Millenium Musings

Having spent my life wallowing in the bog of secular humanism, it's passing strange that I now see myself as, well, a millennialist. Naturally, this strikes me as quite a revelation, although it has nothing to do with Revelations. Or does it?

I know the place, I know the year, I know the day when all this happened. The place was the television studio of CNBC; the year was 2000 (we're talkin' millennium here, right?); and the day was election day. Election night, to be precise.

And I know the moment: it was the very instant that, first one, and then the other network anchors began saying, "Never mind. Remember a little while ago when we told you who the next president will be? Well, NEVER MIND!"

I distinctly recall exchanging a wide-eyed look with David Gergen, with whom I was working on election coverage that night. I guess I was thinking, "You know that somethin's happening, but you don't know what it is... do you, Mr. Gergen?" Well, I didn't know either. Neither did any of us.

Who among us didn't feel that certain, existential "Huh?" shiver through our fundaments? And who didn't immediately, in defense against the inexplicable, say inwardly: "Wow, this glitch is a doozy. Will it be a couple of minutes or perhaps an hour before they sort this out and put the cosmos back in order?"?

And who among us, dear readers, isn't still waiting for exactly that? You know -- an ordered cosmos; a reversion to a reality that is problematic, complicated, unfair, and impossible to understand - in other words, a world that makes a little bit of sense. It feels like a galaxy far, far away.

Throughout the lifetimes of my kids, from childhood to adulthood, I've been both thankful and sorry that they did not, could not, know what life was like during the Vietnam era. Thankful because who would want to experience that? Sorry because, in a way, who WOULDN'T want to experience that?

Well, that paradox is a dead letter now. It's not that my kids - or your kids - have come to really feel what it felt like four decades ago. That was then, this is now, and every every historical moment is different. But what they are experiencing now - let's face it - surpasses, in surreality and dread, all that rained down on our heads back then.

After all, Vietnam's great enabling lie (or fiction, if you prefer) was the domino theory. The cynics of the time used that theory to stampede us into disaster. Those who sincerely believed in it (and there were such people) were simply wrong. And the rest of America believed otherwise. Under the circumstances, it was a strangely comforting thought: however the war turned out, there would be no falling dominoes -- not Cambodia, or Laos, or the Philippines, or Malaysia, or Indonesia, or anywhere else. We believed that at the time, and history has borne us out.

But who among us - children or parents - can find any parallel comfort in our present circumstances? What sustained us back then was the conviction that, despite all the carnage and horror, despite all the lies our leaders told us about larger calamities that lay in wait, no such end was in store. We knew, we KNEW, that all we needed to do was to stop the killing, and then an ordered cosmos could return.

Who among us feels that way now? Our current leaders - you know, the millennialists - have constructed a reality in which it's nearly impossible to divine any hopeful scenario, no matter what happens in the weeks and months ahead.

Please, don't get me wrong. Let me be clear. I'm not looking for red heifers. I'm not searching for so much as one horseman, let alone four. I don't feel a bad case of the Rapture coming on, and I'm not worried about the end of days. Or am I?