Happy Anti-Millennium!
CBS News Correspondent Eric Engberg takes on the thankless task of trashing millennium hype in this Reality Check. After a slow start, Engberg warms to his subject with an impressive display of anti-millennium sarcasm, scorn and ridicule.
It's not easy taking a curmudgeonly position on Y2K hoopla. It's not easy when you've been badly beaten to the punch by the entire population of the United States of America.
Everybody thinks this big calendar change is a bunch of hype. Everybody thinks it will be at least a little bit creepy to have to write "2000" on deposit slips, insurance forms, term papers, and birth announcements. Everybody thinks mega-millennium parties that have been years in the planning are destined to be letdowns. That's why they can't give away tickets to big city New Year's Eve fests.
Personally, I don't know anyone - anyone - who is just dying to be in a crowd of costumed, inebriated revelers when the magic moment strikes. Nor do I know anyone who can't wait for the moment ABC begins its non-stop, 24-hour plus, Y2K extravaganza. My guess is a Munsters marathon on cable will get better ratings.
The contrarian stance on Y2K, clearly, is to declare the whole event totally cool and have a grand list of party and hoopla options cross-indexed on your Palm Pilot. But I have been assigned to be cranky, so here goes.
Millennium schmillennium. Fanfare schmanfare.
How's that? Pretty lame, right. Well, with all the terrorism threats out there and general fear level escalating, there is a significant bad-taste issue to think about.
Most people I know do have an "inner-Luddite" deep down that is rooting for the Y2K bug to triumph just a little. Nothing life threatening. Nothing traumatic. But it would be kind of fun to get one last laugh on World Cyber-Dominance before it takes over everything and we all have Pentium 99 chips installed in our brains. It would be fun if just one 22-year old geek Web zillionaire has his entire net worth permanently and irretrievably erased by a computer glitch. And it would be a giggle if some IPO-engorged venture capitalist's Gulfstream jet gets stranded in Pongo Pongo after an opulent New Year's party.
Reality Check can't condone such anti-social urges. That would be wrong.
Perhaps the most compelling reason to cheer on the arrival of 2000 is that it will bring a merciful conclusion to the orgy of list-making that has accompanied the end of the century. "List fatigue" is the direct result of the American predilection to rank everything in some artificial order of importance. Thus we have had such bizarre millennial debates as Albert Einstein vs. Babe Ruth: Who counted for more?
"List fatigue" stems from having seen too many portentous magazine covers proclaiming:
The Person of the Millennium, Man of the Century, Cooking Utensil of the 1900s, Top Serial Killers, Top Ten Hair are Products of the Last Thousand Years, etc.
This leads one to wonder if the powers that be in the year 999 engaged in similar list-making as the last turn of the millennium approached. Did they engage in debates over whether fire should go ahead of the wheel under "Important Discoveries?" Did the magazines (or stone tablets) of the period list such things as:
The Ten Greatest Plagues, Ten Torture Devices that Changed History, Top 100 Huns, Best Pillaging of the First Thousand Years, Monk of the Millennium.
The lists at least should stop when the clock strikes midnight. Maybe I'll make that my resolution.
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