Twenty-ten!....I think that’s what people are gonna call it now cuz it’s easier than saying, two thousand ‘n ten.....not much easier, mind you, just seems t’roll off the tongue a little smoother...
Not that it makes a heck of a lot of difference,
Back when the century turned from 1899 to 1900, people didn’t have any trouble getting their tongues around those p’ticklar numbers but when we left 1999 behind....ah well, we always got to have something to fret about.....
A hundred years ago, the United States was still prattling about ‘Manifest Destiny’....The Grand Experiment of our fore-fathers was working really well for us....we were coast to coast, boom or bust, Johnny come latelies to the dance of world powers....The old civilizations looked down their noses at us, at our exuberance, our new-found wealth, our young muscles that we were beginning to flex around the world...Our national self-esteem was at an all-time high...there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do...so we dallied in Cuba, danced on our border with Mexico ‘n went a couple rounds in the Phillipines.....we strutted our stuff in old Europe in WWI ‘n stumbled ‘round with the League of Nations then buckled down ‘n got real serious after Japan bloodied our nose in the Pacific....came out of that riding high, got the A-bomb ‘n figured that our shit didn’t stink ‘n that Manifest Destiny meant that we wuz spozed t’be the beneficient Lords of the ‘hull damn world.....ah well, men plan ‘n God laughs....This century may be a turning point for the good ole US of A....Rome lasted a thousand years or thereabouts....it’s gone faster for everyone else since then.....we may become a ‘third-world’ country quicker than anyone could imagine cuz ‘manifest destiny’ is a tricky thing ‘n the gods are a capricious bunch given to practical jokes......prob’ly a good thing if we can hang on to a sense of humor about the whole thing....
“He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” R. Sabatini
No comments:
Post a Comment