American politician spontaneously combusts!

This is from an email I wrote on December 10:

Since we're sharing unjustifiable premonitions, the phrase "spontaneous human combustion" has been persistently presenting itself to me recently, together with the idea that some prominent person (possibly [I name a specific American politician]) is going to fall victim to that extremely unusual phenomenon, causing a sensation. Obviously the odds against any such thing happening are astronomical, but I wanted to go on the record just in case.

I can't say exactly when these "spontaneous human combustion" premonitions began, but certainly no later than November 26, when I used the phrase in an unrelated blog post because it had been on my mind.

And this is a passage from Scott Alexander's novel Unsong which I read yesterday, December 20. The story exaggerates the uncertainties surrounding the 2000 presidential election (the "hanging chads" and all that), such that inauguration day comes and goes without a clear winner. George W. Bush finally takes office on March 20, due to a decision by the Supreme Court secretly manipulated by Dick Cheney behind the scenes. On January 29, 2002, he delivers his State of the Union address. There has been no 9/11 in this alternate history; instead, a terrorist magician named Dylan Alvarez, leader of an organization called BOOJUM, has been assassinating people. President Bush's address concludes thus:

"[. . .] But with the help of all the brave people in different government departments and all around the country working on this case, we’ve got Alvarez on the run and are tightening the noose around his neck. Some of these people are here with us tonight. People like Robert Mueller, director of the FBI. Like Michael Gellers, a police officer who successfully defused a BOOJUM bomb in Philadelphia. Like Sonja Horah . . .”

President Bush spontaneously caught fire. “HELLLPPP!” he screamed as the entire executive, legislative, and judicial branches watched on in horror. “HELLLPPP . . . HELL . . .”. By the time Secret Service agents reached him at the podium, he was already a charred corpse.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say – in the midst of his laughter and glee – he had softly and suddenly vanished away – because Dylan Alvarez had hacked his teleprompter to display the Mortal Name.

In the story, Jahorah is the true pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton, called the Mortal Name because it causes anyone who speaks it to die on the spot. (Since this is Unsong, biblical puns are never far from the surface; here, as in Exodus, we have the name of God coming from a burning Bush.)

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What is the nature of the relationship between my persistent "premonition" and the Unsong passage? The thing is, I'm fairly sure I've read the Bush episode before, although I have no conscious memory of it. My first encounter with Unsong was the interlude about Trump and about how The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe predicts the outcome of the 2016 election. Enjoying that, I started reading the book from the beginning but couldn't really get into it -- so I stopped halfway through Chapter 1 and just read some (maybe all?) of the interludes. I know for certain that I read Trump, Obama, Miss American Pie, and There's a Hole in my Bucket. As I've said, I have no memory of having read Bush -- not even a sense of familiarity after reading it yesterday -- but I think I surely must have.

I started reading Unsong all the way through on or shortly after November 16, which is the date of an email from a reader recommending it to me. So such evidence as I have suggests that my premonitions about spontaneous human combustion began shortly after I began to read the novel.

The most prosaic explanation of my "premonitions" is that starting to read Unsong triggered subconscious memories of the Bush episode, which appeared in my mind as the free-floating idea of an American politician spontaneously combusting. I mention again that I had no idea at all that that idea was connected with the book I was reading, or that the politician was Bush. (I had another specific politician in mind, in fact.) It's not clear why that particular episode would present itself to me like that, but apparently it did.

Another possibility, is that my premonitions were genuinely precognitive -- but that what I was "premembering" was not an actual event in the world but just my reading a fictional account of such an event. My past work on precognition has shown that one of the most common things to premember is something from a book or movie one is about to read or watch.

Both of these two interpretations would mean that the premonitions were essentially a false alarm, relating to a novel and not to the real world, and that no one is actually going to spontaneously combust.

Looking a little deeper, though, one can see signs of the synchronicity fairies' involvement. Why did a reader happen to recommend Unsong at that particular point in time? Why did I happen to remember or premember the spontaneously combusting politician (but not that it was Bush) rather than any of the other episodes in this rather long novel? Why does the context of that episode -- a disputed election, not resolved until long after the usual date -- fit so nicely with current events in December 2020, when I read it?

To be clear, I am not predicting that anyone is going to spontaneously combust -- that's just a little too crazy even by my standards -- but I am suggesting that the "burning Bush" episode may have some hidden significance that will become clear in the coming weeks or months.