I studied graduate level American history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario from 1993 to 1995. Before that, I studied history as an undergraduate at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, on-and-off, for pretty much forever, or at least between 1976 and 1993, which sometimes felt like forever. I also spent more than three decades working as a journalist and now I work in a university library. So how good am I at prognostication and prediction? Perhaps better than some groundhogs are every Feb. 2, but still not in the league of Nostradamus or Maelmhaedhoc O’Morgair, born in Armagh in 1094, later to be known as St. Malachy, to be sure (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/). And come to think of it, almost seven years ago in March 2013, I didn’t see Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina, becoming Pope Francis. Who did?
Sure, I sometimes (OK fairly frequently or at least with some regularity) write about such doomsday topics as pandemics and economic meltdowns, not because I’m always prescient, but rather because I understand they’re both cyclical phenomenon. “How quickly we could we make a trip back to a modern-day equivalent to the Dark Ages of the 5th to 11th centuries?” I cheerily asked in a Jan. 23 post here, headlined “The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2020/01/23/the-fire-this-time-pandemic-prose-and-waiting-and-watching-for-the-big-one/).
When it comes to pandemics and economic meltdowns, they’re always coming and the next one may well be bigger than the last one. Something like earthquakes. In reality, of course, that all has more to do with mathematical probability than me being a seer-like scribe, although one can always wish for that.
While The Jetsons cartoon television show, which only aired for a single season in 1962-63, but became a popular culture benchmark for my generation in terms of measuring our distance from the future, works OK for gadgets (still waiting for flying cars, hyperloops, and jetpacks, but the Slovakian startup AeroMobil is hard at work on a car that can turn into an airplane and vice versa; while other startups like AquaFlyer, Martin JetPack and Jet Pack International are working towards jetpack reality) in particular (as do the many iterations of Star Trek, for that matter), we’re not as good on the non-gadget, non-cyclical side of predicting the future, myself included.
The list of what I didn’t see coming is so long, it would be easier to enumerate the few things I did see coming. But here’s a few things I missed along the way, just in the first two decades of the 21st century, which turned out to have some historical significance.
At the beginning of 2008, I did not foresee the United States was a little more than 10 months away from electing its first Black president and that president would be Barack Obama, and that he would be easily re-elected to a second term in 2012. Obama was an obscure senator from Illinois, at least to my mind, in early 2008, and early in the year I thought Hillary Clinton the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. The long winter and spring primary season campaign trail changed all that in terms of who I saw winning the party nomination, and Lehman Brothers filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection at 1:45 a.m. on Sept. 15, 2008, following a mass exodus of most of its clients, drastic losses in its stock, and devaluation of its assets by credit rating agencies. Lehman’s bankruptcy filing remains the largest in U.S. history. The name Lehman Brothers would soon become shorthand for one thing – and one thing only: the collapse of the investment bank triggered the financial meltdown that resulted in the Great Recession, the most financially cataclysmic event since the decade of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1939, and ended the late John McCain’s chances to become president in the general election that followed, as even with the novelty of Sarah Palin, as his VP running mate, the prospect of a third-term Republican presidency was beyond the pale to most American voters a dozen years ago. As Peggy Noonan put it so well in a perfect football analogy in the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 14, 2008, “the idea has settled in that America just threw long.”
And speaking of American presidents, and missing or coming late to certain realizations, while now President Donald Trump formally announced his candidacy on June 16, 2015, with a campaign rally and speech at Trump Tower in New York City, it wasn’t until the Republican winter and spring primary season campaign trail victories of 2016 that I started to really pay much attention to his candidacy. Later in the fall, it was Allan Lichtman and Michael Moore who convinced me Trump was going to dispatch Hillary Clinton back home to Chappaqua in the general election and become president, polling be damned.
My political myopia, sadly, hasn’t been limited to the New World. Across the Atlantic, I didn’t see the United Kingdom general election result of 2010, leading to the first “hung parliament” since 1974, followed by the coalition government of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
Nick who?
Can’t say I saw much in advance either Cameron promising in 2015 to hold a referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued European Union (EU) membership after the UK Independence Party (UKIP) strong showing the previous year. We all know how 47 years from Jan. 1, 1973 to Jan. 31, 2020 ended last week: Brexit+6=Post-Operation Yellowhammer/Operation Redfold. Apparently the United Kingdom still has food, medicine, money, and moving freight.
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