The following is an excerpt from the never forthcoming book, ‘Rocksplaining the 21st Century’ by the author David Lawrence Rock IV, Emeritus.
In Shakespeare’s Richard II, the deposed and imprisoned king Richard of Bordeaux, who’s seen his once supreme and sybaritic existence unspooled into solitary dungeon confinement, has too much time to ponder how shit went so far sideways. He starts his mournful Act 5 soliloquy, “I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world…” The erstwhile king then goes down a mental wormhole that gnaws on every kernel of how he’s been endlessly wronged, something today we would just amount to ‘being very online.’ (In fairness, Richard is far more poetic than your average @spoogevomitSteve6969-type edgelord.)
Now, let’s be clear to our Gen Z readers that Shakespeare is the guy from the movie Hamnet who writes the sad-happy-and-history plays and loves his sulky trad-medieval-wife.
Meanwhile, we’re concerned with previous generations who might have once held high giddy hopes for the new millennium, left wondering, like Richard the Deuce, why it feels like we’re circling down the Skibidi Toilet? Weren’t these supposed to be our salad days? If not gourmet lobster remoulade, then perhaps a palatable Cobb, a noble Ceasar, or even whatever dredge lies beneath the spit-stained Sizzler salad bar. Instead, the spoiled lettuce is all soaked in graft and greed, conspiracy-laced croutons and cretins abound, infested with internet-ravaged cabbage, topped with Covid-hangover-drizzle dressing, peppered with polarization, served on a bowl of white nationalist boogers.
These first 25 years of the 21st century are so full of mind-blowing suffering succotash, we must wonder if this is all really happening, or if somebody just spiked the arc of justice with formaldehyde? Would it just be better to be lit out of our minds than feel so utterly gaslit? The way it’s felt for a quarter century time.
The Y2K disaster that was promised couldn’t have been as bad as the quarter century of WTF that’s been delivered, unloaded off an Amazon stinger that includes $28 million in Brinks truck designer grifter bags to Melania, plus her backend of the popcorn profits.
Image credit : Franklin R. García, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
With the depravity abundant in Melania and Minnesota, the frozen-faced first lady and the South Dakota dog sniper embody the ascendancy of the both the modern ice and ICE queen. If these were more sober times, would not ice still conjure snow cones, those delightful sugary multi-pigmented playground treats? They wouldn’t be sending the sweet men with ice cream carts to CECOT and Alligator Alcatraz while shedding crocodile tears over Bad Bunny balling out in Spanish.
Then again, never mind the planetary dumpster fire, have you seen those astronomical Super Bowl ratings? Celebrate the growth, dammit! For four hours sardine-packed with celebrity-cringe commercials we’re all in this together. At least until halftime.
How did we even reach this phase of post-modern phantasmagoria? A critical and twisted plot point arrives at the century turn when the Supreme Court handed Florida to W. It’s been a lot of Ls for those without the Bs, as in billions, and a lot of C2, as in climate change, ever since. If there’s not a straight line from Bush v. Gore to the ascendance of the Man from Mar-A-Lago, it’s at least a squiggly one, like that he once scribbled as lovely lady parts on a lascivious Jeffrey Epstein 50th birthday card.
The playful spirit of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” in the 80s morphed into girls just praying to escape Epstein Island, pursued as purely prey by the supposedly sagacious, certainly more rapacious greasy elbow-rubbing global elite. Even the renown linguist and leftist Noam Chomsky was to be found sparing a predicate for a predator.
But before all that, the moment you really felt the peyote kicking in, is when we pike somersaulted into the empty dead-pool that was Iraq. There was no WMD, just PTSD for a generation of soldiers and never true accountability for the mendacious Masters of War. As Richard the Third said, “My kingdom for a… oopsies, wrong country!” We must have been tripping, or was that really her barnstorming with lead chickenhawk cheerleader Liz Cheney? That closed the argument about as well as your four-whiskeys-in crazed uncle come apple-crusted pie time at Thanksgiving.
Then later in the 21st century all those Century 21 signs went up fast as bitcoin miners when the bubble burst. The hope spot should have been Obama who was supposed to be transformational but became suddenly transitional as the clock struck midnight and the high office transmogrified into the most transactional pumpkin in presidential history. What happened? Were we all hopped up on psilocybin goofballs? The comedian Ryan Sickler joked early in the Obama era (paraphrasing), “I voted for change, I didn’t expect to be begging for it.” If 44 wasn’t willing to unsheathe the pitchforks for the bad business actors that sunk the economy, Trump would summon enough apprentices to help him scapegoat The Others.
