[Reader-list] Dental care

[Rana Dasgupta]

December 31st 1999.  In the grip of a temporary but
passionate numerology the masked party-goers of the
world wait to see what happens when digits turn. 
Three zeros is like three tunnels into the past,
through the messy swirl of 945s and 848s and 389s and
towards more far-off dates that you rarely think
about, through 1000 (since no one can remember what
happened that year) to 0000 which was never written as
a date but which has some powerful relationship to God
and the beginning of what, for everyone that counts,
can be called 

Time.  

Time made real that night, standing among us like
waxworks from the past, entering people's guts and
making them feel aged.  TIME magazine tells us about
the Stars of the Millennium and suddenly our memories
are long and epic and our hearts are leaping: Thank
God I lived to see this!  "See what?" is a
mean-spirited question, for the magic of numbers is
still magic, and even the rationalists have found
their techno version of it in which all of Capitalist
Mother Nature - all the power stations and bank
account databases and supermarket inventory systems to
whose bounty we owe our daily happiness - loses its
fecundity at midnight as the clocks of the world
register the fact that there is no more time.  They
have a code for it: Y2K or L or M or something.

How can it properly end, the twentieth century?  whose
drama has replaced every other drama by its scale and
pixelated plenitude.  How could the demons and saints
whose fables are replayed every night on History
Channel withdraw into 'last century'; how could the
tragedies whose rubble is still being turned over or
the triumphs that have made modern life So Different,
So Appealing, cease to belong to 'our century'?  But
too late; the revellers are already preparing the
birth of the new millennium (which other mean-spirited
people predict for the following year) and your grip
on all that stuff is weakening.  

Saturday 1st January 2000 has already dawned bright
and hot in New Zealand, and even Greenwich Mean Time
has gone off the end of the twentieth century scale. 
But everyone knows that cosmic time is American time,
Eastern Standard Time, and the nervous world-managers
in Boston and New York and DC are not comforted so
easily.

Just before midnight: standing in a party looking down
on Times Square, a rectangle of lights and people in
the middle of a dark and abandoned buffer zone that
the Mayor's numerology experts have advised him to
shut off.  As the last twenty-fourth of the day plays
itself out to bad twentieth century techno, fancy
dress people in costumes of time spin out from the
dance floor one by one and look down.  There are
exceptions: Death still has his tongue down the throat
of some girl in the corner, his scythe and his
awareness of the hour temporarily abandoned.  But we
look down: and no one talks as balls drop and a
million camera flashes go off down below, the moment
seized the only way we know how, the end of time
rolling through the Kodak machines on Monday morning
in sets of 24.  Also rolling: tears down the cheeks of
the woman who stands in front of me.  The moment seems
large and meaningless, and tears are not uncommon.

Party doesn't pick up again even though about sixty
cops who have finished manning the barricades on
Seventh Avenue lurch in around 2am ready to start
their evening.  People go to bed sober because they
needed their wits about them to get through that.  And
the next morning, they wake up.



Sometimes you watch suspense movies and the hero keeps
waking up amazed he still alive.  You ain't surprised
cuz of course he gonna get through: but he never gets
that into his head; and every time he just fulla
surprise.  Did you touch yourself that morning, make
sure you all there?  Heart still beating at 70 even in
21st century time?  You say 'two thousand' to yourself
real quiet to see how it sounds now it really here? 
Phone got a dialling tone and the fridge full of
twentieth century shit still cold and everything is
really *normal*.  

Your body catches up with the 21st century real fast. 
You realise you know how to do this.  Wierd
superstitious thoughts of the previous night seem
suddenly like another age.  There's always more time
where that came from; and we just got another hand
out.

Wow.  This is the time that wasn't supposed to come,
man.  This is fresh time, new time.  You start feeling
all protective about the new century.  It's like a kid
has just lost his Coke-stained bike-bashed baby teeth
and 28 new ones come through and you looking at them
thinking of your own voyages with a blind boatman down
the depths of the root canal and saying to yourself
"Those teeth gonna stay just as good as they look
today."  Start getting all moral about cookies and
soda 'n' shit cuz the old teeth was just temporary but
the new ones is permanent.  You got a new look on your
face.  You gonna be the Colgate of the 21st century
man, you gonna keep it sunny and beautiful like it is
this morning.  No plaque, added whiteness.

Twentieth century was f**ked up by other people.  We
didn't have a choice.  But the 21st, that's still
pure.  This is the century we gonna get old man,
century we gonna die.  You realise you don't what
music sounds like from the century you in now, don't
know how people dress.  You don't even know how to say
the dates yet cuz 'twenty hundred' still sounds like a
rational possibility.  You been used to the snappy
rhythms of '60s' and '70s' and all that but '00s'
ain't something you say, just something you imagine. 
Wow.  This is our time man, our time to make.  If
there gonna be great movies this century - we gonna
have to make them.  Time is weightless, this century. 
Empty.  You move easier, think more clearly.

Well: stock markets crash and a whole lotta people
lose a whole lotta money they didn't have to begin
with.  Depending on who you are, that ain't so bad. 
All those ads celebrating the humble man-on-the-street
billionaire getting a bit annoying.  Know a few people
mourned for the thirty year-olds losing their
hard-earned twenty million but maybe that's the kind
of tragedy a century can handle.  We've seen tragedies
of millions before and they can be worse than this.  

Still, a bit of irrational exuberance is always fun to
have around, idea you can be a billionaire just by
investing your $35 to reserve YAHOO! dot-com is always
handy to have in your back pocket.  And when the
patient corporate moguls move in to rationalize the
Internet things seem sterner.  'Oh *that's* what
capitalism looks like' we remember.

