Rip van Winkle… 2000!

I’m teaching an 8-week course on early American Lit for the Summer (via Zoom, which I should probably also post about at some point), and we just read Rip van Winkle. In attempting to create some context, I asked the class to imagine a modern version; someone who had fallen into a coma in mid-2000 and just woken up now.

I felt my age, as I realized that many of them weren’t born in 2000, or were so young at the time that it was meaningless. The exercise, therefore didn’t go over very well, but it helped me, at least.

This modern Rip wouldn’t know anything about the Bush presidency, 9/11, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama presidency, SARS, the bird flu, the swine flu, YouTube, the entire concept of social media, reality TV, online streaming, Amy Winehouse’s entire musical career and her death, wifi, smartphones, Uber… Hell, Google had only been around for about two years and Amazon mostly still operated as a bookseller (they began selling other media in ’98).

And then he wakes up to a world that’s burning due to global warming, is in the middle of a pandemic, but has citizens in the street despite that protesting police murdering them, a president he knows as a New York weirdo who only let them film Home Alone 2 in his hotel if they put him in the movie and who apparently wants to build an actual wall around the country to keep certain people from getting in…

He’d probably encounter an Alexa or Siri and assume that Skynet had taken over (having come from a wold that only had two Terminator movies(not to mention two Jurrasic Park movies)) and he was now in a dystopian future. And I’m not sure that he’d be wrong.

And none of this even begins to describe the horror he experiences when he tries to go to the airport and fly somewhere else with only an expired driver’s license as ID.

I mean, his biggest fear when he fell into a coma was the Y2K bug. Just try to imagine what waking up to this mess would be like.