Let\u2019s face it, people: The next two years look to be pretty much a wash. Don\u2019t expect to get a whole lot of work done, and you best bring a lunch.<\/p>\n
The folks who can\u2019t count assumed that the present millennium 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\u2019t count and don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
The Y2K crisis didn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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; \u201cParty like it\u2019s 2000 or 2001\u201d just doesn\u2019t have the pulse of \u201cParty like it\u2019s 1999.\u201d But he\u2019s 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\u2019t blame that on Mr. Symbol, now can we?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ll descend rapidly into barbarism . . . or, confounding all estimations of their capabilities, the dreaded mongrel hordes will somehow keep the new world order\u2019s 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\u2019s say), and that would be just terrible, I’m sure you’d all agree.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s pure true haute culture any more. A matter of grave concern to us all, I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n
Remember the \u201cgive us back our 14 days\u201d 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\u2019s when some explanation will become increasingly obligatory, and rationales for the persistence of same-old same-old will proliferate like bunnies.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Finally, of course, the doomsayers may all be dead wrong. Could be that nothing much will happen next New Year\u2019s Day. The oppressed multitudes may not suddenly break their bonds and sally forth in search of the bloody revenge to which they\u2019re 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 \u201canthropologist Dr. Bradley Durbin\u201d (according to the Weekly World News, Nov. 9, 1999) looks inclined to let everyone off easy.<\/p>\n
None of that happened this past New Year\u2019s and maybe none of that will happen next New Year\u2019s, or even the one after that. Maybe you\u2019ll end up drinking the bottled water, putting those \u201cI Survived the Millenium\u201d T-shirts and \u201cWho\u2019s Afraid of Y2K?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
In other words, we may find that two years down the pike it\u2019s business as usual, no accounting to face except the one that confronts us every single day. That\u2019s going to be really hard on some people. As I put it in a recent poem, \u201cIt\u2019s now the year 2002; what\u2019s a poor millenarian to do?\u201d 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\u2019s poem, “Expecting the Barbarians,” with its poignant conclusion as the woebegone citizens of an unnamed city-state discover that they won\u2019t be overrun by the anticipated barbarian invaders for whom they\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, we\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Have a happy new year. Make something of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let\u2019s face it, people: The next two years look to be pretty much a wash. Don\u2019t expect to get a whole lot of work done, and you best bring a lunch.<\/p>\n
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