…Disneyland’s Tomorrowland-of-yesterday for The Atlantic and asks whatever happened to the human imagination.

That’s close to something I’ve been asking for a long time: Whatever happened to the future?

The two are highly intertwined, as O’Rourke’s essay implies. Without a working imagination, an individual or a society can’t foresee a compelling vision of tomorrow, let alone implement it.

This situation goes far beyond mere theme-park attractions, beyond the unending post-apocalyptic cliches in novels and movies.

You could see this utopia-deficiency among those liberals and radicals who spent the 27 years prior to this past year conveniently moping that everything was going to hell and nothing could really be done about it so why bother.

You could see it among those conservatives and business hustlers who spent the same years propagating a social zeitgeist of I-got-mine-screw-you.

And it ties in with a current project of mine.

I’m in the process of writing a futuristic story, in the form of a graphic-novel script. It’s a simple story, but it’s set in a complex world. Its setting is a future America that’s neither utopia nor dystopia, in which machines have progressed and the environment’s been “saved” and many other things have happened, but in which individual humans are just as fallible and their social structures just as imperfect as ever (albeit “different” in many intriguing ways).

When I’ve told people about it, I’ve had to repeatedly explain to them that my particular story’s “back story” includes no apocalyptic event between our “now” and the characters’ “now.” No nuclear wars, no eco-catastrophes, no corporate-military coups, no alien invasions, no mass genetic mutations.

It’s as if we’d lost the very ability to imagine an Earth on which things just happen, at their own various paces, with various results, with which people learn to live.