Inaugural Mulligan

by JOHN FEFFER / Foreign Policy In Focus

According to the British historian Eric Hobsbawm in The Age of Extremes, the 20th century didn’t truly begin until 1914. World War I, with its new technologies of violence and effective termination of several empires, brought what Hobsbawm called the “long 19th century” to a close. Those with a more scientific bent might date the beginning of the 20th century to the first flight of the Wright brothers (1903) or the first transatlantic phone call (1915). If you prefer to think of the last 100 years as dominated by Hollywood and the global image factory, the 20th century began prematurely in 1896 when the first movie premiered in New York.

The profound changes that mark an era rarely correspond to a calendar’s shifts. Even Jesus Christ came into this world several years before the millennial turning point to which he gave his name. In other words, an era dawns two ways, chronologically and metaphorically.

Our choices for the metaphorical dawn of the 21st century are rather bleak. Here are a few possibilities: the outbreak of fighting in Yugoslavia in 1991, the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2001 report on the incontrovertible evidence for global warming, the attacks of September 11, the Iraq War, and last year’s dizzying stock market crash.

If these events set the tone for this century, we are in deep trouble. We face a long economic decline, a slowly increasing heat wave, growing anarchy and violence, and lousy governance. As these trends converge, we face not the “perfect storm” but the “last storm.” We’re all living on borrowed time (which gives us the name of our epoch, according to a recent contest in The Nation).

But let’s pretend that we’ve simply gotten off on the wrong foot with this century. In a friendly round of golf, if you make a lousy tee shot, you can declare a “mulligan” and do the shot over. We’ve certainly sent the ball into the woods this time around. So let’s call a “mulligan” and start over.

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