Dum Pendebat Filius

The 50th anniversary of Kerouac’s On The Road has inspired lots of articles recently (see “On the Road at 50″ (NYT), “Road Rules” (Newsweek), “On the Road at 50″ (NPR), etc, etc).

But no one seems to have noticed Kerouac’s eerie prescience. Readers, look at this quote from On The Road, Part Two, Chapter Two:

When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York. We swished through the Lincoln Tunnel and cut over to Times Square; Marylou wanted to see it.

Res ipsa loquitur, readers.