It’s 2012. Our governments and their tentacular appendages are the effective analog of socialized cancer. Our educational systems have been reduced to a kind of stumbling zombie-production factory. Our military and justice systems are cruel, inhuman, rapaciously greedy, and unthinkably powerful. Our commerce and technologies are dehumanizing poisons, and our environmental activity is reducing the planet to a seething bed of toxic assassination. 70% of the people you know will get cancer. Maybe more. Obtaining skillful medical attention is the privilege of the wealthy, and the lost dream of the common citizen. Our taxes feed the demons that consume our lives and hope.

Along with this, common human intelligence is plummeting, and most Americans cannot speak the single language they were infected with at birth. Oh, and our ‘space programs’ are like something they write jokes for late-night talk-show hosts about.

This is the future we dreamt of in our youth. And it’s a bleeding nightmare of cruelty, agony, terror, and hubristic misapprehension. Small wonder that many look to religious ghosts, dead cultures and aliens for salvation. The chances of us assembling any ourselves appear functionally nil.