Foolproof Predictions on Election Day
Polls are just propaganda tools used to manipulate public events by dampening or engendering enthusiasm, specifically by fostering and then actively exploiting an infantile simulacrum of thought according to which “momentum,” as a collective human phenomenon, is real and quantifiable (which it is not, and never can be), while five hundred people’s ambiguous answers to leading questions are treated as persuasive rhetoric.
Yes, it’s prediction day in America, in which people pretend to have serious reasons for their guesses about what millions of people they have never met will do in the privacy of a voting booth in some town they’ve never visited, as they fill out ballots listing the names of people, most of whom the prognosticators know little to nothing about. Nevertheless, basing their guesses on past results and barely-suppressed hopes, and benefitting from the laws of probability, these people will all come reasonably close to the real results; close enough, at any rate, to boast that their wild guesses were “pretty accurate, overall,” and therefore to imagine they ought to engage in such guessing again next time.
I, for one, have had it up to here with empty guesses pretending to be predictions, almost as far up to here as I’ve had it with empty people pretending to be voting citizens, empty heads pretending to be experts on political philosophy, empty salesmen pretending to be principled commentators, or empty self-servers pretending to be political candidates.
I prefer my predictions a little more reliable and useful, thank you. Having said that, it’s prediction day in America, so, since it’s already late Tuesday afternoon here in Korea (which means it’s the wee hours of Election Day in the U.S.), allow me to register a few predictions I believe you can take to the bank.
The Washington establishment will win, big time, re-electing a lot of the same old climbers who have been facilitating the slow disintegration of the American republic for years, and padding out the ranks with several new faces who will, as usual, quickly turn into willing sycophants for the old guard leadership of the two major parties, rather than ever show whatever ounce of apparent independence or backbone they might have faked to impress two or three dozen naïve voters during the campaign.
Donald Trump will win bigly. He is not on the ballot, of course, but since in his mind everything is always about him, and about gaining attention for himself, and about placing himself at the center of everyone’s conversation and in the headlines of every news outlet’s daily fare, he has already rigged (to use a favorite word of his) the whole election to accomplish his primary objective. Reality TV victory.
The U.S. national debt will not stop growing as a result of this election.
The entitlement behemoth will not be substantially dismantled as a result of this election.
U.S. healthcare will not become a private system, freed from the control of government regulators and crony capitalist riggers (that word again) as a result of this election.
The American “left” will not become less ardently progressive and neo-Marxist as a result of this election.
The American “right” will not become more ardently pro-liberty, republican, and conservative as a result of this election.
No third-party alternative that might gradually begin to challenge the phony “two-party system” and blow a hole in the propagandistic “binary choice” lie the Republicans use to squeeze votes out of good but desperate people every election cycle will emerge as a meaningful movement from this election.
No more than a dozen people, and probably fewer, will stop watching the fake news networks (left or right versions), stop wasting their evenings on sitcoms with laugh tracks to tell you where to be amused, stop drinking too much and telling themselves this is good clean fun, or stop throwing hours down the toilet on computer games, chat rooms, the Food Network, and endless political blather of the “Go team!” sort, as a result of this election.
Let’s meet back here tomorrow, next month, or next year, and see how I did.
