« Notice | Main | Notice »

The J. Patrick Buchanan Memorial Library for Failed Prophets of Doom

Imagine if you will, a library that is stocked with books that relate to one thing, the Cassandra like predictions from the past that have failed to come true. A Library entirely dedicated to the published works of blowhards, pundits, college professors, and economists everywhere who like the sound of their voice and are certain that they have seen the end times just around the corner. But for some reason never seem to be able to predict the disaster we all know is waiting for us out in the murky future. The Library should serve as a warning to all who wish to see the future darker than it really is.

It would be a hell of a thing wouldn’t it? Row after row of books that predict the end of the world and “why you need to do something now to survive it and for 19.99 you can buy my book to tell you how to make the most of the coming ice age/global warming/polluted cities”. Just think of all the people who have made big predictions about how “really screwed you are”, book after book, year after year, they keep coming and the public doesnt seem to be able to get enough.

Remember back in the 1980s how every other book was about how Japan was going to rule the world and the Germans really won the war and were going to dominate us economically, and we should just learn to accept our new Japanese overlords? Remember right up to the day the Berlin Wall fell people were still predicting that World War III was just around the corner and if only you would have the common sense to buy their book on the end of the world, you could see it too. Communism my friend, that’s where the future is, Captialism is on its last legs, you’ll see. Even today, despite the failures of New Orleans, and the failure of Old Orleans, there are still people who think the Socialist model works. But don’t let a little thing like facts and evidence get in the ways of your ideas kids…

I grew up in the 1970s. I saw movie after move that predicted with absolute certainty the end of humanity that was just around the corner. I watched them all, and besides the fact that they almost all had Charlton Heston in them they also had one other thing in common, they all said our collective human goose was cooked and there was no way were could survive much longer that soon we would all be reduced to eating our neighbors and using the dried out skins of their pets as fuel.

I found myself watching “The Omega Man” the other day, and at one point, these as scene where the haggard survivors look at a calendar on the wall and see the date when “it all went to hell” – It was May 1975!

I remember when I was a kid and that date was off in the future and I wondered, “gosh, will we make it?” and I was seriously worried that we weren’t going to make it, that the world would end, just like it did in the movie. Yet, the day came and went and to my surprise, we were getting along just fine. Sure, we had our daily things to get through but we didn’t have “Matthias and the Family (ed: Stone?)” roaming the streets and my dad didn’t have a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on top of the house. It was just normal every day life in the ‘burbs. Go to work, pay the bills, watch TV, go on vacation, say, what’s that VCR things the neighbors got and who would pay for TV?

Now, some 30 years later, it seems laughable to think that I was seriously worried about the future, when to look back at it the worst and scariest part of what the future would be was over on the last days of the 1970s.

There’s a staggering number of these “doom” books on the market, here’s just a few that stick in my mind:

United States of Europe

The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream

Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century

The Japan that can say no

Time Bomb 2000: What the Year 2000 Computer Crisis Means to You! Revised & Updated Edition

There’s a whole wing in my proposed “library of failure” dedicated to that great economics prognosticator, Ravi Batra who never saw an economics indicator that didn’t lead to a great depression and the end to Capitalism. Here’s just a few of his greatest hits:

The Great Depression of 1990

Stock Market Crashes of 1998 and 1999: The Asian Crisis and Your Future

The Crash of the Millennium : Surviving the Coming Inflationary Depression

The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism: Can Capitalism Be Saved?

Not content to have blown it in 1990, he goes on to try again in 1995. Ooops, ok lets try end of the millennium. Damn…. Ok, sure the stock market did go down in 2000. They do that, they go up and they go down, but you cant call the time a “depression” unless of course you were in the software industry at the time, but that’s not what he was talking about. He’s talking about soup lines, dust bowl, tortilla flat, hobo jungles, you know all that stuff, not the little bubble of the internet and Y2K.

I was also reminded of all those great books about how “America is doomed” that became so popular right after Bush became President, Today, In the light of Frances rising problems with the Arab street, which is now quickly becoming Europe’s problem as well and in light of the rejection of the EU constitution and a continual european economic disaster that would get a US President removed from office in this country if he had anything close to the economics of the Europeans, these books seem rather silly to me.

