PROPHETS OF DOOM THINK THEY ARE PROPHETS. THEY'RE NOT | 2002-02-09
On November 21, 1998 I began an article, SUPERTERRORISM, with the following sentence, "There it hangs, the threat of Superterrorism." It seemed like a pretty harebrained thing to be talking about at the time. It had absolutely nothing to do with the headlines of 1998.
Almost exactly three years later to the day, our entire national attention became riveted on Homeland Defense. Every threat I talked about in that article is now front-page news.
The same people who moan or cheer over what is in the media right now don't even remember which news items obsessed them in 1998.
What is really going on in the world has a lot to do with the crisis that did not happen on January 1, 2000. What is really going in the world has nothing to do with a bunch of predictable, silly professors and commentators huddled together coming to the same conclusions they always come to.
So if you are a leftist who thinks those professors are prophets and the world of the future is theirs, you're being ridiculous.
And if you are a rightist who takes everything we see around us at this moment very, very seriously and think we are all doomed, you are being ridiculous.
What is really going has nothing to do with the headlines or what we now think we know about the future. Everybody will nod when I say that. But then they will go back to being hypnotically entranced by whatever the headlines are this week. I have not met more than three or four people who get the full import of what I am saying.
And until you do get the picture I am trying to convey, anything you say about the future is simply nonsense.
Which is good, because the future you would predict right now looks very grim indeed.