"The Future" Is Not Fairly Distributed

Futurologists have been masturbating about sooper-longevity gene therapies and anti-aging pills for years and years in their saucer eyed pop-tech Best Selling books and the fraudulent position papers of their Very Serious think-tanks.

The result of all that futurological hyperventilation is certainly not that the world is the least bit closer to tank-grown replacement parts or fine-tuned genetic enhancement therapies or designer robot bodies or any of the rest of that nonsense, but only that the very rich, very pampered, very insulated inside-the-beltway politicians and pundits who shape the healthcare policies with which we have to live our actual lives in the actual present always have widely-disseminated, perfectly-legible, false-but-familiar, phony-but-plausible media narratives and images to call upon when they are scouting for justifications to raise the retirement age or voucherize and eliminate healthcare benefits for the overabundant majority of the American citizens they claim to represent.

Of course, we are a nation of non-millionaires represented by multi-millionaires whose access to the best available healthcare is utterly alienated from everyday reality, just as we are a nation of hard-working stressed-out laborers employed in jobs that could not be more different than the working lives of career politicians and lobbyists and members of the commentariat who think phone calls and quorum calls are stressful, who are lavished with attention and favors all their lives and not only see no need to retire at sixty-five from their labors such as they are but typically cling to their positions well into their seventies and beyond right up until the moment they literally collapse unconscious into stretchers and get carted off from them they enjoy them so damned much.

While the futurologists continue to spin scenarios that cash out in fanciful Hollywood action thrillers and Paul Ryan Ayn Rand wet-dream blood-baths of anti-government looting, it remains as true as ever that technodevelopmental gains in economic productivity over the last thirty years have larded the richest of the rich with greater profits and highest of the high end wealth concentration while the buying power of average salaries has flatlined or declines, it remains as true as ever that new medical techniques have created splashy high-end successes while the life expectancy past the relevant age of sixty-five for the average American have scarcely improved an iota.