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To: Hightechhooper who wrote (123386)	12/19/2000 10:10:43 PM
From: opalapril	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

"Don't give me the "remember the 70's" mantra either..." Yeah, the "15-Seconds of TV Fame Pundits" are elbowing each other to get their mugs on the air so they can say the NASDAQ is having its worst year since 1974 -- obviously implying dark parallels pregnant with implications. Well, sir, I knew the '70s and this is no 70s. Around 1974 and the middle of that decade-- * For the first time in its history the U.S. lost a war -- not only lost, but was driven away in a last, panicky, humiliating flight * We awoke from the Vietnam debacle to find we had set the entirety of Southeast Asia aflame, alienated India ("most populous democracy in the world"), brought ourselves eyeball-to-eyeball with a very hostile mainland China and a very frightened U.S.S.R., and aroused the suspicions of our allies in Britain and France * Famous characters like Patti Hurst, to name only the most well known of many, were joining crazy outfits like The Weathermen and Symbionese Liberation Army to shoot up banks, bomb university labs, trash store front businesses, and down large power grids * For a year and a half the average citizen on the street, sitting in buses, riding in cars, and mopping the floors was tuned attentively to the unfolding drama of House and Senate impeachment hearings -- hearings about real presidential crimes and an authentic constitutional crisis that ended only with a quiet (and necessary) coup in the form of resignation * The vice-president of the United States about the same time was caught red-handed committing fraud and cheating on his taxes so behind the scenes he was forced to resign under a threat of ruin (and what he later claimed was a threat of death) * We eventually installed in the White House the only man ever to become president without having run for one second for any national office. * Gas lines were invented and "service station" became an anachronism * For a few months, beef became so scarce reputable grocery stores also sold horse meat 'steaks' * One winter, paper grocery bags suddenly became hard to get and stores urged customers to bring their own * Just as New York City was narrowly avoiding bankruptcy, other cities like Cleveland and Atlanta found themselves on the brink. * Housing prices commonly appreciated faster than dot-com stocks, often 50% to 100% a year * The U.S.S.R. and U.S. chronically threatened each other with imminent nuclear destruction; American forces were scrambled hundreds of times -- and at least twice that I know of came within a couple of minutes of W.W. III * Israel militarily occupied the Sinai as well as large parts of Jordan and Syria * The rest of Jordan fought a civil war against the Palestinians * The educated class of Biafra and a number of other African proto-nations was virtually wiped out by horrendous slaughters that no one in the West except Kurt Vonnegut and a handful of others noticed * The Dow headed for 650 where it would stay for several years * Bank CDs looked good, paying as much as 10% annually in the early '70s and as much as 25% per year in the late '70s * A third of America's farmers went bankrupt * Unemployment was north of 8% for much of the decade and at times reached as high as 12%-14% * Minimum wage was around $2.25/hr. * Poverty afflicted nearly 20% of the nation and upwards of 33% of the elderly * Our roads and highways were still littered with trash and endless heaps of abandoned autos and broken refrigerators * Our skies were fouled with pollution, in many areas the the water was unpotable * The slickest office equipment out there was an IBM selectric typewriter. * By the start of the decade Xerox had invented an office copy machine that took only 60 seconds to make a one-page impression * In telephony, the Princess telephone phone was all the rage (it had buttons!) * Many people thought Betty Davis still looked pretty good (she didn't), Rock Hudson could act (he couldn't), and Dave Brubeck played piano with his left hand just as well as with his right (not) There were compensations... the music, the sex, the literature, the drugs (or so I suppose)... but on the whole it was a rotten time with a war-crippled economy and a scarily mounting national debt. The spectre of poverty lurked just around the corner for most Americans, two-car families were as rare as two-TV households, and "high tech" meant a lineman climbing a utility pole. The '70s bear as little resemblance to our time as U.S. Steel does to Cisco or the former Pittsburgh looks like Silicon Valley. The times are different now. Safer, healthier, more peaceable, more equitable. So is the economy. So are the investment opportunities. So-called analysts ought to know our history so we can all learn from it, rather than twist and mispresent it to sew unfounded fear and dispair among retail investors.