ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, July 10, 1996 TAG: 9607100084
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
Marshall J. Fishwick (pictured at left) doesn't think the world is coming to an end in four years.
But there are those who do, just as there were farmers who didn't plant crops the last time the Christian calendar came up with double zeroes, in the year 1000, because they believed the end was near.
Fishwick, professor of communications and humanities at Virginia Tech, specializes in the hard-to-define field of popular culture.
"To ask a scholar to define popular culture is like asking a fish to define water," he said. "The point is we're in it all the time. We're immersed in it."
Fishwick and Ray B. Browne, chairman emeritus of the popular culture department at Bowling Green (Ohio) State University, have co-edited the recently published "2001+: Popular Culture Studies in the Future" (Popular Press). Browne estimates that 1 million students are now taking courses in media, film, literature and other facets of the popular culture window which can also be a lens for viewing our civilization.
"Popular culture always holds a mirror up to the times. ... It doesn't claim to be a discipline, but it does claim to work between the disciplines," Fishwick said. So their latest book's essays deal with the coming millennium in different ways - through books and movies such as "Looking Backward 2000-1887" and "Things to Come," the Internet as a continuation of rails and automobiles shrinking the world, and even religion in such forms as growing fundamentalism, direct-mail and "jock" evangelism (using celebrity athletes to promote it).
A theme running through the essays arises from Joan Didion's 1968 book, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," particularly the part reading as follows:
"And What rough beast, its hour come at last,
"Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"
Most of the essays paint us slouching in that manner toward the millennium, becoming a society of throw-away products, a community-less society sitting in front of computers, a society of fear and at war. Some fundamentalists see Armageddon predicted in the Book of Revelation as coinciding with the turn of the century; so did the 16th-century French prognosticator, Nostradamus, who picked July 30, 1999, as the date for the world to end.
Current events aren't easing those fears, Fishwick said. The truck bomb that killed 19 U.S. service people in Saudi Arabia "raises exactly the fear which is motivating the millennium, that the Middle East is going to blow up. In fact, it keeps blowing up," Fishwick said.
Elsewhere there are cults like the ones in Waco and Montana, international crises, distrust of government, religious conflicts, violence against women, against children, he said.
"So I see a convergence of these forces," Fishwick said. "It's almost as if Satan is on the loose, for people who think in those terms," he said. "I think there's a sense - I sense it myself - that we're into something like a steamroller and we can't stop it."
Some people leave movies like "Jurassic Park" believing we can recreate dinosaurs today, he said. "The millennium is fed by the huge number of action movies, violence. For example, if you want to see what the end will look like, see any Arnold Schwarzenegger movie."
Fishwick often launches his own classes with the nature of reality, giving Plato's example of people living in caves and accepting shadows on the walls as real to the point where they won't venture outside. Today, he said, "you have to literally drag people away from the computer and the television. ... We might be entering the millennial cave."
But, while no one can prove the world won't end at the turn of the century, Fishwick is still planning a life extending beyond 2001.
"It's somewhat equivalent to the flying saucer phenomenon. For those who like to believe it, they will always believe it," he said. "I think the millennium will pass but the insecurities will remain ... and I think the only advice we can give is keep fighting. Keep fighting, don't give up."
And that is the thrust of the book, figuring out the challenges of tomorrow and how to meet them. It is also the basis of democracy: if people have enough of the right information, they will make a wise decision.
"Some days, I doubt it," Fishwick admitted. "But I can't doubt it. If democracy doesn't work, all is lost ... and that would be my fear, more than the millennium."
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