PDA

View Full Version : Best 'End of Decade Review' I've Seen Yet



Kathianne
01-01-2010, 12:30 AM
http://www.julescrittenden.com/2009/12/31/god-damn-the-naughts/


God Damn The Naughts

We watched the sun drop on the last day of the 1990s and the Second Millennium; myself, a Boston Herald photog and assorted others, looking west from among the old Jewish tombstones on the Mount of Olives. A choir of Carmelite nuns emerged by the gates of Gethsemane to sing sweetly at the sunset, which was silhouetting Muslims walking atop the Temple Mount, toward the domed mosque of Al Aqsa, from which we could hear the mezzuin calling them in. It was like the past was being put to bed, even as everything continued on in this ancient place one more day at a time...

...“This is a very bad situation,” I shouted to Andre, a Russian photog pal who was being carried along about 10 feet away, his blond shock of hair sticking up like a beacon.

“It is important not to panic!” advised Andre. He had survived a bad crowd scene when AC/DC played Moscow, plus horrific beatings as a Red Army conscript, and knew what he was talking about.

It’s always good advice in dire circumstances, as the Naughts would reminds us again and again, and I minded it that night. Shortly afterward, miraculously maybe, but through no effort of our own, the crowd spat us out like watermelon seeds into a centuries-old alley, all three of us within a few minutes next to each other. We tumbled down the hill, found our car and got the heck out of Bethlehem.

The Holy Land is in the business of producing omens, and the inability of Palestinian cops to coordinate with another species on peace symbolism wasn’t the only portent it offered up at the end of the last millennium. A few days earlier, the Herald photog and I had raced down from the Golan where we had been doing a mood piece on the anticipated Israeli-Syrian peace talks. We made Tel Megiddo at sunset, and the watchman liked our press cards enough to let us in.

Up on the ancient mound of Armageddon, we could see Nazareth to the east, Mount Tabor, and the pass down to the Mediterranean. We were surrounded by, in fact atop the scene of many ancient and terrible battles. It wasn’t for nothing John of Patmos in his cave settled on Armageddon as the place where the world would end. It had been doing that on a regular basis there for centuries.

The sky was afire, blood red and terrible overhead. It looked great, very apocalyptic. But Garo needed someone to shoot amid the ancient wreckage of 16 cities, and I needed someone to quote. I caught a flash of black in the corner of my eye, a caped figure bounding across the old fallen stones at some distance.

“Look, it’s the Angel of Death,” I said. “Let’s go get him.” ...

...Here are some of the things we all shared.

The USS Cole bombing in Aden in October of 2000 was trouble pounding at our door. On Sept. 11, 2001, it burst in. My memory is of the planes emptying out of the sky, one by one, each of them having a menacing quality as they flew through the same airspace over Boston through which two of the hijacked plans had departed a couple of hours earlier that morning. On the TV monitors at work, we watched the Twin Towers fall. A Boston Herald photo editor commented that a colleague’s father was in there. The 2,973 innocent victims were the first of the many dead we would come to know.

God damn the Naughts...

...God damn the Naughts.

It was odd, how people turned to the kind of naivete that got us into all of that in the first place. Maybe they expected a cheap kind of messianic deliverance. That’s not so odd. In dire times, people have always wanted the easy out. I remember as well the unexpected feeling of relief when they had their way. They wanted it, let them have it, as one friend said. That feeling wouldn’t last long.

We were now facing an economic collapse, the sudden onset of which stunned both our political and financial leaders, yet another obvious threat out in plain sight that no one had quite noticed, and each side immediately blamed on the other. After years of war and deepening political divisions, hundreds of thousands of us faced the prospect of losing homes and jobs. Another fundamental fear we were supposed to have transcended decades ago had resurfaced, and it isn’t clear yet that it is ready to subside. That was just one of a series of blows to my own business, the newspaper business, which would in this decade be laid low by this marvelous tool of the devil, the Internet. It revived popular literacy and caused an explosion of information, and threatened to destroy all of the fundamental infrastructure of both. It gave the people a voice, new avenues of power, and means of exacting accountability, and showed just how base, vile and petty people could be.

Damn the Naughts.

A great moment in our nation’s history, the election of the first black president, was mired in vile accusations of racism that were debunked by the facts of repeated elections, but still opposition to his political proposals were dismissed as bigotry. Ironically, one of the most straightforward tutors in modern race relations ultimately was not the president himself, but a white cop who was wrongly denounced, and bore it with grace...

There's lots more and a bit of something regardless of your political take.