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As we all know from the world of politics, if you say something enough times, it becomes true.
As we all know from the world of self-help gurus, if you say something enough times, especially while looking into a mirror, you become good enough, smart enough and, doggone it, people really do like you.
So I ask you: Are we trying to scare ourselves that the world is going to end this year, with the Mayan calendar and Nostradamus and so on, or is it actually unraveling before our eyes like a cheap sock?
I overcame a childhood filled with dreams and magic by working for nearly two decades in newsrooms, and I've had most of the irrational fears beaten out of me. I spent 9/11 Downtown; I wasn't going to flee until something happened to St. Louis.
All that time in newsrooms also taught me that the news media love disasters, threats and scandals -- hence the eternal obsessions: weather, crime, money and sex, although print journalists see much more of the first two.
I try to keep a sense of perspective. Remember how many trains every day DON'T derail, how many people drive home in the snow and DON'T get stranded, how many planes DON'T get delayed by a celebrity or drunken bond trader having a meltdown.
I have come to believe that most of what goes on in the world cannot possibly live up to the marketing. I avoid panic because it's so embarrassing afterward. But guess what?
I'm a little creeped out.
For starters, the bees disappear and feral pigs are everywhere. But that can be overlooked as merely weird. There are things to put on ham besides honey glaze.
America is just beginning to mop up from this miserable recession; meanwhile, Europe throws up all over itself. It's all very well joking about the irony of using Greek letters in economic equations or assuming the Germans will take care of it. The Germans don't want to take care of it. They know what it's like to acquire most of Western Europe, and it never ends well for them.
Besides, Europe isn't Vegas. What happens there doesn't stay there. If the eurozone implodes, we will feel the suck of that black hole.
By the way, the cosmos is also against us, starting with our own jittery planet. Researchers are now saying Tokyo is due for a major earthquake, weather forecasts are freakish with a chance of devastating, and flocks of birds have stopped soiling cars and now fall stone dead on them.
The sun just spat out a big flare of radiation and plasma at us, which may take out electrical grids but at best is terribly rude.
And it's not just the Maya and the economists. A Chinese feng shui master recorded his prediction for this new Year of the Dragon for the BBC, and he's putting his money on floods, earthquakes, economic fear and loathing, and a continuation of the political upheavals and revolutions that keep going off like land mines every few months.
But here's what rattles me. The last straw.
Big Ben -- the clock tower, not the quarterback -- is crooked.
It's leaning about a quarter of a degree since the construction of a subway line under it. True, a construction expert has said it's moving so slowly that it won't become dangerous for 10,000 years, by which time even Downton Abbey may be gone.
Big Ben has survived other afflictions. In 1976, its clock mechanism exploded, doubtless as a result of our Bicentennial gloating.
Nevertheless, in Commons this week a Conservative MP asked whether it was time to start buying life jackets because Parliament was sinking into the Thames.
And if he says it enough times ...
First Published January 26, 2012 12:00 am
