A p o c a l y p s e   N o w

I want to spend the last day of the 20th century at the tip of Easter Island, together with my girlfriend. Five minutes before midnight, I will put on a mini-disc and Bono will sing New Year's Day just for us as the fireworks go off above the Pacific Ocean. Then I will smile, knowing that we are the last people to enter the New Millenium. So help me Dog, if I should live to see the day.

The world seems to be gripped by premillenial syndrome - a lingering paranoia about the coming of Year 2000. The signs are everywhere. Switch on your television. You are likely to see some special CNN report about the "Millenium Bug". The pesky program glitch is set to crash mainframes around the globe, on New Year's Eve 1999, sending the world into a state of technological chaos. If not, then it could be a program about a funky new virus, which can be killed by household medicine. Change the channel, only to see Chris Carter's bleak (and top rated) Millenium, surely the most obvious example of Pop culture's fascination with the epoch to come. If you surf the 'Net for a little while, you'll soon find a plethora of websites dedicated to the imminent judgment day. Listen to Girls Against Boys's hit single "Park Avenue", with its doomed sonic prophecy. Eli Janney warns you to "Check your life-span", in the wake of the holocaust to come. Let's face it: Armageddon sells.

Hollywood only makes things worse, for the past few years, summer audiences have been subjected to one doomsday scenario after another: asteroids, bug-eyed aliens and killer lizards from Japan. (Need I even name-drop?) Even Mother Nature seems to have PMS, in the minds of studio big-shots.

More than anything, the pre-millenial era seems characterized by a search for some higher force. From the advent of Zen advertising, to the widespread popularity of extra-terrestrials, it seems that man is looking for something greater than itself. OF course, things get out of hand, doctors and lawyers give up their hard earned cash, in order to follow charismatic aquarian con men, on their trips to the dark side of the moon. God equals dollar signs, at a time when man thinks that he's all alone.

Ironically, the 90s are also an age of suspicion. Nowadays, it seems like everybody (and his mother) has his or her own conspiracy theory. Armchair mulders everywhere spout homespun cabal theories faster than you can say "Deep Throat". Thanks to the information superhighway, techies from backwater logging towns can swap their hypotheses with schoolchildren in Beijing. It seems like everybody is questionable, in somebody else's head: Microsoft, Trent Reznor, the Church, Manoling Morato.

For all this apocalyptic brouhaha, there is one scenario that we never think of: that the millenium will come without any major happening, granted, Roxas Boulevard will be lined with reveling masa, eager to greet the next stage in man's evolution. Nakpil street will be full of hipsters in Jetson-esque spaceage threads. Tycoons on viagra will raise glasses of Dom Perrignon, in the antiseptic confines of gated subdivisions. But when the party is over, everything will be the same. No cataclysmic this and that will take place. There will be no instant new world order. Man will not become an endangered species overnight. Far away, on Easter Island , my girlfriend and I will feel like Adam and Eve in reverse, being the last two people in the 20th century. At that point, I will ask what the fuss was all about.