A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

When I was growing up, I learned to identify previous decades by the epithets that had been assigned to them by the Columbia Record Club. "The Gay Nineties", "The Roaring Twenties", "The Swinging Forties" and so on were both names of record collections and descriptions of life in those long-gone eras.

The trend continued. I, personally, experienced the Fabulous Fifties, Soaring Sixties, and Saccharine Seventies before the Eighties flatly declared itself to be the "Me Decade." Then TV shows like Ellen and Will and Grace made it seem like we had worked all the way 'round to a new Gay Nineties.

Now we are more than halfway through the first decade of the 21st Century and it's not so obvious what to call it. One problem, of course, is arithmetic. You can talk about the thirties, twenties, or even the tens. But what is this decade…the "zeroes"? The issue was avoided a century ago by letting the Gay Nineties simply continue until the Roaring Twenties came along, with little change in music or culture until the First World War introduced all those young men to the pleasures of "Paree," forever jading them when it came time to return down to the farm.

The Zeroes of the 21st century, however, are thoroughly different from the Nineties of the 20th. The Nineties had a balanced budget; the Zeroes have a staggering deficit that, in spite of Vice President Cheney's assurance that "deficits don't matter," will impose a crushing burden on our children who'll have to repay it. So perhaps these are the Na?ve Zeroes.

In the Nineties, Americans would never have tolerated the torture of prisoners of war…if we'd had any, which we didn't. Although we were bombing Serbia, we had no ground troops there; and we stopped when the evil dictator Milosevic was captured. Besides, we didn't initiate the attack; our NATO agreements required us to fight alongside our fellow NATO nations and we honored our commitment. In the Zeroes, we don't care what anybody thinks; we use 9/11 to justify invading two countries that had nothing to do with it, while turning our ports over to a country that did. So, perhaps these are the Arrogant Zeroes.

Speaking of 9/11, the September 11th attacks have kept Americans in a perpetual state of terror in which we have approved of anything our president proposes: a lessening of personal freedoms, the eviscerating of the Bill of Rights, and the aforementioned attacks on unrelated countries. So these could be the Terrorized Zeroes.

They could also be the Contrary Zeroes, not only from Bush's penchant to name legislation the opposite of what it does (the Clean Air Act encourages pollution; the No Child Left Behind Act earmarks money for expensive books and materials produced only by a couple of publishing houses, including one owned by brother Neil Bush) but also from the deep division of the country between dimwits who actually believe they compose a majority that won the 2000 and 2004 elections, and the majority who are gradually coming to realize that the election was stolen, despite the lack of acknowledgement by the media that this is so.

While current events such as the exposure of wide-spread corruption in the Republican congress, incompetence in the handling of everything from storm response to port management, and the revelation of blatant lies by President Bush himself, culminating in the sinking of Bush's approval ratings to below 30% (and Cheney's to a humiliating 18%), suggest that people are, at last, beginning to awaken. Still, the fact remains that even if every American came to his or her senses today, we would still be stuck with this useless, corrupt and dangerous administration for at least three more years…more, if Bush declares martial law and refuses to relinquish the White House at the end of his second term.

And even with an approval rating of 27%, yes even with an approval rating of 1%, there will remain those zeebs who still drive their Bush-Cheney bumper stickers around with pride, who gleefully send others' kids to the military, and who think we really have a liberal media because Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh get media time to say so.

Which officially makes this decade the Zombied Zeroes.

You read it first, here.