Like a guest who’s
overstayed his welcome, the 20th century departs clumsily, leaving behind a
residue of unfinished business ranging from trivial (Y2K) to catastrophic (40,000 nuclear
weapons). Still, we stand in the door and watch it depart,waving, pretending that a
foolishly sentimental tear or two is not threatening to run down our smiling cheeks.
What a century. We learned how to blow the planet up, and then figured out a way to leave
it. We got really good at despoiling the environment and then in spite of our highly
successful capitalism with Darwinian tendencies
started cleaning it up. We killed in the neighborhood of 200 million of ourselves in
various wars and revolutions, along with countless animals, fish, plants, and
microorganisms. This while at the same time turning our 8,000-mile-diameter home into a
wired but wireless village (of sorts).
A century that gave us Hitler and Gandhi, Gilligan’s Island and Tennessee Williams, Belleau Woods and
Woodstock, Bill Gates and Einstein, Hank Williams, Jr. and Hank Williams, Sr., Garth
Brooks and Glenn Gould, William Buckley and H.L. Mencken, the Holocaust and the Salk
vaccine, O.J. Simpson and Martin Luther King, Jr., Martin Amis and P.G. Wodehouse, rap and
Scott Joplin, Lyndon Johnson and Lyndon Johnson, Guernica and Guernica, ICBM’s
and ATM’s, Mao and the man in front of the tank, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles,
alcohol’s okay and marijuana’s not, Clarence Thomas and Jackie Robinson, Eyes
Wide Shut and 2001, Vietnam and the Marshall Plan, Diet Sprite and MRI's,
Patrick Buchanan and Walter Kronkite, Peron and Borges, Hiroshima and Brasilia, Phyllis
Shlafley and Bella Abzug, Windows and Macintosh, AIDS and protease inhibitors, Andy Warhol
and Chuck Jones.
But withal, a century not unlike others, with the continuing plague of merciless and
intolerant religionists of every ilk, the long-running reign of men whose stupidity and
greed are matched only by their violence, children as chattel, starvation.
And at the end, as at the beginning, like all centuries, chronocentric, believing itself
the best and brightest that had ever been.
At the end, as at the beginning, in most of us tyrant ego was supreme, brutally ignorant
of the permanent splendors of organic reality, blind to the playful rainbow of all that
is, deaf to the music of the infinite spheres of creation. Ciao, petty rulers. Ciao,
little century. The century is dead. Long live the century.
END
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