By the year
2000, the term “working class” had fallen into disuse in the United
States, and “proletariat” was so obsolete it was known only to a
few bitter old Marxist academics with wire hair sprouting out of
their ears. The average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic, or
burglar-alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun
King blink. He spent his vacations in Puerto Vallarta, Barbados, or
St. Kitts. Before dinner he would be out on the terrace of some
resort hotel with his third wife, wearing his Ricky Martin
cane-cutter shirt open down to the sternum, the better to allow his
gold chains to twinkle in his chest hairs. The two of them would
have just ordered a round of Quibel sparkling water, from the state
of West Virginia, because by 2000 the once-favored European
sparkling waters Perrier and San Pellegrino seemed so
tacky.
European labels no longer held even the
slightest snob appeal except among people known as “intellectuals,”
whom we will visit in a moment. Our typical mechanic or tradesman
took it for granted that things European were second-rate. Aside
from three German luxury automobiles—the Mercedes-Benz, the BMW,
and the Audi—he regarded European-manufactured goods as mediocre to
shoddy. On his trips abroad, our electrician, like any American
businessman, would go to superhuman lengths to avoid being treated
in European hospitals, which struck him as little better than those
in the Third World. He considered European hygiene so primitive
that to receive an injection in a European clinic voluntarily was
sheer madness.
Indirectly, subconsciously, his views
perhaps had to do with the fact that his own country, the United
States, was now the mightiest power on earth, as omnipotent as
Macedon under Alexander the Great, Rome under Julius Caesar,
Mongolia under Genghis Khan, Turkey under Mohammed II, or Britain
under Queen Victoria. His country was so powerful, it had begun to
invade or rain missiles upon small nations in Europe, Africa, Asia,
and the Caribbean for no other reason than that their leaders were
lording it over their subjects at home.
Our air-conditioning mechanic had
probably never heard of Saint-Simon, but he was fulfilling
Saint-Simon’s and the other nineteenth-century utopian socialists’
dreams of a day when the ordinary workingman would have the
political and personal freedom, the free time and the wherewithal
to express himself in any way he saw fit and to unleash his full
potential. Not only that, any ethnic or racial group—any, even recent refugees from a Latin country—could
take over the government of any American city, if they had the
votes and a modicum of organization. Americans could boast of a
freedom as well as a power unparalleled in the history of the
world.
Our typical burglar-alarm repairman
didn’t display one erg of chauvinistic swagger, however. He had
been numbed by the aforementioned “intellectuals,” who had spent
the preceding eighty years being indignant over what a
“puritanical,” “repressive,” “bigoted,” “capitalistic,” and
“fascist” nation America was beneath its democratic façade. It made
his head hurt. Besides, he was too busy coping with what was known
as the “sexual revolution.” If anything, “sexual revolution” was
rather a prim term for the lurid carnival actually taking place in
the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000. Every magazine
stand was a riot of bare flesh, rouged areolae, moistened crevices,
and stiffened giblets: boys with girls, girls with girls, boys with
boys, bare-breasted female bodybuilders, so-called boys with
breasts, riding backseat behind steroid-gorged bodybuilding bikers,
naked except for cache-sexes and Panzer
helmets, on huge chromed Honda or Harley-Davidson
motorcycles.
But the magazines were nothing compared
with what was offered on an invention of the 1990s, the Internet.
By 2000, an estimated 50 percent of all hits, or “log-ons,” were at
Web sites purveying what was known as “adult material.” The word
“pornography” had disappeared down the memory hole along with
“proletariat.” Instances of marriages breaking up because of
Web-sex addiction were rising in number. The husband, some
fifty-two-year-old MRI technician or systems analyst, would sit in
front of the computer for twenty-four or more hours at a stretch.
Nothing that the wife could offer him in the way of sexual delights
or food could compare with the one-handing he was doing day and
night as he sat before the PC and logged on to such images as a
girl with bare breasts and a black leather corset standing with one
foot on the small of a naked boy’s back, brandishing a
whip.
