Crystal (meth) ball

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

TO WRITE a startlingly original newspaper column, you’ve got to copy ideas wholesale and, in 1999, I stole a great one from the Miami Herald’s Robert Steinback who, every January, wrote a column making predictions for the coming year and assessing the accuracy of his predictions the year before.

Since 2011, when I thought of the skullduggery at its root, I have stunned readers with the accuracy of the previous year’s first predictions, as you will now see:

* Boris Johnson will win a landslide snap winter election through an empty slogan, “Get Brexit Done!” because of an even emptier contender for prime minister in Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn. Correct, but only because, trusting the useless memory of a nation that vacillates between electing PNM and UNC governments, I wrote this prediction this morning.

* Theresa May will call a general election, which Labour will make a referendum on Brexit, and win – third time lucky? So wildly wrong, I didn’t even get the British PM, or Labour’s feeble Brexit “policy,” right.

* Trump, astonished he cannot prevent the release of the damning Robert Mueller report, will call on his followers to riot to “defend the 2016 election result.” True in the working-out, but applied to a different problem, via an American attorney general who betrayed his office and all but broke the law to protect Trump; it also applies squarely to Republicans in Congress who lie through their teeth to give Trump an out on Ukraine.

* There will be drought riots in some parts of the world and floods in others; also applies to Trinidad. Depressingly correct; but you could ironically call this an “evergreen” prediction.

* A copycat will perpetrate Trinidad’s first American-style mass AR-15 shooting but it will happen in. Morvant-Laventille and will be mistaken for just another long weekend. Double A-plus on this one, despite Double-G.

* An Islamic jihadi copycat will perpetrate Trinidad’s first sabotage of a major transport link but no one will be able to tell the difference in the Tobago sea bridge. True. But the “terrorists” were the Prime Minister and the Minister of (Nothing) Works.

* The new Guyanese government will collapse before it is even elected. Depressingly true – but irrelevant, now, because, although everything in Guyana will collapse, it will all now be prevented from falling over by propping it up with oil money, just as it was in Trinidad.

* Police Commissioner Gary Griffith will be voted in as our first executive president by an admiring nation. Not yet true – but give him time, elections are this year.

And here are my predictions for 2020:

* Boris Johnson will betray Brexit voters monstrously and repeatedly, as he did his wives, girlfriends, family and moderate Tories – but Brexitj/New Tory voters will cheer him all the way.

* Either West Indies or Pakistan will reach the Cricket World Cup final four. Proving for sure that God is a West Indian Pakistani.

* Trump will be formally diagnosed with the several mental illnesses his symptoms publicly prove but the Republicans will oppose his committal until he loses the election.

* Me, my editor, Judy Raymond, Denis Solomon and two mathematician/pedants will be the only Trinidadians who will know – or care – that 2020 is not the start of a new decade.

* Trump will lose in November because everyone but hypocritical, calculating Republicans and American Nazis will just be exhausted by his firetruckeries – but the slave state-biased Electoral College system will make it seem close.

* The Internet of Things will spread rapidly across the world until it reaches Trinidad, where it will become the Internet of Porn & Thing.

* The British Parliament will start each day’s sitting with a rousing chorus of Rule Britannia.

* The British economy will plunge and race-based attacks and assaults on LGBT people will spike.

* Trump will leave the G7 because their leaders laughed at him in London and start the G2, a “group” of the US and Russia; Vladimir Putin will be elected its leader by two votes to nil.

* China and India will join forces and control entirely world manufacturing.

* Discernment, as an intellectual quality, will simply cease to be – but no one will be able to tell

* I won’t be able to think of a better way of ending this column than I have for the last 20 years. How could I firetrucking know? I amaze me!

* This column will end abrup

BC Pires is a never-seer, come-for-seer. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com