A Tale of Two Times—2000s and 1920s

The movie Chicago premiered on December 10, 2002, and looks back to the spring of 1929. In this section, we will take a look at these two shadowy times, and see how the Cosmic Game plays out.

**As the Century Turns Again to 2000
***Terror, War, Violence And Destruction
***The Dark Side of Computers
***Political Scenes
***The Always Entertaining Entertainment Industry
***Corporate Corruption Runs Rampant
***Here Today Gone Tomorrow
***Science—From Chromosomes and Cloning to the Cosmos

**The Twenties : A Paradoxical Period
***Conservative Constrictions and Underworld Activities
***Women and Youth—Return of The Repressed
***Trash Tabloids to Literary Heights—Arts and Entertainment Abound
***The Art World— From Gay Paris to Broadway and the Blues
***Capital Ideas, Inventions and Innovations
***What Will They Think of Next? Our Favorite Foods
***Radio and Television Rule the Airwaves While Movies Modernize
***Psychology Becomes Popular
**Putting Things in Perspective

As the Century Turns Again to 2000

The turn of the Twentieth Century to the Twenty-First Century had a dramatically different feeling to it than when the Nineteenth Century turned to the Twentieth. The beginning of the Twenty-First Century was also the beginning of a new millennium, and although apocalyptic predictions abounded, initially modern society got by relatively unscathed, with concerns over the effects of “Y2K” on computers proving, after all of the hype and worry, to be “much ado about nothing.” While this technological glitch proved relatively painless, America did get hung up on “hanging chads” in the hotly contested 2000 presidential race. The top stories of the period reflected the distinctly shadowy feeling of the Saturn-Pluto planetary archetypal complex.

Terror, War, Violence, Murder, And Destruction

Israel and Palestine were at each other’s throats again as the decade began: the violence in the Middle East escalated, as Yassir Arafat declared an “intifada” in late September 2000 with suicide bombing attacks and the ensuing retaliations by Israelis. Intifada is an Arabic word meaning shaking off, shuddering, awakening, insurrection, or uprising. (Answers, n.d.) www.answers.com/intifada)

During the following year, the infamous 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon occurred as explosive fundamentalist suicide bombers used airplanes to target America’s economic and military might. The United States's led “war against terror” followed, beginning with the war in Afghanistan where the Taliban, a repressive fundamentalist government which had harbored Al Qaeda, was overthrown.

The United States then went to the United Nations with its Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) case against Iraq in 2002. Although the WMD information was later found to be inaccurate, it provided the rationale for the US-led invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 in an initial campaign of “shock and awe” which ousted dictator Saddam Hussein from power. The Iraq war was initially thought to be successful, leading to the deaths of Saddam’s sadistic sons Uday and Qusay and the capture of Saddam himself. Since then, however, Iraq has become a quagmire-like battleground, plagued by a terrorist insurgency, with almost daily car and suicide bombings.

The rest of the world did not escape from terror either. Russia saw two terrorist attacks: a Moscow Theater in 2002, and a school in 2004. There were bombings at a nightclub in Bali in 2002 and at a Madrid train station in 2003. Genocide swept Sudan beginning in 2003 as ethnic Arabs began slaughtering blacks, which led to over 50,000 deaths in the Dafur region and millions more becoming refugees, fleeing the country into neighboring Chad.

In the United States, domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh was executed in 2001, and two snipers terrorized the Washington DC area for weeks in 2002. Scott Peterson killed his wife and unborn child on Christmas eve 2002, their bodies surfacing in 2003. Peterson was then tried and convicted in 2004.

Wildfires ravaged the Western United States, with California being especially hard hit. Two nightclub fires in 2002 killed more than a hundred people in Rhode Island and Chicago. The Russian nuclear submarine Kursk had a catastrophic explosion and sunk in the Barents Sea in August 2000, and the space shuttle Columbia exploded in February 2003. A massive earthquake in Iran killed 20,000 people in late 2003.

Britain was plagued by Mad Cow disease, while the United States experienced an anthrax scare, which occurred in the weeks following September 11, 2001. In 2003, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) killed 750, and 8,000 people were infected. SARS wreaked economic and social havoc from Beijing to Toronto, disrupting trade, travel, and major events. China and Southeast Asia also suffered outbreaks of Bird Flu, which necessitated the mass killings of domestic fowl.

The Dark Side of Computers

Computer viruses swept the globe, one of the most infamous being the electronic love letter originating in the Phillipines. According to Rob Pegoraro (2003), “the dark side of the Internet” erupted in 2003 and “the Internet officially stopped being fun. The festering problems of spam, spyware, viruses, worms and pop-ups boiled over, making the online experience merely annoying at best, financially and emotionally destructive at worst.”

Johnny Depp, the kohl eyed Captain Jack Sparrow of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean (Verbinski, 2003) was not the only one singing “yo-ho yo-ho a pirate’s life for me.” Pirates surfed the Internet, aided by Napster, Kazaa and other companies, violating the copyright laws by illegally file-sharing and downloading songs and movies, which caused financial fits in the entertainment industry. Apple launched its Apple Store in 2003, selling songs for 99 cents, and in less than a year sold its 15 millionth song.

