Because You Never Asked

     It's been many years since I've dealt with the obligatory mirth known as New Year's Eve, but not even a recalcitrant party pooper like myself could ignore the overwhelming energy --- like a Chernobyl-like radiation leak --- which infested the atmosphere as the hands of time inched towards the year 2000. As alienated as I might be, the millennium celebration showed me that I am still a member of the human race.

     One of the most enduring forms of entertainment is what we refer to as "fireworks". I can remember when I was a very little boy and my parents would take us to Coney Island to see the great display of pyrotechnics on the 4^th of July. In spite of the fact that its technological content is not all that different from those Brooklyn Dodger days of old, its ability to thrill and amaze us remains totally intact. As I sat under the marvelous array of colors, forms and sounds exploding above me in the newly inaugurated year of 2000, I could not help but ooh and ahh at the wonder of it all. At times I found myself laughing out loud, in much the same way great athletes do when somebody makes a play so remarkably good, it's actually funny.

     During one such moment of giddiness, with everything reaching its crescendo of exhilarating madness, I looked around and saw a young mother whose 3 year old son was taking it all in on her lap. His eyes were wide open in amazement and he was laughing and oohing and aahing just as I was . and I saw myself at Coney Island more than 50 years before . and I thought:

     "You see Jerry, in spite of all your bitching and complaining, there's nothing better than to be alive in the year 2000".

     In examining the legacy of the last 1000 years, it soon becomes evident that we can just about ignore the first 8 centuries. There are some notable exceptions, to wit: the work of Galileo-Copernicus, their "revolutionary" ideas as to our planet's physical place in the celestial scheme of things having changed our understanding of our lives forever (that is, at least in Occidente); the Portuguese sailors of the 15^th century, most notably Prince Henry The Navigator, whose invention of the sexton cut the umbilical cord of within-sight-of-land, dead reckoning travel; Charles Darwin, whose work on evolution helped diffuse a thick encyclopedia worth of ludicrous superstitions. Perhaps most important of all was the work of the Moorish mathematicians of North Africa, who created the numerical system we still use. This has led to just about everything that both enhances and degrades our lives today. If you wake up in the morning and find Kathy Lee yakking to you about her kids again, you can blame those Moorish mathematicians.

     But . and notwithstanding what has just been said, almost all of who we are today is the result of what has happened in the last 2 centuries.

     If we could somehow look back upon the last 2 centuries from the year 3000, I feel comfortable in saying that its legacy would be etched firmly in the technological progress

which exploded (it didn't gradually come upon us) during this time frame. Although some extinct cultures, such as the Egyptian or Inca-Aztec, surely knew things we still haven't decoded, there can be no doubt that our ability to travel effortlessly from one side of the globe to the other, our ability to communicate instantly, both verbally and pictorially, our ability to protect ourselves from the elements and produce the nourishment that sustains us, has been developed beyond any foreseeable possibilities in the last 200 years. Perhaps the most striking development in the panorama of the last 200 years is the ability to produce.

     This is good .

     but now for the bad news.

     Perhaps the most tragic aspect of what has happened to us over the last 200 years is most understood when we compare our emotional progress against this spectacular explosion of technological discovery. From an evolutionary standpoint, it is of no importance to replace the cumbersome clumsiness of catapults and horses with the deadly precision and efficiency of Smart Bombs and Stealth Jets. I see very little difference between E-mail and the Pony Express if the content of our communication has not been upgraded. It is of no value to the progression of our species to have a cell phone perpetually stuck to your ear if the intellectual discourse for the vast majority of us rises no higher than the banal trivialities of the Get Your Ass Out Of Bed America morning shows.

     If we go back about 25 years, to that moment in history when satellite communication made the infestation of cable TV a reality, I can remember a glimmer of hope amongst the more progressive elements of society. Here, perhaps, was an opportunity to use TV in a more enlightening way. But instead of a beautiful rose sprouting from well fertilized soil, we seem to have gotten a lump of manure that grows bulkier all the time --- more "instant replay", more Hulk Hogan dementia, more Howard Stern, more shopping channels, more Springer, more Whoopie-Willis garbage, more cigarette dangling, Sharon Stone sluts, more Pacino hoodlums and Van Damm tough guys bloodying and maiming each other.

     And now along comes the spectacular technology represented by the world of Bill Gates. Once again, wow, maybe now, all this information, Congressional libraries full of information at everyone's finger tips, right in your own home. Surely, here's an invention that will collectively raise our intellects, that will rescue us from the tinny canned laughter that has become the backdrop of our lives.

     Perhaps it is a bit premature to render an analysis of a technology still mired in its infant stages, but there are already some troublesome symptoms. The question is: will the Internet positively change the degrading breast implant reality we are falling deeper into, or will it simply become a more convenient way to further propagate an anti-intellect that has become very profitable?

     The early returns are not encouraging. More than anything else, the "Net" has been taken over by the reality of "dot Com", meaning "commercial". Its primary function seems to be evolving into an easier way to shop and do business. Sure, there is all kinds of worthwhile information on the "Net" outside of a commercial context, but it must be remembered that this new technology did not create this information. It simply allows one to find it more conveniently. It eliminates the library or the book store, but it doesn't make the "lumpen" masses more interested in it. Those who were already interested such pursuits would generally find such information anyway.

     Technology is good. But it does not think or create. All it does is serve the intellectual-emotional climate it is set into. The new technology's use will more likely reflect that emotional climate, rather than change it. If you are one such as this writer, who believes to have cracked the cultural code and sees a vast foundation of stupidity underlying what most of us take for normal behavior, the intellectual failure of expanded television programming does not bode well for what Bill Gates and his cohorts have now given us. It will probably end up being an easier way for us to be stupid.

     So here I am, a historian of the year 3000, looking back at the civilization which existed in the year 2000. I am impressed by the technological epiphany of the era, much of which, in an outmoded way, is still relevant today. But the signature of this time frame is the emotional barbarism which lagged way behind the technological advancements. I am convinced that this emotional lag was the result of their economic system, who's competitive aggression still reflected a time when physical survival was a more paranoid, neurotic exercise. It was only ? (take a guess) amount of years later, when they finally devised a distributive system which ceased demanding more consumption and allowed for a more cooperative approach to providing humanity's essential material needs, that this emotional-technological gap began to close.