Gone are the days when smart grey-haired Gods in white lab coats would invade our hopeful imaginations with unthinkable possibilities. Erased are the moments when American ingenuity would promise to make our lives more like the Jetsons by the millennium’s arrival — a daily collage of engineered genius which would make all of our cups runeth over with trademarks and patents. Evaporated are the hopes that vehicular innovation would be born from the industrial smog of Detroit, and automobiles would emerge from their wheels, taking to the sky by the impulse of sheer design.

Here are the days of needless iPhones with infinite apps, tired locomotives that barely procure energy from diesel and neighborhood power-lines, an electrical grid in national disgrace, and mammograms that at best, get it wrong most of the time.

We’d be kidding ourselves to think that 2009 is as we have always imagined it: a serpent struggling to shed the skin of the industrial revolution. It is an omen that warns of death to the American imagination, something we just cannot afford to outsource.

While we hiss and moan at the era that threatens the great subsidization of health care, we come to the global stage half-way empty-handed — trillions of dollars and nothing to show for it. We bring no cures for cancer, AIDS, or diabetes; no stem cells for the stolen limbs of Walter Reeds’ almost fallen; no restoration of wetlands for New Orleans; and no plan B for alternative energy.

With the Maglev in Shanghai and the TGV in France, we settle for the Acela as if it is the best we can do, shrugging our shoulders at the unionized chain gang whose labor goes undervalued with the decay of the rails.

We’ve still not yet amended the laws of physics, barely securing cloture for magnetic levitation, propelling ourselves from destination to destination by the graces of friction atop pavement with dotted lines, on batteries that cannot outlast their first wind. Our fried mainframes muse of their anti-biodegradability, soaking in the acid of a landfill, promising to never decompose.

Somewhere in the laboratories of Merck, around the hallway of increased profit margins, and beyond the foyer of marketability, the Southeast Asian accent of innovation is being masked away in the syringes of Gardasil, where all rights are continually reserved and illness masquerading as medicine lies beneath the lens of a microscope. It is why India answers our 1-800 calls when we’re in the mood for a little customer service and product solution. It is why Bangladesh returns our 24-hour client support e-mails. It is why Sri Lanka revises the service manuals in our club-compartments. America cannot do it.

Women who run many miles a year, wearing hues of pink around the halos of their chest, huff and puff in disappointment and defeat, because after years of research, we only know how to kill the tumors by waging a war on their breast tissues with chemo and radiation — the consequence of many false-positives, a kink we were never able to iron out.

Yes, gone are the days where resting on the laurel of a past medical breakthrough was forbidden. Erased are those years where invention and creativity were met with praise and gratitude. Evaporated are those moments of real home-grown patriotism, where one’s love for country was spawned by the promise of modernism and cutting-edge progression.

No wonder we are uninspired.

Popularity: 2% [?]