You say you want a revolution?

 Well that was a fine and timely Spring Break we gave ourselves (though we're not supposed to call it that, it was a Wellness Holiday)... and now it's Spring! Kurt Andersen sees a glimmer of light at the beginning of the end (let us hope!) of the pandemic.

Have to admit its getting better... https://t.co/FwkDpCWBVT

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) March 20, 2021

Spring always effects a kind of revolution in my outlook and disposition, as the world turns and tilts to the sun. A year ago Spring 2020 was glorious, until on Friday the 13th they pulled the plug on Spring Training--we were in Scottsdale, enjoying our first Cactus League excursion--and the world sorta stopped revolving. 

This Spring, things are finally looking up. Went for an MRI last Wednesday, later today I'll see a neurologist, I go for my second COVID shot next Sunday, and then for a serious second consultation with the surgeon who may promise to fix my constricted spine and get me back to really enjoying the dogwalks that have become, thanks to my increasingly annoying stenosis, a slog.

Meanwhile, back in Democracy in America, it's morning in America again.

 

As Andersen tells the tale in Evil Geniuses, the Reagan Revolution was the pivotal turn away from the light that's landed us in our present hyper-partisan, oligarchic, plutocratic, un-democratic doldrums. (I'm struck once again, btw, by the stark contrast between our collective/political distress and the surge of Spring-fed delight so many of us are gratified to feel every year about this time. The saving salvific surge. Thank goodness for it. Or thank the equinox.) 

 

"Around 1980," Andersen writes, "the Great Uncoupling of the rich from the rest began." Gordon Gecko's ethos of selfishness reigned. ("Greed is right. Greed works.") "Nearly half of Americans said they worried a lot about being laid off... Since 1981 states have cut their funding of public colleges and universities by half... Americans' personal debt excluding home loans increased twelvefold..." And on and on goes the litany of our decline, or rather the decline of the 99%. Plus.

But I've just read Louis Menand's latest Americana essay in The New Yorker, and I take a small measure of courage from his reflections on the meaning of the pre-Reagan Revolution revolution that didn't quite come off.

...The music historian Greil Marcus was a Berkeley undergraduate in 1964. He described the experience of rallies and mass meetings this way:

Your own history was lying in pieces on the ground, and you had the choice of picking up the pieces or passing them by. Nothing was trivial, nothing incidental. Everything connected to a totality, and the totality was how you wanted to live: as a subject or as an object of history. . . . As the conversation expanded, institutional, historical power dissolved. People did and said things that made their lives of a few weeks before seem unreal—they did and said things that, not long after, would seem ever more so.

No, the '60s revolution did not come off. It sputtered and slid anti-climactically into the self-absorbed superficial 70s, eventually paving the way to the Reagan devolution. But as Menand suggests, those Michigan and Berkeley radicals help us recall the great message of American philosophy in the pragmatic tradition (not to mention Marx). "Things do not have to be the way they are."

And, 

The nation was at a crossroads in the nineteen-sixties. The system did not break, but it did bend. We are at another crossroads today. It can be made to bend again.

We'll see.