In 1999, the year before, this
particular sexual kink—sadomasochism—had achieved not merely
respectability but high chic, and the word “perversion” had become
as obsolete as “pornography” and “proletariat.” Fashion pages
presented the black leather and rubber paraphernalia as style’s
cutting edge. An actress named Rene Russo blithely recounted in the
Living section of one of America’s biggest newspapers how she had
consulted a former dominatrix named Eva Norvind, who maintained a
dungeon replete with whips and chains and assorted baffling leather
masks, chokers, and cuffs, in order to prepare for a part as an
aggressive, self-obsessed agent provocateur in The
Thomas Crown Affair, Miss Russo’s latest movie.
“Sexy” was beginning to replace “chic”
as the adjective indicating what was smart and up-to-the-minute. In
the year 2000, it was standard practice for the successful chief
executive officer of a corporation to shuck his wife of two to
three decades’ standing for the simple reason that her subcutaneous
packing was deteriorating, her shoulders and upper back were
thickening like a shot-putter’s—in short, she was no longer sexy.
Once he set up the old wife in a needlepoint shop where she could
sell yarn to her friends, he was free to take on a new wife, a
“trophy wife,” preferably a woman in her twenties, and preferably
blond, as in an expression from that time, a “lemon tart.” What was
the downside? Was the new couple considered radioactive socially?
Did people talk sotto voce, behind the hand,
when the tainted pair came by? Not for a moment. All that happened
was that everybody got on the cell phone or the Internet and rang
up or E-mailed one another to find out the spelling of the new
wife’s first name, because it was always some name like Serena and
nobody was sure how to spell it. Once that was written down in the
little red Scully & Scully address book that was so popular
among people of means, the lemon tart and her big CEO catch were
invited to all the parties, as though nothing had
happened.
Meanwhile, sexual stimuli bombarded the
young so incessantly and intensely they were inflamed with a randy
itch long before reaching puberty. At puberty the dams, if any were
left, burst. In the nineteenth century, entire shelves used to be
filled with novels whose stories turned on the need for women, such
as Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, to remain chaste or to maintain
a façade of chastity. In the year 2000, a Tolstoy or a Flaubert
wouldn’t have stood a chance in the United States. From age
thirteen, American girls were under pressure to maintain a façade
of sexual experience and sophistication. Among girls, “virgin” was
a term of contempt. The old term “dating”—referring to a practice
in which a boy asked a girl out for the evening and took her to the
movies or dinner—was now deader than “proletariat” or “pornography”
or “perversion.” In junior high school, high school, and college,
girls headed out in packs in the evening, and boys headed out in
packs, hoping to meet each other fortuitously. If they met and some
girl liked the looks of some boy, she would give him the nod, or he
would give her the nod, and the two of them would retire to a
halfway-private room and “hook up.”
“Hooking up” was a term known in the
year 2000 to almost every American child over the age of nine, but
to only a relatively small percentage of their parents, who, even
if they heard it, thought it was being used in the old sense of
“meeting” someone. Among the children, hooking up was always a
sexual experience, but the nature and extent of what they did could
vary widely. Back in the twentieth century, American girls had used
baseball terminology. “First base” referred to embracing and
kissing; “second base” referred to groping and fondling and deep,
or “French,” kissing, commonly known as “heavy petting”; “third
base” referred to fellatio, usually known in polite conversation by
the ambiguous term “oral sex”; and “home plate” meant
conception-mode intercourse, known familiarly as “going all the
way.” In the year 2000, in the era of hooking up, “first base”
meant deep kissing (“tonsil hockey”), groping, and fondling;
“second base” meant oral sex; “third base” meant going all the way;
and “home plate” meant learning each other’s names.
Getting to home plate was relatively
rare, however. The typical Filofax entry in the year 2000 by a girl
who had hooked up the night before would be: “Boy with black
Wu-Tang T-shirt and cargo pants: O, A, 6.” Or “Stupid cock
diesel”—slang for a boy who was muscular from lifting weights—“who
kept saying, ‘This is a cool deal’: TTC, 3.” The letters referred
to the sexual acts performed (e.g., TTC for “that thing with the
cup”), and the Arabic number indicated the degree of satisfaction
on a scale of 1 to 10.
