Thursday, October 13, 2011
It occurs to me - hardly brilliant in any way that it does - but still it occurs to me that 'polls' have become a fixture of news reporting and political media in general - and yet polls are stupid - and it never becomes a topic of discussion just how stupid they are - the status quo has become to just accept them as somehow a reflection of something substantial - polls ostensibly defining what people 'think' about a particular policy especially annoy because even a cursory scan of the average democratic polity reveals that the average voter knows very little and understands less - a poll defining what people feel about a certain thing tells me nothing other than that people tend to be very mutable and fragile emanations of a largely unknowable darkness - what am I supposed to do with that information? - but political polls also frustrate with their insistence on being taken seriously - evidence strongly suggest that only those polls taken near an actual time of decision manage to capture a semblance of truth because it's clear people really only start paying attention [a term used loosely] when they feel they have no other choice but to pay attention - and yet here we are months removed from any meaningful elections and polls germinate with abandon on a near daily basis - to tell us what though? - for instance the Wall Street Journal poll this morning showing Cain as leading the republican presidential race - what that tells me is that there's a significant portion of right wing voters who are 'angry' and will throw their support behind anybody, anybody who seems to give voice to this anger - these people are idiots, possibly well meaning idiots and possibly idiots angry for just cause, but idiots all the same - because Romney is quite obviously the only credible candidate left but if a year from now we're watching a presidential election between Obama and Herman Cain well, this country is finished, raise the white flag, we're done - that's what that poll tells me - and yet the Journal publishes it and other news sources report on it as it were saying something different and not at all implying that the country may indeed be fucking doomed.
