Listen to Pete read this article.

The worse the present is, the more promising the future seems. And right now the future has never seemed better.

Chuck Klosterman once wrote that people would look back at this time and think that the only thing people could agree on is that Lindsay Lohan had perfectly spherical breasts. Well, I hope that people in the future will look back at us and not able to fathom all of the crap we got ourselves into.

Here’s what I hope people in the future will have a hard time believing about the beginning of the 21st century:

1. The executive branch would spy on citizens without warrants while refusing to respond to subpoenas from Congress.

2. We let corporations run our country even as they continually forced agendas that kept the population undereducated, without reliable health care and susceptible to the charms of charmless shit like America’s Got Talent and Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

3. We all drove around in cars that were kind of like really fast horses that shat poop that ruined the atmosphere.

4. Our entire society and economy revolved around these carbon-burning shitmobiles, and the only sort of activism we engaged in was lambasting anyone who tried to cut in front of us on the freeway.

5. Gay marriage was illegal, but divorce wasn’t.

6. It was pretty obvious that the Bush Administration was bent on attacking Iran before the end of its term, and nobody did anything to stop them.

7. Toby Maguire wasn’t yet recognized as the XXVIIth Dali Lama.

8. We considered drilling for oil off our coasts and in pristine wildlife preserves though it was clear that by the time those rigs produced any oil we’d be past the point of no return on Global Warming and forced to stop using fossil fuels anyway.

9. In one century, we learned to fly. Then we went into space, to the moon and beyond. We created technology that could connect every person in the world—first by voice, then by pictures and then interactively through the Internet. Carriages became automobiles. Telegraphs became cell phones. And medicine increased life expectancy while improving the quality of life for people around the globe. But America still (sort of) elected George W. Bush twice.

10. Only fifty years after the Holocaust, the world was nearly silent about genocide in Sudan.

11. People weren’t allowed to smoke pot.

12. People weren’t allowed to say “shit” on TV.

13. We still built Skynet though we were well aware the computers really wanted to kill us.

14. We still fought wars about what we thought God told some people thousands of years ago.

15. Diet Sunkist wasn’t the national beverage and required at every meal.

16. The guy who played Napoleon Dynamite hadn’t yet published his Unified Field Theory or walked across Lake Michigan in his magical “floaty” shoes.

17. People thought the way to stop illegal immigration was to build a really big wall.

18. Hannah Montana was still passing as a female. Some people even thought Will Smith was black.

19. People were obsessed with the secret story behind 9/11 while the GOP was openly trying to purge minorities from the voter roles.

20. We actually had to brush our teeth every day by hand.

21. Every kitchen had a little radiation machine that nuked food.

22. Nobody recognized that the semen produced by a man using Viagra was an excellent low-calorie butter substitute.

23. Karl Rove was not in jail.

24. The same people who were against abortion were also against birth control.

25. There were over 20,000 armed nuclear weapons, enough to destroy the planet over and over and over and over and over and over, and somehow we thought they’d never be used.

26. People thought they had the right to care about and even legislate what kind of sex consenting adults and really hot nineteen-year olds had in the privacy of their own homes.

27. Matt Groening hadn’t yet taken his Simpsons money to buy a satellite TV network where he broadcast a hilarious cartoon filled with sly allusions and sarcastic insinuations entitled–Mohammad the Prophet Moves to Beverly Hills.

The beginning of the twenty-first century is certainly a time chock-filled with obstinate stupidity made increasingly ironic by stunning intellectual and technological achievements, which are largely taken for granted or scoffed at. But hopefully we have a lot more to look forward to than an unhealthy obsession with the mamglands of very young women.

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