Shut Down Nostalgia

In the condensed timescape of the twenty four hour news cycle, it is now officially appropriate to begin feeling nostalgia for the October government shutdown. We have, it seems, reached the point where the only storyline that captures our collective attention is one of existential threat, which, with the looming specter of federal government debt default, the shut down provided in spades. For just a moment, before House Speaker John Boehner let it slip that he would not, in fact, allow us to welsh on our debt and launch a global economic meltdown on his watch, it was beginning to feel like late 1991 in the Soviet Union. For those of us not out a paycheck this moment was, among many other things, spectacularly entertaining. It was like watching an overtime NFL playoff game, except that instead of the possibility of the end of the road for Ravens Nation (until next season) we were actually witnessing the possible final act for our really existing nation state, without the “just wait ‘til next year” safety net. This made for some real Must See TV, an archaic phrase popularized by the National Broadcasting Company’s dominant Thursday night comedy lineup in the 1990’s, an institution ultimately done in by reality TV. The government shutdown is, of course, nothing but the ne plus ultra form of reality television.

To get a sense of just how entertaining the government shutdown was, one needs only tune in to the news media’s current sky-is-falling narrative account of the difficulties in the implementation of the Affordable Health Care Act. It turns out that “Hey look, Obamacare isn’t working,” isn’t anywhere near as compelling as “Hey look, our way of life hangs in the balance,” although many on the right and many in the media would seek to conflate the two, both judging, perhaps correctly, that doing so is good for their bottom line. But, as I heard Tony Kornheiser say on his radio show the other day in response to Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin’s grandstanding about the World War II Memorial’s shutdown enforced closure, the American people aren’t stupid. As with pornography, we know looming catastrophe when we see it. And, not unlike the eight billion dollars’ worth of porn we consume annually, when we see it we can’t stop watching. (And if that isn’t testament to Freud’s pairing of Eros and Thanatos, the libido and the death instinct, then perhaps nothing is.)

It would be nice to close by saying “Wake me up when Obamacare is as taken for granted as Social Security.” But that presumes a future, one with both a functioning democracy and something resembling a modest social safety net, that was, if I am being optimistic, placed in jeopardy by the government shutdown, or, in my more pessimistic moods, was actually foreclosed by the half-way point of Ronald Reagan’s first term in office. If the latter, then our inability to stop watching the government shutdown was already a form of nostalgia for something long since lost. But since this perspective is simultaneously maudlin, defeatist, and realistic, I choose optimism. In the wake of the government shutdown, and with the full frontal assault on the Affordable Health Care Act in full swing, it may be the peak of naivete to give thanks and exclaim “We just dodged a bullet,” but I prefer the term chutzpah. The only way forward for the left is to have more chutzpah than the right and their corporate media acolytes, who have effectively pronounced Obamacare dead on arrival, to which I can but say “Obamacare is dead. Long live Obamacare!”