PHILIP MARTIN: Zero Hour

Most people know more as they get older

I give all that the cold shoulder

-- Philip Larkin, "The Winter Palace"

probably shouldn't say anything, but it's been bugging me. So let's walk through it together. A decade is any 10-year period. Starting from whenever.

So Wednesday is the first day of the '20s. Because the '10s started on Jan. 1, 2010. And the '00s started on Jan. 1, 2000, even though the 21st century didn't begin until Jan. 1, 2001. So all you folks--and you know who you are--who are declaring all end-of-the-decade essays premature are just wrong.

You're absolutely correct when you say there was no year zero, and the Anno Domini era began on Jan. 1, AD 1, and that the second millennium ended on Dec. 31, 2000. A lot of people thought it ended on Dec. 31, 1999, but all that really was a portentous odometer rollover. Our computers did not freak out and kill us all and I was able to feel smug about not buying the tub of rice and beans and bottled water proffered by my earnest neighbor.

In 1982, when Prince urged us to "party like it's 1999" he wasn't making any claims about the year marking the end of the second millennium. He only wanted us to have some fun. (I miss Prince.) And we did, because it seemed like there was something auspicious about leaving the '90s behind for the brave new '00s. Never mind we still had to serve out one more year of the second millennium.

This isn't so hard. All you have to accept is that the 00s were not a full decade. But the 10s ran from Jan. 1, AD 10 to Dec. 31, AD 19, the 20s from Jan. 1, 20 to Dec. 31, 29, etc...

This is the convention we follow. Of course, a decade being any 10-year period, you can start one whenever you want. My first decade ran from Nov. 19, 1958 to Nov. 18, 1968. If you really want to feel old, and I can't think of any reason why you should, consider that if you were, like me, born in the '50s, if you wake up tomorrow you will have experienced eight decades on Earth. Count 'em: '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, '10s, '20s.

So let just shut up about end-of-the decade reminisces being premature. We're done with the '10s as of midnight tonight.

And I don't really have a clue about what any of it meant.

I was very sure at the end of the '80s what the best album of that decade was (The Clash's London Calling, though that actually was released in December 1979 in England, with T Bone Burnett's Proof Through the Night coming up fast on its heels) and I could rattle off a short list of the decade's best books (Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Don DeLillo's White Noise, Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children, Rachel Ingalls' Mrs. Caliban, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove).

I had strong opinions about '80s movies--my Top 10 consists of Platoon, Do the Right Thing, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Tender Mercies, Full Metal Jacket, Raging Bull, My Life as a Dog, The Last Metro, Bull Durham and Spoorloos, the Dutch crime thriller that was underwhelmingly remade for American audiences as The Vanishing in 1993.

I'm much less certain about the 1990s; and in some ways nothing after Sept. 11, 2001 seems to have made much sense at all. This decade was over before it really settled; at times it felt like the juddering of a once great machine on the verge of collapse. It feels like we have neglected the experiment. Like Tobacco Road's Dude Lester, we've driven this shiny miracle for too long without oil and are now preparing to leave it for junk on the side of the highway. It feels like our short-sighted nihilism, our distaste for discipline and thoughtful planning have overcome whatever better selves we once believed achievable. Sometimes it seems the 2010s were the decade that the promise of America as the world's last best hope curdled. The American century is ending, but only because we're abandoning it.

The 2010s were years of backlash and counter-punching, of the unraveling of common dreams and the shattering of norms. We seek amusement and spectacle more than true engagement, and we have been licensed to believe ourselves entitled. The buzzy optimism that ushered in the decade crashed despite the unlikely longevity of an economic recovery that--to be fair -- few in the middle or working classes experienced in any meaningful way.

Too many people began to retreat to social media to find their tribes, to gather digital "friends" who reinforce their particular worldview and flatter them while increasingly retreating from the actual communities that surround them. It was the decade where a lot of us began to identify as persecuted; when the idea of "facts" as things immutable and inarguable eroded. Now if we encounter a fact we don't like, we have the option of impeaching any source and installing our own hand-picked intellectual mascot as the source of our truth.

(Another great album of the 1980s that almost no one has heard of is the aforementioned Burnett's Truth Decay. At the time that title seemed more clever than prophetic. As usual, T Bone was just a few decades ahead of his time.)

But I feel that way sometimes.

I get out and walk a lot, and while things aren't perfect at ground level either--I don't understand how we can accept as normal the homeless brothers and sisters who live provisionally on our streets and beneath our underpasses--most of the people I encounter are kind and caring and willing to listen. As ugly and vindictive and depressed as the world sounds when filtered through the prism of news and opinion, when you get out in it you see beauty and feel real joy, not just the dopamine drop you get when someone likes your photo on the 'Gram.

No, there was no year zero. But the concept has been embraced by various revolutionaries, from Pol Pot to the National Convention of the French Revolution to Jesus Christ. Would that we could escape our history, rebottle our demons and be born again. The years are just numbers, but every morning is a potential start.

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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected] and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.

Editorial on 12/31/2019

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