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Television Millennium TV: A thousand years of
history
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
How are you spending New Years
Eve?
Some of us, I dont doubt, have invitations to special
parties in exotic settings -- the Pyramids, Windsor Castle, St. Peters
Square or atop the Eiffel Tower.
A few inner-directed souls will tell themselves that this is just
another night. They will deny the millennium. They will stay home, read a book
and go to bed at 11:45 p.m.
Everyone else will watch TV.
To make sure we are watching TV, the media have been hyping the
millennium, or the century -- in the press, on film, and, above all, on TV. The
special issues of magazines and the Sunday morning gasbags have
come on with their lists of greats, some more serious than
others.
American Heritage (November) has cartoonist Edward Sorel
pay homage to the centurys 20 Greatest Innovators of the
Century, with No. 1 as Philo T. Farnsworth (1906-1971), the inventor of
TV. Time (Nov. 22) is preparing us for its announcement of the Person of
the Century. George W. Bush and John McCain have nominated Winston Churchill;
Al Gore has named Franklin D. Roosevelt. On Bob Schieffers Face the
Nation, (Nov. 28), historian Douglas Brinkley nominated Franklin and
Eleanor together: him for the Four Freedoms speech -- of speech, of
religion, from want, and from fear -- and her for the Declaration of Human
Rights, which she guided through the United Nations. Others named Martin Luther
King Jr. and Nelson Mandela
Gail Collins, in her New York Times column (Nov. 9), trying
to lighten things up when she sensed that the millennium just wasnt
catching on, came up with a tentative list of the millenniums top tunes.
She and her friends included: Ave Maria, La
Marseillaise, Oh! Susanna, A Mighty Fortress Is Our
God, After the Ball, and Auld Lang Syne. Somehow
they overlooked Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.
On Sunday (Nov. 21) NBC tried to give viewers a jolt with
Y2K, a sci-fi thriller in which planes crash, subways stop, an old
man dies in an emergency room power failure, the lights go out in Times Square
and a nuclear reactor almost melts down. The electrical companies, fearing
viewers would mistake TV for reality, asked NBC not to run the show: But there
was no need. NBCs ratings were the lowest of the night and lower than
Mary, the Mother of Jesus, the week before.
Meanwhile, a planned Party of the Century, a $25
million bash for rich people at New Yorks Javits Center -- $1000 to
$2,500 a head, featuring Andrea Bocelli, Aretha Franklin, Sting and
chauffeur-driven limos for the first 2000 guests -- has been scotched for lack
of interest.
Why so little concern? Columnist Charles Krauthammer suggests
(New York Daily News, Nov. 22) that this is a much less religious age
than the last millennium, and the birth of Christ is less fraught with
meaning. At least he associates the event with Christ. A radio commercial
for travel in Israel tells us, See Israel for the millennium. Masada, Tel
Aviv -- thats what the millennium is all about.
On PBS, Frontline presented a thoughtful two hours,
Apocalypse, a scholarly consideration on how Johns Book of
Revelation has been interpreted -- usually misinterpreted -- over the
centuries. Explaining the Babylonian, Zoroastrian, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman
origins of the complex imagery, they document its misuse by Pentecostal
movements and cults. Contrary to the babble of contemporary fundamentalists who
link up Biblical passages with contemporary events like the atomic bomb, the
Arab-Israeli war and AIDS, this last book of the Bible is not a prophetic
prediction of things to come but a Christian attempt to give hope during the
Roman persecutions.
On Thanksgiving Eve, Nightline was honest enough to
point out that since Christ was born not at year zero but about 5 B.C., the
millennium were waiting for was actually about five years ago -- and
nothing happened. Anyway, St. Thomas Aquinas told us in the 13th century not to
think about it, that its all symbolism.
The media didnt listen.
The New York Times Magazine tells us that the
turning point of the last 1000 years was mans replacing God as the center
of the universe -- enabling each of us, who before the Renaissance didnt
even have last names, to achieve individual identity.
The New Republic (Nov. 8), gave Anthony Grafton 12 pages of
small print to review six books on apocalypses and the millennium, in which he
makes the useful point, citing Stephen Jay Gould, that the
millenniums end -- like those of centuries, and the return of
Halleys comet and other dates to which prophets and historians have
traditionally ascribed deep meaning -- is purely arbitrary.
At most, these dates are an occasion for us to sit back and ask
some questions about where we have been and where we are going.
The best way to do this is to study history. Watching CNN is not
exactly studying history, but, at Ted Turners direction, the same team
that made the admirable series, The Cold War, has produced the
ten-part Millennium, the last part of which will air on Sunday,
Dec. 12, at 10 p.m. It gives us much to think about, both by what it includes
and what it leaves out.
If the Renaissance emboldened us to turn our gaze from the heavens
to ourselves, in the 20th century, says CNN, we plunged beneath the surface
self into the subconscious, the secret self. Whether the submerged self is the
real self or its vanquished opposite is another question. But, as the 19th
century belonged to Charles Darwin, the 20th has belonged to Sigmund Freud.
Graphically the documentary depicts the archetypal imagery of tunnels, towers
and inky whirlpools that allegedly reveal the hidden fears and forbidden loves
of modern mankind.
Wisely the producers make no attempt to cover everything. Rather
than focus on standard Western history, they present a global view. In its
segment on the population explosion, as the narrator, Ben Kingsley, tells us
that 6 billion people live on this planet and that Mexico City covers 1600
square miles of urban sprawl, the cameras zoom over the slims of Calcutta,
India, and Mexico City.
Ours was the bloodiest century. We fine-tuned 19th-century
technology so that in World War I one man with a machine gun could mow down a
company in a minute. Once we had split the atom, one pilot and bombardier could
annihilate cities of millions in seconds.
CNN passes over the familiar great leaders who gave us hope. No
Winston Churchill, no FDR, no popes. Few, if any, religious leaders have made
these lists of greats. These years belong to the devils: We see
Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, both playing with little children. Then the
faces of Freud, Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer -- who respectively
taught us to dig into our sexual selves, to reach for the universe and to blow
ourselves up.
Ultimately, ours has been the age of the communications
revolution. We have banished solitude with the cell phone; silence with
the stereo; both isolation and privacy with the TV camera and satellite dish,
that lets all of us watch each other anytime, anywhere. When Princess Diana got
married, 200 million saw her on TV. Two and a half billion saw her funeral.
Progress.
After watching and reading all this stuff, two themes stand out.
First, at least to historians and public intellectuals who do the measurements,
the impact of religion has been small and is waning.
Either the people of the world are too distracted by either their
comfort or their desperate poverty to listen to the gospel, or those who preach
it dont know what to say.
Second, the statistics show that, as America enjoys a delirious
prosperity, worldwide the gap between the rich and poor has widened
dramatically. Whole populations among that 6 billion are on the move -- some
decimated by their own civil wars, others yearning to breathe
free.
Which brings us to my Person of the Century. Its the
anonymous woman, the Migrant Mother, photographed by Dorothea Lange
during the Depression. She is dressed in rags and covered with grime and
nestles a baby in her left arm. Her older children cling to her, hiding their
faces from the camera. Her right hand touches her face, and her eyes, hard,
anxious, desperate, stare straight ahead.
Wondering what will come.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is writing a history and memoir
of Fordham University.
National Catholic Reporter, December 10,
1999
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