Time Essay: A Remebrance of Things Future

• Share

It is written: Jackie Onassis will become an ambassador. Bralessness will sag in popularity. Kidnapers will threaten Donny Osmond. Dr. Jonas Salk will find a cure for the common cold.

Translation: The eternal prognosticating game has just finished going berserk again. It does so at every turn of the year. The result, as the honest-to-God gleanings from the popular press above and below suggest, is that 1979 stands revealed in marvelous detail. Even before the old year has been digested, the new can thus be consumed. A few of the prophecies—who knows?—may even tell something of the future. In any event, the reveling in revelations tells a good deal about Americans.

Jerry Brown and Linda Ronstadt will marry. Amelia Earhart will turn up in a Japanese jail. A thought-reading machine will be produced. A dentist will romance Olivia Newton-John. Burt Reynolds will get hurt making a rodeo shot. The achievement of formal peace between Israel and Egypt will be thwarted.

In their insatiable hunger for news about the future, Americans surely prove themselves kinsmen of their remotest ancestors. Humankind, archaeology has long since made clear, began trying to penetrate tomorrow as soon as it dawned on men that there was one. The oracle and prophetic magic were invented before the wheel. Today, entrails are about the only thing not widely sifted for inklings of things to be. The soothsaying fraternity conjures all year long to supply the public addiction. The orgiastic bumper crop comes as a sort of special start-of-the-year fix. One effect of the overdose is that it makes everyone momentarily forget that public dependence on prognosticating is not just seasonal but chronic.

Silicone wrinkle shots will come in style, eyelifts will go out. Telly Savalas will marry a starlet. John Travolta is heading for a surprise wedding. Dinah Shore will marry. Israel and Egypt will sign a peace treaty.

The demand for foreknowledge of practically everything supports a professional industry whose size is barely hinted at by the hovering legions of astrologers, fortune tellers, palmists, mystics, clairvoyants, tarot cardists and stock-market analysts. In fact, the craze for foretelling (and being foretold) runs so deep that it has incurably infected the one profession whose redeeming mission is actually to discover what happened yesterday: journalism. Even though this obligation regularly taxes its competence, journalism today spends a surprising amount of its energy transmitting what it cannot possibly know for sure. Not only tabloids like the National Enquirer but sober organs like the Christian Science Monitor love to prophesy.

Teddy Kennedy will announce for President and then withdraw. John Jr. and Caroline Kennedy will each take on spouses. A new child ice-skating star will emerge. Farrah Fawcett and Lee Majors will split. The N.F.L. will take on a woman referee. Jimmy Carter will decide not to seek reelection.