Tags: editorial | Havel | Y2K

It's hard to believe that this is to be the last piece I write on my trusty computing machine before it crashes on cue, January 1st, 1999.

Since leaving academia to become a THINK columnist in 1977, I have written over twelve-hundred essays on this Texas Instruments T1-99, each of which facilitated by the knowledge that they were somehow guided by the light of reason and progress, those twin pillars of our late, great twentieth-century.

No more of that in the coming new age. The young ones tell me that the next century will be filled with little more than cynicism, a fiendishly tempting selection of cable channels, and rising ocean levels.

Not much more for an old newspaperman like me to do except sit back and wait for my warrantee to expire, maybe catch some pay-per-view The Ultimate Fighter along the way. Oh sure, I'll write my memoirs, publish a retrospective collection or two, but mostly just pick toe cheese out in the pasture, dig out my old Beta machine and butter up some porn-on-the-cob.

But that time is not yet. The future can wait, what with so much excitement on tap in the City of Destiny. Take for instance the third annual Future Forum, President Havel's last gasp exercise in relevance. Surely the sparks from these closed-door discussions between financiers, novelists and Hillary Clinton will ignite a bonfire of energy for the betterment of the race.

Who can contain their excitement in awaiting the soundbites from world-renowned humanists like Henry Kissinger, waxing eloquent on the needs of humanity in the next century? And what with Jan Stransky in the line-up-lookout-this year's festivities promise to be even more earth shattering than the last two. Forum 2000: Fantastic!

And let's not forget the moving of The Prague Post editorial offices. With more space at their disposal, everybody's favorite news team will be able to deliver even more coverage of the business community and high-end real estate advertisements. It is also rumored that hard-hitting opinion writers bemoaning graffiti and tourist scams are to be allotted cubicles and free Internet access (for research purposes). Seigfried Mortkowitz is also to be given an alternate universe, in which he is Walter Lippmann.

And hovering above all of this is, of course, the frenzy of excitement surrounding the outcome of the great Nomura sell-off. Will Budweiser or Heineken get control of the famed Czech breweries? As Budweiser has already announced plans to raise productivity and profits by cutting staff by 40% and doubling the amount of water in the brewing process, we can only hope that the Dutch win this one. If not, then, well, I guess it really doesn't get any better than this. Cyanide, anyone?

If Budweiser gets Pilsner, then not only will the national Czech car be owned by a company started at the command of Adolf Hitler, but the very national soul will be captive to the company that brought the world Bud Bowl-not to mention some of the worst labor practices in the developed world.

All of which is merely to say at the end of the twentieth century, and you can quote me on this: Fuck Budweiser, fuck assholes with those dangling ear plug mobile phones, fuck people who think America is the greatest country on earth, fuck career climbing pricks in Prague who think they matter more than people working in non-profits, fuck real estate developers, fuck the European Commission, fuck the oil industry, fuck Henry Kissinger, fuck Havel for inviting Kissinger to his fucking elite gabfest, and fuck frat boys on exchange programs who can't believe 'how cheap it is here.'

I'll see the rest of you midgets under the new digits. (And I mean that in a good way.)