Anybody remember the comic Sam Kinison? His schtick was to ramble along talking about something in a halfway normal voice, then suddenly distort his face into a feral snarl and scream three or four words, then drop back to normal again. It was quite funny, if a little alarming.
A similar effect -- I think of it as political Tourette syndrome -- befalls a lot of writers on politics and culture whenever the firing of some stray neuron brings the thought of Karl Marx to mind. I recently noticed a fine example in a book review written by one Bruce Thornton, author of _Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization_ ( http://tinyurl.com/27uqz).
Here's Thornton's normal voice:
"Along the way Miller gives an entertaining survey of everything from the mechanics of starting blocks to the layout of the festival sites--allaimed toward demonstrating the central place of athletics in the culture of the Greeks."
Then without warning his face goes mottled red, his eyes bulge, and he drops to all fours and chews the carpet con-brio for a paragraph or two:
"Unfortunately, the current interpretation of athletics--both classical and modern--reflects the anticapitalist prejudices of a worn-out Marxist cultural criticism. This received wisdom tells us that competition and hyper-masculinity are really nothing more than a training-program for the shock troops of capitalist and imperialist hegemony--although sports also provide a distracting and profitable spectacle for the oafish middle classes."
The fit quickly passes, though, and we return to the calm, even stagnant waters of book-reviewery.
I always enjoy seeing stuff like this -- it gives me a vivid mental image of old Karl's mischievous ghost roaming the Castle Gormenghast of contemporary middlebrow thought and every so often blowing a cold draft down some pop-historical Grubstreeter's poorly-barbered nape.
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.