20th vs. 21 Century

Today's theme starts in my head and moves out into the world: the calendar puts me and my generation in Buck Rogers time. Born in 1949, I am very much a 20th century man. My father was in the Korean War and damn near convinced me to go to Viet Nam, though Korea had been one of the biggest military fiascoes in history, and he knew it. I lived through the threat of nuclear war, the murder of JFK, RFK, MLK, Chicago, Nixon, Watergate, blah-blah-blah. So did you, right? But all I remember are TV shows and music and getting high. A wife, kids, the usual.

The point is: I don't think I ever grew out of the 20th Century. Most people I know did not either. I still read 20th century authors more than new writers. I listen to 20th century music, my collection centered primarily around the 60s and 70s. I don't trust most of the newer technologies, like Twitter, which seems silly. How it saved protesters in Iran at 140 words a clip is beyond me. I don't like Facebook or Craigslist or MySpace, though there's little difference between them and my blog. I wake up feeling thirty and feel like the bathroom mirror has been rigged to play a cruel joke. I can't be that damned old.

Down the street a kid got killed in an auto accident 2 weeks before graduating high school. It was a one car accident. Police say he was texting while racing down the road and drove right into a tree. What my 20th century mind does not get is this: why TEXT on a cellphone instead of TALK? It's a phone, right? And the coming text novels will find their places, being read and written by drivers everywhere.

Michael Jackson's death and the endless tributes show I'm not the only one who feels this way. MJ was definitely a 20th Century icon, and his passing is mourned, like Farrah's, with a certain nostalgia. Celebrities live on film. It's always startling to find they have the same frail bodies as the rest of us. And it seems like the 21st Century is devouring the stars of the 20th. As it will consume us all.

Maybe having Bush in charge for so long has something to do with the inabilty to transit the 100 year mark. Everything seemed stalled, like we had returned to the Nixon era. I keep waiting for The Monolith to be found, like in A Space Odyssey. Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

Or maybe that is the destiny of Everyman, to finally grow and master the terms of one time, only to have it swept away, by endless cycles of planetary spin.