COLUMN: Singin' the millennial blues

From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print," Fall '99 From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print," Fall '99So, this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a series of arty black-and-white retirement portfolio ads. The year 2000 is coming, but with a whimper that can be heard all around the world. First of all, we've taken all of the fun out of the ever-exciting possibility of the end of the world. For the past few years in Israel, religious zealots -- or freaks, as they're known in Hebrew -- have been gathering at the base of the Mount of Olives eagerly awaiting Jesus, which is fine, I guess. But cooler heads have already assured me that rather than the promised Four Horsemen, vengeful messiah and boils that the apocalypse had always promised, we're far more likely to be done in by an avoidable computer glitch, which does little for my imagination. Rather than a feeling of impending terror and awe, a sense of premillennial boredom -- or fin de siecle ennui if you prefer your apathy in French, as the French are so wont to do. Rather than a year of Bacchanalian rioting, glee and orgies -- which would take a lot of the edge off of trying to find a job -- the only people really getting off on this festive season are named Merrill, Paine, and Dean. Watch an evening of TV and tell me if you've ever seen more commercials for brokerages, retirement plans and investment strategies to acquire money to send your rugrat to college. Yah, Lynch, Webber, and Witter have it all together -- anticipating the great paranoia which we get every thousand years or so, they're all ready to take your money now for a payoff years from now when a misprogrammed bomb in an abandoned silo in the Crimea has already put an end to everything. The cynics! Don't give in. Somehow the magic of the changing millennium has faded away. I share the spirit of the old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon in which our slightly delusional young protagonist -- ADD all the way -- and his Ritalin-flashback of a tiger friend greet a new year with disappointment because, frankly, the future is so dull it wouldn't cut balsa. I don't need flying cars or colonies on Mars, but just three years ago, the movie Strange Days told me we would have neat virtual reality toys and global anarchy and while the latter might be a bummer, I'd sure dig the gadgets. Somehow it doesn't look like we're gonna make it. Yet for all of the anti-climaxes, we're still going to end up with a year long countdown of lists --Dozen most influential baseball players of second thousand years? One hundred greatest inventions up to and beyond sliced bread? Basically it's going to be like spending twelve months anticipating Christmas, only to discover that Santa Claus was really Bill Gates and that rather than presents, he was going to set the world's clocks back one hundred years. Our year even has its own carols, like Prince's "1999," which would be a great happy song if it wasn't going to be ubiquitous for the next fifty weeks and if it didn't end in Armageddon. Still, we should be thankful we aren't approaching "The Year 2525." John Travolta has already declared his intention to hop in his private plane and go flying through as many time zones as possible to celebrate the new year over and over. Clearly, having never made a movie where I took second billing to a talking baby, my choices seem kinda different: Either get the silliness out of the way by hijacking Travolta's plane and heading to Antarctica, the first place on Earth to sing "Auld Lang Syne," or head over to Western Samoa, the final place on the globe for the champagne not to be Korbel. It seems like an important decision, if I could only make myself care.