Let's pause a moment before we head for the exits. I'm talking about the
spectacular, the ludicrous, the humiliating and uproarious discomfiture of
the Y2K doomsayers. How deliciously wrong they were! We're dealing here with
one of the biggest busts since the Edsel.
Are there lessons to be drawn from the fiasco? I suppose the core
phenomenon to be looked at is the propensity of the richest, most secure
nation in the history of the planet to believe that collapse, utter and
awful, is just around the next corner. This mental outlook is understandable
in, say, Poland, which has been invaded and ravaged not a few times in this
century. And there are some ethnic fractions here -- Hmong, for example --
who could be pardoned for having an apprehensive take on the future. But the
Hmong weren't buying all those generators, or laying in enough canned food
and bottled water to last through the rest of this century.
Driving by Costco right before New Year's, I saw a couple staggering
towards their truck with a pallet load of toilet paper. Few things agitate
the American soul more sharply than the possibility of a shortage in this
vital commodity. It's up there with oil and electrical-generating capacity.
At least one of my neighbors -- a lawyer invested heavily in gold stocks
under the supposition that a) the Arabs wouldn't have fixed their computers,
and so b) there'd be an oil shortage, with c) a rapid decline in living
standards, morals, the rule of law and thus, d) the collapse of capitalism,
requiring e) gold as the only fungible medium of exchange.
I suppose that this profound apprehension is the price tag -- a modest one
to be sure -- that comes with being top dog on the block. Back at the turn
of the 19th century, the British had similar worries, and spun endless
fantasies about the precise way in which everything would collapse. In 1903,
a huge best seller in the United Kingdom was a book called "When It Was
Dark," by Guy Thorne. His particular version of Y2K horror was a fantasy
about what would happen if it were shown that Christ never rose from the
dead. By means too complex to describe here, the villain engineers a fake
archaeological discovery throwing doubt on the Resurrection. Here's what
happens then:
"We find a wave of wave of lawlessness and fierce riot passing over the
country such as it has never known before. . The Irish and the Italians
robbing and murdering Protestants and Jews. . Fathers and mothers treated
with contempt by youth. . Maidens are spat upon and cursed by a degraded
populace, and assailed with eager sarcasm by the polite and cultured. ."
Thorne visits one emblem of collapse after another, and reaches his climax:
"The terrible seriousness of the situation need hardly be further insisted
on here. Its reality cannot be more vividly indicated than by the statement
of a single fact -- THE STOCK MARKET IS DOWN TO 65!"
At least here the apprehension derived its strength from a collapse in
religious belief. Today, I can respect millennarians and indeed
fundamentalist Christians who awaited the rapture. This same expectation is
part of the eschatology of their faith. But the fear that prompted my
atheist lawyer-neighbor to buy gold, gasoline, canned goods and toilet paper
had nothing to do with the rapture. He was seized, like many others, with an
entirely irrational panic, that technology would fail.
Being an optimist myself, back in September, I pondered how best to honor
the new millennium, and decided to commission works of art, to be placed on
the steep, wooded hill behind my house. This plan allowed me to approach
Elizabeth Berrian, an artist living in Eureka, Calif., who makes wire
animals. Back in the 1840s, an early settler in the Mattole Valley, where I
live, reported in his journal that from a hilltop he could espy no less than
30 specimens of Ursus arctos horribilis, aka Ursus ferox -- grizzlies to you
and me -- grubbing about looking for berries and bugs, or hunkered down on
the edge of the Mattole, scooping up salmon. We still have mountain lions
and brown bears, but the grizzly is long gone, so I commissioned Berrian to
weave out of aluminum stainless wire a 9-foot grizzly, destined to haunt my
hill.
In the months that followed, Ursus, hanging from a pulley in the barn where
Berrian works, gradually grew in size to his present majestic 9 feet, and on
Dec. 30, I drove up to Eureka in my truck to pick him up. We tied him on his
back to the lumber rack, and I headed for home in the darkness. Halfway up a
mountain grade, all power in the '68 Dodge truck failed. No lights. No
power. No emergency brake. Low compression so the gears wouldn't hold me.
Take my foot off the brake pedal, and either I'd roll back to the right and
drop off the edge, or roll back to the left and drop into a ditch at the
base of the cliff. Stay put, and some homeward-bound logging truck would
plow straight through me. Ursus and I waited for the end. And it wasn't even
Y2K yet.
The rancher in a mighty 350 Ford pickup didn't hit me. He had a chain, and
pulled me to a safe spot, handing me his cell phone The AAA dispatcher 300
miles south in Petaluma patched me through to Jerry, who runs the local
breakdown service at Tipple Motors in Ferndale. I told him I had a wire
grizzly on my rack, and if necessary, he should pull me 50 miles home to
Petrolia, almost a freebie on my triple-A plus card, one of the greatest
bargains in America. In the end, Jerry fixed the truck, and Ursus and I
puttered south under the stars. The next day, Jerry called and said he'd had
a call from the AAA office in Petaluma, wanting a photo of "the wild
grizzly" reported by the night dispatcher as having been tied to a truck up
in Humboldt. On New Year's Day, we unveiled Ursus before an admiring crowd
of Petrolians, and now, he's up on my hillside, a ghostly intimation of the
past that we should honor more, while simultaneously fearing the future
less.
Alexander Cockburn is a columnist for The Nation and author of a syndicated column, essays and books. The Times Literary Supplement called him “the most gifted polemicist now writing in English.” To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at
www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2000 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
