Union Square Station
Malone
1/3

Real Millennium Strange; The Midnight Orchid

This is going to be a strange year. As Bob Dole the erection shill would say, "You know it, I know it, the American people know it."

The long prosperity is hitting a rocky interlude. There is a new president waiting to be sworn. Madonna is chained in wedlock. And as the eminent ex-basketball player Charles Barkley recently pointed out, when the best rapper is white and the best golfer is black you know that everything has gone to hell.

An American couple who lost their infant daughter intends to have her cloned back to life from her own preserved skin cells. Hillary Clinton is the new Senator from New York. And Kim Basinger will continue, presumably, to have sex with Alec Baldwin.

How much more bizarre strangeness would someone need to be convinced that the year itself is strange?

Don't misunderstand me, I'm no doomsayer, but I think that this year will be the weirdest and perhaps the wildest since 1969, and no one alive now who was no longer living with their parents then has finished concealing what they did that year.

What could I possibly mean by that? Well, for instance, is it or is it not true that millions of forty- and fifty-somethings have enormous gaps in their memories about just whether and how much ergot derivative they took during that hoppin' year? From the dearth of LSD memoirs floating around one would think that it wasn't much of a thing at all, and that many from a very large generation did not in fact get thrown through the doors of perception the way card cheats in old westerns were thrown out through the swinging saloon doors.

However else it was used around the world, LSD was a prototypically American thing, an instant enlightenment more akin to time-saving household appliances than to any sort of spiritual devotion. "Here, take this," came the word, and about thirty to forty minutes later you were seeing more deeply into the nature of things than a world dependent upon superficiality could sustain.

No, it didn't make you any smarter. You stayed as stupid as stupid gets, but this was the opportunity to know it. And if you learned anything from it, it was that you had best forget all about the doors of perception and embrace the stupidity. Not because that's where the money was, but because that's where the real true weirdness of things wasn't.

Back here in 2001, where a creepy combination of Madison Avenue image shaping and serious academic malfeasance have done more to form what passes for character than any of the great moral teachers, you have people -- who would have once fallen to the ground in laughter at the very sight of her insane smile and bulging eyes -- now having silent orgasms at the thought of Hillary! taking charge of what they loosely conceive of as their political agenda.

Yes, looking at the alternative, it's true that George W. Bush was probably just another bong passer with a big smile and a good laugh while the ever-so-serious bucktoothed Miz Rodham was waving revolutionary banners, but how is it that no one seems to recall that she was the person who you would duck down a stairwell and out a back door to avoid because she was just so annoying that you didn't want to risk passing her in a hallway, lest she corner and harangue you with crypto-Marxist bleatings?

Times change, of course. What was once last on a list of things you'd most like to see suddenly winds up at the top, perhaps because you've had to cross everything else off. But this is the year when the accumulated weirdness of the last eight will, I predict, suddenly flower like an orchid that only blooms at midnight in the dead of winter.

We've had a decade or two now where the emerging generations of young have had their way with the culture and have held an immature finger on the remote control. That's about to pass, I think, and now a generation that had its peak experience in 1969 and used it to reshape the world will come face to face with the furies that it unleashed, and the pieces of conscience and common sense it threw overboard to keep aloft while finding a place to land will return with a vengeance.

© Union Square Journal 2001

Previously by Malone...

Smoke 'em if you got 'em (12/21/00)

Union Square Station (12/11/00)

Union Square Station (12/3 back to 11/24/00)