If You’re Already Bored With Y2K Alarums, Just Wait Awhile

A year to go and millennial fever laps around our knees. Whenever a millennium comes along (only once thus far in the Christian calendar), people think in terms of brimstone, chaos, apocalypse. Read up on what happened in the 990s. And every century has seen its millennial cults, in pre-board mode for The End. One version of this is the already tiresome Y2K frenzy, which assumes computer meltdown at 00.00 hours in the new century.

Even though most Americans have never experienced invasion or famine, they have a particularly vivid apprehension of Big Trouble on the way; the Y2K alarums are yet another receptacle for such fears. Yet, in the end, life turns out to be humdrum. The Martians never land, the Great Crash is postponed yet again, the steeds of the Four Horsemen browse idly in the pasture. We’ll be left with business and politics as usual, and here it seems likely that the tedium will be ghastly.

The dear, departing year of 1998 was a delightful tonic, thanks to the Lewinsky scandal. There were whole weeks and months when it was a joy to scuttle out of bed and pick up the morning headlines. But it looks very much as though the U.S. senators, after taking the temperature of the American people, are eager to finish off the impeachment trial at a rapid clip. Nothing has ever been certain in the Lewinsky scandal, but, alas, it may be gone from us by early spring. Then what? It’ll be back to the serious business of politics in the age of Clinton, starting out with a big new push by the mutual funds industry to capture the Social Security funds.

So far as election 2000 is concerned, if early portents hold true, by early summer of the new millennium, the American people will be down on their knees, begging for apocalypse now as necessary relief from appalling political vacuity.

One could see the omens already last Nov. 4, when post-election analysts said that “moderation” won the day. Translated into the language of stump oratory, “moderation” means demure candidates speaking in terms so dulcet that their party labels and doctrines are invisible.

Take Bill Bradley, former U.S. senator from New Jersey. On Dec. 4, he launched his bid for the Democratic nomination with rhetoric so decorous that he could not even bring himself to say that he was challenging Clinton’s heir apparent. “This is not about Vice President Al Gore and me,” was Bradley’s stirring call. So, if it wasn’t about him and Gore, what was it about? Bradley was unable to explain. I read five different newspaper stories in search of ideological nutrition concerning the Bradley candidacy but came up empty-handed.

Now consider the political slogans of the two main contenders for their respective party nominations, Gore and, for the Republicans, George W. Bush. Gore offers us “practical idealism” and Bush ripostes with “compassionate conservatism.” To read these phrases is like being slowly suffocated with goose-down pillows, the way the Ottomans used to snuff out caliphs they had wearied of.

Gore says he wants to reject “false choices.” What is a false choice? How about this one: Saying that you have to choose between sugar plantations in southern Florida and the survival of the Everglades. Under the Gore plan, we can accept huge political payoffs to the Democratic National Committee from the sugar barons and order up more environmental studies to prove that the toxic runoff from the plantations won’t destroy the Everglades until after 2008. The “idealism” comes with wanting to save the Everglades; the practicality comes with knowing that in the present political system, there’s no way that can be done. “Practical idealism” apparently comes from the slogan-writer who gave Gore “no controlling legal authority” when he tried to slide out of the problems associated with doing party fund-raising from his government office.

As for Bush, his “compassionate conservatism” has the same fraudulent resonance. “Conservatism” makes you want to kill Karla Faye Tucker. “Compassion” allows you to take a phone call from the Rev. Jerry Falwell pleading for her life. “Conservatism” prompts you to privatize Social Security. “Compassion” compels you to remember all those poor pensioners who vote.

The alternative to all this mush? Well, why do you think Jesse “The Body” Ventura pulled the highest turnout in America last Nov. 3 when the former professional wrestler won the governorship of Minnesota? He put some life into the process. Which is what people want, now and in the next millennium.