Peter Krupa

“Picture show,” is the headline on Garrison Keiller’s latest column in Salon.com. The sub-head reads: “The camera can turn callow teens into celebrities and make Bush look like a pilot. Are photo ops ruining America?”

The answer is “no,” so I won’t bother reading the article. Why be so presumptuous? Because it’s just another in the long line of “Is X ruining America?” stories, and “X,” whatever it turns out to be, is almost never ruining America (or Western society, or the Youth, or whatever other cherished group/institution you can dream up).

Nevertheless, according to our punditocracy humanity is always perched on the brink of some precipice or other of cultural annihilation. These days it’s usually illegal drugs or gay marriage or MySpace, and in the past it’s been anything from video games to ultimate fighting to booze. No matter the dire predictions, we’re generally all still here once the dust clears, and life, as it has a way of doing, goes on.

As for why social critics are drawn to this kind of “the-end-is-near” journalism, my guess is that our approach to the future has something to do with our perception of the past. The modern mind is trained to think of history as punctuated by dramatic moments and urged along by small ripples that become a tsunami.

Thus we have the assassination of Prince Ferdinand, Black Tuesday, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 9/11 to punctuate history, while we think of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Romantic poets, Elvis, and the invention of the assembly line as ripples that ended up causing a global flood.

What journalist wouldn’t want to be the one credited with having put a finger on the Next Big Thing? Of course, like any good seer, the journalist’s strategy is to predict a whole bunch of Next Big Things, then only remember the predictions that were right. Thus we have a glut of “X is destroying America” stories, in the hope that “X” turns out to be the next crack epidemic, or the next acid rain.

Most likely, however, no one ever does manage to predict the Next Big Thing. That’s part of why it’s the Next Big Thing. If the thing that will destroy society is so obvious that a columnist for Salon.com can pick it out, it’s doubtful it will make it very far. No, the thing that destroys our society will be a total surprise.

So when you die with your helper robot’s spindly fingers wrapped around your throat, don’t blame Garrison Keiller. Likely he’s just as surprised as you are.