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wHY 2-K IS YESTERDAy

jANUARY, 2000 - "cELEBRATE With The World - 7 Continents - 1 Network." The ABC News promo offered me a chance to really break the mold, and break from all those old fashioned 1900s style New Year's Eve parties with people you could actually see and touch. My friends might be stuck in the past, but not me. With a six pack, chips, and the blue glow of TV, I set out to party like the artist formally known as the artist who got angry being formally known by anything, instructed us nearly two decades ago. I bet Mr. ??? - if I might call him that - never guessed I'd get to party with the whole world!

Hours into my celebration, at about the time ABC told me that 2000 had hit outer Monrovia, I got a shiver realizing I was becoming part of history. Centuries, nay, millenniums from now civilizations might study remnants of me and my late 20th century kind. I imagined them digging up bits of my apartment, concluding that I was part of the "Watcher" empire, run by a generation of outstanding air guitarists.

Some civilizations invented time measurement and printing presses. Others developed steam engines and space flight. We took the telephone to new Internet heights. But most of us liked to watch: athletes we never met who made or broke our day with their game moves and career decisions; actors who dressed up as doctors, cops, soldiers or all three; girls who danced themselves into a frenzy on dimly lit stages, apparently searching for their clothes. It won't take long for students in the future to learn what we loved to watch most though - explosions. Actually, we most loved watching explosions that never really explode - volcanoes, cities, cars, and The White House (we really seemed to like that one). Future civilizations will rightly conclude that this fetish, and a curious fascination with toilet jokes, came to define late 20th century movie making.

Thinking of all the exploding things that never really exploded, I imagined the prospect of some Y2K disaster suddenly freezing our New Year's Eve in perma-space. If students in the future came across parts of me and my apartment this night, they'd see I was a pivotal part of my time, using the technology of my era to its global fullest, watching other people like me on TV.

Stroking the trendy stubble, carefully cultivated on my 1999 chin, I felt a wave of goose bumps. Because to really understand my world, future civilizations will want to examine people like me, North Americans, to learn why our world was what it was. If they read this screed they'll find the answer - We Were Number 1. Actually we were better, because we made originals obsolete. I mean why mess with messy Italian cooking, when you could eat at Olive Garden; why suffer the drudgery of law school when you could make more money and get more girls playing a lawyer on TV; why actually Rap when you could look like you did after a quick visit to the GAP?

Watching each other the way we did, without so many nasty farms and cattle ranches interfering with our late century salads and drive thrus, we developed a much keener sense of what we were all thinking. At the edge of the Big 2, elections had become mere formalizations of what pollsters predicted as the inevitable outcome of most any political vote. It got so easy, that we started trying to make things interesting, throwing little twists into the game.

In the United States, Republicans decided to dispense with all the primary and caucus silliness, and just anoint their presidential nominee at the outset, then spread rumors that anyone who challenged the selection, was "insane" from trauma suffered during a past war.

Things were no better north of the border where the big question at the end of the century was - how many Quebecois did it take to split off a province? Answer - no one knew. Less than half the province thought support from 51% of the population was enough to execute said cleavage. But less than half the province thought 51% was insufficient.

Future students of our times might read long enough to learn than most French Quebecois thought that support from 51% was enough to sever the province, while most everyone else in the province argued otherwise. Instead future civilizations will rightly conclude that Canada was the late 20th century society that invented the concept of too-much-spare-time.

21st century Quebec bonus question: How much support do you need, to win support for opposing a vote that would oppose the poll predicting who will support a vote on the poll?

Before closing the book on our millennium though, future civilizations sifting through the remains of me and my apartment will probably decide that we couldn't have been much different from the all confused types speckling any other era: a little weird, a little sad, all frightened, and all silly, but mostly well meaning. Happy New Year 2000.

Yours Truly,

Xandor
Copy Boy In-Chief