Poor Cassandra
Varifrank posts a fine rant about those modern-day prognosticators who never seem to be called to account for the failure of their predictions of doom and gloom to come true (with, of course, the sole exception of Bush and the WMDs).
I've often wondered the same thing, in relation to pundits (especially those financial analysts who tell you where to invest), scientists, economists, fortunetellers, and psychics. But I'm not sure most of these predictions aren't considered a sort of entertainment, much like disaster or horror movies, meant to impart a frisson of almost-pleasurable anxiety but not necessarily to predict reality.
I have one tiny quibble with Varifrank's essay: he compares these people to poor old much-maligned Cassandra. Now I happen to know a little bit about Cassandra, having been fascinated by her back in high school when I first encountered her through Greek tragedies (yes, they used to make us read them in high school, and a public high school at that) and was moved to write a paper on her poignant plight.
Cassandra received one of those "yes, but" gifts/curses of which the Greek gods seemed so very fond. Her resultant powers, however, actually made her the opposite of those whom Varifrank decries: it was Cassandra's terrible fate to make correct predictions about dreadful events to come, but to never be believed.
Who would ever host her on cable news?
posted by neo-neocon @ 11:30 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
In 1941 the NYT Magazine ran a piece called "An Amazing Prophecy by Winston Churchill," citing pieces from his 1936 speeches that predicted the belligerent ambitions of Hitler and Nazi Germany. He was called the "British Cassandra," and we all know what happened a few years after he made his call.
But today, who will sort out our Cassandras, if any exist, from the multitude of "pundits," people whom in my college days we called "bullshit artists."
Who will tell the people? And, do they want to know?
Part of this is due to the amazing shallowness of so much of the media. When Professor "X" makes an alarming prediction, most normal people would crank up the ol' search engine (or just go to the library) and see what predictions Prof X made in the past, and how those turned out. But most media players seem uninterested in anything that didn't happen within the last 5 minutes, so they won't bother with this kind of research.
I actually like Cassandra.
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