A Respite from Garbage

In the days after an election nothing is so worthless as pre-election political punditry.

News or no news, every day of the campaign the pundits, like attendants at a menagerie, swept up the droppings of the day and chewed them to a fine pulp for the next day's page.

The pundits who guessed right may gloat, as publicly as the world will let them. The politicians whose wins they predicted will quietly pay their way out the door and invite them, like consulting oracles, to return with good tidings at the next election.

Those who guessed wrong would be saved from conspicuous ignominy by the multitude of others who also guessed wrong if anyone bothered to reproach them--but no one will.

I bear no grudge against these parasites upon prediction in an era that slavers to know the future. It is not their fault that they are tolerated. Day after unchanging day, people pay to read the newspapers in which the seers spew forth their political wisdom. The people pay to read what they themselves will or may or might do.

It is the infatuation of a child with his own potency, the love to hear again and again of his power to make the politicians pander to his whims. And like a child or a puppy, those people (you, dear reader) have no memory. Will they recall what columnist two weeks ago failed to call the score in Nebraska? And if they did, and if he'd got it wrong, would they take him to task, and tell him to alter his system of prediction or get off the public page?

No, they would remember his prediction of three weeks ago, which directly contradicted his later insight. The public mind has no system and expects no system; it respects the infallibility of the man who predicts that something will happen.

As I write this election eve, the moths have gathered in front of the fluorescent screens. Newspaper editors in their city rooms all over the country are preparing the final flatulent belch to an already prolonged, parataxic monologue. Soon, I hope, the air will clear, empty prediction will withdraw to its bastion on the sports pages, and newspapers will return to their permanently valuable fare of weddings, obituaries, and corruption.