In the year 2000, girls used “score” as
an active verb indicating sexual conquest, as in: “The whole thing
was like very sketchy, but I scored that diesel who said he was
gonna go home and caff up [drink coffee in order to stay awake and
study] for the psych test.” In the twentieth century, only boys had
used “score” in that fashion, as in: “I finally scored with Susan
last night.” That girls were using such a locution points up one of
the ironies of the relations between the sexes in the year 2000.
The continuing vogue of feminism had made sexual life easier, even
insouciant, for men. Women had been persuaded that they should be
just as active as men when it came to sexual advances. Men were
only too happy to accede to the new order, since it absolved them
of all sense of responsibility, let alone chivalry. Men began to
adopt formerly feminine attitudes when the subject of marriage came
up, pleading weakness and indecisiveness, as in: “I don’t know; I’m
just not ready yet” or “Of course I love you, but like, you know, I
start weirding out when I try to focus on it.”
With the onset of puberty, males were
able to get sexual enjoyment so easily, so casually, that junior
high schools as far apart geographically and socially as the slums
of the South Bronx and Washington’s posh suburbs of Arlington and
Talbot County, Virginia, began reporting a new discipline problem.
Thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls were getting down on their
knees and fellating boys in corridors and stairwells during the
two-minute break between classes. One thirteen-year-old in New
York, asked by a teacher how she could do such a thing, replied:
“It’s nasty, but I need to satisfy my man.” Nasty was an aesthetic
rather than a moral or hygienic judgment. In the year 2000, boys
and girls did not consider fellatio to be a truely sexual act, any
more than tonsil hockey. It was just “fooling around.” The
President of the United States at the time used to have a
twenty-two-year-old girl, an unpaid volunteer in the presidential
palace, the White House, come around to his office for fellatio. He
later testified under oath that he had never “had sex” with her.
Older Americans tended to be shocked, but junior-high-school,
high-school, and college students understood completely what he was
saying and wondered what on earth all the fuss was about. The two
of them had merely been on second base, hooking up.
Teenage girls spoke about their sex
lives to total strangers without the least embarrassment or guile.
One New York City newspaper sent out a man-on-the-street
interviewer with the question: “How did you lose your virginity?”
Girls as well as boys responded without hesitation, posed for
photographs, and divulged their name, age, and the neighborhood
where they lived.
Stains and stigmas of every kind were
disappearing where sex was concerned. Early in the twentieth
century the term “cohabitation” had referred to the forbidden
practice of a man and woman living together before marriage. In the
year 2000, nobody under forty had ever heard of the word, since
cohabitation was now the standard form of American courtship. For
parents over forty, one of the thornier matters of etiquette
concerned domestic bed assignments. When your son or daughter came
home for the weekend with the live-in consort, did you put the two
of them in the same bedroom, which would indicate implicit approval
of the discomforting fait accompli? Or did you put them in
different bedrooms and lie awake, rigid with insomnia, fearful of
hearing muffled footfalls in the hallway in the middle of the
night?
Putting them in different rooms was a
decidedly old-fashioned thing to do; and in the year 2000, thanks
to the feverish emphasis on sex and sexiness, nobody wanted to
appear old, let alone old-fashioned. From the city of Baltimore
came reports of grandmothers having their eyebrows, tongues, and
lips pierced with gold rings in order to appear younger, since
body-piercing was a popular fashion among boys and girls in their
teens and early twenties. Expectant mothers were having their belly
buttons pierced with gold rings so that the shapelessness of
pregnancy would not make them feel old. An old man who had been a
prominent United States senator and a presidential candidate,
emerged from what he confessed to have been a state of incapacity
to go on television to urge other old men to take a drug called
Viagra to free them from what he said was one of the scourges of
modern times, the disease that dared not speak its name: impotence.
