THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER

August is winding down, and as we approach the resumption of the real world, after Labor Day, the Republican craziness is imploding. After riotous town meetings, death threats against Obama, birther bizarrerie, and even the egregious Michelle Bachman being booed at a constituent meeting, with cretinous creeps like Chuck Grassley fresh out of plausible pontifications [do you ever wonder how some of these people actually got elected?], with Ted Kennedy lying in state, and serious talk of reconciliation now to the fore -- with all of this, it looks as though we will get a health care reform bill that has a good deal, but by no means all, of what we dreamed of and hoped for and voted for. JUST AS I PREDICTED. This is not rocket science or brain surgery, folks, it is Congressional legislating, pretty much as it has always been.

Let us suppose that I am correct. As we approach the Thanksgiving/Christmas season, where will we be? Well, the economy will slowly, painfully, be turning around, having avoided a second Great Depression, but unemployment will still be unacceptably high -- although much of the Stimulus Bill spending will still lie before us. We will finally have significant health care reform, though muich will remain to be done. The first serious attempt at confronting global warming will be law. A Special Prosecutor will be investigating the Bush Justice Department. And the President will be able to ask himself and the country, "What shall we do in my second year?"

I mean, seriously, what more did you really expect? Gay rights remains to be addressed, though the first steps have been taken. Barney Frank will have to find a way to shepherd serious financial reform through Congress. And Obama will have to actually wind down the Iraq war and place realistic limits on the Afghanistan involvement. But Peace Talks will be restarted in the Middle East, and we may even see some sort of major change in Iran, though that is up to the Iranians, not us.

I think back again to the wisdom of Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse argued that all of us carry within us repressed infantile fantasies of immediate and effortless gratification -- fantasies to which an enormous amount of libidinous energy is attached, but which are, in their very nature, unrealizable. Combining the deepest ideas of Marx and Freud, Marcuse tells us [this in EROS AND CIVILIZATION] that the realistic goal of any revolution can only be to diminish the quantum of surplus repression imposed on men and women by the demands of capitalism and tyranny. But what fuels revolutionary fervor is the promise of LIBERATION, which is to say the fulfilment of those repressed fantasies. That is why those who have lived through revolutionary times, no matter how dangerous and uncomfortable, look back on them as the most glorious moments of their lives [rather like the way people think about tornados, hurricanes, wars, and floods, and for the same reason.]

Well, the election of Obama was no revolution, but for a moment it felt like one. Now we are seeing that the reduction of surplus repression, so to speak, still leaves us with repressed fantasies of liberation, and so we feel let down. That is normal, understandable, but not really vrey grown up of us, and so we must put away our fantasies and get back to the daily work of making as many incremental improvements in the life of this country as we can.

In an odd way, I think Teddy understood this, but that Jack and Bobby did not. That is why Jack was actually an indifferent President, and Bobby an indifferent Senator, but both were spectacular bearers of our fantasies of instant and infinite gratification.

HERBERT MARCUSE -- WORDS OF SOLACE IN DIFFICULT TIMES

I have been getting more and more depressed by the unwillingness of Democrats to pass meaningful health care reform. I assumed the Republicans would be obstructive, and that there would be some heavy negotiating with so-called Blue Dog Democrats, but the level of resistance has surprised me, even though I come to the political world fully outfitted with Marxist presuppositions and a lifetime of disappointments. For solace and wisdom I turned, as I often do, to the words of my old friend and one-time co-author, Herbert Marcuse, now long departed. In the Preface to his most powerful book, ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN, Herbert apologizes for the abstract character of the analysis, with these words:

“In the absence of demonstrable agents and agencies of social change, the critique is thus thrown back to a high level of abstraction. There is no ground on which theory and practice, thought and action meet. Even the most empirical analysis of historical alternatives appears to be unrealistic speculation, and commitment to them a matter of personal (or group) preference.”

He then continues, a paragraph later: “The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less reprehensible. The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful.”

The fault, in short, lies not in our President, but in ourselves. Were there sufficient support in the electorate for the necessary and salutary changes he seeks, there would, I have no doubt, be a sufficiency of Representatives and Senators willing to vote for them.

What to do? Well, I spent a few hours yesterday at the Chapel Hill Public Library, collecting signatures on a petition being circulated nationally in support of the principles underlying Obama's health care proposals. As might be expected, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. In ninety minutes, two of us collected seventy signatures. The principal resistance came from a few folks who were holding out for a single payer system. But Chapel Hill is to North Carolina as Berkeley is to Northern California, Madison is to Wisconsin, Hyde Park is to Chicago, and Harvard Square is to Cambridge. Still, the welling up of protest here in the newly Democratic South does seem to have turned Kay Hagen around, and perhaps a comparable outpouring in other swing constituencies will do the trick.

Is it any wonder that I have retreated further into the clouds even than theory, to spend my time spelling out a fantasy of the ideal college?