Three Accurate Poetic Predictions?

We published the first of our poems offering insights into the likely outcome of the presidential election on May 5, 2016. At that time, the national polls showed Hillary Clinton to be comfortably ahead of Donald Trump.

The Pundits’ Cloudy Forecast

They say that Trump has little chance

Against the mighty Hillary,

But of his foes who have all tapped out,

She’s the very epitome.

This next poem, published on June 23, 2016, one would have thought, did not require a great deal of soothsaying ability on our part.

Plunder Woman

What we can expect from Donald Trump

Is business-as-usual disruption.

With Hillary what we'll likely see

Is old-fashioned Third World corruption.

I am almost surprised myself at how quickly some of the disruption has occurred. One dramatic and obvious change in business as usual has, most curiously, not been remarked upon by anyone that I know of. The orderly, virtually totalitarian presidential press conferences that we observed under President Barack Obama seem to be a thing of the past. We’re talking about those clearly scripted affairs in which Obama called on members of the press by name from a list on the lectern while the rest of the press corps sat meekly and quietly in their seats like so many stage props. I think we should all celebrate, for the sake of our democracy, the apparent end of such outrages.

Unfortunately, though, it looks like the change reaches no further than Trump, himself. I notice that the very first question that his new press secretary, Sean Spicer, took came from a reporter from Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, whom Spicer called on from a list: “Daniel Halper, you’re first.” You can see it at the 51:15 minute mark here. Even worse, this reporter Halper worked formerly for the neocon Weekly Standard and is the author of the very partisan book Clinton, Inc.

Furthermore, after we started this article President Trump threatened Iran with military action, of all things, in frightening words that are so familiar from the last three administrations, that “nothing is off the table,” and his new United Nation’s representative, Nikki Haley, made a statement on Russia and the Ukraine that could easily have come out of the mouth of her predecessor, Samantha Power. On this one, it’s beginning to look like my crystal ball could use some polishing. That’s why I have had to add a question mark to the title, one that was not there when I started the essay.

As for what we could have expected with Hillary as president, no clairvoyance at all was required, and, more than anything else, I think, it explains her resounding defeat. The Bill and Hillary Clinton record speaks for itself when it comes to corruption on almost every level.

I posted the last of the three poems just two weeks before the election, on September 23, 2016. When I travel by automobile I find it convenient to listen to National Public Radio stations, which are usually down near the low end of the FM radio dial. I could not help but notice the contrast between the range of opinions and the breadth of knowledge imparted on NPR public affairs programs with what I get from the web sites I usually consult, the books that I read, the people I talk to, and the experience that I have had. “All Things Considered,” as a pretentious mischaracterization, is right up there with the slogan of The New York Times, “All the news that’s fit to print.”

My NPR-Junky Friends

They’re smug, they’re liberal, and they’re misinformed,

With limited powers of cognition.

They don’t know what they don’t know,

And they’re opposing the least and the most informed

In a powerful Trump coalition.

The two links in the poem, the first dealing with the national heroin epidemic and the second a review of the revealing memoir of Bill Clinton’s long-time paramour, Dolly Kyle, are on subjects that NPR would never come close to considering in any real depth. I later expanded upon the first subject on December 1, 2016, with “The Heroin Epidemic and the News.”

One of the main reasons that so many in our so-called “educated class” were so completely blindsided by the outcome of the election and are so devastated by it is that they have been so poorly served by their primary sources of information. They truly don’t know what they don’t know, and, what is worse, they don’t know why they don’t know it.

David Martin

February 2, 2017

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