The once outlandish predictions of Ballard, DeLillo and (yes) The Simpsons are coming true. It\u2019s time to write our own future<\/p>\n
Writing about the assassination of President John F Kennedy for Rolling Stone in 1983, 20 years after the shooting, the novelist Don DeLillo remarked<\/a>: \u201cEuropeans and Middle Easterners are notoriously prone to believe in conspiracies \u2026 Americans, for their own good reasons, tend to believe in lone gunmen.\u201d How times change. Since Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt<\/a> on 13 July, social media have boiled over with talk of conspiracies, false flags and complex manipulations of state and psyche for unclear ends. After Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy<\/a> for president, various online conservatives argued that he was actually dead<\/a>. Meanwhile, otherwise sensible observers blamed the media for creating the narrative that Biden had lost mental acuity and keeping Trump in the public eye \u2013 a kind of Rothschild conspiracy for people who took undergraduate sociology.<\/p>\n It\u2019s fun to scoff at such people, who believe that powerful forces secretly organise the world even as we confront evidence that human intelligence is no longer sufficient to run a branch of Chipotle. In fairness to the paranoid mindset, though, a lot of events from earlier decades\u2019 fiction have been coming true lately. Consider Lisa\u2019s prophetic line from the Bart to the Future episode of The Simpsons, original airdate 19 March 2000: \u201cAs you know, we\u2019ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.\u201d It was funny at the time. I believe it was either Karl Marx or Nelson Muntz who said that history repeats itself: first as farce, then as whatever all this is now.<\/p>\n Dan Brooks writes essays, fiction and commentary from Missoula, Montana<\/p>\n