Time & Perspective Quote by Alan Dundes

Polls promise a peephole into the future, but Dundes coolly reminds us theyre really just receipts from the immediate past. The line has the brisk, classroom clarity of an educator who has watched students and institutions confuse measurement with prophecy. A poll is not a compass; its a snapshot. The moment you click the shutter, the world has already moved on.

The intent is partly methodological and partly cultural critique. Dundes, best known as a folklorist, spent his career showing how people read meaning into patterns and artifacts as if they were stable truths. Polling works the same way: we treat a temporary, socially produced data point as if it were an enduring fact about what "the public" thinks. His phrasing - "tease out" - hints at the seduction involved: the idea that opinion is a hidden substance you can coax into revelation. But "once taken, they belong to the past" punctures that romance. Polls are not neutral discoveries; theyre time-stamped constructions shaped by wording, sampling, and the very events they claim to track.

The subtext is a warning about the feedback loop. Polls dont just record trends; they can create them, feeding media narratives, donor behavior, and voter psychology. Treating yesterday as destiny is how campaigns and news cycles end up chasing their own reflections.

Contextually, Dundes is pushing against modernitys craving for quantifiable certainty. Polls soothe anxiety by turning messy civic life into numbers, but the comfort is fleeting by design: they force us into a treadmill of perpetual re-measurement, mistaking movement for understanding.