Project: Unstable balance

11 THE OPINION POLL

Are you for it or against it,
Holidays in Val Camonica?
Does the harpsichord sound better,
Or a chamber composition?
Have you heard? The Honourable Member
May be suffering from vertigo.
Could you kindly give your verdict:
Moles or freckles—which way do you go?
Are you for it or against it,
Sunday outings and excursions?
Telephone directories (or those discount-sheet promotions)
Left in stacks on staircase landings?
In the polygonal kingdom,
Where exactly goes the triangle?
Did you follow the discussion
On the gender of the angels?
Are you for it or against it,
Witches haunting children's fairy tales?
What do you most often picture
In the shapes the drifting clouds unveil?
Will the starlet's firstborn baby
Be a boy or be a girl?
This is hardly idle chatter:
It could set the press awhirl.
Are you for it or against it,
Surveys, samples, statistics?
Are you for it or against it,
Punctuation polemics?
Politicians rise or perish
On opinions turned to figures;
Cross-tabulated percentages
Seal the fate of every creature.

Once, when decisions had to be made, people consulted the gods, the stars, priests, soothsayers, the flight of birds or the entrails of animals.

Today, rather more soberly, we consult a sample of the population.

The Poll is a cheerful, irreverent jive about the great contemporary liturgy of recorded opinion. In favour or against? Better this or that? What do you feel, what do you think, what do you see among the clouds? Every question, however inane, can become material for analysis, fierce debate and voting intentions.

And so, while everything appears to be participation, attentive listening and democracy in real time, something is reversed: decisions no longer arise from vision or medium- to long-term strategy, but from the cross-tabulation of percentages; complexity is not understood—it is sampled.

It is the moment when collective destiny ceases to ask for thought and entrusts itself to new, modern haruspices.