Spectator: All Our Yesterdays

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Could it be that people today just don't care about the future? That's what Tony Baxter, the "Imagineer" who oversees Disneyland design, seems to be getting at when he discusses Tomorrowland's overhaul. Baxter talks at length of the need for the park to make "an emotional connect" with visitors, to draw on prevailing cultural myths. "Dreams about the future were very easy to tap into in the '50s," he says. "There were so many challenges left unrealized because of the Depression and World War II--there was a lot left to dream about." The promise of the future then was one of hope, of a technological utopia. But the sometimes bad, mostly prosaic way in which many of those dreams eventually came true (space-travel perception: vacation on the moon; space-travel reality: a bunch of Russians stuck for months in a ratty old orbiter) may have dulled people's appetites for looking further forward. We like our microwave ovens, and cell phones are surely a boon to the self-important, but hasn't real life become messier as it's become easier?

That's why Baxter and his colleagues are betting that the public will be more excited by yesterday's heroic tomorrow than today's more jaundiced one. Given that the nation's most prominent exemplar of earnest, old-fashioned futurism is Al Gore, it's not a bad wager.