Strategery, Obummer and the Drunken Taxicabs of Absolute Reality

It's worth reminding ourselves from time to time that when any of us blames one party or the other for election strategy, atmospherics, and organizing models, we're rearranging and polishing the deck chairs on the Titanic. Isn't the real issue that the economic model has changed to something decidedly post-industrial and that nobody knows what to do about it? The way the political parties talk about this shift doesn't even come close to capturing its complexity. Neither political party addresses the facts on the ground, and to that extent, their proposals and our criticisms fall short

Even a rotting capitalist order can keep the chickens from coming home to roost for a while -- an economic system can be perpetuated for a surprisingly long time even though an ever-shrinking percentage of people benefit from it because everything is stacked in the winners' favor. They constitute a charmed circle, those "shiny happy people holding hands," don't they? But such a situation can't continue forever -- ordinary citizens won't tolerate misery without hope of relief, especially when hope has been held out to them for so long, as it has been in western industrialized societies.

Here's where I think we stand -- a change has come over the economic life of the nation, and we don't know how to deal with it. I still think it's much better to have Democrats in power than Republicans, but there's no easy way out of our difficulties. That's why, I suggest, those (especially progressives or liberals) who are always reproaching "Obummer" and the Dems are missing the point – he and they are running up against a murderer's row of what Allen Ginsberg called "the Drunken Taxicabs of Absolute Reality." Those things tend to swerve as cannily as Democritus's atoms right in your direction, just when you think you've outsmarted and evaded them all.