2010: In An Odd Space

We went out to dinner last night (I'll tell you about that later) and got back home, undressed and in bed in time to see the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I haven't seen that movie in over twenty years and didn't really see it then.  We had smoked a jay before going in to the theater and midway in the movie HAL's soft voice lulled me to sleep.  Kind of reminds me of song lyrics, "Got stoned and I missed it."  Last night I just had some red wine to slightly dull the senses so I was awake for the entire movie, commercial free.

It is a great movie with a superb sound track, 
but last night the movie affected me in a disturbing way.  I first saw 2001 in 1968 not too long after it came out.  Last night it struck me as bizarre that a 1968 movie was portraying events taking place thirty-three years into the future, and there I was last night watching events unfold that were nine years in my past.  It certainly can't be argued that Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick were way ahead of their time, but what about the here and now?  

We still haven't caught up with the technology depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  What is even more disturbing, especially after watching and listening to the hate filled protests taking place all across our country, is that we don't appear to be all that much farther ahead of those head bashing hairy apes at the beginning of the movie.  The screeching and grunting that took place around the watering hole reminded me so much of the less-than-peaceful demonstrations we have seen on TV and read about in the papers.

The wild west mentality of those gun toting "patriots" is another sign that we are going back in time, not moving forward.  And, where the hell is Wyatt Earp when you need him?  This country has got to be a joke to the rest of the world and makes the movie Idiocracy seem like a portent of our future.  America, Land of the Dumbed-down.