A Note to the Teacher
Re: Skipping the 21^st Century

by Lulu Dilworth

Dear Teacher (wherever you are),

Due to conditions outlined below, I wish to respectfully request an excused absence for the period 2000-2099, or any portion thereof it may be my foreordained lot to experience.

Given a century with certain excesses:

• 200,000,000 +/- 10% killed in wars, revolutions, holocausts, genocides, or purges
• 500 +/- 20% television channels
• 10,000 +/- 5% country music radio stations
• 50,000,000 +/- 10% personal home pages
• 500 +/- 5% models of cars that all look alike
• something in excess of 5 billion pop music CDs that sound alike
• 100 billion fast food burgers that taste alike
• 70 whooping cranes left alive
• 5 buildings over 100 stories high
• 1 Jesse Helms
• 1 Microsoft
• only 1 Glenn Gould, and he dead at age 50
• 1 Scott Joplin opera not performed until 60 years after his death
• 0 American female presidents
• PBS with commercials
• 10.73 Canadian forests per year devoted to printing Vanity Fair
• 1 Cokie Roberts
• 1 AIDS epidemic
• 1 Aspen
• 1 My Lai
• 1 Tiananmen Square
• 1 Berlin Wall
• 2 Ronald Reagans [himself, plus himself in drag aka Margaret Thatcher]
• countless Boileau Woods
• 2 Hiroshimas
• 50,000 nuclear warheads
• 0 equivalents of Caravaggio
• 1 Middle East;
• 750,000,000 genital mutilations of newborns
• digital re-mastering of analog recordings
• call-waiting
• 20¹⁸ cell phones
• 1 Taos
• the disbanding of the Fugs
• 1 Carl Sagan
• Pat Robertson et al.
• William Safire, George Will, and their ilk
• 75,000,000 SUVs
• REI
• Starbucks
• 1 Seattle
• 1 Austin
• 1 Myanmar
• adventure tourism
• Innumerable Macintosh obsessives
• 39,837,392 gallons of highly toxic chemicals per year to print Vanity Fair
• the new New Yorker
• 1 ice-covered barbed wire fence in Wyoming
• 1 pick-up with tow chain in Jasper, Texas
• barren European landscapes worse than any astronomical Black Hole [Auschwitz, Dachau...]
• 1 Milton Babbitt
• 1 Anita Bryant; 0.37
• 3 Canadian forests per year devoted to printing post-modern/structuralist lit-crit journals
• 1 Eva Sedgwick,

I simply feel that enough is enough.

I understand that Kenneth Starrs we shall, like the poor, always have with us. And I understand that they come in many shapes (though prissy-pudgy seems most common) and many sizes (though smaller than life seems most common), and I understand that we should view the grinding self-hatred of their ambition as a learning experience and an immoral example. Still, enough is enough.

When you come right down to it, I need a breather. Please accept the very existence of this request as an acknowledgment of your continuing authority. It’s not as if I’m snubbing my nose, or giving the finger, or just walking away. I do feel a certain prick of conscience but am convinced a century away will do wonders toward restoring the old joie de vivre which, let’s face it, has been in decline since the death of Mozart. Wouldn’t a more accurate term for the present expiring era, considering the list above in toto, be "joie de morir"?

If 100 years is just too much, then I would request at least the relief that would come from five decades off. If you wish, I might check back in around 2050 and see how things are going. How about this. At that time, for every remaining nuclear warhead, I’ll get an additional week off?

                                                              Yrs obdntly,
                                                              Lulu

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