And you really might be high if you think it’s not the same wolves of Wall Street that credit default swapped us on Enron, Madoff, AIG, subprime mortgages, Crypto … and Quibi (oh, poor Quibi), that are pushing their chips all-in on unencumbered AI. A technology that promises to make all our lives better as it dislodges us from our jobs. Which only makes sense if you are high or reading Brave New World, whose author was not-for-nothing an early LSD adopter.
This brav-ish new world is up in smoke, where pot is legal in some places, but protest will get you sometimes shot. We were promised a 21st century where The Cold War would be over, but now we just have war in the some of the coldest environs – Ukraine, Russia… Greenland? It’s a game of Russian roulette to decide which country gets a US bunker buster this week. Yemen, you get a bomb! Venezuela, you get a bomb! Iran, you get two bombs! In doing so, we’ve neutered NATO, treating it like more feral cat than failsafe alliance. We thought Game of Thrones had a terrible ending, but this real game of thrones endgame could be worse.
Of course, such doomsaying is probably overblown, what with those ginormous Super Bowl ratings seeming to have no ceiling! Hey-o!
In such unequal, teetering times, it’s not surprising the 21st century lad prefers gambling to sex. The dudes know they’ll never be able to afford a house in the future, so why not bet the farm now? The dearth of sex is just as well for women, forced by the government to gamble their bodies since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Maybe we were all just fershnickered when those perspective justices whispered those sweet nothings about “settled law”? This is a meta-muddle-verse where if clarity is a lost commodity, corporations and Claude the chatbot are people, and Clarence is always for sale.
This is a benighted century where elections are denied, riots on the Capital are deified, and all you can hope is that the simulation hypothesis is real and we’re living in a computer-generated experiment on how far we’d go. (If it’s true, even the machines must be gob-smacked by how hard we’ve dunked on ourselves in their mousetrap.)
We are orbiting a deformed sun, the stars are misaligned, the galaxy is disinclined to reason. ‘Just say no’ seems like a brilliant conceit compared to the going stratagems of Project 2025 (otherwise known as Project Skibidi Toilet) . This is not the iowaska droids you were looking for.
We took opioids away from the dental surgeons and pill mills so we could put business back where it belongs, back in the hands of those dependable, execrable drug cartels. This is the century where we learned drugs like Sudafed we’ve taken for years never even worked, except as an early plotline in Breaking Bad. We’ve been fed such a Sudafed diet of comparable slop and deceit that we just pseudo-shrug this kind of news off nowadays. Just don’t count on ‘Sudo’ (or your dental surgeon) to numb the pain.
Then again, on the bright side, those Super Bowl ratings do keep going up and up and up!
Only in this topsy-turvy 21st could we have just last year written a random column poking lighthearted fun at Savannah Guthrie’s savior-embracing book, so that all of a sudden said celebrity’s mom is now this century’s Lindbergh baby. That’s the kind of demented stuff that’s best left for a David Lynch fever dream. Only now he’s left us, too.
Or maybe this is the century where the glut of readily accessible disinformation blends into the ether of consciousness and common confabulations to the extent high is the equivalent of Pi if that’s the choose your own reality adventure anyone can so choose to believe.
In the end, Shakespeare’s Richard II finishes his monologue mourning how, “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” (TBH, the soliloquy is super-fab but also kinda never ends. Gotta snip-snip-snip that puppy to put it on its feet. Sorry, Billy babe, you’ve been dead for 400 years, but we still have notes. Then again, you couldn’t possibly know the Super Bowl ratings would climb this high, so tis not thou fault.)
We don’t want to be Dicky in the dungeon, wondering where the time went, weeping that the world is now a prison, wishing it wasn’t all true, that we just were wilding out on some Sudafed that worked its ephemeral over-the-counter wonders. Century 21 is off to an awful start. “It’s a house we have to flip;” Yogi said, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over,” but he also noted, “It gets late early.” Both of these things The Blunt Truth believes.
And, in any case, at least it’s only another year until we get those sexy Super Bowl ratings!
David Rock is a television producer and playwright, splitting time between Los Angeles and The Iron Islands. His most recent play, Masters of Puppets, premiered in 2023 at The Legacy Theatre. He believes in vices, not viceroys. Any questions and comments can be sent to drockstar@yahoo.com.
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