Brave New Millennium

by Edward Hothi

While it was happening, there were basically three possible responses to the 20th century:

1. Pretend it wasn’t happening and try to make a life, hoping that the century wouldn’t notice, or if it did, it would at best reward you with some money or fame (but not too much) and at worst it would indifferently erase you along with the other 100 million or so souls it managed to wipe out with such efficiency in purges, famines, and wars. We’ll call these people "one-ers."

2. Acknowledge that it was happening but pretend it wasn’t as bad as it was, hoping to find praise and some success for your "realistic" and "practical" views and practices in business, science, academics, art, music, or whatever it was you were interested in. These are "two-ers."

3. Look at the century open-eyed without censorship, either of yourself or of what you were seeing. And these are "three-ers."

One-ers.
Most people, as you would expect, opted for Choice Number One. Quite a few of those people (most by chance) survived and passed along their cowardly genes to the next generation, who grew up spoiled to become latter-day "Christians" or, worse yet, Republicans, or worst of all, both.

Many a satisfactory career in the arts, the sciences, academe, and of course business and politics, and religion, was built on those who made the first choice and allowed expediency to rule their lives. Their works and legacies are easily recognized by faux piety, a starchy style, and the shallowest, frothiest of patriotisms.

It is difficult to be harsh with these first-choice people (or their progeny). They didn’t after all know better (makes you wonder just how many Neanderthal genes are still hanging around). Not only did they not know better, they didn’t have the mental or emotional wherewithal to know better. Still, the damage they did (and do) was (and is) massive, ranging from countless forests destroyed for the printing of the likes of Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov (not to mention the countless other forests involuntarily devoted to the printing of academic commentaries on Proust, Joyce, Nabokov, and their blindered ilk), to the temples of "art" filled to the air-conditioned brim with the doodles of Magritte, Warhol, and Dali, to the empty-seated temples of "music" echoing hollowly with the disharmonies of, oh, say Babbit, Reich, and other pygmies standing on the shoulders of giants. Nor should we forget the shapers of the brave new universe ("big bang" indeed) daring to go, on the most biased of evidence, where no Newton or Einstein had dared go before. Anyone for string theory?

As for the masters of industry, one expects nothing better from them than what they have given us in the cowardly new/old world of unbridled greed called "the free market" (all hail Milton Friedman). Of course they chose (and always choose) to just get on with business. It worked for their fathers, it’ll work for them, and it’ll work for their sons. Period.

Similarly with the masters of science, who after all are involved in the holy pursuit of pure knowledge. Whatever we lesser beings make of or do with their discoveries is our problem. Alas, _____________ (choose the site of your favorite hi-tech belligerent atrocity, from Babylon to Belsen to Baghdad).

For all these people who are in total denial about the horrors of history happening around them, in case the reality of the victims of all this fiddling while Rome keeps on burning is just too, too offensive, then issue an edict barring the photographing of the flag-draped coffins returning home. If there’s no picture, it didn’t happen.

Two-ers.
Persons of moderate intelligence and o’erweening ambition generally opt for Choice Number Two. Carefully picking and choosing which horrors to acknowledge, these people often succeed in epater-ing the bourgeoisie just enough to top best-seller lists, weekend box office tallies, and now and then garner a Nobel Prize or two. Picasso glanced at the ravaged town of Guernica and look how far that one brief look into the heart of darkness took him: decades of glory on the Riviera and a billion-dollar estate when he died. Or how about ol’ Stravinsky, who for a couple of years escaped the tyranny of the tonic with really bracing results (Firebird, Rite of Spring), and then closed up the new shop and fled to safer, more profitable ground.

Some Two-ers choose to focus their limited acknowledgment of just how bad things are on the lesser horrors of the impoverished and the near-impoverished struggling to meet everyday needs, which leads to commercial empires such as that of Wal-Mart.

Others surf comfortably on mid-level tsunamis of cries for hope and consolation, which leads to quasi-imperial religions (Christianity, Islam, Zionism, etc.), a.k.a. "power masked as piety."

On the intellectual front in the 20th century, of course, there were the tireless word-games of the literatistes, the poetasters, and the critics and meta-critics, with, as usual, the French in the vanguard, tippy-toeing right up to the edge, then cringing back with yelps of polysyllabic, oh-so-clever punning horror.

Three-ers
As for the third choice, those who look unblinkered into the abyss are rare. Rarest of all are those who look and figure out a way to report back on what they’ve seen without getting burned or beheaded.

The 19th century gave us some great role models—Darwin, Marx, Freud—which the 20th century, alas, chose either to ignore or rather savagely misunderstand.

Some in the 20th century tried, really hard: Brecht, Sinclair, Terry Southern, Paul Goodman, R.D. Laing, Wittgenstein, Einstein even. Others managed a dance of sorts right on the edge: Cage, Bacon, Lawrence, Lessing, Graham, Leary, Grosz. Yet others just couldn’t hack it: Woolf, Hemingway, Plath.

Some century, huh? Call it "the Age of Great Denial."

And we are its heirs.

What to do, what to do?

Look backward, angels, for your models.

Shakespeare is praised for everything but few have noted his bravery. He saw clearly and kept on seeing for a good long time, and then shut up.

Swift took one good long look darkness-ward, and then shut up.

Ah, examples can be multiplied endlessly.

Searching for sheer survivability with skill? Study Shostakovitch.

Know that you're about to fall off the mountain but want some lessons in how to do it with grace and beauty? Memorize whole passages of Tennessee Williams.

Meanwhile, what’s it gonna be? Bullet-in-the-chest Gandhi or bullet-in-mouth Hemingway, eh?

The simple truth is that those three choices have been the same three faced by everybody in every century. From Mother Courage dragging her cart across the wasteland of the Thirty Years’ War to bloody Electra screaming over her mother’s body to vision-filled Arjuna despairing on the battlefields of India to sweet Hamlet maddened by his inability to stop seeing the horrors of his particular shard of reality.

So here we are, we 21st-centurions, once again stirring the global pot of violence bigtime.

Whence, for anybody who dares to look back, seems pretty clear.

Whither, for that same anybody, must therefore also seem pretty clear, i.e., more of the same. Or, as the Fugs in a pithier mode labeled History: the Big Brown River:

"River of shit, river of shit. Flow on, flow on, river of shit. Right from my toes on up to my nose, flow on, flow on, river of shit. I've been swimming In this river of shit more than 20 years and I'm getting tired of it Don't like swimming, hope it'll soon run dry. Got to keep on swimming cause I don't want to die."

One so wants Krishna to be right when he reveals to Arjuna the illusory nature of, well, everything. One so wants Jesus and Mohammad to be right, when they, well, you know, whatever. One so wants that old prince among riddlers, Lao-Tze, to be right: "You’ve figured out that nobody knows diddle? Then shut up already." And through centuries of befogging commentary, one so wants Buddha to be right but so thick is the fog now that it’s hard to discern just what he might have been right about.

Yes, the vaunted Third Millennium sits facing the same old three choices. It also sits facing the same old barely whispered question that few hear and fewer answer coherently: Is there ever a fourth choice?

END

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