But all kindsa things are happening, people.  Big
things.  The fact is, and here we gotta be a little
bit discreet, keep our voices down, no one really sure
what nations are for any more.  And that is a problem.
 Like to have a government with a vision, money for
the poor, parks for the kids, but they don't seem to
be in control of all that shit anymore.  Look at that
Tony Blair says such nice things he really believes
in!  But he's gotta put down more cops and more tests
just to stay afloat and still there's race riots
breaking out all over the shop he can't do nothing
about!  Lest we doubt that he's the guy in charge he
knows how to talk the talk of the C-E-O don't worry we
can turn this around quarter one two three it's all
about more computers more management skills more
technology - and Brits are such nice people so
technology is always good even when it lands on
people's heads - but now those people turning up in
Dover and we got even more problems.  Please keep your
heads, people! - I come to praise Tony not to bury him
- and it really couldn't happen to a nicer guy.  But
virtual money got him by the short and curlies and all
he's really gotta think about from dawn to dusk is how
to get people to work more for it.

Nations are a joke that does the rounds of the chat
rooms and labor camps of the world.  Nations are dead.
 They still standing looking like they always did but
they're just mirages.  And the more you don't believe
in them the more furious they get.

September 11, 2001 - man the century ain't two years
old yet! - and a bunch of guys who don't believe in
nations do something astounding.  It makes nations
really mad.  Those people just the sort of unpatriotic
wanderers the Jews was before you couldn't say that
kinda stuff no more.  With bombs in their pockets. 
They grow up in England, y'all, got all the miracles
of modern life and education at the London School of
f**king Economics and still deep down they don't give
a shit about everything we struggled to build.  Live
in Germany and Italy, people, live in Florida!  And
still they thinking about places we never even go on
vacation, thinking about Afghanistan and Iraq y'all! 
Who *are* these people?  What kinds of minds?  We
gotta work that out, people, gonna try to understand,
more categories are needed, more fields in the
database.  Bomb Afghanistan, bomb Iraq and Sudan if we
gotta - that stuff is obvious.  But the real war is a
war of renewal cuz we're not gonna let this 21st
century go down just like that.  We gotta find out
more, know more, keep on top of everything, everything
will be OK as long as we just know enough.  It's clear
Muslims is more complicated than they seemed but
that's a temporary problem.  Keep your heads people!

But in some quarters patience is at an end.  Had
enough of these outsiders!  Enough!  And some of those
people are thinking about other uses for nations.  Big
men say: if you stick with me I'm gonna get rid of the
nation and give you a homeland!  But you gotta be in
the contract and it ain't just social.  Contract of
flesh.  Contract of suspicion: I'm gonna tolerate you
as long as you don't slip up but after that you're
out.  People are happy: if the nation can't do nothing
for me no more then the nation is gonna BE me!  Do I
let tumors and viruses just hang around in my gut or
do I cut them out?  In the nation that is me you gonna
be cut out boy cuz you don't need to prove your
disloyalty no more.  Europe thinks the 21st century
won't suffer from a few more powerful men that look
good on TV and know that it ain't no time to be
talking about inclusion right now.  Israel, where
inclusion wasn't a problem you had to deal with,
decides the time is right to extend its psyche all the
way to those new borders where irrationality and the
death wish still lurk.  That's innovative man; if you
think it's ironic it's cuz you haven't come so far as
Israel in putting the twentieth century behind you. 
India embarks on a far more ambitious plan, since even
the borders it isn't fighting over with the Muslims
contain 120 million Muslims and that's a lot of
expansion that's gotta be properly planned and
budgeted for.  Man I'm having problems keeping my
train of thought clean here cuz there's murder in this
story, murder - and bodily interactions that aren't so
hygienic.  Man we have bodies mounting and sights that
weren't supposed to be part of this 21st century: we
got mass graves y'all and politicians making the lists
of the people who gotta die and Safe Havens where
people don't seem so safe.  We got sights!  we got all
kindsa - we got - sorry I gotta - people I think I
gotta stop there and depend on your knowledge of
Current Affairs cuz I don't wanna talk about the other
stuff.  The stuff that no decent person could allow in
their heads.

You saying to yourself - why he spoiling my surfing
with bad words and big numbers I can't fit inside?  I
understand people cuz sometimes I slip into
tastelessness that just steals up on me never gave no
warning.  I understand and I'm sorry.  I really am. 
It's still our century, people!  But I'm trying - hear
me out here - to make a little point that I'm gonna
have to whisper again.  Point is that when you got
problems with nations you got serious problems.  May
not like nations.  But you gotta see what happens when
they break apart.  That's really f**king scary. 
Realize there was a lot of things keeping a lot of
other things in place.  Your decency, for a start.

Century not yet three years old, y'all.  We not used
up a fraction of it yet.  Do you still got your sense
of protectiveness?  21st century still gonna be whiter
than white?  You sensing some tooth decay?  I'm
telling you dental technologies amazing these days. 
Can fix you up like nothing ever happened.  I know a
guy smashed his teeth out on a skateboard making $60
thousand in facial modeling!  I know - it's amazing -
but I'm just saying what's possible.  Course
prevention is better than cure y'all, my man still
wishing he didn't take that skateboard that morning. 
Course now you wondering whether we talking about
cavities or we talking about all that other shit?  Not
sure myself now.  But while we're on the subject I
can't tell you enough how important that dental
hygiene is.  I'm really serious about this.  Floss,
brush.  That's basic, of course.  Every poster in
every dentist place tell you that.
  
Look I think some of you got all worried.  I'm telling
you.  Don't get upset.  This is our century, y'all;
it's ours to make.  If there gonna be great massacres
this century - we gonna have to make them.  And that
ain't gonna happen.





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