The seventeen-year locusts are back, and with them the four-year Democrats, stridulating their immemorial song: lesserrevil lesserrevil lesserrevil.... Some things never change.
As always, I find myself talking to good, earnest, well-meaning people who urge me to go pull a lever for Kerry. "Surely you'll admit," they say, "he's better than Bush?"
I always have a slightly disoriented feeling after these conversations, and I think I've just figured out why. It's like talking to a certain kind of neurological patient -- somebody like the famous H.M.
H.M., a victim of brain surgery, can't convert short-term to long-term memory. He has both kinds -- he remembers his childhood, and he can memorize eight-digit numbers and repeat them back to you a minute or two later, and he can
conduct a coherent conversation for a short while. But after about ten minutes, all newly-formed memories drop off a cliff. He will reintroduce himself to you as if you had never met.
Like H.M., what my good, earnest, well-meaning lesserrevillers can't do is incorporate new memories into their picture of politics. They can't remember and learn how the contemporary political system works _over time_.
At least since '68, the system has worked like a ratchet -- a mechanism that will only rotate in one direction. Apply force to it in that direction, and it rotates. Apply force in the other direction, and it won't rotate back; there's a little device called a "pawl" that engages teeth in the rotor and prevents movement in the backwards direction.
The Democrats are the pawl in the American political ratchet. Every few years we get a reactionary onslaught; a Nixon or Reagan or Bush gets into office and rotates the ratchet rightwards. Then the impulse spends itself -- usually because of a scandal -- and a Democrat gets into the White House, like Carter or Clinton, who will keep the chair warm for the next Republican, and in the
meantime resist any attempt to roll back the gains made during the last right-wing assault. In the political lexicon of the Democratic Party this is called "being realistic."
A BBC journalist recently did a "whatever happened to" story on poor H.M. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A667820). He reports:
"[H.M.] still likes detective shows. He likes doing crosswords, and watching TV. However, it is impossible for him to make new friends as he cannot remember a person for any longer than ten minutes. He lives in a world where... Truman is still President.... He never really knows exactly how old he is, but reckons that he is about 30. When he looks into a mirror, he is shocked by the reflection."
Kinda says it all.
Posted by gracchus at May 29, 2004 07:26 PM | TrackBack