The Colt 45 Chronicle #44

This is an example of a letter written to myself, probably with the intention of reworking it into a letter to a friend. I remember I took a copy of it with me when I drove back to the West Coast from New York City in December of 1988. I quit my first career-track job at the Foundation Center after three months. I couldn't stand it. Nothing at the university had prepared me for the horror -- the horrible pettiness and ignobility -- of the 9-to-5 life.

The ostensible reason for the drive back to California was to return a VW bus to my father. Keeping it in New York City was not an option. My wife was in class all day and I was downtown at work. We had no parking space included as part of our married student housing. So we had to park the bus on the street which required frequent moves due the city's alternate side of street parking schedule. We accumulated tickets and the bus was broken into on more than one occasion.

I refer to myself below in the third person. The tone is semi-bombastic, par for the course for most of these youthful letters, which probably had something to do with the fact that I was normally drunk when I sat down at the word processor. I recount a morning after I stayed up all night writing a paper on Plato's Gorgias and then zonked from lack of sleep and too much speed getting lost in the Berkeley hills trying to find the house of my professor, kind old man Gregory Vlastos. My wife, who was still at that point my girlfriend, had recently moved out of our apartment so as to be better able to pursue her trists.

After I finally located Vlastos' house and slipped my paper under his door, I headed home via a route that took me through campus; that's where I ran into my professor Art Quinn and the departmental administrative assistant Andy who was working his throwing arm with one those big rubber bands. I think he belonged to a fast-pitch softball league.

Autumn 1988 

Cocksure and lesson-proof. Pay attention more to my brain and less to direction. A time when I listened to ON THE BEACH, when Ashley had moved out, when I had been left utterly alone and semi-adult with my graduate-class-on-Plato-with-the-foremost-scholar; friends poured in, wanting to see the new man, and all his new old furniture. Coming down off speed, off crystal, which he had been with so much during that period, the world was new for him. People came to him. The walk at dawn had gone on earlier, like Christ without a cross. The pilgrimage that meant nothing but burnt paper. You can't hold a candle to it. Talking to Quinn and Andy on the way back: Quinn was pitching Thomas Mann; I was pitching Homer; Andy was pitching pitching. -- Off to Chateau and Mark naked and the shitty out-of-place reggae music which was the choice over Irangate on the radio on the way to a Mastercard breakfast. Nothing can touch that time for what it was: William Henry Harrison, a Snuz fight, a rosewood legged chair that smelled like a dead dog; "Adorno as the Devil" by Lyotard; Shale with a girlfriend at last, crazy and gone.

Massive System Failure

The political system in this country is failing. The GOP is fracturing along a Tea Party Bircher versus Rovian establishment fault. At the end of last month longtime political commentator Thomas Edsall, wrote a story, "The Republican Autopsy Report," that appeared on the New York Times "Opinionator" blog. In it he discusses a 97-page post-2012 election assessment commissioned by RNC chairman Reince Preibus:

The G.O.P. report is an extraordinary public acknowledgment of internal discord and vulnerability, which has intensified the battle between the deeply committed conservative wing and the more pragmatic, pro-business wing for control of the Republican Party. With just a few exceptions, it does not mince words. 

At the federal level, it says, the party is “marginalizing itself,” and, in the absence of major change, “it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win a presidential election in the near future.” Young voters are “rolling their eyes at what the party represents.” Voters’ belief that “the G.O.P. does not care about them is doing great harm.” Formerly loyal voters gathered in focus groups describe Republicans as “ ‘scary,’ ‘narrow-minded’ and ‘out of touch’ and that we were a party of ‘stuffy old men.’ ”

What's going on is the GOP establishment, which made a Faustian bargain with the Tea Party to combat the Obama tidal wave following the 2008 election, is now, with Karl Rove still the #1 strategist, attempting to eradicate the Bircher jihadists:

More broadly, the alliance between Rove and the R.N.C. does substantiate the view that establishment forces are driving the reform movement within the Republican Party, an establishment that includes much of corporate America, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Bush family and its allies, and the more moderate, traditionalist donor community. 

