A Clean Millennial Slate for the Human Tragicomedy

Anticipating it was one thing. Weeks of hearing the numbing bleat of pols and policy wonks, the yammering of pitchmen, had worn the edge off the approaching day, blunting it into just one more contrivance of the calendar.

Yet the first time you find yourself writing it down, 2000, or typing it out, 1/01/00, even the most sensible being must hesitate a little at crossing that threshold, artificial as it is.

A single midnight’s transit is all it took, and there they are, clean, pure zeros all lined up--a slate wiped mystically clean and ready for rewriting the human story.

Something about being human compels reinvention: maybe the mere hiccup of cosmic time it took us to evolve from chattering creatures at the veldt’s edge into the lords of this spinning blue dot. Maybe the hurtling speed of the Now, when a single human life span can reach from the dozen seconds of the Wright brothers’ first wobbly flight to a man chipping golf balls on the moon. Perhaps the yearnings of genetic mapping, the wish to stitch and splice ourselves to the highest specifications.

The nation premised itself on reinvention, and no place reinvents more ardently than California. The state re-Mixmaster created the people who created the computers, the movies, the cyclotron, the freeways, aerospace, no-fault divorce, self-esteem, navel-gazing.

“Eureka” is the state motto--”I have found it.” It leaves it to us to decide what “it” is. Nine decades ago, a British diplomat visiting this big and empty and eager state asked what would become of it when 50 million people lived here, when “the real question will not be about making more wealth or having more people, but whether the people will then be happier or better than they have been hitherto.”

As the calendar page stands at triple 0, we are far closer to that 50 million than we are to knowing the answer to his question.

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One after the next, throughout the 1970s, four spacecraft raced across the solar system and caromed off into the galaxy. The first pair were named Pioneer, the second pair, Voyager.

Aboard both Pioneers were encoded data fixing planet Earth in the solar system, the solar system in the galaxy, mathematical language, and drawings of the human male and female--carefully vague on genital details, lest NASA be accused of sending smut into space.

Aboard both Voyagers were records encoded with Mozart and the Beatles and a Navajo chant, 117 photographs of human adults and babies, of animals wild and domestic, of a traffic jam and a radio telescope. They bear greetings in human and humpback whale languages. “Hope everyone’s well, we’re thinking about you all, please come here to visit when you have time,” in Mandarin. “Hello from the children of planet Earth,” from Carl Sagan’s 8-year-old son, Nick.

They were like notes tucked into bottles and cast into the sea, messages from the maker--as the maker wished to see himself, on his best behavior. The words from the greatest of these good impulses, the United Nations, were read by its then-secretary general, Kurt Waldheim: “We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship. . . .”

Today, as Waldheim’s voice still soars through eternal space, Waldheim himself is not permitted to set foot in this country. The head of the U.N., it emerged, was an intelligence officer in Nazi Germany.

That is our quandary: Just which Waldheim are we humans? If we were launching a Voyager 2000, what should we put aboard to tell our story honestly? Lifesaving penicillin, or Zyklon-B, the killer vapor of the gas chambers? The wartime savagery in the painting “Guernica,” or Monet’s placid water lilies? A tape of Edward Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame,” or “Beavis and Butt-head”? A microchip, or a garotte? Or all of it?

I choose as the emissary of Mankind 2000 the 18th century assessment of the poet Alexander Pope. He stood 4 feet, 6 inches tall yet could see, over the rim of time, his fellow humans: “Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled: The glory, jest and riddle of the world!”

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What a confounding species we are. We have invented our delights and contrived our torments. We created the pleasures of ice cream and ragtime, and the sorrows of the H-bomb and kiddie porn.

We made the clock and the calendar to impose order, and wound up living by their tyrannies. And now, at the turning of both clock and calendar, what do we honestly make of ourselves?

A species capable of rendering itself extinct with both the bang and the whimper. A being timid and arrogant, bloodthirsty and sentimental, greedy and gentle, pacing forever between Nirvana and Armageddon of our own making.

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com