Tick-Tock

Malcolm Bull

• Conversations about the End of Time by Umberto Eco and Stephen Jay Gould
  Allen Lane, 228 pp, £14.99, September 1999, ISBN 0 7139 9363 4
• Apocalypses: Prophesies, Cults and Millennial Beliefs throughout the Ages by Eugen Weber
  Hutchinson, 294 pp, £18.99, July 1999, ISBN 0 09 180134 6
• Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium by Richard Popkin and David Katz
  Allen Lane, 303 pp, £18.99, October 1999, ISBN 0 7139 9383 9

It was in 1982 that the artist then still known as Prince first invited us to ‘party like it’s 1999’, and in those days everyone quickly grasped what he meant. The Cold War made people edgy (‘Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?’) and it seemed quite possible that we might wake up one morning and find that we were ‘out of time’. But now? Well, ‘it’s here and I like it,’ as Will Smith says in his greeting card to the new year ‘Will 2K’. There isn’t much anxiety in this song, it’s time to celebrate. What exactly? The ‘Willennium’, he helpfully suggests, ‘the party of a lifetime ... resolution: get the money’. Future historians looking for evidence of the ‘terrors’ of the year 2000 aren’t going to get much mileage out of Will Smith, or indeed any other area of popular culture. The Western world is unthreatened, some people are enjoying great prosperity, and governments are more popular than at any time in living memory. The End has become a marketing opportunity; it sells anything, even (in the TV ads) Uncle Ben’s rice.