To us, who lived through and survived part of the 20th century, the world now each morning is harsh, confused and confusing, dangerously ambiguous, a 20-billion-year-old banana peel: Oops! Not this again!

From 1900 to 1999, the joke, in all the forms of our vicious, violent ineptitude, was very much on us. Victorious, we made it to the end, celebrated, and as 01-01-00 dawned plunged into not just a new century but, wow, a whole new millennium.

The problem is: You don’t kill 200,000,000 people and just walk away.

We think we have. We think we have just walked away and gotten on with the profitable and entertaining business of creating if not Eden at least the gateway to Eden which we call virtual reality in its Late Capitalist manifestation. That imagined world with its vast and rapid flow of information, its heightened colors and sharpened musics, that world we inhabit every day, pretending it is the only real world.

In truth, we inhabit a culture of denial. What, us worry? But we give ourselves and our denial away even as we click, click, click.

1. Yes, we look back, but very selectively. We devote fortunes and many of our best minds to creating and re-creating vaguely comforting simulacra of a truncated past: movies and television and music. For global mass culture, before 1929, or 1914 at the very earliest, is the Great Void. But even the century left to us, we poke at with child-like obsessiveness, as if to bring a dead pet back to life (Sgt. Pepper on Muzak, The 20th Century War Channal aka The History Channel, post-modern cars fer chrissakes). Movies that hint at the violence, monuments that memorialize a few of the deaths--

But where is the Statue of the Two Hundred Million?
Share Amnesia.

2. Numb, in shock really, we require ever-stronger hits, bigger stimuli: MAKE ME FEEL… but not too much, please. We get a war movie that starts with a fake but horrifying bloodbath (Oh, so this is what D-Day was REALLY like) and then dribbles away into yet another children’s tale. We get reality TV which is real only in that it allows us to confirm that other people are feeling no more than we are--

Shared anesthesia.

3. In flight from ourselves and our utter rootedness in the world, we seal up our houses, our cars, our offices, and enter nature only for a spot of gardening, a bit of prescribed jogging, a few days of the drudgery of a vacation to this or that beauty spot.

How long since your bare feet walked in a forest?
Shared anhedonia.

4. And, oh my, we are so good, so practiced at denial, that most days, most weeks, most months, most years, we slide right along, Teflon skin on the slick surface of Teflon society, making our way quite successfully in the "world". Only the occasional child breaks under the pressure and sprays a school with bullets. Only occasionally does the massively denied seed of hate germinate--

Seen any good Wyoming crucifixions lately?

5. The task of maintaining appearances, of not holding one’s nose to the stench from 200,00,000 corpses is a difficult one. Even the best and the brightest often need help. Fortunately, our scientists know this (we are after all in this together) and provide us with clever aids to denial: pills to subdue the ravaged breast, or, as needed, to take the limp out of the disconnected dick. Prozac, Viagra, what next?

6. Even more perfectly than we ignore nature and our roots in it, we, of a night, ignore the clues to our psychic roots. Dreams are best deleted (as our children, by example, quickly learn), at most being useful for an entertaining anecdote, or, in special circumstances, to hold your therapist’s expensive attention.

7. Help from ages past? You gotta be kidding. What did those guys know? The books written, the pictures painted, the music created at very high personal cost are now pretty much locked up, accessible only to an educated elite. The magical, profound help available in those hard-won documents is ignored, mocked. A frightened, exploited minority tries to take language prisoner and beat it into submission with numbing simplisitic rhymes of violence and anger--