A few days ago, we were celebrating the most incredible event in the history of humanity. Fifty years ago, half a million people, working together with a single purpose for some ten years, made it possible for a man to walk on the moon. Back then, people thought that by 2020 we would have flying cars, there would be cruises to Mars, and police officers, instead of killing themselves every few days, would be busy undertaking large-scale investigations into missing cats or dogs. Alas, no … That future, the future of dreams and fantasies, does not yet exist and probably never will. Whose fault is that? No one’s. It’s just that, believe it or not, nations are born and die, like people. Humanity too, having aged badly, is sliding into a sort of slow and certain regression.
Idiocracy, Mike Judge and Etan Cohen’s now “cult” film was a commercial flop in its time; people left darkened cinemas with a sense of unease, unsure how to laugh at it … it left us with the image, akin to a subliminal reflection of a temporal hyperconsciousness, of a future that was almost within reach. During the last fraught century, we knew how to relax, even when the strategic stakes were high; tomorrow you will find yourself with twenty nuclear missiles heading your way for a misplaced tweet or a clammy handshake. The worst thing is that re-watching
Idiocracy now isn’t funny at all … it foresaw our supreme fall from grace in less than 500 years.
