This era will be remembered largely for the incredible technological (specifically electronic, computing and biomedical) innovations which it has witnessed. It will be remembered by the spreading tentacles (or if you prefer, addictive vapors) of American cultural influence and waning American political/diplomatic influence. Iraq stands out as the presumed failure that will yet surprise. It will be remembered for a thousand celebrity/talking heads' bits of lip service to poverty, AIDS, cancer, and a thousand failures to resolve any of those problems, especially in Africa. It will be remembered as the age when the human mind managed to create a thousand new distractions while becoming inured to anything important. It will be seen as the age when sons did not fight wars on the battlefield, but at the computer screen; when old ways of thinking were reformulated by kids with internet startups, as much as by interdisciplinary thinking.

Collective memory will be seen as a thing of the past, as a fractionation of society into a million overlapping groups is confounded further by an increasing loss of a sense of identity. Religious belief will be seen through the 20/20 lens of seeing the past as the force which battled Western decadence to the last in the epic battle for hearts and minds. Radicals of all sorts will be seen as having framed overworked zombies tired of history and seeing only capital as their saving grace, on all sides. Making the picture more elegant will be both the seemingly endless decadence of Western hedonism, and the moderate religious forces which will have begun the reclamation process from the aforementioned cesspool of self-involved pleasure. At the forefront of this diabolical whirlpool will be the evangelical warriors of the South and Midwest, immigrants and their offspring, fending off the entirety of the West from the deadly malaise of civilizational decline, the only ones ready to give their loves for the principles which made the West what it is. If they will have succeeded, the decline will have been protracted that much further until the next round.

How the dance macabre will end is only for the Deity (if you are so inclined) to know...