Leading Article: Superstition
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Your support makes all the difference.IT CAN'T be long before someone points out that if you turn 1999 on its head, you get, more or less, 6661: ie, the First Year of the Reign of the Beast. We live in superstitious times. This year, like last, will be dominated by the millennium. In fact, the celebrations on Thursday night suggested that the new millennium had already dawned. When it does finally arrive, very few of us will expect to see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping over the Greenwich horizon (though stranger things have happened in Washington in the past year). These days, our fears centre on science rather than on revelation. The millennium bug has been producing horror stories for a couple of years now, and will continue to do so this year, to the great profit of troubleshooters in information technology. According to a report last week, some evangelicals believe that the bug is God's judgement on sinful mankind. Naturally, rational, computer-literate folk scorn that idea, but many of them are nonetheless refusing to fly next New Year's Day for fear that the bug will so disrupt air traffic control that jumbos will start falling from the skies. There are others, no doubt, who will not make withdrawals from cash dispensers lest by doing so they lose their life savings. It would be rash to question the experts - and of course computers will crash on 1 January 2000 (it's what computers do, after all) - but we are inclined to believe that the millennium bug will turn out to be no more real a threat than Edwina Currie's salmonella bug. Meanwhile, there is comfort to be gained from the thought that by this time next year, the millennium will be over - at any rate for another thousand years.
Happy New Year.
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