Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 3, 1994 TAG: 9405040006
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARHALL FISHWICK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Maybe it's the millennium.
We'll be there in a few years - the end not only of a century but a millennium comes on Jan. 1, 2000 A.D. No one has had that combination for 1,000 years, and no living person will ever see it again. No wonder we're getting the jitters. Aren't preachers talking a lot about Armageddon and the Book of Revelation? Didn't Nostradamus, the famous 16th-century astrologer and prophet, say the world would end on July 30, l999?
Looking back to Jan. 1, 1000 AD - the last time we faced a double whammy - historians report much the same kind of reactions. St. Augustine said the Antichrist would appear. Strange events, storms and floods plagued all Europe. (Wasn't our 1994 winter a killer?) Farmers refused to plant for the next year's crops. Thousands left their homes and waited in the streets for the end. Mass hysteria and suicide were widespread.
Heading into the late 1990s, we are experiencing in our city, state and nation the sense of futility and doubt that attends periods that close major eras; a recent issue of Newsweek was on suicides. The suggestion that things are not right crops up like weeds and wildflowers.
Already we can predict, on the basis of hard evidence, that our century and millennium will end not with a whimper (as T.S. Eliot predicted) but with a bang. No one knows how many atomic bombs are concealed out there, and how many unfriendly nations (the list includes North Korea, Iraq, Libya and who knows what others?) can and will procure one. Empires crumble, alliances weaken, holes puncture the ozone layer, warlords defy the United Nations. AIDS spreads; it is the only epidemic on record in which not a single victim has survived.
What does it all mean? Where and when will it all end?
Already we can see what lies ahead: hysterical songs and poems, collections of the last this-or-that, cults. Already, economists predict collapse; preachers, the Second Coming; ecologists, the end of nature; intellectuals, the end of modernism. But wait, there is more. History is about to end, so we must confront endism.
This idea, put forth first by Francis Fukuyama, says we are in for very sad times. There will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.
Endism isn't entirely new: Both Hegel and Marx advanced the idea, and Daniel Bell published "The End of Ideology" a generation ago. But it has picked up a new popular audience in the 1990s, just as Orson Wells' 1938 radio broadcast, "War of the Worlds," caught our mood on the eve of World War II. Popular culture always holds the mirror up to the times.
Certainly, despair has dominated recent art and politics. Our theaters are full of three-handkerchief movies. Michael Keaton's "My Life" takes us into the world of inoperable cancer, Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" to the Holocaust. In "Philadelphia" young Tom Hanks dies of AIDS, and in "Shadowlands" the cancer-doomed wife says, ``I'm going to die. The pain then is part of the happiness now. That's the deal.'' Some deal.
On every side, we hear that standards have decayed, schools declined, foreign policy fizzled. The love affair with high tech is over. Robots, nuclear power and computers promised to make us free - but have instead tyrannized us to a degree unparalleled in history. Law and order are vanishing. We thought we were creating a brave new world. Instead we seem to be smearing it with oil and getting ready to blow it up. William Pfaff hits all these dour notes in "Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends."
The millennium topic is hot; and where hot topics are, there popular culture is also. Count on the Millennium Blues. Expect a strong dose of hysteria and trauma.
Nothing is more fascinating, more addictive, more controversial than ``looking into the future'' and telling what you see. Locked in the present, with little understanding of what today (let alone tomorrow) is or means, we create our own version of reality, our mirage of wish-dreams. This lets us substitute speculation for information, rumor for reality. Caught up in events we can't decipher, reported by people we don't believe, we have neither peace nor prospect of peace. We've got the Millennium Blues.
Take another look. The problem isn't the millennium but change itself, linked with nostalgia. (Even in Genesis, the writer looks back and muses, ``There were giants in those days.'') Both the rate and nature of change baffle us: The world alters as we walk on it. Most of the things we buy, wear or use don't last until the next season.
But the important things outlast the fads and fancies. Old myths take on new meanings, old gods adopt new costumes. The eternal verities remain. So does the American Dream. Hold fast to the dream. Seek with William Faulkner ``our still unspent and yet unexhausted past.''
The problem is not to watch the calendar but to look underneath the surface of our society and our technology, where we will find new wellsprings of energy, purpose and faith. This will mean clearing not only trash from our towns and highways, but also the bric-a-brac from our intellectual attics.
We must civilize our cities and humanize our universities, comprehending our environment and our people in new ways. We must weed and water the landscape of the mind - face the uncertain future and say what Adm. David Farragut once said: "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!''
That's the way to get rid of the Millennium Blues.
\ Marshall Fishwick is professor of humanities and communication studies at Virginia Tech.
by CNB