The Worst Is Yet to Come

A tongue-in-cheek catalogue of what to worry about in an age when Americans have objectively never been so safe.

By BROOKE ALLEN, WSJ

Never in our history have Americans been so fearful; never, objectively speaking, have we been so safe. Except for the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the destruction of the World Trade Center, war has not touched our shores in a century and a half. Despite relative decline, we are still militarily No. 1. We have antibiotics, polio vaccines, airbags; our children need no longer suffer even measles or chicken pox. So what are we all so frightened of?

Encyclopedia Paranoiacacredit card
By Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf
Simon & Schuster, 385 pages, $25

In "Encyclopedia Paranoiaca," Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf—in association, supposedly, with the staff of something called the Cassandra Institute—try to answer that question in some detail. The result is an amusing and cruelly accurate cultural critique, offering a "comprehensive and authoritative inventory of the perils, menaces, threats, blights, banes, and other assorted pieces of Damoclean cutlery" that hover over our collective head.

There's the big stuff, of course: global warming and nuclear warfare, not to mention super-volcanoes and mega-tsunamis "capable of crossing entire oceans at jet-airplane speed and wreaking almost unimaginable damage." The authors don't even bother to list terror attacks or hurricanes, both high on the list of national obsessions after the events of recent years. But they do dwell on financial perils. "Investments, domestic" and "investments, overseas" are both listed as dangers, as are "gold, failure to invest in" and "gold, investing in." Damned if you do, damned if you don't—as with so many of life's decisions.

(More here.)