He dared not speak it, either. He called it “E.D.,” for erectile
dysfunction. Insurance companies were under pressure to classify
impotence in old men as a disease and to pay for
treatment.
In the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, old people in America had prayed, “Please,
God, don’t let me look poor.” In the year 2000, they prayed,
“Please, God, don’t let me look old.” Sexiness was equated with
youth, and youth ruled. The most widespread age-related disease was
not senility but juvenility. The social ideal was to look
twenty-three and dress thirteen. All over the country, old men and
women were dressing casually at every opportunity, wearing jeans,
luridly striped sneakers, shorts, T-shirts, polo shirts, jackets,
and sweaters, heedless of how such clothes revealed every sad
twist, bow, hump, and webbed-up vein clump of their superannuated
bodies. For that matter, in the year 2000, people throughout
American society were inverting norms of dress that had persisted
for centuries, if not millennia. Was the majesty of America’s
global omnipotence reflected in the raiments of the rich and
prominent? Quite the opposite. In the year 2000, most American
billionaires—and the press no longer took notice of men worth a
mere $500 million or $750 million—lived in San Jose and Santa Clara
Counties, California, an area known nationally, with mythic awe, as
the Silicon Valley, the red-hot center of the computer and Internet
industries. In 1999, the Internet industry alone had produced
fourteen new billionaires. The Valley’s mythology was full of the
sagas of young men who had gone into business for themselves,
created their own companies straight out of college, or, better
still, had dropped out of college to launch their “start-ups,” as
these new digital-age enterprises were known. Such were the new
“Masters of the Universe,” a term coined in the eighties to
describe the (mere) megamillionaires spawned by Wall Street during
a boom in the bond business. By comparison with the Valley’s boy
billionaires, the Wall Streeters, even though they were enjoying a
boom in the stock market in the year 2000, seemed slow and dreary.
Typically, they graduated from college, worked for three years as
number-crunching donkeys in some large investment-banking firm,
went off to business school for two years to be certified as
Masters of Business Administration, then returned to some
investment-banking firm and hoped to start making some real money
by the age of thirty. The stodginess of such a career was
symbolized by the stodginess of their dress. Even the youngest of
them dressed like old men: the dark blah suit, the light blah
shirt, the hopelessly “interesting” Hermès tie … Many of them even
wore silk braces.
The new Masters of the Universe turned
all that upside down. At II Fornaio restaurant in Palo Alto,
California, where they gathered to tell war stories and hand out
business cards at breakfast, the billionaire founders of the new
wonder corporations walked in the door looking like well-pressed,
well-barbered beachcombers, but beachcombers all the same. They
wore khakis, boating moccasins (without socks), and ordinary cotton
shirts with the cuffs rolled up and the front unbuttoned to the
navel, and that was it. You could tell at a glance that a Silicon
Valley billionaire carried no cell phone, Palm Pilot, HP-19B
calculator, or RIM pager—he had people who did that for him. Having
breakfast with him at II Fornaio would be a vice president whose
net worth was $100 or $200 million. He would be dressed just like
the founder, except that he would also be wearing a sport jacket.
Why? So that he could carry … the cell phone, the Palm Pilot, the
HP-19B calculator, and the RIM pager, which received E-mail and
felt big as a brick. But why not an attaché case? Because that was
what old-fashioned businessmen Back East carried. Nobody would be
caught dead at II Fornaio carrying an attaché case. The Back East
attaché case was known scornfully as “the leather lunch
pail.”
When somebody walked into II Fornaio
wearing a suit and tie, he was likely to be mistaken for a maître
d’. In the year 2000, as in prior ages, service personnel, such as
doormen, chauffeurs, waiters, and maitre d’s, were expected to wear
the anachronistic finery of bygone eras. In Silicon Valley, wearing
a tie was a mark of shame that indicated you were everything a
Master of the Universe was not. Gradually, it would dawn on you.
