Island
Living 34: Y2K? Y2K+1? YNot?
by A. D.
Coleman |
|
Let’s face
it, people: The next two years look to be pretty
much a wash. Don’t expect to get a whole lot
of work done, and you best bring a lunch.
The folks who
can’t count assumed that the present millenium
ended at the very stroke of midnight this coming
December 31st. Many of them also believed that the
much-ballyhooed Y2K computer problem would initiate
the collapse of civilization as we know it, which
is to say western civ, so that ravening mobs of
the people who don’t count and don’t care
a fig for Dead White European Males and the received
canon would overrun the world -- looting electronics
stores, stealing high-end still and video cameras
and TV sets and VCRs and boom-boxes and tape recorders
and stereo tuners and mixing decks and laptop computers
and other media accoutrements the way we all know
they like to do (because television tells us so).
Appropriating the highest technological achievements
of western civ without so much as a by-your-leave,
having themselves one big multimedia orgy, and not
playing a whole lot of Schubert quartets, you betcha.
That's irony for you.
The Y2K crisis
didn’t happen, in any event, perhaps because
we spent some $300 billion on preemptive measures.
Of course, they may just be off by a year, those
premature millenarians, since technically the millenium
doesn’t exactly end till January 1, 2001, a
little over 11 months hence. We have to cut The
Artist Formerly Known as Prince some slack here;
“Party like it’s 2000 or 2001” just
doesn’t have the pulse of “Party like
it’s 1999.” But he’s done his share
of contributing to the confusion over just when
this act of the drama ends and the next one -- if
there is a next one -- starts. Still, the fact that
we function within a base-ten mathematical system
probably derived from counting on our fingers clearly
escapes most of the citizenry, and we can’t
blame that on Mr. Symbol, now can we?
Be that as it
may, when the crystal ball fell in Times Square
this time the oppressed decided not to demand their
revolution now. But millenial fever remains upon
us, millions and millions around the world waiting
eagerly for some version of the Rapture with the
world in convulsive upheaval just about everywhere
you look. So the computers may not have broken down,
but the fecal matter could still hit the fan.
If that scenario
does prove out, and no one ends it all by dropping
the big one now (as some anticipate), and the messiah
confounds all predictions by not showing up for
some global Judge Judy All-Souls event (as still
others hope and pray will happen), then either the
National Guard and the paramilitary police forces
will take over and try to maintain order or we’ll
descend rapidly into barbarism . . . or, confounding
all estimations of their capabilities, the dreaded
mongrel hordes will somehow keep the new world order’s
industrial infrastructure going and thereby maintain
and control the communications networks. In which
case we can be sure that they will not only forgive
all Third-World debt but, as is their wont, will
doubtless revise the canon -- or at least the play
list -- so that instead of dead white European males
like Enrico Caruso singing Puccini on your FM receiver
the airwaves will vibrate with the music of dead
African American women (Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey
and Billie Holiday, let’s say), and that would
be just terrible, I'm sure you'd all agree.
They might even
(oh, the horror! the horror!) miscegenate them Dead
White European Males, continuing their ingenious
rap and hip-hop elaboration of Cubist and Dadaist
strategies by sampling poor Johann Strauss and mixing
him in with who knows what -- Celia Cruz, Ravi Shankar,
Jimmy Yancey, Ludwig von Beethoven, and other people
of color -- till the little children get all confused
and no one can tell what’s pure true haute
culture any more. A matter of grave concern
to us all, I’m sure, since Caruso and Puccini
have so much more to say to us here in these United
States right now than Lady Day and Duke Ellington
and my uncle Ornette.
Remember the
“give us back our 14 days” riots over
the institution of the Gregorian calendar in 1582?
Of course you do. In any case, the way I figure
it, taking into account various calendric revisions
during the past two millenia, plus the social obligation
of allowing everyone a little wiggle room out of
courtesy and on principle, the failure of the apocalypse
to materialize will not actually begin to become
really embarrassing to its prophets and proponents
until the tail end of 2001. That’s when some
explanation will become increasingly obligatory,
and rationales for the persistence of same-old same-old
will proliferate like bunnies.
