Y2K: The Big letdown with Bizarro-Jennings hen I arrived in Michigan last Wednesday, I took a shuttle from the airport to Ann Arbor. The driver of the shuttle amazed me. He was one of those Y2Krazies. He told us passengers that he had taken all of his money out of the bank and was heading up to the wilderness of northern Michigan with a truckload of generators. "I don't want to be in the city," he said. In his expert opinion, the stock market was going to melt down. Also, everyone who had paper money was going to be screwed because the government was going to fall apart. According to this guy, gold and silver was where our money should be. Now, I'm not one to ignore a potential Armageddon. I wasn't about to freak out like that guy did, but I certainly did prepare for the worst. I had half a tank of gas in the car, a pint of milk in the fridge, drinking water in the toilet bowl and five bucks in my pocket. In anticipation of the wide ranging effects of the Y2K bug, I crawled out of bed around noon, planted myself on a couch and tuned into ABC's round the clock coverage of New Year's celebrations around the world. China and Japan had already celebrated the coming of the "new millennium" and our own stock market was actually climbing! Personally, I figured that the American exchanges would take a dive when the Y2K bug hit Asia. I was pretty darned surprised when nothing happened. My girlfriend and I should have guessed right then and there that we had fallen through a rip in the space-time continuum. As we kept watching, the coverage of Armageddon just kept getting more and more bizarre. It was otherworldly. For 24 hours, I felt like I was on a different planet because everything that was supposed to happen didn't happen and things that don't happen, did happen. Like no other news broadcast, the coverage of the Apocalypse had us hooked to the tube. Planes weren't falling out of the sky, nuclear bombs weren't exploding and monkeys hadn't produced Hamlet after banging on keys for a few decades. The world coasted on into 2000 without a hitch. Actually, the fact that there was no bad news to report seemed to catch the media off guard. Poor guys spent millions flying their reporters all over the world to see the riots, meltdowns and general mayhem that would ensue when everyone's toaster exploded at midnight. After hearing so much hype from the media, technology experts and Y2Krazies, we laughed our butts off when Katie Couric said that all the Y2K reports were "boring." I primarily watched the ABC broadcast. From here on, I'll refer to them as News of the Weird. At one point, Al Franken came out and started talking to Peter Jennings about his Y2MI group. Franken, a.k.a. Stuart Smalley of Saturday Night Live fame, told Jennings that Y2MI was trying to stop all the celebrating because the millennium wasn't really starting until 2001. I couldn't quite figure out if Jennings was in on it or not. He told Franken that if his group could convince everyone in Times Square, then ABC would buy the story. Later on, some guy came out and pulled something out of his stomach and gave it to Peter as a gift. It looked like a piece of string. Jennings was "speechless" and seemingly moved by the gesture. ABC didn't have the monopoly on weird news broadcasts. On NBC, Couric was snapping at Tom Brokaw. On CBS, Clinton was talking about the importance of being free to do what is morally right. Was I hearing things? Back on ABC, a correspondent was reporting on what she was experiencing. She said that, unlike Americans, the people she had met seemed to live lives that were very fulfilling. Although many were very poor, the quality of their lives seemed to surpass that of the average American. First of all, we were amazed that someone on ABC News had actually said that the poor and disadvantaged could live better lives than the rich and powerful. Second, we were even more surprised when we found out that she was talking about Cuba. Later, ABC surprised us again. In a conversation with ABC's correspondent in Rome, Jennings actually referred to Pope John Paul II as the Successor of Peter. He also said that Peter was the first Pope. Talk about amazing. It is not every day that a national news agency concurs with the Catholic Church on the legitimacy and primacy of the office of the papacy. That is, after all, one of the biggest points of contention between the Catholic Church and Protestant denominations. These weren't the only oddities of the day. In fact, my whole break was filled with strange inconsistencies. You'll hear more later. - Mike Lopez can be reached over e-mail at manatlarge@umich.edu. Mike Lopez Man at Large Originally on page 4A in the 1-5-2000 issue of the Daily.