THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS (4 page)

Best Historical Era of The Millennium (Excluding Our Own).

There isn't one. Uniformly and without exception, every single era before this one was pretty much the same from the standpoint of the average person. And the one we're living in now isn't one big happy basket of tropical fruit, either. 

Now, let me amend this by saying that the current historical era is doing very well by
me
. I live in the wealthiest and most intellectually free country that has ever existed on this planet, surrounded by a dizzying array of astounding technical devices, ensconced in a domicile of surpassing comfort (it has cable!). I am overfed, overeducated, overpaid. My greatest physical need is to remember to blink because I stare at a glowing phosphor screen all day. I have all my teeth and limbs. I have to opportunity to bathe every day (and yes, I do just that, thank you
very
much). 

Given the current state of technology -- and some not unreasonable expectations of where that technology is going -- it's not at all unlikely that I'll breeze past the 100-year-old mark. And my infant daughter, who as I write this is cheerfully chewing on a toy designed for maximum educational value, will have everything I have and more. 

But, let's be very clear on this, I'm
not
the average citizen of this crowded, belching globe, and neither, for that matter, are you. If you have the ability to read this, you are more or less like me: Living in a high-technology, high-protein, high-personal-expression zone. The trivia of your life vary from mine, of course, but basically you either are, or have endless opportunities to become, a big stinkin' capitalist pig. 

The average human on this planet is not one of the 1% that is currently and blandly clicking his or her way through the Internet. As Kofi Annan is fond of reminding people, half of this planet's six billion human interlopers have never made or received a telephone
call
, much less are worried about installing a permanent DSL line into the home office.  The
average
human on this planet is a dirt-poor farmer in China or India, and her life pretty much blows, compared to yours. And it's probably more accurate to say this: The
median
human on the planet is a dirt-poor farmer in China or India. Which means that
underneath
her, there's three billion people looking at her and wondering,
why can't I have that life?
Forget about
your
life. Your life isn't even on the
table
.

So, given: The average human's life on this ball of rock isn't a great big grab bag of joy. But also consider: The average life is
still
a hell of a lot better than it's ever been before. The average person doesn't have a tenth of what you or I have, but he or she has better medical care, better education and a better standard of living than his or her ancestors. Even more personal freedom, if you can believe that (but generally not by much). From this point, it's a simple equation. The present sucks for most people. It is still generally better than any other era before it. Conclusion: For the average Joe,
any
historical era was a bad era to be in, and the present's only marginally better. 

Now, this doesn't mean these people were or are
unhappy
--  billionaires can be surrounded by every
conceivable
thing humans have ever thought of and be
suicidal
depressed, while someone squatting down and sticking a plant into a muddy bog of water can be happy as the proverbial clam. Most people who are not actively starving or being hoisted on an invader's pike are usually fairly content. But being happy doesn't mean the
circumstances
of your life don't reek.

The problem with history is that it's maybe one hundredth of one percent of what's going on in the world at any one point. History is rife with kings, queens, explorers and inventors. The bulk of the world's population at any time, however, is a bunch of schmoes planting crops and making horseshoes and typing code and asking you if you want fries with that. We see movement and advancement in the course of humanity's stay because we pick up individual events like seashells on the shore and string them together and call the necklace history. Meanwhile, the acres of sand at our feet stays the same. 

"As it is now, so it was and evermore shall be" -- well, no, I don't really believe
that
. The average sad sack benefits from the technological and intellectual advances that make up the bulk of history, just not as much, or as often, as those of us at the top imagine (the flaw in the "trickle-down" theory is implicit in the title -- no one was ever
satisfied
by a "trickle" of anything). You can go to nearly every spot on the globe and see the vast majority of your brethren living essentially the same lives as their fathers, grandmothers, and ancestors, all the way back to beginning of the agricultural age, with only the occasional television or Bulls jersey thrown into to remind you that you're still here in the 20th Century. 

Ask any of
these
people what historical era
they
feel it was best to live in, they'd probably look at you like you're nuts. They'd understand the question, of course. They just wouldn't know why you'd possibly think it applied to them.

Best Stupid Piece of Attire of the Millennium.

It's the necktie. Codpieces and drawstring pants come and go, but over the centuries, the necktie and its antecedents persist, hanging about a man's neck like a noose done in a four-in-hand. And unlike, say, the codpiece, which had at least an initial utilitarian purpose, the necktie has never been anything but a pointless strip of cloth, born to dangle and sway and wait for a use. Yank on one, you half expect a ticket to issue forth from the mouth of the wearer, to be validated when you buy some bit of Guatemalan handiwork  from that Crate and Barrel down the street.

