The Third Millennium Will Be Underwhelming!

By: Frederick Zackel

Frederick Zackel is a contributing editor to January Magazine.

The Third Millennium will be free-range veal. And diet French fries. All-traffic radio stations twenty-four / seven. I predict that automobile license plate numbers will be UPC codes readable by police laser guns from fifty yards.

I predict a future of permanent AIDS ribbons. More and more red ribbons each year until they become as ubiquitous as the Cross or the Star of David or the Islamic crescent and moon.

I predict there will be X homicides next year. That Y women will be raped. That Z children will be abused . . .

We don't want to hear those statistics.

I don't want to say them. There is little joy in predicting the future. That evil and suffering will be with us in the next millennium is almost guaranteed by the way we live today. The future looks like the past, only more of the same.

We always live in perilous times. After all, TV has shown us cruise missiles flying down the streets of Baghdad. After all, Al Gore was just a Big Mac away from the Presidency. Can you remember when the world waited breathlessly to see the back side of the moon for the first time? And that is all old news.

Too bad we don’t remember the slogan that "May you live in interesting times" is called "a Chinese curse."

We cannot go back to the same old story. The world has irrevocably changed. Pick a place. The English Channel, for instance. Before World War One, a tunnel could not be built. After World War Two, there was no reason not to build one. Voila, the Chunnel.

The world is changing.

We are 6 billion people.

There is no longer any White Rule any more on the African continent.

Worldwide there are 1 billion television sets.

The Economist says there are almost 300 cities in this world with populations greater than a million.

It has taken three centuries to create our global consumer society just here in America.

America is changing. Salsa now outsells catsup. Last year a local news show in San Francisco talked about how condoms were clogging the water treatment plants. They seemed to show up mostly on Sunday and Mondays mornings.

Americans can live anywhere they can afford, our master narrative insists. But can Midwest farmers continue to live within the flood plains of the mighty Mississippi? Can Californians continue to build atop a known fault line? Can people continue to construct luxury homes on the fragile islands of the Outer Banks?

We go on picnics with tomatoes that bounce back to our hands when we drop them. We "butter" bread with artificial margarine that is so artificial that the ants ignore it. While the meat in our sandwiches alters our children's metabolism so that eight, nine and ten year old girls can now ovulate “just like a woman”.

We now have megafarms with 3 million chickens. Nowadays a chicken can be hatched and grown to full-size in 42 days, which is half the time Mother Nature needs.

We pretend we are a suburban nation. We are the only "suburban" nation on this planet, and we only represent 4% of the world's population.

We do not have historical amnesia.

We have no sense of history. (Although we do remember baseball statistics.)

We don't have historical amnesia. We have never learned history in America. We have always been innocent. We listened to the stories we were told, and they were all lullabies that said this is how we Order Chaos.

We were always innocent.

In 1992 thirty-seven million Americans live below the poverty line. That's more than the people who live in the entire state of California.

We are in a hurry, and we are impatient. We find it difficult to wait on a microwave oven to zap our food in moments.

Most of us wear what looks like a slave's manacle. This slave bracelet ties us to the most demanding, most unforgiving, most relentless master of them all: Time.

We as a culture have chosen to become slaves, and our wristwatches show us how tied to a system.

We sit bumper-to-bumper on a limited-access freeway -- with six lanes of tail lights ahead of us for as far as the eye can see, while on the other side of the center guard rail another infinite number of vehicles sits bumper-to-bumper as far as the eye can see.

We call this Rush Hour. We think the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland is crazy because his watch tells the day of the month and not the time.

Time is money, we say, and yet to most Homo Sapiens (and all of their hominid predecessors) this equation is incomprehensible.

But will we still read?

One of my favorite passages in literature is "Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of loosing his place forever."

At first thought one might suspect the paragraph came sometime in the postmodern, a threat of computer erasure. On second thought maybe it was born from the modern era.

But it comes from Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Wakefield". It was written sixteen decades ago.

Edgar Allan Poe reviewed Hawthorne's Twice-told Tales, from which "Wakefield" comes. In 1837 (and later expanded upon in 1842), he wrote, "'Wakefield' is remarkable for the skill with which an old idea -- a well-known incident -- is worked up or discussed. A man of whims conceives the purpose of quitting his wife and residing incognito for twenty years in his immediate neighborhood. Something of this kind actually happened in London. The force of Mr. Hawthorne's tale lies in the analysis of the motives which must or might have impelled the husband to such folly, in the first instance, with the possible causes of his persistence. Upon this thesis a sketch of singular power has been constructed."

I don't forget breadmaking, either.

The seven-page passage on how to grow grain from seed and then make bread from that grain is one of the more interesting sections of Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. That passage stands out because by 1719 the English middle class -- which was Defoe's audience -- had already become so divorced from the everyday world of grain-growing and breadmaking, that it did not know these steps. This was new information for them.

Twenty-eight decades ago the old connection between man and nature had already begun to be severed. Sixteen decades ago the new connection of man and system was in place, and people were signing on in droves (whether they understood it or not).

