Does Your Dental Plan Cover Gnashed Teeth?
            

            Dear David,

            At the end of this series, and of the century, is the Millennium. It can
either be prosaic or dramatic. If it is just the spasm of sex or the
drunkenness of drink, and then the drab morning after, there is no meaning to
the millennium. But what if ...

            Y2K is the perfect metaphor for one outcome. The wheels of the trains, the
whir of the airplanes, the lights in all the houses go out, because we have
reached the limits of two zeroes. 0 and 0 and then chaos. The computers flop.
All the stock options lapse. We all become cavemen and cavewomen, and the
Hobbesian world erupts in all its grim fury. All the world is Chechnya, with
the leer of your Boris Yeltsin hovering overhead.

            But Y2K is itself mundane. It probably will not happen. Three zeroes will
emerge, and the computers will go whirring on endlessly. But what if beyond the
Y2K come the real portents of drama?

            The curtain rises. We call it eschatology --the transforming moment,
the end of days. That has been one of the most enduring and powerful themes in
Western history.

            We see it first in the frightening pages of the Book of Revelation, the last
pages of the New Testament. The trumpets sound. The seven seals are broken. The
beasts come up from the seas. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse begin their
grim ride, the last being the pale horse and pale rider, Death, with a mantle
dyed in blood. And behind it the word of God. (As the fundamentalist preacher
thundered: In the fiery furnaces of Hell, there is wailing and gnashing of
teeth. But I don't have any teeth, cried an old man. Teeth will be provided,
the preacher answered.) And, then, a new heaven and a new earth. The new
Jerusalem comes down from heaven.

            Revelation subsided for a millennium. But then in the 12 th
century, an obscure Cistercian monk, Joachim of Fiore, developed a powerful and
original theology (three books, including the Expositio in Apocalypsim ),
which put eschatology into history . (As the Marxist Ernst Bloch said:
"Joachim was the first to set a date for the kingdom of God, for the communist
kingdom.") Joachim prophesized three ages--the age of the Father, the age of
the Son, and the age of the Holy Spirit, a new age of spirituality in which the
church hierarchy would be abolished and the infidels brought back into the
fold--the lions and the lambs, so to speak, lying down together in peace. (How
do you have the lions and the lambs in the same cafe, Henry Kissinger once
asked Nikita Khrushchev in wonder at the Moscow zoo. By changing the lamb each
day, la femme Nikita replied.) Joachim was adopted by the Spiritual Franciscans
as their prophet, but few Christians today are spiritual Franciscans with their
begging bowls, unless it is in the Nasdaq market. But Joachim did have an echo
in poetry, since his prophecies inspired Yeats' "Second Coming."

            Poetry also came into eschatology in the movies, as many persons found a
liking for Blake's Milton in the spirited lines: "Bring me my bow of
burning gold/ Bring me my Arrows of Desire!/ Bring me my Spear! O clouds
unfold!/ Bring me my Chariot of fire!" And ending, of course, that he will not
cease from Mental Fight until "we have built Jerusalem in England's green and
pleasant Land."

            In the bowels of England's pleasant British Museum, Karl Marx was creating a
new political eschatology, the "leap," as he said, from "the Kingdom of
Necessity to the Kingdom of Freedom." The drama is spelled out in that
lumbering bible, Das Kapital , where in the deepening crises of
capitalism, and the sharpening knives of the class struggle, the end of days
arrives, as Marx put it in the penultimate chapter of Volume I, when the
capitalist "integument" bursts asunder, and the new society, nurtured in the
womb of the old, steps forth as social labor, cooperative labor, communal
harmony (the transit workers and Giuliani) in a mutual embrace.

            All this was given concrete historical reality in October 1917 with the holy
Russian Revolution. In the 1920s, the famous journalist Lincoln Steffens came
to the Soviet Union and marveled: I have seen the future, and it works. It was
a phrase repeated over and over by esteemed visitors such as H.G. Wells and
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, until in 1989, the mantra stopped. And amid the
detritus, one could find a scrawled phrase by a character in an earlier novel
by Robert Littel, Mother Russia , a man improbably named Robespierre
Pravdin: I have seen the future, and it needs work.

            So, off we go, heigh ho, heigh ho, as in the Disney cartoon, singing the
words of Sidney Blumenthal: the new politics, the new economics,
the new technology (nu, nu), all insured by comprehensive health
insurance with prescription drugs, spectacles, and false teeth for the aged (as
promised by Nye Bevan in 1950, when he set up the new British comprehensive
health system).

            But, hey, where is the millennium? Oh. That. That was the spasm of sex and
the drunkenness of drink. That was the night before. And this is the morning
after.

            Love,
Dad