In fact, ties can be traced back, like so many pointless things, to the idle vanity of a king. And in this case, the king who knew more about idle vanity than any before or since: Louis XIV, the Sun King. Seems in 1660, Louis was reviewing a regiment of badass Croat soldiers, who wore brightly colored silk handkerchiefs around their necks. Why? Who knows? Maybe the Croats were worried they'd get separated at court and needed some conspicuous piece of clothing to locate each other later, like wayward second-graders on a field trip. Whatever the reason, Louis saw the regiment and their handkerchiefs, and just
had
to have one: A regiment of badasses, that is, not a handkerchief. He already had some of
those
.

So he got one, because who was going to tell Louis
no
, and he called them the "Royal Cravattes" ("cravatte" derived from "Croat" in French) and gave them fancy handkerchiefs for their necks. That was that. The King had spoken. Everyone started wearing ties. If it happened today, the badass Croats could probably sue for copyright infringement. But this was the 17th Century. What were you gonna do.

Men got stupid with the cravats. By the early 1800s, cravats were stuffed around the neck as if the head were being surrounded by tissue for transport in a box. Some guys couldn't move their necks at all; like whiplash victims or HR Pufnstuf, they had to rotate their whole bodies to look around. And some of these boys wore two cravats at the same time; one imagines they needed servants and a system of mirrors so they could navigate the street.

There were a hundred different ways to tie a cravat, some of which could take hours. Perhaps for this reason, fiddling with someone's cravat was a dueling offense, though think about it: If touching someone's tie was bad, how much worse it would be if you got
blood
on it? Fortunately, no one who would get worked up over a mussed cravat was likely to be missed once his cravat was further mussed by a sword point sticking through it into his carotid.

The best you can say about today's iteration of the ne
cktie is that at least it's not
aggressively stupid. One does not wear it wrapped around one's jaw, or more than one at a time. Even the horrifyingly wide ties in the 70s had a rational basis for their lateral expansion --they were merely keeping pace with the expanding lapels of the time. Mocking a 70s tie is purely a case of blaming the victim. They didn't
want
to go wide. They had no
choice
. 

Be that as it may, it still doesn't take away from the fact that the tie does not now serve, nor has it ever served, any useful purpose. At least bell bottoms and Nehru jackets kept your extremities warm. Tie manufacturers would dispute this assessment of their products' usefulness, of course. But then, cigarette manufacturers used to pawn off their wares to pregnant women.  No industry can be trusted to be an objective observer of its product's place in the universe -- particularly one that has a literal chokehold on the world of men's fashion. 

Men simply do not realize that the tie is there at all their major life events. It's there when you graduate from high school and college. It's there at your wedding. It's there at your children's baptisms and bar mitzvahs. And when you die, they stick one on you and, like a pharaoh taking a prized but aggravating cat into the next world, you are both stuffed into the ground together (and the question is: Who is the pharaoh, and who is the aggravating cat?). The only reason men aren't
born
with ties is the grudging acknowledgement by the tie industry that looping the umbilicus into a Windsor knot around the neck of a fetus might cause brain damage. Which would limit tie purchases later in life. 

Tie enthusiasts, the Quislings of men's attire, point out that ties allow for some individuality in an otherwise regimented world of men's business attire. But really, now. It's not individuality ties provide, it's the illusion thereof, and a poor one at that. Wear your Jerry Garcia tie all you want, you still have to file the same reports as Ted, three cubicles down, wearing his $6 poly blend from Sears. A Bugs Bunny tie will not keep the gun-toting ex-co-worker who just shot his way through Accounting from seeing you as any less of an extension of The Man That Kept Him Down. A tie with Edvard Munch's "The Scream" silk-screened upon its narrow width will not stop you from your dark suspicions that The New Guy makes twice what you do, with half the experience. And anyway, you wouldn't wear a single one of those ties to a performance review, so what does
that
say. Tie enthusiasts also point out that ties accentuate a man's verticality. Well, if you want to accentuate your verticality, go on a freakin' diet, already.

Men wear ties because so far as they know, men have
always
worn ties; it's what men do. If they knew that the tie got started as the passing fancy of the foppiest of the Great Kings of Europe, it probably wouldn't change a thing; the dress code is always dictated from above. Will they ever stop wearing them? Probably not. The best we can hope for is that ties don't start hampering neck movement again; and that if they do, we can somehow take out those tie wearers before they infect the rest of us. Their peripheral vision would be shot, you know. They would never see it coming.

