The Decade in Politics
2000
Flying in the face of scientific wisdom and general good sense, the year
2000 marked the advent of the Millennium for ignorant people, putting a
well-needed one-year gap between the calendars of those in the know and
the unwashed hoi polloi.
But the hype had real economic consequences.
A year early and with Nebuchadnezzarean abandon, the British Government
erected the Millennium Dome, a massive public works project that
the BBC termed "a shambles and a public relations disaster." The Dome
cost
£628 million of lottery money — £229 million more than
originally forecast — and became the butt of countless jokes as
visitors came in numbers far lower than projected.
But the dome, which featured the world's largest
non-working ferris wheel and a wide assortment of unpopular oddments and
knicknacks, was just the shiny tip of a global mountain of Millennial sound and
fury. All over the industrialized world, people gorged on lobsters, flooded
public squares, divorced their spouses and deafened their neighbors with
noise.
Unto itself, no problem. But what about this past New Year's Eve —
the real passing of the millennium? Will we fade into the 21st century with
barely a whisper, our vocal chords fried by the false celebration of
2000? Or was the celebration of December 1999 just the foam at the top of the
West's dot-com surge, destined to be blown away by the year 2000's cold
wind of fiscal reality?
— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)