Political Scenes

International incidents abounded at the turn of the Twenty-First Century. The United States and Cuba played tug of war with a little boy, Elian Gonzalez, the subject of a bitter custody battle, which ended in a late night raid on April 22, 2000 in Miami with federal agents taking Elian at gunpoint to return him to his father in CubaA United States spy plane made an emergency landing in China in 2001. And Political upheaval prevailed, as Milosovic was booted out of Yugoslavia, and later the Serbian Prime Minister was assassinated. Liberia’s Charles Taylor finally resigned in an effort to end the 14 year old civil war in that country. Georgian President Edward Shevardnadze peacefully gave up power due to massive demonstrations. Ex-KGB Vladimir Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin as the President of Russia, while Vicente Fox defeated the ruling party in Mexico, a first in that country’s history.

In the United States, the elections of 2000 had a haunting effect. The hotly contested election, which made its way all the way to the Supreme Court, polarized the country leading up to the following 2004 election. Democratic candidate Howard Dean harnessed the power of the Internet for the first time to raise funds and mobilize his base, amazing everyone, only to be derailed after an attack of anger, which was replayed endlessly on national television.

California recalled Governor Gray Davis and actor and former Mr. Universe, Arnold Schwartzenegger, jokingly known as the “Govenator,” replaced Davis in a special election.

The Always Entertaining Entertainment Industry

“Reality Television” became all the rage, beginning with Survivor in the summer of 2002. Reality TV ironically has almost nothing to do with real life, except that it is unscripted and is mostly focused on ordinary people. Reality TV is cheap to produce, and thus provides magic to the entertainment industry’s bottom line, by capturing the attention of millions. Americans watched everything from Survivor to American Idol, Temptation Island, and Fear Factor. Everyday people became overnight celebrities as they appeared on these shows, competing for fame and money. Show subjects ranged from singing to eating bugs and other scary stuff, to contestants undergoing makeovers of their faces, bodies, cars, and even their homes.

Tales of darkness, alchemy, and occult magical worlds turned Golden at the box office, with record profits, including three Harry Potter movies and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, not to mention the millions of dollars in lucrative merchandising contracts. Monsters were popular at this time too. Some monsters appeared in the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies, and others cuter monsters got their own movies, like Monster’s Inc. and Shrek. The mummy, too, came back in The Mummy Returns.

A number of films offered glimpses into the psyche: I am Sam (J. Nelson, 2001) took a look into the world of autism, and auciences got to stand in the shoes of math prodigy, John Nash who suffered from schizophrenia in A Beautiful Mind (Howard, 2001). Nash won the Nobel prize in economics for developing game theory, and A Beautiful Mind portrays his life. For most of the movie, the audience does not realize that part of what we are seeing are Nash’s hallucinations, and that some of the characters and scenes in the movie are illusions. Kevin Spacey plays a psychiatric patient claiming to be from another planet in K-Pax (Softley, 2001). Spacey is so convincing that we, like the character's psychiatrist in the movie were not so quick to dismiss him.

Anger Management (Segal, 2003) provided a humorous look at anger, while The Count of Monte Cristo (Reynolds, 2002) showed us “don’t get mad, get even!” Angelina Jolie portrayed video game icon adventurer Lara Croft Tomb Raider in two different movies with mythic overtones, dealing with dark foes who seek to control time and unleash lethal viruses with artifacts retrieved from ancient temples (West, 2001, de Bont, 2003).

Two of the most controversial films of note, appealing to different audiences, were Fahrenheit 9/11: Michael Moore’s (2004) view of what happened after September 11 to lead the United States into the War on Terror, and Mel Gibson’s (2004) wild box office success, The Passion of the Christ, about the last hours of Christ’s life which graphically shows the tortures and ridicule Christ endured between his trial and crucifixion.

On a lighter note, people watching the MTV Music Awards in 2003 were treated to a kiss between Madonna and Brittney Spears while Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction exposed a nipple during the halftime show of Superbowl XXXVIII: both of which caused quite a stir. On a darker note, there was extensive coverage of Kobe Bryant’s alleged sexual assault of a 19-year-old hotel employee and child molestation charges were leveled against Michael Jackson in 2003.

Corporate Corruption Runs Rampant

Scandals abounded in many major institutions, from the Catholic Church in 2002 seeing a slew of sexual abuse charges against priests, to prisoner abuse involving the United States military at Abu Ghraib. Not only was power being abused, but greed and corruption abounded as well. In 2003, there was the mutual funds scandal, the Freddie Mac mess, and a house cleaning at the NYSE. Corporate America was rocked by scandals: at Enron, Tyco, and Boeing, as CEOs and CFOs stole or squandered billions of dollars from corporate coffers. The most notorious example of corporate greed and corruption was Tyco Chief Dennis Koslowski’s second wife’s birthday party. The two million dollar toga party on the Island of Sardinia featured an anatomically correct ice sculpture of Michelangelo’s David, which squirted vodka into crystal glasses. Koslowski and his CFO are estimated to have fleeced $600 million from Tyco, a public company. Home decorating mogul Martha Stewart was also in trouble and eventually imprisoned, accused of lying about a stock sale in an insider trading investigation.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

The dot.com bubble burst in 2000 and Microsoft was having antitrust woes. There was a massive power outage in August 2003 that resulted from the collapse of the power grid along the East Coast, leaving an area from New York City to Toronto in the dark and powerless for more than a day. Jobs were being outsourced: not only were factory jobs fleeing oversees, but white collar jobs took flight, too, as technical support, airline reservations, and customer service positions also said sayonara (Japanese for goodbye), or more appropriately namasto (the Hindi word for goodbye), since India became a major destination for these jobs.

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