Cooling Down a Millennium Fever

Ten miles before it happens, you take notice. Two or three miles before it happens, you glance down often, monitoring. A mile, a half-mile. Then the little cylinders spin, and in a twinkling, all those nines are erased and the clean, pure zeros line up, and you feel for an instant as if it’s not mechanical, what just happened, it’s mystical, that the slate has been wiped clean and you have been, for a moment, made new.

That’s only a car odometer.

On Dec. 31, 1999, the world’s cylinders will spin and bring us to imagined exponential redemption or apocalypse, hangovers and resolutions to the nth power, a man-made frenzy over a man-made calendar.

Let the angst begin. The tours are booked to the Greenwich observatory, where time begins, to that South Pacific island where the first millennial dawn will break. And surely, someone’s already tried to register “2000” as a trademark.

Thankfully, there are sober thinkers among us, notably Stephen D. O’Leary of USC, a millennial author and scholar in the classic meaning: an end-time on earth, for good or ill, not just a triple-zero on time’s slot machine. He has been a millennialist at least since age 13, when he read dystopian novels like “1984,” and probably since age 7, when he brought a family dinner-table conversation about psychic Jeane Dixon to a halt by snapping, “She’s no oracle at Delphi.”

The topic that made him weird at 7 and peculiar even 10 years ago now makes him hugely in demand for both considered analysis and for glib sound bites he is not always inclined to give. How huge? The day the Heaven’s Gate suicide story broke, and the millennium was upon us, Stephen O’Leary turned down “Good Morning America” and “Geraldo.”

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So much whirls in our heads as we barrel toward 2000, stuff we Americans are not good at, like history, and stuff we practice all too well, like weirdthink: UFO believers saying that this time the aliens really, really mean it; conspiracy believers saying that at last the dark forces are really, really gonna let us have it.

For something to contemplate between Nirvana and Armageddon, O’Leary and his partner, medieval historian Richard Landes of Boston University, assembled the Center for Millennial Studies. If it had a motto, it would be “Here Today, Hereafter.” O’Leary’s study is in a pretty green corner of the foothills, but a lot of good it does him, walled in as he is by printed words as dissonant as Norse apocalypse mythology and T. S. Eliot (“This is the way the world ends . . . Not with a bang, but a whimper”), David Koresh hagiographies and tabloid bleatings on millennial demons and how to stay thin even though the world is about to end. This time, the real scholarship is as comforting as the pop culture is hysterical.

As we hyperventilate our way toward 2000, O’Leary is here to tell us that there are other ways to interpret millennial prophecy than as the plunge into apocalypse. Humans like to extract from the loom of life a thread here, a thread there, and then reweave disconnected strands into weird and ominous fabric. Already, millennial Dianists see omens foretold and fulfilled in the death of the Princess of Wales.

When the triple-zero moment arrives, O’Leary figures his real work begins: “The buildup, the cresting, then the aftermath--that’s the time to watch.” The peril of mania is built into the very momentum of expectation. Even the most casual calendar-watcher anticipates some cataclysmic alteration of humankind. So, “when the world doesn’t change, people won’t just sleep off the champagne and go back to work. The dark prediction is that people will be in revolt and won’t go back to what they were before.”

The last millennium found Western Europeans who could follow a calendar expecting the world to end. When it didn’t, they turned to raising cathedrals to keep up their hopes. In 1033, the millennial anniversary of the Crucifixion, peasants and the Catholic Church joined forces to bring about a “Truce of God,” whereby the nobles pledged to confine their bloody feudal skirmishes to certain days of the week.

Our millennial Zeitgeist is obsessed with decline and fall. The instrument may be the computer, it may be nuclear war or virus or space aliens, but all of it pushes toward an end that annihilates the old and clears the way for . . . what?

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O’Leary would rather we thought of the millennium not as a single midnight, a weekend, a giddy holiday of abandon, with remorse and disappointment on its heels when mankind isn’t saved in the last reel, but as a season for legacies: gardens and forests planted for the future, oral histories of the past. Making it happen will require “leaders who espouse a millennial vision which is cohesive, persuasive, not rooted to ‘the world will be changed in a twinkling.’ ” (What does twinkle is O’Leary’s countenance when he contemplates living in Central Casting for the Big Moment, the secular mecca for every blowhard, scam-master and true believer who can muster a bus ticket or boot up a computer. “This is the best city in the world for this.”)

I am holding out for the mathematical millennium, which begins Jan. 1, 2001. It’ll be a lot easier to get reservations. Until then, I’m investing in champagne futures.