The poor devil in the suit and tie held one of those lowly but
necessary executive positions, in public or investor relations, in
which one couldn’t avoid dealing with Pliocene old parties from …
Back East.
Meanwhile, back East, the sons of the
old rich were deeply involved in inverted fashions themselves. One
of the more remarkable sights in New York City in the year 2000 was
that of some teenage scion of an investment-banking family emerging
from one of the forty-two Good Buildings, as they were known. These
forty-two buildings on Manhattan’s East Side contained the biggest,
grandest, stateliest apartments ever constructed in the United
States, most of them on Park and Fifth Avenues. A doorman dressed
like an Austrian Army colonel from the year 1870 holds open the
door, and out comes a wan white boy wearing a baseball cap
sideways; an outsized T-shirt, whose short sleeves fall below his
elbows and whose tail hangs down over his hips; baggy cargo pants
with flapped pockets running down the legs and a crotch hanging
below his knees, and yards of material pooling about his ankles,
all but obscuring the Lugz sneakers. This fashion was deliberately
copied from the “homeys”—black youths on the streets of six New
York slums, Harlem, the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Fort
Greene, South Ozone Park, and East New York. After passing the
doorman, who tipped his visored officer’s hat and said “Good day,”
the boy walked twenty feet to a waiting sedan, where a driver with
a visored officer’s hat held open a rear door.
What was one to conclude from such a
scene? The costumes said it all. In the year 2000, the sons of the
rich, the very ones in line to inherit the bounties of the
all-powerful United States, were consumed by a fear of being
envied. A German sociologist of the period, Helmut Schoeck, said
that “fear of being envied” was the definition of guilt. But if so,
guilt about what? So many riches, so much power, such a dazzling
array of advantages? American superiority in all matters of
science, economics, industry, politics, business, medicine,
engineering, social life, social justice, and, of course, the
military was total and indisputable. Even Europeans suffering the
pangs of wounded chauvinism looked on with awe at the brilliant
example the United States had set for the world as the third
millennium began. And yet there was a cloud on the millennial
horizon.
America had shown the world the way in
every area save one. In matters intellectual and artistic, she
remained an obedient colony of Europe. American architecture had
never recovered from the deadening influence of the German Bauhaus
movement of the twenties. American painting and sculpture had never
recovered from the deadening influence of various theory-driven
French movements, beginning with Cubism early in the twentieth
century. In music, the early-twentieth-century innovations of
George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, and Ferde Grofé had
been swept away by the abstract, mathematical formulas of the
Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg’s influence had
faded in the 1990s, but the damage had been done. The American
theater had never recovered from the Absurdism of Samuel Beckett,
Bertolt Brecht, and Luigi Pirandello.
But, above all, there was the curious
case of American philosophy—which no longer existed. It was as if
Emerson, Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey had never
lived. The reigning doctrine was deconstruction, whose hierophants
were two Frenchmen, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. They began
with a hyperdilation of a pronouncement of Nietzsche’s to the
effect that there can be no absolute truth, merely many “truths,”
which are the tools of various groups, classes, or forces. From
this, the deconstructionists proceeded to the doctrine that
language is the most insidious tool of all. The philosopher’s duty
was to deconstruct the language, expose its hidden agendas, and
help save the victims of the American “Establishment”: women, the
poor, nonwhites, homosexuals, and hardwood trees.
Oddly, when deconstructionists required
appendectomies or bypass surgery or even a root-canal job, they
never deconstructed medical or dental “truth,” but went along with
whatever their board-certified, profit-oriented surgeons proclaimed
was the last word.
Confused and bored, our electrician,
our air-conditioning mechanic, and our burglar-alarm repairman sat
down in the evening and watched his favorite TV show (The Simpsons), played his favorite computer game
(Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater) with the children,
logged on to the Internet, stayed up until 2 a.m. planning a trip
to this fabulous-sounding resort just outside Bangkok, then
“crashed” (went to bed exhausted), and fell asleep faster than it
takes to tell it, secure in the knowledge that the sun would once
more shine blessedly upon him in the morning. It was the year
2000.