| Personally Speaking by Tom Kelly Remember just a year ago this month, it was approaching Y2K, and civilization was going to fold up in a noisy collapse? No lights. No phone. Banks berserk. Airplanes falling out of the sky. Gasoline pumps and ATM machines on "Tilt." Your computer lying gasping in the floor, spitting up frothy drivel about William McKinley's reelection as President, Carry Nation raiding saloons with a hatchet, and other trivia from 1900. Grocery stores couldn't sell because their bar-code scanners wouldn't work, for crying out loud. You were hoarding water and trail mix, canned tuna, beef jerky, and dried beans, and wondering if you should have bought a bigger generator. You had plenty of ammo for your guns, cash money and silver coin laid in, and just one tiny part of you hoped things really would fall apart so you could play John Wayne and defend your space against the marauding likes of myself, who only had a couple extra cans of dog food for the animals during the weekend, and a spare bag of coffee. Remember? I guess the reason I never got too excited about it was that I have too clear a memory of Life in the Slow Lane - Gaar's Mill, Dodson, pre-WWII New Orleans, rural Acadiana, and a couple of other un-wired spots in Louisiana in the 1930s and 1940s - not to mention the 1950s in and around a much more mellow Winnfield. Water? Drew it up from a well. Milk? Straight from the cow's udder to your kitchen, hand-grabbed and "streened." Buttermilk? Right there in that churn, and cool that bowl of butter in a syrup-bucket let down the water well before you serve it. Eggs? When you hear the old hen cackle, get 'em off the nest and ease 'em out real fresh. Lighting? Kerosene lamps. Making biscuits? Flour, buttermilk, fresh lard, salt, baking powder, and a fresh egg in a mixing bowl, hand-spanked and browned just right in a stovewood-hot range oven. Radio? Big Emerson battery job sitting on the living room table. Air conditioning? Front porch swing. With these experiences to draw on, it's hard to get really frightened about a Y2K computer bug halting life completely. Could have been a little inconvenient, but we'd have survived. As the millennium clock struck midnight, all that happened, happily, after a frantic year-long upgrading of computer hardware and software that sent the Bill Clinton economy into the stratosphere, was a globe-circling explosion of pretty good fireworks, from Moscow to Paris, to New York . . . With the fizzled Y2K threat, all we have to keep us nervous these days are the conspiracies of Big Government, Big Politics, Big Business and many other even more improbable symptoms of social hypochondria. "Them." The Trilateral Commission. The UN. The Damn Liberal Democrats. Big Media. The FBI/CIA/NSA/ intelligence cabal. The marshmallow-centered U.S. military. What else you got? I'm about as nervous about all those conspiracies as I was about the Y2K bug. After 50 years - plus a little - of wearing out my "surprise" circuits on small-town journalism, I subscribe completely to the adage, Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity. Even if it is my own. And so now, set your doom calendars forward to the year 2030. (It'll be here sooner than you think; I'll only be getting ready to turn 100, so I expect to see this one through, also). Astronomers have supposedly sighted an asteroid "out there" that may be on a collision course for Earth. Or not. It may smack us hard. Or not. It could hit an ocean. Or . . . Keep those generators tuned up, and replace the water every six months. Put Clint Eastwood in cold storage until 2029, and thaw him out in time to fly the atomic rocket out to meet the thing and blast it out of orbit. Or not. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .*** I am certain I'm living in the wrong universe when I browse my copy of Editor and Publisher magazine, the professional journal which I re-subscribed to a few months back after a period of living in the world of regular people. In a section called Culture Trends, there is a list of what I suppose are the Top 20 musical offerings from something called MTV. (I've heard of that before - but don't ask me if I care). It seems there are listings of so-called "artists," and whatever it is they are doing. I am not sure which is the "band" and which the "song", from this sample: There is "Offspring," and "Original Prankster." There is "Green Day," and "Minority." There is "Fuel," and "Hemorrhage." Is there supposed to be some sort of "art" in this? There is one other listing which sums up the whole thing - something called "Ludacris." Not counting idiotic spelling, them's my sentiments, exactly, whether it's a band or a song. And why does "The Magazine of the Fourth Estate" carry such a feature? If that's what journalists are reading about or listening to these days, it's no wonder "The Media" are in big trouble. |