101 Reasons to Stop Writing

A pessimist would say that the 21st Century began on September 11, 2001. I remember looking at my 12-day-old second child that day and thinking that the world had changed, irrevocably, and that she would never know what it was like to live without the omnipresent threat of global terrorism.

An optimist would say that the 21st Century began on November 4, 2008, when the United States of America finally said No to the politics of Old White Men. I have four children now, the youngest about 20 months old, and by the time she is old enough to understand such things, she will probably not believe there was a time when people thought America “wasn’t ready” for a President who wasn’t an Old White Man.

The war in Iraq will end, eventually, and the spectre we call Al Qaeda will fade and be replaced by another shadowy fear. But we will never return to the old 20th Century mindset, of passive racism justified by resignation.

Hopefully this will also see the long-overdue mainstreaming of “black” literature, and mark the end of the Magic Negro cliche in fiction.

Note: The LA Times’ David Ehrenstein argued, back in March 2007, that Barack Obama is America’s Magic Negro. It’s depressing to think he may be right, but after the first four years of his presidency it won’t matter.

Of course, a technophile might suggest that the 21st Century began on December 15, 1994, when Netscape Navigator 1.0 was released and the promise of the Internet began to be realised. And there is bound to be a nitwit with no poetry in their soul who claims that the 21st Century began on January 1, 2000 (and a truly pedantic nitwit still clinging to the mathematically correct notion that it started on January 1, 2001).

It is my sincere, but faint, hope that between now and his Inauguration, Barack Obama takes the time to visit Saturday Night Live, and give this speech: