Tiny Bubbles, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

December 26, 2009 Martha Thomases 6 Comments

The people in charge of our stupid discourse have decided that this week marks the end of the decade.  Math nerds and historians know that the new decade doesn’t start until 2011, but that hasn’t stopped numerous media from trying to come up with a catchy name for the years since 2000.

In the previous millennium, and especially the last century, we had the Gay Nineties, the Roaring Twenties and the Swinging Sixties.  Decades had personality.

The reason the media likes the snappy names for decades is simple:  it beats thinking.  Why bother with a deep analysis, one that might require research and book learning, when you can come up with a catch phrase instead?

The last ten years have been less splashy.  We never came up with a cute, compact way to say the year.  We always mouthed the entire “Two Thousand” part.  Next week, we can say “Twenty Ten” and be done with it.

What will we call these last years?  Nothing trips easily off the tongue.

“The Zero’s” doesn’t work.  It takes too long to say, and it’s dull.

I’ve heard some suggest “The Aughts,” but very few people did what they ought, and it sounds like something Jethro Bodine would say.

“The O’s” makes it sound much sexier than it was.

My personal favorite is “The Bubbles.”  I think it sums things up very well.  We started out being terrified that the Y2K Virus would crash all our computers, and ended up obsessed with how Tiger Woods used his genitals.

In between, we went crazy in other ways.  In response to 9/11, we spent a gazillion dollars and killed hundreds of thousands of people in a country that had nothing to do with the attack.

And we went completely ape-shit about money.  We speculated on our houses, taking out gigantic mortgages on the assumption that our real estate investments could never lose value, but would only go higher.  We speculated on weird investments no one understood, using those gigantic mortgages as collateral.  And then the bubble burst.

Luckily, according to a recent survey, at least people are laying the blame for this on the right feet.

There’s no telling how long we can count on the populace being that educated, however.  The so-called “liberal media” are much more like a bunch of junior high school students, worrying more about who is popular, and less about who has facts.

We watched rock’n’roll, rap, hip hop and other kinds of pop music die, killed by relentless homogeneity of American Idol, Disney, and the music industry.  I have no doubt there are brilliant people making brilliant music, because that’s what creative humans do, but it’s more and more difficult to find it on the radio.  For that matter, it’s more and more difficult to find music on the radio, or in the clubs.  CBGBs and The Bottom Line closed, driven out by real-estate speculators.

On the plus side, animation and graphic story-telling finally got some respect.  After a few decades of “Pow! Bam! Comics/Cartoons aren’t just for kids anymore,” the marketplace finally believed.  The money helped; graphic novels are one of the only categories experiencing any growth in bookstores.  Pixar, in my opinion, gets the credit for animation’s respect (with a tip o’the hat to The Simpsons), because their movies showed that technology works best in service of a good story, with interesting characters.

What’s ahead?  Don’t ask me.  I believed this movie I thought we’d have flight packs and hover craft by now.  I thought the abortion issue was settled.

At the same time, I didn’t think I’d live long enough to see an African American president.  Sometimes, it feels great to be wrong.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, enjoys the days getting longer.  She wishes you all better days.