A Few Non-thoughts on the Non-millennium

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

1/4/00

I swore I wasn't going to write "a millennium piece", especially since I'm one of those sour and humorless types who believes that the millennium is some time off - 1/1/01, to be more precise.

But, like chickens transfixed by a chalk line in the dust, people zoomed in on all those zeroes, and felt the same excitement they felt when the odometer on dad's car hit 100,000 miles. The media was paying close attention, partly to see if Y2K would raise its ugly head and destroy civilization, as the wild-eyed fanatics were claiming. (It will come as no surprise that the same fanatics are now claiming that the busted crisis was staged by {Clinton, the Chinese, the Canadians, Saddam, Liberals} to secretly invade the US while every one was distracted. Must have worked, too. Nobody except the fanatics notices that we've been invaded.).

And of course, with all those zeroes, the world decided to throw an end-of-the-world party. This isn't an unhealthy reaction, and even many of us "But it's NOT the millennium, dammit!" types allowed that the parties, at least, should be a hell of a lot of fun, and it's pretty hard to argue against that.

So along about 10 am, I turned on CNN, and left it to babble in the background while I made feverish preparations for Y2K, which consisted of nipping down to the market to get a bottle of Martinellis and some ginger ale and a bag of chips. Martinellis and ginger ale go well together, and I'll miss them after civilization collapses.

My wife was on the phone with a friend down in Hollywood, who was watching millennium coverage, apparently on ABC. I sat down and flipped open what no doubt would be the last current newspaper I would ever see, and read the occasional mention of Y2K, which occurred, on average, once every three column inches, including the ads. I was so engrossed with the "oh-gawd-we're-all-gonna-DIE!" stories that I nearly failed to notice that my wife was hitting the remote control a lot more than she usually does.

After a few minutes, it became clear what was going on. One would say to the other, "Oooh! You should see what they're showing on ABC?", and the other would flip to ABC. By that time, ABC had cut to yak farmers in Mongolia, and so the TV would go to CNN. It would be showing a beautiful dance to the millennium, and the other woman would say, "Oooo! You should see what they're showing on CNN!", and right then, CNN would cut to an ad for tampons.

In other words, commercial TV was being its usual jittery, incoherent self, with the result that you would get a wild melange of images, none lasting more than 90 seconds.

We reached a point where the commercial networks were all showing ads, and I grabbed the clicker and went to PBS. If nothing else, I figured they would tell us what, if anything, was happening in Russia in response to Yeltzin suddenly quitting.

We were glued to the screen from then on, with some of the best television we've ever seen. Utterly unforgettable scenes, like Nelson Mandela lighting a peace candle in the cell where he was held for 18 years, or the Dawn Dancers on the beach of China, or the Tai Chi master greeting the dawn on Mt. Tai, or the Queen swaying from side to side, palms out, singing along with the crowd, "All You Need is Love" in the fantastic Millennium Dome.

Chopin in Warsaw. Strauss in Vienna. And Berlin. Beethoven as the Thames exploded into fire. Handel as the Eiffel Tower became a Saturn V. Afrocelt in Dublin. A poet on TableTop mountain, shouting the 21^st century challenge to Africa. Tango 2000 in Rio.

Announcers who knew when to shut up, and let the images speak for themselves. And not one damn commercial. It was wonderful. The TV remained tuned to PBS for the rest of the day.

A friend of mine complained later that even as he enjoyed the display, he was annoyed by the patent fraudulence of many of the celebrations, many held in countries where the year was 1420, or 5760, or 4698. It wasn't even a New Year, let alone the Millennium.

I shrugged. It wasn't even the Millennium in OUR calendar. Of course it was fraudulent.

But unlike the commercial networks, PBS didn't try to portray it as anything other than one culture making a polite observation of a major fete in another. China staged two utterly beautiful works of performance art-the mentioned Dawn Dancers and the Tai Chi master-in remote locales, with no crowds, no noisemakers, no countdowns. It simply a polite, and through its beauty and taste, sincere nod to Western Culture.

I suspect that many of the countries that participated in this manner - China, India, Israel, Egypt, Micronesia - shared that same impulse. Some, such as Micronesia and Egypt, were quite openly sniffing after profits, and presumably made some. Others simply spotted a chance to show Americans, walled off by a negligent press, what their world was like when it was having fun. For too many Americans, knowledge of other countries is limited to 90 seconds of footage of tanks rolling down streets to the burps of semi-automatic fire. The rest of the world knows that Americans are vanishing into our own navels, and grabbed the chance to show that they were people, and could have a good time, too.

As evening came, I noted that Newfoundland, on the half hour ahead of Atlantic Time, would be the first part of North America to reach 2000. I joked to my wife that celebrations from St. John's might consist of some old geezer in an oil slicker peering suspiciously at the camera and demanding, "Two thousand WHATS?" When St. John's did come on, it looked like a family reunion for Bob and Doug McKenzie, toques and mufflers and padded parkas, but it was a smallish, well-behaved crowd having a smallish, well-behaved Canadian good time.

Ninety minutes later, coverage hit the east coast and went rapidly downhill. American celebrations, with the exception of Washington, were garish, over-commercialized light-and-noise shows. The role of humans was purely secondary, there in the role of enthusiastic crowd noise.

No graceful dances, no choirs of children, no humble old men lighting peace candles in former jail cells. No pride in costuming, or wonderful compositions from earlier in time. Just an inchoate roar, funded by the garish commercial signs that lit the faces of Americans the way that joy and pride lit the faces of people in the rest of the world.

It was a sobering and saddening reflection on what we have become.

By the time 2000 rolled around to our side of the country, and my town celebrated in an uncharacteristically subdued fashion, I had time to reflect.

As my friend said, it was a fraud, a humbug. It didn't show the problems, the realities, the grim times. Of course, "realities" on television leave us convinced the whole world is a seething mass of flames and gunfire. The actual reality is that the rest of the world are people living their lives as best they know how, and an American is safer walking the streets of Beirut or Dublin than they are in their own home town.

America, certainly, showed its problems in the celebrations, with the garishness, and the corporate pep-rally atmosphere, and the thin undertone of apprehension. But American problems are both readily apparent, and look like they CAN be solved. And that, too, is part of the American reality. That's the good news. The fact that we displayed such problems so unabashedly didn't stem from honesty, but a simple lack of awareness that there was a problem.

That's the bad news.

We have become bystanders in a corporate culture.

We need to stop doing that.

I think we can.

Check in with me next year. I'll wish you a happy new millennium then.

In the meantime, Happy New Year.