Inertia is defined by the physicists as "mass in motion." Not "mass at rest."

The future has many facets.

Consider the syndicated TV series Baywatch. More human beings already have watched this syndicated television series than have witnessed any single event in history. Episodes of "Baywatch" are airing in Mainland China. Yes, this unabashed swimsuit show goes to the last major communist country.

Think of its impact. Think of the cultural damage this show is doing. Think of all those voluptuous, big-breasted American beauties with their golden palomino hair and their bronze-tanned legs that go on forever. The Chinese female tends to be long-waisted, small breasted and have short legs. Picture the average Chinese male in front of the TV set with his shirt unbuttoned, his shoes kicked off, a beer in his hand. Picture his wife bent over the wok, a cleaver by her side . . .

Now, any American feminist can tell you the damage done to American girls and women from Hollywood's impossible-to-achieve enticements.

Think of the cultural damage this show will do to Chinese romance!

Digital compression means we can have 500 channels of Gilligan's Island. Won't that be fun! We can watch it ina hundred different languages.

Yet, in some small communities, various social groups have fought for (and sometimes have won) the Black Entertainment Network or the Spanish-language Univision or some other racial or ethnic cable channel to be available through their local cable company.

In essence these groups are asking for access to their master narrative and its specific stories AND for the legitimatization of that master narrative within our greater American (global?) culture. They are demanding a multi-cultural world for themselves and for the availability of that master narrative to the curious.

Five hundred channel future affords that freedom.

Television series in the future will continue to feature narratives. Perhaps each cable channel will create its own clone of a "series hero", one specifically geared to that channel's marketing demographics, its target audience.

Will we still read?

Literature teaches a sense of worth. To see your own story in words is a wonderful thing. To see your own story retold is to touch your own immortality, what little of that which we can get. Novels like Roots and Beloved make us all feel what slavery was like for that person.

All literature teaches us what we are worth.

But who defines the worth?

Who computes the worth?

Albert Camus said death is a wind coming from the future. Realistically, our master narrative ought to be paranoid. To be romantic is naive. This Third Millennium we are aimed at could be "the time of the assassins," as Henry Miller said.

The future is guaranteed to be a time of great emotional turmoil, as global values collide. Is it a luxury to hold any aesthetic?

If we have learned anything, it is that what is repressed boomerangs back in our face. Today's Solution too often becomes Tomorrow's Problem.

The Judeo-Christian heritage says: We are the only creatures chosen by God Himself to share in the knowledge of Him and thus to share in the promises of His riches.

The implication is: Screw the rest!

Do we need a new mythos?

When he set up his Utopian future, Gene Roddenberry said, "In the 24th Century, there will be no hunger, no greed." He gave no steps on how we'll reach there.

But the mythos of Star Trek is perhaps our most utopian mythos, and we will all be disappointed if what we inherit doesn't match up to our expectations.

Who knows what part of the American master narrative we must sacrifice in order to save and preserve our nation?

By the way, you shouldn’t get too excited about our Great Leap Forward into the Third Millennium. After all, only half the people in the world have ever used a telephone.

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), November 30, 2000

Answers

This essay would not be out of place on EZ Board.

-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), November 30, 2000.

Should I delete it?

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), November 30, 2000.

I like the part about big breasts and legs-up-to-here.

-- (nemesis@awol.com), November 30, 2000.

Hi, Unk!

Nice place you have here. Cool article. Mind if I take that quiet table over in the corner, lean back in my chair, and take it all in for a bit? Been away for a little while, and I need to ketch up.

Browne's looking better by the day, don't ya think?

-- Spindoc' (Spindoc_99_2000@yahoo.com), December 01, 2000.

Goodness Unk, take a shower!

A clean stream of warm water is good.

Then inhale!

Then FIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Never give into wrongness. EVEN WHEN OVERWHELMED.

STAND!

-- shower (slime@slime.com), December 01, 2000.

This guy talks about the end of white rule in Africa, the proliferation of BET and Univision and the rise in popularity of salsa as though they're bad things.

He sounds like an uptight, xenophobic jerk.

-- Tarzan the Ape Man (tarzan@swingignthroughthejunglewithotua.net), December 01, 2000.

Tarzan is one of those "glass is half empty" kinda guys. Sees negativity in everyone and everything.

Perhaps some divine intervention is what he really needs.

-- x (x@x.x), December 01, 2000.

Divine intervention my foot.

What that man needs is a blow job. It'll do wonders for his mood.

-- Tarzan the Ape Man (tarzan@swingingthroughthejunglewithouta.net), December 01, 2000.

He didn't mention anything about being able to watch Welcome Back Kotter reruns. Truly one of the highlights of the 20th Century.

-- Dr. Pibb (dr.pibb@zdnetonebox.com), December 02, 2000.

Whatever happened to Gabe Kaplan? I sure do miss the fella.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), December 02, 2000.