Burke: Speculation is fun but little comes for betting on it
Published 1:30 am Monday, January 31, 2022
By Tom Burke / Herald columnist
If anyone starts telling you what’s going to happen next, about any of the issues facing us (covid, the midterm elections, the 2024 election, Ukraine, Russell Wilson’s future, et al.) change the channel, turn the page or steer the conversation to who’s the best craft-beer brewer in Everett.
‘Cause nobody knows what’s gonna happen next and you shouldn’t waste your time chasing clickbait:
The pollsters don’t know; they blow it often enough to make them unreliable.
The pundits don’t know; most come to their topics with specific agendas to sell.
The Wall Street wizards don’t know; last week’s roller-coaster market shows that: “It’s up, everything’s wonderful.” “It’s down, the bubble’s burst.” “No, it’s up again, things are OK.” “Wait, it could go down tomorrow. My God! The sky is falling!”
The foreign-policy commentators don’t know, and the experts at the CIA and State Department who might know ain’t talking to any of us.
And TV and social media commentators; well Tucker Carlson and his fellow Fox News (OAN, etc.) propagandists just plain lie.
Now there are some actual facts, not fungible, “alternative facts,” but real ones that matter:
• Trump lost the election.
• There was a planned-in-advance, multipronged, MAGA coup attempt that led to Jan. 6 insurrection (and the House’s Jan. 6 committee is digging in to it all);
• Covid is real; 870,000 Americans have died from it; thousands more are dying each and every day. (Most are unvaccinated.)
• Vaccines work. Masks work.
• The climate change crisis is real.
• Biden’s first year was the strongest year ever for economic growth since 1984.
• The Supreme Court is going to do something, or nothing, about Roe v. Wade.
• The Republicans won’t say what they stand for. (Minority Leader McConnell arrogantly, and with clear disdain for voters, answered when asked about it, “That is a very good question. And I’ll let you know when we take it [Congress] back.”
Meanwhile, Biden has:
• Eased the supply chain crisis;
• Eliminated tax havens for the uber-wealthy;
• Rejoined the Paris Climate Accords;
• Got a $15 minimum wage for all employees of federal contractors;
• Passed the covid relief package, (and not a single Republican voted for the American Rescue Plan),
• Diversified the federal judiciary;
• Got us out of Afghanistan (albeit less than brilliantly);
• Stopped building that stupid wall;
• Rejoined the World Health Organization;
• Secured $9.8 billion for historically black colleges and universities;
• Mailed free covid tests to anyone who wants one and made N95 masks available for free as well.
So here’s my five critical things to watch:
• The mid-terms. “The Dems are doomed!” read the headlines. Wanna bet? I wouldn’t. No one, and I mean no one, knows what’s going to happen with Russia, the Jan. 6 probe, the virus, a new Supreme Court pick, the economy, and a lot more that will influence next November’s results. (Anyone claiming they know is smoking way too much dope.)
• Ukraine. Will Russia’s Vladimir Putin invade? Who knows? What’ll France’s Emmanuel Macron, the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson (if he’s still the prime minister), Olaf Scholz of Germany and others do? Don’t know. Biden’s next step? It depends. It is, as they say, “in flux.”
• How will the Supreme Court decide in Roe v Wade?. Folks can speculate ‘till the cows come home, but it’s still just speculation.
• And how about, oh say, Kim Jong-un? What’s the dictator who Trump “fell in love” with going to do? Who knows, but he’s got nukes, is a total despot, unstable, and capable of anything. He’s another total mystery.
As Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “there are known knowns (what we know we know) and there are known unknowns (what we do not know). But there are also unknown unknowns (what we don’t know we don’t know), and … it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.”
But wait gentle reader, there’s more; a corollary to Rumsfeld’s analysis by philosopher Slavoj Žižek who postulated that beyond these three categories there is a fourth, the unknown known — that which one intentionally refuses to acknowledge that one knows — the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.”
And today’s MAGA/Republican/RedState/Fox News devotion to the pretend, those unknown knowns (the Big Lie, anti-vaxxing, the Jan. 6 insurrection, voter suppression, support for Russia) makes the future all the more unknowingly dangerous.
So tune out the speculation; abandon the “crystal-ball-gazing” that fills cable news’ 24 hours-a-day-ratings-needs; and focus on the facts and what people actually say and do, not the “what ifs,” or “maybes,” and outright lies spread by those whose anti-democratic, power-hungry, personal, paranoid-self-aggrandizement philosophies drive their agenda.
Stick with the facts, not the fantasies.
Mask up. Get the shot. Get the booster. Stay safe.
Tom Burke’s email address is t.burke.column@gmail.com.
