HOW HEINLEIN’S 1952 NOVEL THE YEAR OF THE JACKPOT FORESAW 1968 – And maybe 2016 as well:
The story had been published in 1952, but it conjured up the annus mirabilis/horribilis that I could see flashing before me every day: nudity in public, nudity in the churches, transvestites, draft-dodgers, cigar-smoking feminists, bishops promoting sex education, ludicrous lawsuits, a “startling rise in dissident evangelical cults,” and the Alabama state legislature proposing to abolish physics (not the teaching of physics, no, they wanted to repeal the laws of nuclear physics). Heinlein even predicted that weird antiwar protesters would be arrested in Chicago and disrupt their subsequent trial. In the story, a bespectacled statistician (they always wear glasses) discovers that all varieties of human behavior move in waves, and now (as he plots on graphs) all the waves are cresting at once. “It’s as clear as a bank statement,” he warns. “This year the human race is letting down its hair, flipping its lip with a finger, and saying, ‘Wubba, wubba, wubba.”‘
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Once every generation or so, history abruptly floors the accelerator and leaps off the road. In 1789, 1848, 1917, 1933, 1968, and 1989 regimes fell, astonishing events erupted daily, ideologies realigned, new movements were born, past experience was rendered obsolescent and irrelevant. Each of these revolutionary years took contemporaries by surprise: only after the smoke had cleared did historians find the underlying causes that should have been obvious to everyone.
If you ask whether the Bastille was stormed because bread prices were skyrocketing, or because Louis XVI was inept, or because his tax system was hopelessly corrupt and his government couldn’t pay its bills, or because the armed forces had been humiliated in military adventures, or because the Enlightenment had undermined faith in the established order, or because the lower classes wanted an end to feudalism, or because the middle classes wanted power, most historians would answer: “Sure.” Revolutions never have single causes; they take off only when multiple dysfunctions coincide in a perfect political storm. And right now storm clouds are gathering everywhere. If indeed we once again hit the historical jackpot, it will be frightening and enthralling to watch. Brace yourselves.
As Glenn — and Heinlein — would say, there’s another root cause: “this is known as bad luck.”
(Via Kathy Shaidle.)