COMES THE MILLENNIUM - Revisited

 

Back in the 1990s, as the year 2000 was approaching and we started seeing various stories in the news about computer disasters, etc., I decided to write a book about what seemed to be happening around me, and titled it COMES THE MILLENNIUM. However, because in those years I was working in a part of the country where I knew a whole lot of people would be greatly offended by what was in that book, and some of those people had been exceedingly generous in supporting my work, I decided to publish CTM under a pen name, Jack Blake. Well, two things have happened since that book came out. First, my work in that part of the country ended, and second, the American people, in their predictable way, elected an individual as president in 2024 who made the subtitle of CTM even more relevant than it had been back in the 1990s. That subtitle, as you can see from the picture, is: A look at the burgeoning hysteria, religious mania, and anti-intellectualism as the millennium approaches. So, I decided that because CTM was becoming increasingly relevant, I got all the rights back from the publisher and decided to publish a second edition. What’s you’ll see in the next few weeks are the chapters from that book, although I’ll also put them up on my blog, fridaycoffee.blogspot.com.

Here are the first two paragraphs from COMES THE MILLENNIUM, to give you a sense of what will follow in the next few weeks:

If you are a rational person, then put this book back where you found it. Why? Because Comes the Millennium may make you furious. Nobody needs that kind of stress in his or her life. Besides, the last televangelist I watched said the world is going to end in rapture before very long anyway, so there’ll be no need for this book. But rational people should hang on to it just in case the guy was wrong.

The world is in a mess. On the other hand, some part of the world has always been in a mess. During the period from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance, for example, the life of an average human being, at least in Europe, was hellish. If we had to live like people lived during the Dark Ages, then we’d think the world had already come to an end. If life as a serf seemed intolerable, then a person could join a Crusade and get a real taste of slaughter, rape, pillage, plunder, starvation, failure, and multiculturalism. Nowadays, parochial school athletic teams take up nicknames like “the Crusaders.”