Happy New Year

[Sebastian Dangerfield]

On this New Year's Eve, I can't help but think of one of Gramsci's
jailhouse scribblings:  "The Crisis consists precisely in the fact that
the old is dying and the new cannot be born.  In this interregnum, a
variety of morbid symptoms appear."  

As we sit poised at the end of 1998, already some ways along into the fin
de siecle americain,  we see playing, skipping, rewinding,
replaying--like a demonically possessed VCR (its LED blinking 12:00 . . .
12:00 . . . 12:00)--History, by rapid turns tragic and farcical . . .  A
veritable Hootenanny of tin-eared Neros cacophonously sawing away in the
Halls of Congress to the beat of percussive cruise-missle blasts (Fickt
nicht mit der Raketemensch!) . . . while we're treated to stock footage
of antiseptic green glowing flashes . . . while Capital, neatly encoded
into packets of ones and zeros whips, around the globe in a frenzy often
to the scripted algorithms of derivative instruments so complex that
their Nobel Laureate authors, like all poor Sorcerers' Apprentices, stare
in disbelief as their creatures take on a life of their own . . . while
talk of a new economic paradigm whereby the Business Cycle is abolished
is hushed as even the most insouciantly bullish of Wall Street hucksters
now begin to whisper of some 'softening' in 1999 . . . drowned out by the
guttural death rattle of a pack of formerly 'Miraculous' Asian Tigers . .
. While new Schlemiel for the '90s, a geriatric mass-murdering general,
bounces up and down like a yo-yo between the possibility of
Accountability and the possibility of Exemption . . . This morning in
Brussels, a group of newly elected ersatz social democrats (sans our
telegenic ally Tony "I'm not a leftist but I play one on TV" Blair)
decide to celebrate their economic integration -- under oppressive
debt-to-GDP strictures laid down by conservative German central bankers
of the Kohl era -- launch 3,000 blue-and-gold balloons to celebrate their
post-national currency . . . Watch as the nation-state as sovereign
guarantor of certain minimal social protections erodes in importance
while nationalism moves ahead strongly as ever . . . 

The fitting song to think about tonight is not that hoary old chestnut
'Auld Lang Syne.'  Oh no, Dear Firends, fellow Bozos on this Bus, as the
ball drops in Times Square think instead of Ernie Kovacs's Nairobi Trio,
that ill-synchronized group of psuedo-mechanical gorillas, honking and
bleating Dvorak's New World Symphony.

Here's wishing you all a happy new year.  

Hurry Up Please, It's Time!
Hurry Up Please, It's Time!

Start the show!
___________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html
or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]