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| In This Century |
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| Five Moments |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, December 29, 1999. It is hard to resist, I admit, this millennial best of, the century's crowning achievement, the decade's most important something, the year's mostest person or event. It becomes silly early on, sentimental overkill. Yet, there are events that were pivotal sadly omitted from all the lists I have seen. I want to pay brief homage to them and the people involved here. There are many that crowd around me as I write this, but flensing them I am left with five. First, the ABC correspondent shot to death in the late 1970's by the Somoza thugs in Nicaragua. He was killed on camera, lying on the ground with his hands behind his head. The murderer casually glanced around, saw nothing of note, and shot the man. It was run on the newscasts within a day or so. From that moment, Somoza lost any remnant support in the United States and assisted the Sandanista revolution and assured a round of applause when he was killed in 1980. I want to say, it did not make the revolution or provide the impetus, but it underlined for Americans, awash in propaganda about the dangers of the left and communism, that right wing dictators are still the yardsticks by which we measure depravity and sadism. His name, I recall, was Bill Stuart. As we watched his body bounce on the ground, you could almost hear millions of minds locking, loading, and poised to remember….ever. From that moment, the United States citizenry started a long overdue backing away from its vague Cold War support of Hispanic dictators, a long overdue mental recalibration of its relations with Castro and Cuba, and an appreciation of what, after all, the left was revolting against in these countries. It also fixed some vaguely held theories about the recently lost war in Vietnam, where our government lied and backed some genuine lowlife. It was different than the horrible murder of one Vietnamese by another also caught on camera years before. This was an unarmed American journalist. If you saw it, you remember. How it affected the far left and far right is irrelevant. It moved the great middle of the country, against which no President, especially Reagan, would ever stand up. It guaranteed support for the Panama invasion once the Noriega face was implanted over Somoza's. I hold it pivotal. Another forgotten moment was the proof of Galileo. An astronaut on the moon dropped a rock and a feather, and given the weak gravity and lack of atmosphere, they gently hit the surface together as the crabby old Italian said they would and science had since proven in vacuum tubes. Still, it was a surprisingly touching moment, and if there is an afterlife, I hope the old man got wind of it. He deserved it. People who say science is not an art are mistaken. Galileo simply imagined the result in an experiment he could not himself conduct. It is the same with quantum mechanics today, but given Galileo's world, I hold his vision far more impressive and dangerous. Then, a photograph of an unknown Chinese baby in Nanking. He was only about a year old, judging by the size of his head and the way he holds his arms. He is sitting on a railroad track after the Japanese, long before the Nazi's or the Franco forces in Spain, instituted bombing of civilian targets simply to terrify and kill. The child's mouth is open in the very definition of pain, fear, and confusion. He is filthy, perhaps bloody. We have seen many similar photographs since, but this one in the 1930's was groundbreaking and made it to Life Magazine, and therefore became an icon to the sheltered American population. Even after the Spanish Civil War, even during the Second World War, relief agencies for those nations fighting Japan would still get notes with fifty cents or a buck saying 'this is for the little guy on the tracks.' It is hard to say, but when the time came to drop the big one on Hiroshima, the surprising lack of guilt or hesitation in President or nation could possibly find its cause in subconscious recollections of that doomed child in a magazine years before. And something else. We have all had this sensation. Do you recall the first time you saw a live, rock and roll performance with a real sound system? I mean hi-fi sound, with woofers and real guitar amps? If you are my age - in your youth used to bands playing through auditorium bullhorns - the warmth and surprise of big sound absolutely set me free, even if I was iffy on the music itself. It meant that hundreds of thousands of people could experience a live artistic performance together at the same time. Nobody chats about that, but I think that the improvements of affordable mobile sound reinforcement are among the most important developments of this century, along with all recording and instrumental replications. It changed us socially, mentally, and perhaps ethically. Certainly, it rivaled the religious experience for the generations since Bill Haley's band unloaded the bass fiddle and got an electric bass. The profusion of music this century is a major and unremarked story; the mass event enjoyment of it is another. And fifth, the residue of the apocolypse mindset, century after century. There are thousands, perhaps millions of people hoping for catastrophe in the next few days, some because they believe that Christ will come again, some because they're bored, some because they do not understand the world today and want it to be revealed as evil to excuse their incompetencies. Some because of all three. Still, for all our advances in science and common sense, there remains a human, perhaps genetic willingness to believe the worst possible scenario is upon us. Whether Jim Jones or the idiot cults of Montana and Idaho, the untutored Christians awaiting the end in Jerusalem, Aimee McPherson or Father Coughlin, there is a common thread of stupidity and con at work. I hope after the Millennium, so called, is over, we will recall and condemn those who threatened and worked for catastrophe, whether priest or survivalist or salesman on the phone terrifying the elderly. I hope, this once, we do that. |
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