No one should look twice at books like these if their prediction fail to come true, but the people who write these books are rarely called to account for their predictions. They make predictions, the predictions fail to come true, and they make even more ridiculous predictions, and people keep buying the books! For some people, like Ravi Batra, after awhile you have to wonder if its “prediction” that he’s doing or expressing his own wishful thinking. I wonder sometimes if most of doom prediction of the future is in fact wishful thinking in some perverse way.

The king of silly predictions of the future is Hal Lindsey, writer of the book “ the late Great Planet Earth”, this book started a boom in books that spelled out the pre-apocalyptic predictions of the coming to a theatre near you future that we were all doomed to live in. These disaster books were the kind that would give you detail after detail about how the future was just a big stinking pile of doom followed by a big hairy disaster.

But once again, none of it has come true! No Famines, no 'rise of the global anti-Christ (Marilyn Manson does not count), the Soviet or Chinese domination of Arab oil fields, nothing. Zip nada. Yet, no one holds him to account, they just assume that he must’ve gotten the dates slightly off and he goes on to publish even more fanciful accounts of the disasters that are yet to be! I mean as a budding writer, I admire the cojones of someone being that wrong that often and still managing to get a publisher to dump 100,000 copies on the market every year. It's Nice work if you can get it.

But there is something about the future that we in the modern world have managed to turn upside down. The future is truly unknowable, but for some reason we have decided that it must be filled only with doom, dread and disaster. There is no equal consideration for how things might just be better, despite all the evidence that things in general are much better than they were in the past.

If we were to go back to the world of 1905, we would see a world very different from our own. A world largely without paved rual roads and interstate highways, rural electricity, inoculations to immunize against childhood polio and thousands of other diseases that were commonplace at the time, antibiotics and penicillin, food and drug standards, building codes, child labor laws, sewage systems, and yet in the modern age people are convinced that stray electrons from power lines and cell phones antenna radiation will kill you. All those things I listed are things that have bettered the lives of billions of people but to the world of 1905, they barely existed. You tell someone in 1905 that there’s a one in a billion chance that their child might get autism from a polio inoculation and they will just point to half a dozen kids in their area who are severly crippled from the disease and then they will tell you of half a dozen other families where the afflicted child didn’t survive at all. In 1905, you expected that at least one of your children would die before they reached puberty, today, no one lives with that expectation. Ive seen what the just the word "polio" can do to older folks, they remember real horror, not the fake made up crap of today.

How did the human race survive all of that to end up at a point where today it’s practically afraid of its own shadow? We are all the descendants of those who came before us, who in each of their lives saw and experienced things daily that would make each of us wet our pants in fear. We face none of those horrible things in our lives today, yet we are more in fear of life itself than any of those people were in theirs while they faced very real threats and not the imagined ones of that we face in ours.

Why is that? And why were the people of 1905 so positive about the future and we are so negative?

By Comparison to the world of 1905, we live in a golden age, an age of tremendous bounty, an age of wealth unknown to any generation of mankind since the start of civilization. With the exception of the Irish Potato famine, there hasn’t been a famine in the western world in 200 years. Famine was once a common occurance in the human condition,yet today, outside of Communist and Socialist Central Planning economies, they are rare indeed. Human Populations, rather than increasing exponentially to our eventual doom are actually decreasing, many parts of the world are actually in negative population growth, which is something none of the Sci-fi movies that Charlton Heston stared in managed to predict.

In today’s world, you are not allowed to say that the future is bright because to do so is to expose yourself to ridicule as a know nothing fool. Just today, I made the mistake of saying to a friend that the economy was in my opinion actually doing pretty well. In return for that opinion, and I got a 20-minute lecture on how terrible things were and how he had never seen it so bad.

“You must’ve forgotten the Carter years”, I said in retort. When I brought up the statistics of the Carter years, the double digit unemployment, the double digit inflation rates and home interest rates, the inability to get any gas at any price, he agreed that things were bad then but that they would soon be just as bad.

"Soon? You mean, they aren’t now?" I asked.

No, they aren’t that that bad now, but they are going to be, you just wait and see”

So there you have it, just wait, things will get worse. You’ll see. And how can you argue with it? I mean despite the fact that things are actually better than they were, and little facts like that I suppose, but hey...