Myself, I plan
to give the survivalists and televangelists till
the post-Christmas white sales of 2002, two years
hence, and I urge you all to show them the same
consideration. Meanwhile, no harm in erring on the
side of caution by keeping a few spare gallons of
spring water and a supply of extra canned goods
in the cupboard, plus enough Sterno for a week or
so and some fresh batteries for your portable TV
and radio and cell phone and laptop, just in case
all hell -- or all heaven -- does break loose. Couldn't
hurt.
Finally, of
course, the doomsayers may all be dead wrong. Could
be that nothing much will happen next New Year’s
Day. The oppressed multitudes may not suddenly break
their bonds and sally forth in search of the bloody
revenge to which they’re surely entitled. And
conceivably no one will descend from on high for
a last reckoning -- though the kindly-faced gent
in the purported photographic portrait of Jesus
made with a camera obscura circa 30 A.D. and recently
discovered by “anthropologist Dr. Bradley Durbin”
(according to the Weekly World News, Nov.
9, 1999) looks inclined to let everyone off easy.
None of that
happened this past New Year’s and maybe none
of that will happen next New Year’s, or even
the one after that. Maybe you’ll end up drinking
the bottled water, putting those “I Survived
the Millenium” T-shirts and “Who’s
Afraid of Y2K?” gimme caps into mothballs for
the eventual delight of your retro-fashion-conscious
grandchildren twenty years hence, and giving the
canned ravioli to some local shelter for the homeless,
whose lot will not be noticeably improved by any
of the above scenarios.
In other words,
we may find that two years down the pike it’s
business as usual, no accounting to face except
the one that confronts us every single day. That’s
going to be really hard on some people. As I put
it in a recent poem, “It’s now the year
2002; what’s a poor millenarian to do?”
Those of you heading off post-Christmas next December
to your underground shelters and mountain cabins
should consider packing a copy of C. P. Cavafy’s
poem, "Expecting the Barbarians," with
its poignant conclusion as the woebegone citizens
of an unnamed city-state discover that they won’t
be overrun by the anticipated barbarian invaders
for whom they’d prepared an elaborate ceremony
of welcome and surrender. "And now what shall
become of us without any barbarians?" Cavafy
wrote. "Those people were a kind of solution."
Remember, too, another great sage and soothsayer,
Walt Kelly, whose Pogo told us decades ago that
we have met the enemy and he is us.
Meanwhile, we’ve
got the next two years to get through. I find myself
thinking of On the Beach -- or, more precisely,
of two works that share that title, and another
that refers to its imagery. The best-known -- or
am I dating myself here? -- is the 1959 film by
Stanley Kramer, based on the 1957 novel by Nevil
Shute, Hollywood’s first grim imagining of
atomic apocalypse, a melodrama of the outbreak of
nuclear war as seen through the eyes of the crew
of a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine. The second, probably
less familiar, is another Hollywood product, the
transplanted Canadian Neil Young's 1974 album, whose
title song conjures an ominous but less specific,
perhaps entirely interior devastation. "I went
to the radio interview," Young sings, "but
I ended up alone at the microphone. Now I'm living
out here on the beach, but those seagulls, they're
still out of reach. The world is turning; I hope
it don't turn away." Finally, there's the closing
scene of yet another dream from La-La Land, Franklin
J. Schaffner's 1968 film Planet of the Apes,
with Charlton Heston grieving on his knees before
a shattered Statue of Liberty half-buried in the
sand on the balmy shores of what was once New York
Harbor.
This century
will go down in history as one of extraordinary
achievement for our species: radio, TV, computers,
cars, airplanes, spaceships, men on the moon, organ
transplants, the eradication of smallpox, a cure
for polio. And as a litany of horror, writ both
large and small: Rwanda, Kosovo, the gulags, the
Nazi death camps, poverty and illness and misery
everywhere, Attica, lynchings, murderous homophobia,
hate in so many hearts. Collectively and individually,
we have slightly less than one year to throw our
weight on one side of that scale or another as the
twentieth century winds down its hundredth year
and the present millenium finishes out its thousandth.
Eleven months to make some difference in the way
that history -- if not some angrier, more punitive
judge -- will gauge what we did to balance things
out before the odometer rolled over.
Have a happy
new year. Make something of it.
back
to top
back
to journal index
©
Copyright 2000 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
By permission of the author and Image/World
Syndication Services,
P.O.B. 040078, Staten Island, New York 10304-0002
USA.
