Note: I can't get the link to the specific post to work, so I will just link to Digby's blog, and scroll down until you see a puffy face on the cover of Time magazine, and you'll know you're in the right place.
As a follow on to yesterday's post on left-wing anger, I think it wise to recall a bit of history. This is always a chancy thing, as we are a notoriously historically ignorant people. Our media are infected with this virus, to the point they cannot even bring themselves to remember what a politican said last week (unless it's one of Tim Russert's "gotcha" moments on Meet the Press, and that's not history but political and journalistic theater designed to catch a liar or hypocrite; I digress). I think it is important to recall, as Digby does, that anger is not a political phenomenon that is new or limited to the left. I also think it is important to think about that previous manifestation of political rage, and its mouthpiece, Newton Leroy Gingrich.
I think it is safe to say some generalities about the Republican take-over of Congress in 1994. First, there were multiple displays of political anger at the time, but what most fascinated me, then and now, was that they were directed not at America as it was then constituted, but rather at the counter-culture. Conservatives viewed Bill Clinton as the counter-culture icon par excellence, the archetype of the anti-war protestor/pot smoking/long-haried-hippie-freak who had tried to repudiate his past. Of course, they were not going to allow him to do that. Neither were they going to allow him to continue in office, as the Republicans in general, and conservatives in particular, viewed the Oval Office as theirs by right (to a certain extent they were correct; the times should have dictated a Republican President, but George H. B. Bush was so abysmal, he was tossed on his ear; that he is viewed with nostalgia by many today should tell us a whole lot about our current state of affairs; again, I digress). Clinton was not just Democrat, but a former pot-smoking/war-protesting/long-haired-hippie-freak who wanted to pretend he was reformed. The Republicans aimed their legislative and overight agenda at the 1960's in general and Bill Clinton specifically because they understood that they owed their existence as a reaction to that counter-culture. They wanted to erase any trace of it from the American consciousness.
Into this political-cultural mix was thrown the most unlikely figure one can imagine. Gingrich first made his name in the mid 1980's when, after a special order speech to an empty house, he was reprimanded by then-Speaker Thomas O'Neill in a rare intervention. Gingrich knew the rules of the House, and got the Speaker's words striken from the record. It was the first strike against a House establishment as bloated as the Tipster's nose.
His next target was House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas. In a deal not nearly as lucrative as one Gingrich would negotiate once he ascended to the Speaker's chair, Wright managed to wrangle all sorts of money out of a publisher for a book. Gingrich demanded an investigation and Wright was gone. The final stroke was the 1994 election, and the defeat of Speaker Thomas Foley for re-election, and Gingrich's rise to the top. Those who thought he was just a firebrand who could only stand against a fat, tired, and long-since dessicated Democratic majority did not know our Newt. They hadn't seen anything yet.
In a collection of essays originally published in The New York Review of Books, Political Fictions, Joan Didion had an amazing article that was bio/analysis of Gingrich the man-as-budding-political-figure. Two of the most striking things from that particular essay have stayed with me, because they have a certain resonance with my own experience in life.
First, Gingrich had a restless, almost hyperactive mind. Not necessarily a great thinker, Gingrich was wedded to a certain aphoristic approach, jotting notes he kept in shoe boxes. There was rarely any connections amongst the various thoughts, except for the fact that they were spawned in Gingrich's head.
As a precocious child myself, I recognize the almost constant stream-of-consciousness that Gingrich put on paper. I was not nearly as disciplined as the young Gingrich, devoting the time to putting on paper all that flitted through my head. As an intellectual discipline, however, such early habits are antithetical to analytical ability; part of being able to think is to follow connections between things, to be critical of one's own thought and thought processes, to use not just logic and analogy but all sorts of sources to move from A to Z. Impressed with his own precociousness, Gingrich never graduated to the analytical stage. The conclusions he managed to draw was that having a plethora of thoughts equaled genius and wisdom; actually it just means he probably should have taken Ritalin. Never having developed a critical stance toward his own intellect, he never developed an analytical habit; there were seldom conlcusion that could be drawn from all the thoughts scratched on scraps of paper, except within the fertile mind of the future Speaker.
The other thing I remember very distinctly is that Gingrich was a devotee of science fiction. Growing up with an older sibling who was also one such, I can attest that science fiction is poor soil in which to plant the seed of serious, critical thought. Rather, it cultivates a pre-adolescent fixation on "things", on the possibilties inherent in technology. As an antidote to the too-often messy, irrational world of politics, science fiction offers a view of the world that says, "What if we just . . ." and then fills in the ellipse with all sorts of improbables. Because these improbables "exist" within a certain limited rationality of science fiction - I say limited because they are justified from a story point-of-view, but the background to these stories is rarely examined in detail - to the devotee, they seem less improbable than they might otherwise. As my one sibling who still harbors a love for S-F has said, why aren't we mining the asteroid belt, since there are all sorts of minerals out there for the taking. That such a thought could occur, detached from any other reality, and be taken as a serious economic/industrial query, shows the corrosive effects of S-F upon one's perception of reality.
Taken together - the lack of analytical ability in a hyperactive/precocious child, and the fascination with the technical possibilties offered by science fiction - create a world in which the messy realities, especially of politics, interfere with the possibilities inherent in humanity. This combination is exemplified in Gingrich's almost constant preference for techinical over political solutions; if we just allowed people to invent new things, all our problems would be solved. Such techinical entrepreneurship, however, is stifled by liberals with all their concerns for social welfare, for the regulation of business, for their preference for a politics of the political and social rather than a politics of technique. If we just freed American mind from the strictures of the social, the political, and the analytical, all sorts of possibilities open up.
Of course, such a view is so devoid of reality, shallow, and lacking in the humility and recognition of human limitations that it is difficult to grant it anything other than a chuckle. Yet, the lower house of Congress, and the Republican Party, was once controlled by one who thought this way. I say "thought" only in the sense that, as a private citizen, Gingrich no longer lives in the public eye. There is no doubt he still thinks this way, as evidenced by his announcement concerning a possible Presidential bid. Rather than go the usual route - exploratory committee, surrounding himself with backers and donors, getting the word out, etc - Gingrich insists a movement will somehow coalesce itself in America that will demand his leadership, and he will not-so-hunbly acquiesce to this demand. These are not so much the thoughts of a deranged mind as the thoughts of an undisciplined, non-analytical mind still wedded to non-existent possibilities he first read in the stories of Isaac Asimov and Ben Bova.
