-- By Tom Phillips
With nowhere to go this Viral Spring, we've been staying home, watching old movies we missed the first time around. I skipped "Dr. Zhivago" in 1965 because I thought it was sentimental claptrap, and it is. But it's a cultural icon, a landmark for my generation. Sometime in the not too distant future Hollywood will make a blockbuster tear-jerker about love in the Pandemic of 2020.
No one alive can remember anything like it -- a political crisis, wrapped in an economic crisis, inside a global pandemic. It resembles 1918, with the Russian Revolution bundled in World War One and the flu pandemic. Paging Dr. Zhivago...
Then as now, politics comes first. The pandemic will be over in a year or so. The economy will follow the nation's health into recovery. But the political crisis will not be resolved in 2020.
Like the Wobblies in the 1920's, both Democrats and Republicans fantasize about a final conflict that will decide the nation's destiny. But with two septuagenarians vying for the White House, this is not the year.
No matter who wins, both sides will double down for 2024, when power will pass to a new generation. War Babies like Biden and Bernie Sanders will age out of public life, and Boomers like Trump will quickly follow, with a shove from the next generation. AOC is a harbinger; so is Ted Cruz. This decade will complete a century of economic, political and cultural warfare that started with the Great Depression. By 2030 this will be a new America, and a new New World.
To win control of it, Republicans have made it clear that they will sacrifice democracy. With demographic trends against them, their plan is to institute minority rule through anti-democratic means. During the W. and Trump years they have worked tirelessly to complete the groundwork: elevating young, partisan right-wing judges to the nation's highest courts; gerrymandering to produce a conservative congress; promoting a "unitary" presidency that can rule by decree; and suppressing voting rights by every means available.
Meanwhile Democrats envision a grand coalition of the weak -- labor, racial and religious minorities, teachers, writers and artists, academics and intellectuals, the old, the poor, the unemployed and the homeless. This is actually a majority in America, and one that can articulate its goals. But to achieve power it will have to be a super-majority.
Democrats dream of a Nanny state like Denmark; Republicans of Putin's Russia. So much for the American Dream. Meanwhile China mocks us all, as the center of gravity shifts inexorably back toward the Middle Kingdom.
The only sensible line in the movie of "Dr. Zhivago" came from Lara, who told her doctor/lover -- this is a terrible time to be alive.
So is this. I can't wait for the movie.
-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips
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| Omar Sharif as Dr. Zhivago |
With nowhere to go this Viral Spring, we've been staying home, watching old movies we missed the first time around. I skipped "Dr. Zhivago" in 1965 because I thought it was sentimental claptrap, and it is. But it's a cultural icon, a landmark for my generation. Sometime in the not too distant future Hollywood will make a blockbuster tear-jerker about love in the Pandemic of 2020.
No one alive can remember anything like it -- a political crisis, wrapped in an economic crisis, inside a global pandemic. It resembles 1918, with the Russian Revolution bundled in World War One and the flu pandemic. Paging Dr. Zhivago...
Then as now, politics comes first. The pandemic will be over in a year or so. The economy will follow the nation's health into recovery. But the political crisis will not be resolved in 2020.
Like the Wobblies in the 1920's, both Democrats and Republicans fantasize about a final conflict that will decide the nation's destiny. But with two septuagenarians vying for the White House, this is not the year.
No matter who wins, both sides will double down for 2024, when power will pass to a new generation. War Babies like Biden and Bernie Sanders will age out of public life, and Boomers like Trump will quickly follow, with a shove from the next generation. AOC is a harbinger; so is Ted Cruz. This decade will complete a century of economic, political and cultural warfare that started with the Great Depression. By 2030 this will be a new America, and a new New World.
To win control of it, Republicans have made it clear that they will sacrifice democracy. With demographic trends against them, their plan is to institute minority rule through anti-democratic means. During the W. and Trump years they have worked tirelessly to complete the groundwork: elevating young, partisan right-wing judges to the nation's highest courts; gerrymandering to produce a conservative congress; promoting a "unitary" presidency that can rule by decree; and suppressing voting rights by every means available.
Meanwhile Democrats envision a grand coalition of the weak -- labor, racial and religious minorities, teachers, writers and artists, academics and intellectuals, the old, the poor, the unemployed and the homeless. This is actually a majority in America, and one that can articulate its goals. But to achieve power it will have to be a super-majority.
Democrats dream of a Nanny state like Denmark; Republicans of Putin's Russia. So much for the American Dream. Meanwhile China mocks us all, as the center of gravity shifts inexorably back toward the Middle Kingdom.
The only sensible line in the movie of "Dr. Zhivago" came from Lara, who told her doctor/lover -- this is a terrible time to be alive.
So is this. I can't wait for the movie.
-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips
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