I'm mejeffdorchen and welcome to the Moment of Truth, the crystal of beauty that precipitates out of the stinky murky broth of capitalist media sewage.We're living in the year 2000. I don't care if it's the first year of the new millennium or the last year of the old one, I don't care that it's just some arbitrary numerical designation of a cultural construct, this is really something. We're living in the future! That's what the year 2000 is. The future. I was born in the early sixties, and back then the year 2000 was still the future.
When I was a kid, the image of what a car was gonna look like in the year 2000 was totally futuristic. The actual models that resembled the sixties version of the car of the year 2000 actually came out in the eighties. The DeLorean was the engineering and entrepreneurial brainchild of John Z. DeLorean, who eventually was busted for cocaine and disappeared from the public consciousness, except among DeLorean owners who still belong to DeLorean owners' associations, which I guess are groups of people who get together and mutually admire their futuristic cars of the past.
So you could say the future of the automobile began in the late fifties and ended in the eighties. The history of automobile design ended when DeLorean got busted for coke and it's been downhill ever since. The internal combustion car is a vestige of the last century. It's a clumsy dinosaur. It's an embarrassment before nature and god and the year 2000. It offends the eyes and minds of us people of the future. The only thing that keeps it on the road is the global political and economic entrenchment of the petroleum and automobile industries.
Especially the petroleum industry. Everything about the story of the petroleum industry reeks of the last century. We should be done with this crap by now. How is it that it's the year 2000 and we're still lumbering around in the last century's horse and buggy? How is that we're still staggering across the fruited plain at less than the speed of sound? Sweltering in traffic jams, creeping herds of these archaic monstrosities farting out clouds of poisonous gas?
The entrenchment of oil. What other industry flies into African villages with military helicopters and mows down the inhabitants that stand in the way of its domination of land distribution? What other industry props up antidemocratic monarchies in the desert? The politics and economics of oil are a tangled web. The United Arab Emirates bought like a zillion jillion dollars worth of fighter jets from US-based multinational manufacturers last year. Oil is a military, industrial, economic and political web, an archaic web, a web of feudalism, a web of roots, a root system. A web that is strangling innovation in transportation. It has no place here in the future. It will, I say, it WILL fall by the wayside, it WILL go the way of vinyl records, and it WILL do so sometime in the 21st century. The United Arab Emirates will certainly get a chance to use their fighter planes, because I have no doubt whatsoever that the rise of alternative transportation and energy and the fall of oil and automobile, so long overdue, is going to be the vortex of THE major worldwide social upheaval of the next hundred years -- maybe only the next fifty.
But I'm not here today to talk about cars and oil, I'm here to talk about the future, which is now. This is the year 2000! I had a great new year's eve, gliding through the night from party to party, ending up at my studio and painting till the first light of dawn, then zipping down to the lake to watch the sunrise. I watched the sunrise at dawn in the year 2000! And let me tell you, it was a profoundly moving sunrise, not just a beautiful one, which it was -- the brave o'erhanging firmament fretted with golden fire. Why it appeared no other thing to me than the beginning of the future.
I wish you all could've been there with me. If you had, you would be saying with me, now, "Here we are, living in the future!" You would be thinking, as I am, "This is the future! The year 2000!" You would, as I have done, vow never to refer to it as 2000, or aughty-aught, or oh-oh, or twenty-oh-oh, but always, "the year 2000." January eighth, the year 2000.
It's the year 2000! That's what we always called it when we were kids. For us, the year 2000 would be when all the potential of 19th and 20th-century scientific progress would be fulfilled. Whatever the future was gonna be, that's what the year 2000 would be like. Well, we were just kids, we were stupid. We didn't figure in the intractability of human evil and dumbness and the retarding effects of corporate rule of the earth. We were idealistic, starry-eyed -- the future! Everything shiny and silver. Robots, computers, jetpacks, crystal citadels, white ameba-shaped buildings in green landscapes. Cities on other planets, teleportation, no pollution, no need for money; contact with nice beings from outer space, vaccinations that didn't hurt, zero-gravity sex.
It was an idealist vision, but a sterile one, too. A kind of sterility that I think the wealthier people of the world actually live in -- a world of consumption, with all traces of dirty, hands-on production removed, pushed out of sight, behind the scenes. A futuristic consumer sterility that very much fulfills the dreams propagandized in the United States in the late fifties and early sixties.
Was I disappointed as the sun rose on the year 2000? No. Was I disgusted by the future I inherited from myself? No. What went on in my mind as I sat there, the sun rising on the first day of the future, me wearing the shoes of a 1950s salesman, the pants of a cowboy, the coat of a Greek fisherman, the hat of an English carriage driver, sipping a champagne brandy made according to a centuries-old process...
I'll tell you. I thought to myself, wow! It's the year 2000! This is sunrise in the year 2000! I never thought I'd live to see it! I never thought I'd live to see my twenties, let alone my thirties, let alone to the year 2000! I thought for sure I would have killed myself by now, what with humanity as stupid and evil as it has been and me as intolerant to its stupidity and evil as I am. Well, it turns out humanity hasn't been entirely as stupid and evil as I thought, and I haven't been as intolerant as I could've been, so, all in all, despite the fact that the fantasy future of my sixties American youth hasn't come to pass, although the most selfish parts have come true for the owners of the world, I felt pretty good, kind of hopeful. I mean, sunrise, year 2000.
The sun was rising, it was the year 2000, and I felt hopeful. Now it's the future. There's no more waiting for potential to be fulfilled. Whatever the future's gonna be like, it has to be like that now, or at least start being like that. Whatever I'm gonna be like in the future, I better start being now, cuz this is it, this is the future, I'm there now. I felt like, this year 2000, this is a year to bring my dreams of the future into reality, into the now, now being the future. I wondered if maybe a lot of people might start to feel this way. I wondered if this sunrise might herald an entire global human taking of stock and bringing of dreams of the future into reality, into the now, now being the future.
That's how I felt as the sun rose on the future. I just wish you all could've been there with me. I'll tell you, you're all welcome here in the future anytime you wanna come.
Until next week, this has been mejeffdorchen with The Moment of Truth.
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