It's a commonplace that something is "out of kilter" in America, as Senator John Kerry put it in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing; that "everything that's tied down is coming loose," as Bill Moyers has observed; that "the world has gone crazy," as the Unabomber declared, in his official capacity as op-ed essayist and mad bomber.
There's a growing belief that mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, as Yeats foretold; that the best lack all conviction, while the worst—terrorists like the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh, cult leaders like David Koresh of the Branch Davidians and Marshall Applewhite of Heaven's Gate fame—are full of passionate intensity. The cultural critic James Gardner believes that we live in "an age of extremism," a time of "infinite fracturing and polarizing," when extremism "has become the first rather than the last resort." But, all this gloom and doom notwithstanding, there's a darkly farcical, Coney- esque quality to the '90s, a decade captivated by celebrity nonentities like Joey Buttafuoco and Tonya Harding and Lorena Bobbitt and Heidi Fleiss and, at the moment this is written, the cast of "zippergate," starring Monica Lewinsky. The increasingly black comedy of American society is writ small in the information flotsam that drifts with the media current—back-page stories like the one about the Torrance, California man sentenced to 25 years to life in prison under the state's "three-strikes" law for stealing a slice of pizza from a kiddie party, or the one about the Long Island men accused of conspiring to kill local politicians, whom they believed were concealing evidence of a flying saucer crash, by lacing the officials' toothpaste with radioactive metal.
The postmodern theorist Arthur Kroker believes that millennial culture is manic-depressive, mood-swinging between "ecstasy and fear, between delirium and anxiety." For Kroker, the "postmodern scene" is a panic, in the sense of the "panic terror" that some historians believe swept through Europe at the turn of the last millennium, when omens of apocalypse supposedly inspired public flagellation and private suicides. But, he implies, it's also a panic in the somewhat dated sense of something that's hysterically funny (with the emphasis on hysterical). Fin-de-millennium America is an infernal carnival—a pyrotechnic insanitarium, like Coney Island at the fin-de-siecle. From alien abductions to encounters with angels, recovered memories to multiple personalities, Satanic ritual abuse to serial killer fandom, "cutting" as abject fashion statement to S&M as mainstream lifestyle option, our media landscape seems to be dominated by solitary obsessions and subcultural crazes, "extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds," as Charles Mackay put it in his classic book of the same name.
Are we on the eve of a new Age of Unrest and Unreason? Or are the visions of excess and premonitions of doom haunting millennial America mere numerology—the same mass manias that have bedeviled the Western world every thousand years? Is there "some sinister hysteria in the air out here tonight, some hint of the monstrous perversion to which any human idea can come," as Joan Didion wondered, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem? Or is it just the smell of Chaos, the new scent from Donna Karan?
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