whatever (I don't remember exactly, sorry, it was like 25 years ago) and it would just give him what he wanted. How cool is that? Jane must have had to buy ingredients for it or something, why else would George have had to put up with Mr. Spacely? Still though, how great would it be to just walk up to a machine in your apartment and order whatever you wanted. I know, Star Trek had even better food technology, and I'd love to be a guy on a star ship, but we're taking baby steps here.

I also remember flying cars, and there was a lot going on with sprockets and cogs. My point is, I was promised a cool future. So, where's my bold new advancement? Where's my big new thing? The internet, you say? Bleh. I have a confession, I'm not a big fan of porn. Some people are, and for them, the internet is better than a whole garage full of flying cars, but not me. For me, the internet is just a convenient way to take work home (and do this, but if I didn't have a blog, I'd probably just make my co-workers listen to my rambling).

Cell phones? Double bleh. When I was a kid, people could leave their houses and be left alone for a while. Now? People expect you to be constantly available. I continue to assert that cell phones, while they're useful sometimes, are really more of an annoyance then anything else. And really that's it. That's what we got. Where's my flying car? Where's my jetpack? Where's my awesome machine that makes whatever food I want?

I'm sure there are a lot of perfectly sane reasons why we don't have these things. For example, I know that jetpacks have actually been invented, they're just incredibly dangerous and use a ridiculous amount of fuel. Still, I am not satisfied with these excuses, my cup is less than full, and I think it starts with leadership. In 1960, President Kennedy said to the nation "hey, I'm gonna get these science nerds together and they're gonna put someone on the moon by 1970." I may be paraphrasing. My point is, Kennedy said it, and then it happened. This is the kind of bold idea I'm talking about. It starts with a difficult goal, but we find a way to reach it, and in the process, we make other discoveries and advances. Eventually, I get to have steak in my apartment without having to, ya know, know how to cook a steak.

Where's the leadership now? I recently read somewhere that President Obama wants to promise an 83% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. Why not just promise a 13 billion percent reduction in carbon emissions by the year 3900? And anyway, who gets excited about reducing carbon emissions? I want to hear some political leader demand that we cure cancer by 2015, or build a working nuclear fusion reactor by 2020 (and by working I mean it both powers stuff and doesn't annihilate us. Is this even possible? Probably not, but people didn't think the moon was possible either, that's sort of my point). Or how about just saying we're going to Mars by the end of the next decade?

I'm not hearing the bold ideas from our leaders. And you know whose fault it is? Yours (caught you off guard there, didn't I?). It's my fault too, it's all of our faults. If President Obama stood up at January's state of the union address and announced that we're sending people to Mars by 2020, here's what would happen. First, the news media would mock him and say he needs to worry about the economy and jobs and security. Then the Republicans would latch onto that message and make it part of the 2012 campaign. Then, enough of us would fall for it and the President wouldn't get re-elected. The other option would be for the President to drop the idea and never mention it again. This is what happened when George W. Bush said he wanted to send people to Mars. He got made fun of, he saw polls that said people want him to focus on other stuff, and he never mentioned it again.

This where Fox comes back in. We get the quality of journalism we deserve. Fox exists because enough of us watch (myself included). In a democracy, we also get the government we deserve. We have to be willing to believe that our leaders can focus on more than one thing at a time. We have to let them do big, abstract things without accusing them of ignoring the smaller, more concrete things that effect us everyday. We have to be willing to let our leaders reach for bold goals and fail sometimes without bitching about it and electing someone else.

I think, if President Obama wanted to point us to Mars, he wouldn't say anything, because it wouldn't poll well while the economy's in the toilet. And I think it's a shame, because it's hard to make amazing new advances when you're not trying to do anything that requires amazing new advances. I don't want a newer, smaller cell phone that does more stuff other than make phone calls, I just want a damn food machine, and maybe a jetpack.