Chaos? Or creative destruction?

As a follow-up to yesterday's post:

Why is it that whatever things are like, good or bad, we seem to think that's the way things will be from now on. Jimmy Carter talked of a national "malaise." And recently we experienced an "illogical exuberance" that was the lemming's cliff that failed to warn us about the coming crash.

Stephan Jay Gould once wrote an essay about why Joe DiMaggio's 56 consecutive game hitting streak would (probably) never be broken. The numbers, he wrote, are always chaotic near the beginning of any undertaking - which is where Joe was in 1941 - and then they flatten out.*

So along comes Jeff Goodby and in an AdAge (maybe OpEd?) column, he says pretty much the same thing about Bob Garfield's book.

Whistling past the graveyard? Or insightful thinking.

What do you say?

*(In checking these numbers I discovered that DiMaggio, when playing with the San Francisco Seals, had a 61 game streak.)