Conservative analysts like Timothy P. Carney of the Washington Examiner and Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review quickly spotted the establishment tilt in the Priebus report. Carney wrote:

Republican elites tend to favor mass immigration and be ambivalent or supportive of legal abortion and gay marriage. So, shouldn’t we take it with a grain of salt when the Republican leadership puts out a document saying that the G.O.P. should change only its rhetoric on economic issues, but change its substance on social issues?

Similarly, Ponnuru wrote that the recommendations “come naturally to Republican elites” who “are more likely to favor same-sex marriage and comprehensive immigration reform on principle.” The report reflects “elite conventional wisdom perfectly, just perfectly.” 

In January, I pointed out that “If the conservative movement continues on its downward trajectory, the American business community, which has the most to lose from Republican failure, will be the key force arguing for moderation.” 

That moment has come. The Priebus report and Rove’s Conservative Victory Project together mark a significant escalation in the battle between the center and the right over the soul of the Republican Party. What has yet to be determined is whether they are fighting over a patient who can be quickly resuscitated or a patient with a chronic but not fatal illness — or a corpse. 

The very bluntness of the Growth and Opportunity report reflects the seriousness of the moment the Republican Party faces: increasing difficulty holding on to its House majority; weakening prospects of regaining control of the Senate; and the threat of unending Democratic control of the White House.

For the Democrats it appears that it is TINA ("There Is No Alternative") to Obamaism, which after much hope and longing on the part of a progressive majority in this country seems to be nothing more than Clintonism. Obama's failure to get a gun control measure out of the Senate along with his proposal to chop Social Security benefits presage an impotence -- a mere six months after his landslide reelection -- that can only grow more pronounced. The AFL-CIO is rapidly shrinking and looking to overhaul its organizing model. How many times have we heard that before? So there is no hope there. Occupy Wall Street, barring another economic meltdown, is unlikely to recapture its former glory.

I was looking to Cyprus to show us a way forward by voluntarily rejecting the euro. We need courage, experimentation. But in the last couple of weeks there is no indication that this will happen. So for now it appears that our best bet is Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement. Rachel Donadio has an excellent story, "President of Italy Nominates Center-Left Official as Premier," in today's paper about the latest political developments in Italy. Luigi Bersani resigned the leadership of the Democratic Party after two months of unsuccessfully attempting to form a government and getting his presidential candidates to succeed President Giorgio Napolitano. With no resolution on the horizon, the 87-year-old Napolitano agreed to serve another term and was reelected. Now, as Donadio reports,

After months of political paralysis capped by a week of turmoil, President Giorgio Napolitano on Wednesday named Enrico Letta, a high-ranking official in the center-left Democratic Party, to form a broad coalition government to try to steer Italy out of political chaos and its worst recession since World War II. 

And former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the great survivor of Italian politics, emerged as a kingmaker by default, having outlasted most of his adversaries. 

“It’s undeniable that this is a victory for Berlusconi,” said Giovanni Orsina, the deputy director of the School of Government at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. “He got what he asked for, from Napolitano’s re-election to a political government with broad, bipartisan support.”

Like the current Greek government, a three-party coalition in which historical enemies on the left and right have joined together out of fear of extinction and a lack of viable alternatives, Mr. Letta is potentially the last gasp of a political cycle that in Italy began in the early 1990s with the collapse of the postwar political order and the rise of Mr. Berlusconi.

The party system is collapsing. Television is said to have led to the erosion of political organization in the United States. Now TV is being replaced by the Internet. Life is migrating online. Is this good or bad? Judging from the stasis of the status quo one can only conclude that so far it's not good. We might be at the point where there is so much information available that we are paralyzed -- the "dream machine" that Jean-Francois Lyotard predicted in his seminal La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) (1979).