Have you bought your millennium-countdown calendar? Your coffee-table books on the 20th century? Yes? Well, now it's time to start stocking up on apocalyptical analysis, and Mark Dery's razzle-dazzle look at American carnivalesque culture would be a good place to start. Dery, who writes cultural criticism for both Web zines and print media, is well-read, intellectually agile, and blessed with seemingly total pop-culture recall. In these glimpses of millennial madness, he uses the metaphor of "the pyrotechnic insanitarium," as journalists called the electric funfair of Coney Island at the turn of the century, to represent the whirligig freak show of American society in the 1990s.

Dery's term has affinities with Martin Amis's metaphor for America, "the moronic inferno," but emphasizes his own obsessions with "technology and pathology." In Dery's view, cyberspace millionaires and electronically mediated daydreams are accelerating the schizoid fragmentation of American society, and upping the ante on the social Darwinism of the 1890s Gilded Age. "Once again," he warns, "American society is profoundly imperiled by a yawning chasm between the obscenely wealthy and the chronically overdrawn, between sublime fantasy and sordid reality."

In support of this view of contemporary decadence, and with varying degrees of detail, Dery considers such phenomena as The X-Files, evil clowns, New Age prophecies, The Truman Show, Jerry Springer, cloning, Disney, TV surgery, and the Mutter Museum calendar of grotesques and anomalies. His most ambitious chapters draw connections between cultural trends and postmodern pathologies. In "The Scream Meme," he analyzes the adoption of Edvard Munch's screaming figure as the pop "poster child for self-mocking millennial dread." But today existential despair is ironized and commercialized: postmodern parodies like Wes Craven's Scream movies or drag comedian Dame Edna's Scream- patterned frock turn Munch's melancholia into cynicism and camp. "Call it Angst Lite," Dery observes, suitable for the "designer nihilism" of our decade. The difference between Munch's agonized Screamer of 1893 and our postmodern version is loss of affect; it's like the difference "between the solitary madness of Van Gogh cutting off his ear and the farcical nightmare of Mike Tyson biting off Evander Holyfield's ear in your living room."

The historical precision that makes this chapter so brilliant is less developed, though, in "Anus Horribilus," where Dery sees connections between the puerile scatology of Jim Carrey or Beavis and Butthead, and the excremental anarchy of Georges Bataille. He ricochets from Gilbert & George to Dumb and Dumber, from the sculptor Kiki Smith to the toilet humor of South Park. But compared to late-19th-century decadent coprophilia (think of writer Jean Lorrain's death from puncturing his colon with an enema), ads with Jennie McCarthy on the toilet are nothing much. Here Dery's critical distinctions get blurry; the excremental carnival, he concludes, could be a sign of how greedy and gross we are, how much we are being haunted by our own excess and waste; or it could be a healthy rebellion against puritanism, a subversive "mockery of the social order."

Dery always seems to be on the brink of explaining how to tell the difference. But his own style, tastes, and ideologies too often blend with the phenomena he claims to denounce, and work against the sobering force of his thesis. Dery's choices of topic are morbid to begin with; the American millennium might look different with essays on Post-its, stadium seating, voice mail, or online catalogue shopping. Indeed, although he refers to the names of perfumes, Dery doesn't take many of his examples from American women's culture. His prose, too, is hyped-up and caffeinated, a riot of alliteration, lists, similes, analogies, catchphrases, and neologisms clamoring for the reader's attention. Several of the chapters are too brief for sustained analysis; they are intellectual fast food.

The tensions between Dery's obvious delight in clever wordplay and his more polemical effort to expose emotional liteness in the culture are most apparent in his chapter on the Unabomber, "Wild Nature, Wired Nature: The Unabomber Meets the Digerati." An expanded version of a lecture given at a SUNY­Stony Brook conference, the essay attempts "a socioeconomic analysis that would make sense of [the Unabomber's] individual pathologies in a larger cultural context." It presents Kaczynski as Wolfman, as rugged individualist whose "refusal to fall into lockstep with the digital revolution has struck a sympathetic chord with all who are weary of the ceaseless drumbeat of cyberhype." Bombs, Dery suggests in a favorite image, are a sort of "Outsider terror-art." Thus the Unabomber, "psycho-killer though he is . . . speaks at times for more reasonable minds." Really? In an embarrassed postscript, Dery acknowledges that he has "set aside the obvious fact that the Unabomber was a serial-bombing murderer. . . . [T]here's more than a little irony in airbrushing the bloodstains out of an essay that takes the digerati to task for their Laputan disengagement from the human realities of everyday life."

Dery is similarly caught up in the conspiracy theories he targets as symptoms of the millennial breakdown. He argues that conspiracy theory is the "theology of the paranoid," a way for the bemused and overwhelmed to make sense out of the chaotic random torrent of their days. They find comfort in the belief that in a godless universe, "someone, somewhere, is in charge," even if that someone is an evil genius or alien monster. He notes that conspiracy theories seem to be reinforced by cultural phenomena. "Computer interfaces . . . seem to confirm the paranoid assumption that everything is connected, that everything is a symbol, fraught with hidden meanings." Dery hints that conspiracy theories may be "true lies," depending on the politics of those who hold them. He puts forth his own theory that "the New World Order of transnational capitalism is profoundly imperiling democracy on a global scale," with the IMF ("a secretive organization") and NAFTA as its Dark Avengers.

So is conspiracy theory a good thing, a sign of heightened awareness and high intelligence? Such obsessions with imaginary plots and hidden meanings can only confuse us further about reality, and are more likely to produce Unabombers and pseudoscience than enlightenment. The best cultural criticism of millennial paranoia— Tana Dineen's Manufacturing Victims, Jeffrey Victor's Satanic Panic, or Thomas Robbins and Susan Palmer's Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem— uses reason and evidence to show us how to draw the line between justifiable skepticism and crackpot hermeneutics.

Dery, however, is much better on symptoms than on cure, and at the end he has to fall back on the lamest of cop-outs by declaring that the only certainty of the foreseeable future is uncertainty. Perhaps so, but a critic of his gifts should have been able to offer a guide to handling uncertainty, rather than a catalogue of its excess. Best to regard this book as a collection of lively essays rather than a coherent whole, and just enjoy the ride.

Elaine Showalter is the author of Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media.