Insignificant instants
The talking- and typing-heads went on about "the Clinton legacy." He’ll be remembered, they said, as the president who was impeached, or as the president who brought China into the WTO, or as the president who made peace in Kosovo. Blah blah blah. Short-sighted blather for which those who spout it get paid 6- and 7-figure salaries.

Cassandra, doomed by the gods’ whimsy to see the future clearly but to be believed by no one, spouts the truth and gets paid nothing. Well. Almost nothing.

What will the people of the future think when they think of Bill Clinton? They, squirming through the disasters almost upon us, will think of an era of such uninterrupted, unimaginable, untroubled affluence that they will remember little of the impeachment. They will recall Bill Clinton as a miracle worker, a great, inspiring leader who reigned over the last, unparalleled time of wealth and ease.

As the decades pass, as our condition worsens, the Clinton memories will glow brighter and brighter. Could we, people will ask, ever have been so rich, so carefree, so spendthrift?

The Clinton "legacy" will join other grand illusions built from the needs of a bereft humanity: the glory that was Greece, etc.

At the end of affluence, we are in almost total denial. The blind led by the greedy controlled by the amoral.

Cassandra speaks. But who listens?

Apocalypse now? No, but soon, soon.

The Cassandra Scale
To help gauge the probability and intensity of the approaching disasters, Cassandra has created the Cassandra Scale, sort of the social equivalent of the Richter Scale used for earthquakes.

The Cassandra Scale ranges from 0 to 10:
0.0 – 2.9: Quasi-Edenic reality. Tranquillity reigns. Lambs lie down with lions, everyone has enough food, clothes, shelter, we all do the work we want to do rather than the work we are forced to do, etc.
3.0 – 6.9: The human condition throughout history called "peace", that being the time of rebuilding and re-arming between wars.
7.0 – 8.9: Catastrophe in the form of war, plague, pestilence, genocide, starvation.
9.0-10.0: Apocalypse.
For perspective: Humanity has never existed at a level less than 4.0. During most of the 20th century the Cassandra Scale registered between 7.5 and 9.0.

Consider, please, Cassandra’s list, the symptoms whose causes we continue to ignore:

1. Violent children. In the 1960s, disobedient children spoke when they were supposed to listen, demanding an end to a terribly mistaken war. The country at first responded with violence. Mayor Daley’s police brutally attacked and crushed demonstrators at the 1968 Democractic convention in Chicago. The war escalated. The children protested more loudly. As a nation we walked to the very brink and tried filicide twice. At Kent State and at Jackson State, we shot and killed children. Shocked, we backed off, began to listen, and chose to end the war rather than kill our own children.

Now, the children are speaking again, screaming. With guns. The children themselves are killing each other. In the schools. Are we listening, trying to respond humanly and humanely? Please consider how we have so far responded. First graders now routinely pass through metal detectors. Police patrol the halls. We fill classrooms with teachers teaching to a national test and proudly call it educational reform. This is not education. This is not reform. It is social coercion, brain-washing of the young. Education is discovery, the growth of wonder. What we’re doing is only to clamp down, increase control. Our response is to the symptoms, not to the cause. The screams will only get louder.

Outlook on the Cassandra Scale: 8.7.

2. Violent weapons. It is only a matter of time till those whom the worshippers of Mammon call rogue and heathen nations acquire and use nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The bombs in the African embassies were only a warm-up. We of course will strike back in kind, only tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold.

3. Violent death. The most advanced country in the world, with 4 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. And 50 percent of the world’s murders by gunfire. We elect a president who governed a state in which more people were executed than in any state in American history.

Outlook on the Cassandra Scale: 9.1.

4. Hate. A 120-pound boy is murdered and crucified on a Wyoming fence, because he was gay. A young man is attacked and dragged behind an East Texas pickup until he’s dead, because he was black. We elect a president and give the government to a party which sees no need for hate-crime legislation.

5. America as banana republic? How else to describe us after a presidential election about which Jimmy Carter, who has monitored dozens of elections in trouble spots around the world, says: He would not assist a foreign nation that had election procedures as flawed as Florida's. "I was really taken aback and embarrassed by what happened in Florida. If we were invited to go into a foreign country to monitor the election, and they had similar election standards and procedures, we would refuse to participate at all.'' Hail to the thief.

6. Expedience at the highest level. America, shining example to the world of the rule of law, watched SILENTLY as its supreme court groveled before its moneyed masters. Habeas corpus is virtually gone already. What rights do we lose next? In a banana republic, you never know.

7. Theocracy. The money-changers are in the temples (just turn on the TV late at night), in the government, and in the courts. If it will further secure their power, they will put the Christian God, to which they give lip-service, into the law, while the populace fails to see that the one true god is now Mammon.

8. Greed. Five percent of Americans control 95 percent of American wealth. And the inequality of income distribution is worsening.

9. Up 10 degrees in 100 years. That’s the latest global scientific estimate of how much and how fast the temperature is going to increase. The scientists make guesses, many dire, but the truth is NO ONE KNOWS HOW CATASTROPHIC the effect will be. Catastrophe’s acoming. The only question is how big.

10. Blackouts in California? Let me say that again: Blackouts in California?

Finally, off all charts, we move into unknown territory.

The X-factors.
We know about all those things—the lying, the hypocrisy, the greed, the violence, the damage to the environment. What we don’t know is the cumulative impact of these symptoms.

What is the medium- to long-range societal impact of a supreme court that, when push comes to shove, acts with brazen political expediency? We don’t know.

What is the impact of our ever-more-complex pollution of the environment combined with, say, the effects of a "small" nuclear (or bacteriological) war? We don’t know.

What is the impact when 1 percent of the world’s people finally control 99 percent of the world’s wealth? We don’t know.

There can be little doubt that new, vastly more destructive factors that we haven’t even thought about will come into play as the scale of our collective malfeasance, what we now so proudly hail as "the global market," increases.

Outlook on the Cassandra Scale: 9.9.

Ah, how tiresome to hear old Cassandra drone on. We’ve heard it all before… Just one more point, if you’re still awake:

So engrossed have we become in our greed that we have forgotten to heed the true prophets: the artists. Not those who are themselves greed-driven, but the ones who spend their lives listening, looking, feeling, and then reporting on what they find, no matter the cost to themselves.

We’ve now got to the place where we think art is either something you study in school or something you buy at Sotheby’s. We forget that the best of artists pay a very, very high personal price for the shards of knowledge they try to pass on to us.

Look, I ask you, at the art of the last half of the 20th century. Look.

What a mess! That art, that mess, is the last symptom Cassandra would remind you of. Those people were shouting at us: "SOMETHING’S WRONG! SOMETHING’S REALLY WRONG!" And what was our response? We bid their paintings up into seven figures at Sotheby’s. We imprisoned their music in elite symphonic subscription series. We drowned their words in a cacophony of movie violence and TV vapidity.

And made billionaire heroes of athletes. And multi-billionaire heroes of the superficially clever manipulators of 1's and 0's.

What does Cassandra see for the 21st century? Oh, her vision is still clear, but if she told you what she sees, you wouldn’t believe a word of it. That’s her fate—and yours, remember? So she’s going to be coy, delphic, if you will.

What Cassandra sees indicates that the 20th century was only practice, a warm-up. If you want to see what Cassandra sees, it’s easy. Just take any of the statistical curves from the 20th century and extrapolate. 200 million violent deaths? A mere warm-up.