An Omen. Since omens are inherently nonscientific, the cognoscenti can stop reading right here. Last night I bought some beer at the package store I always go to. It’s run by a seriously large Polish guy, an immigrant like my late grandmother. I’m always interested in his take on things. He said he thought Trump would be the next president. The store is in a heavily latino neighborhood (mostly Puerto Rican). Given what Trump has said about Mexicans, I pressed him on it, but he wouldn’t budge, and said the people in the neighborhood liked Trump.
Flashback to my late grandmother, running a drygoods store in a little New Jersey town in the 40s and 50s. Family lore has it that she was certain that Truman would win in 1948, despite every poll to the contrary. She said “they’re talking Dewey but they’ll vote Truman”.
People in retail (particularly those running the show) talk to anyone walking in the door. They see a far wider mass of humanity and interact with many more people in the course of a day than you and I. Think about Pauline Kael’s remark that she didn’t know anyone who’d voted for Nixon. Probably in upper Manhattan she didn’t.
An omen? Perhaps.
Chemiotics II 