Opinion: The Prague Post Online

Wednesday, March 29, 2000

Are we there yet?
The hyped 'new century,' like the last, offers the same old story line: a world gone mad

By Christopher Lord

Has anyone else noticed? The 21st century has failed to arrive. The biggest media circus of all time failed to conjure it up. The obscurantists were right. It won't start until next year. Oops.

You still hear people talking about the 20th century, don't you? They are right. And it sounds unnatural to talk about the 21st century, doesn't it? It's instinctive. In our heart of hearts we know we've all been conned.

Yes, this is, as the dry pedants told us all along, still the last year of the 20th century. The real fin de siecle. The U.S. Secretary of Defense is on a triumphal tour of Vietnam. You will soon be able to get your stock exchange information on the little screen of your mobile phone, so you can help the final destruction of what is left of world civilization go along a little faster.

War is big business. The Vatican has apologized for the Crusades, but without being too specific. Meanwhile, in the Holy Land, the outcome of the Crusades is still being disputed by Arabs and Jews.

It's like the millennium bug. Never existed in the first place. It's as if we had all gathered for an eclipse, but they had got the year wrong. And now we're all halfheartedly saying, "Mmm, that was a good eclipse, wasn't it?" "Oh, yes, wonderful!"

No ray guns?
When I was a boy in London, there was a comic called 2000AD. I remember it well. Of course, they had made the same mistake, and it is hard to blame them. But let us think of the excellent astronomer and thinker Arthur C. Clarke. What did he call his great novel, filmed so brilliantly by Stanley Kubrick (who sadly missed the year itself)? 2001. Yes. The scientific mind, you see.

But neither the comic, the novel nor the film came close to the grim reality. Racism, massacres, prejudice, hatred, mass poverty and malnutrition, man's inhumanity to man continuing unabated. New ignorance rising up daily to smother the old. Schoolchildren with machine guns imitating computer games to murder the adolescent sporting heroes who are placed above them in the pecking order by a world gone mad. AIDS. Genetically modified food crops. Cyanide in the rivers, sulfuric acid in the air, the earth poisoned, the ozone depleted.

Where are the moral people with ray guns we were led to believe would be taking care of all this? The supercomputers to guide us painlessly through everything? The anti-gravity cars? The friendly robots?

The supercomputers are otherwise occupied, unfortunately. They have better things to do. Either they are working for the Pentagon and busy targeting missiles, or they are working for Wall Street and busy financing and building them. And the men with ray guns? The space colonies? The moonbase? We will have to wait a little longer for all that, it seems. For the 21st century, when it comes, faces an uphill struggle.

It reminds me of 1984 in Britain. George Orwell's novel 1984 had transformed it into a magical date: a symbol of Big Brother taking over and all that. They made a film of the novel, and there was some half-hearted media razzmatazz, but ultimately it was a dead loss. Because it was only a story in the end.

It was the same with the so-called millennium. An irresistible story, but just a story. And who knows, maybe when 2001 comes around and the next 1,000 years really starts, even the millennium bug will be able to spring unexpectedly to life -- to usher in another age of human self-expression with a dose of cold reality.

Which is something we all could do with.

-- The writer is editor-in-chief of Perspectives, the Central European Review of International Relations.

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