Today we see the opposite of the mood of the 1990’s. In the 1990’s no bad news ever got in the way of feeling good about things in general, but into today’s world no good news gets in the way of feeling bad. its directly the opposite, but its just as idiotic, yet the negative one is given more credibility than the other more positive one.

I watched news reports the other day that talked about how bad it was that Gasoline prices were going down, when just a month before it was the end of the western world that it was going up with no end in sight.

I watched Exxon Mobile get knocked by the market on its quarterly earnings, which were the best in 32 years because analysts had said that it was “below expectations”. Below expectations? Who is it that set expectations so high that they could not be reached in a market where they had done better than at any time in the past 32 years?

Are we all a little guilty of setting expectations too high right now? Do we all set expectations so high that they can never be reached, and if they are reached we find ourselves looking for reasons to discount the good news as suspect and really just evidence of bad things to come, even when the news is really genuine good news?

Yikes, following logic like that is like following an Escher painting…

“Irrational exuberance” was the phrase the Fed chairman used to describe the 1990s. “Irrational negativity” is what I call the new millennium. I used to think it was just President Bush that was getting the bad news treatment, but I’ve come to see that its just about everything that goes on these days is just a setup for someone to say ‘see, I told you, signs and portents of disasters to come”

Today’s apocalyptic talk centers on the near certainty of the rise of bird flu throughout the world. Everyone is absolutely convinced that, the flu will come and it will kill millions of people. Yet, there’s no evidence that the flu will mutate and that once mutated it will prove to be fatal. I know several people who are frankly scared to death at the possibility of getting the flu, even though I tell them that their chances of dying from the flu are pretty small. It is almost as if they need to worry about it.

Here’s the thing about the “bird flu”; there isn’t one damn thing you can do about it, so you might as well stop worrying about it.

I mean besides washing your hands everytime you go in public and covering your face when you sneeze, there is almost nothing you can do to prepare for something as awful as a repeat of the 1918 Flu epidemic. Take your flu shot if it’s available, but don’t sit around and squirm that it’s all over for you if you don’t. Why squirm around and get upset about it? Why not enjoy the world that is rather than worry about what might go away in the future?

Maybe, it will happen, maybe it won’t, but worrying about it isn’t going to keep it away. If it makes you feel like you are in control by worrying, then go ahead, do it. But for Gods sake don’t write a book about it. I’m afraid the J. Patrick Buchanan Memorial Library for Failed Prophets of Doom is getting mighty full these days. We may have to open a branch in a town near you if you all don’t put a lid on all this gloom and doom crap.

Stop whining and go have fun, enjoy yourselves, your ancestors worked hard to get you where you are. Go read Ravi Batra and laugh at a grown man who consistently acts like a fool but not nearly as much a fool as those who take him seriously no matter how many times hes proven to be wrong.

Update: Why J. Patrick Buchanan instead of Patrick J. Buchanan? easy, its pompus and inexplicably funnier that way, just like the man himself. After all, the great prognosticator who wrote the book "Conservative votes, liberal victories: Why the right has failed" deserves to be remembered for posterity. Why is that funny? because he wrote it in 1975. 4 years later, The Reagan revolution was underway and it would be 12 years before another Democrat president and in 14 years, the Senate and the House the South and most Govenorships would be solidly in the hands the Republicans. But for our "prophet of doom", all that would not be good enough, in fact all that success would just be proof to Pat that the Republicans werent conservative enough, so he would leave the Republicans to join the reform party.

Gee, that worked out swell, didnt it Pat...

Posted @ November 09, 2005 01:13 AM | Current Affairs

Posted by: Survivedthe70s at November 9, 2005 11:46 AM

Posted by: OhBloodyHell at November 16, 2005 11:13 AM

Posted by: OhBloodyHell at November 16, 2005 11:15 AM

Posted by: OhBloodyHell at November 16, 2005 11:17 AM

Posted by: OhBloodyHell at November 16, 2005 11:43 AM

Posted by: dymphna at November 16, 2005 02:05 PM

Posted by: Supercat at November 19, 2005 12:24 PM