Best Vision of Hell of the Millennium.

It comes from Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch painter who lived in the 15th and 16th Centuries (although assuredly, not through them both entirely). Other people wrote about Hell, lectured about Hell, or simply feared it as the inevitable end to their sinful ways. Bosch
saw
Hell, like Walker Evans saw the Depression, and then reported on what he saw. It wasn't a very cheerful report, but then, what would you expect. Hell's not a resort filled with Payday bars and happy kittens. Unless you're allergic to nuts and cat dander. In which case, that's
exactly
what it is.

How did Bosch get this preview of Hell? It's not that hard to imagine. Sartre famously said that Hell is other people, and while he was probably directly referring to some annoying waiter at Deux Magots, the line has broader implications. People are flawed, and not in the Japanese sense of
wabi
, in which a slight imperfection merely accentuates the fundamental perfection of a thing. Wabi is the mole on Cindy Crawford's lip, the wheat bits in Lucky Charms, or the fact that Bill Gates' fortune is owned by him and not you. 

No, we're talking about deep-seated incipient screw-upped-ness, the kind that puts you on the news as the helicopter gets a top down view of the police surrounding your home. For most of us, fortunately, it expresses itself in less virulent form, usually a furtive, opportunistic violation of one or more of the seven deadly sins when we think we won't get caught. Coupled with this is the dread knowledge that, not only do we
know
what we're doing is wrong, but we'll probably do again the next time everyone else's attention is back on the TV. We're all a country song waiting to happen. With that realization comes the grinding sound of Satan's backhoe scraping out space in our brain for another yet Hell franchise (six billion locations worldwide!). Hell is in
all
of us, not just the ones who use cell phones when they drive. All you have to do is look. 

Bosch looked. A pessimist and a moralist (one can hardly be one without being the other), Bosch saw what evil lurked in the hearts of men, and then hit the paint.  His friends and neighbors were no doubt unhappy to learn they were the motivation for Bosch's horrifying and
fantastical
canvases; It's difficult to live near someone who might paint your face onto a damned creature with Hell's staff fraternizing in what used to be its butt. But there's a story about another painter which could shed some light on what Bosch was doing. Pablo Picasso once painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein, only to have someone comment that Stein looked nothing like the painting. Said Picasso: "She will, soon enough." (And she
did
). Apply this same reasoning to a picture of yourself with imps in your ass. It might make you think.

Beyond the existential and theological nature of Bosch's work is the fact that, as paintings, they are just so damned cool. Bosch's paintings of Hell influenced two great schools of art: Surrealism and Heavy Metal. Surrealism got off on Bosch's vibrant and innovative use of color and his ability to combine the
mundane
and the fantastical to make bitter and intelligent social commentary. In fact Bosch had one up on most of the Surrealists in that he actually believed in something; unlike the surrealists and their kissing cousins the dadaists, Bosch's work is rooted in morality rather than running away from it. Bosch wouldn't have painted a moustache on Mona Lisa; he'd've had her devoured by a fish demon as a pointed warning of the dangers of vanity. 

Heavy Metal artists dug Bosch, because, dude, he
totally
painted demons. Without Bosch, we'd have no Boris Vallejo airbrushings or Dio album covers, and it's debatable whether Western Culture would be able to survive their lack.

Some ask, does Bosch's work show Hell as it really is? No less an authority than the Catholic Church suggests that Hell is not so much a location as it is a state of being, an eternal absence of God's grace rather than a place where pitchforks are constantly, eternally and liberally applied to your eyeballs. In which case, Bosch's turbulent colors and troublesome devils are just another picture show, a trifle used to scare the credulous and the dim from indulging their baser instincts, like sex and thoughts on the possibility of even more sex. 

It's the wrong question. It's not important that Bosch shows Hell as it truly is; it's entirely possible that, other than a useful philosophical construct, Hell doesn't exist at all. (This does not change the fact that the Backstreet Boys must somehow be eternally punished for their crimes.) But whether it truly exists or not, humans need the
idea
of Hell, whether it be to scare us into a moral life, comfort the smug ones who believe everyone
else
is going there, or simply to remind us that the actions of our lives, good or ill, live beyond those lives themselves, and the accounting of them may occur past the day we ourselves happen to stop. Bosch saw the importance of the idea and put it down in oil. 

The question is not whether Hell exists, but rather: If we could see our souls in a mirror, rather than our bodies, would they be as Bosch painted them? If they were, we wouldn't have to wait until the next life for Hell. It would already be here.