My worst predictions: that rock music was about to disappear, that soccer would become America’s top sport, and that Sylvester Stallone would be known for his writing talent. Maybe there were some others, but I’m bleeding already.
My rock prediction sprang from a fancy theory: that rock music was separating out into its constituent elements, these being noise and energy (the Clash, punk in general) versus melody and catchiness (I forget what, some wimpy act of the time). Pat Benatar represented a reverse-engineered mock-up of the complete entity, and as such she provided a sign of that entity’s impending doom. You’ll notice that I overlooked just about everything, but let’s say I overlooked the Pretenders and leave it at that.
My reasoning for the soccer prediction was shrewdly down to earth. The New York Times Magazine ran a piece about student life at a high school, and it quoted the girls as saying that boys on the soccer team had better rear ends than boys on the football team. Guys want to get laid and all else follows from that. Sighting a key lever of social history, I looked ahead to a mighty shift. Instead there was the medium-size shift known as women’s soccer. This happened because girls decided they’d get the rear ends themselves.
The first two predictions were from my early-20s. My Stallone prediction emerged when I was 15 and trying to pad out a letter to my grandma. That’s a couple of excuses right there, and the third is that, all on my own, I’d gone to see Rocky in a movie theater. As a socially crippled autistic basket case, I was excited simply to walk down city streets, to ask for a ticket and pay for it (with that strange, clunky foreign money because I was in London for a family trip), to sit among a crowd of strangers and watch with everybody else as they laughed and cheered. Those Brits and I liked Rocky just fine. The script’s really clever and original, a series of well-devised gimmicks that puts you on the hero’s side and keeps you there, and his losing instead of winning allows the story to be about self-respect, not the movies’ usual look-at-meism. Having seen Rocky VI, I regret to say Stallone’s work has slipped from its old level.
I note all the above simply to reassure myself. Looking at developments of the past 25 years, I wonder about the next 15. I figure maybe—that’s all I’m saying, maybe—the military will be taking more of a hand in our politics, by which I mean kicking out a government and putting in a new one. To me it seems like this development has gone from unthinkable to thinkable. On the other hand, Rocky VI really did suck, so let that reassure you.