Hildegarde

As I write these blog entries, there is a situation occuring in the United States that I think may be unprecedented in our history.  I have no idea how this is being reported abroad, although I do get a couple of European news channels and check a few web sites every day.  As far as I can tell, very little is being said about it, and what is being said is perfunctory: when Democrats take to the field to defend and promote President Obama’s health care reforms, they’re met with a lot of opposition.

Well, it’s not opposition they’re being met with, although that’s there, too.  What they’re getting is large groups of outrightly angry people, and those people are not angry at insurance companies or the private health care system now operating in the US. 

It would be dificult to exagerate the fury–and I do mean fury-of what probably is about a fifth of the US  electorate against the very idea of government funded health insurance.  

And that’s in spite of the fact that the US  already has government funded health insurance, and a lot of it.  Medicare (for people over 65) and Medicaid (for the poor) and the various CHIPs programs (for children across a broad range of the middle class) now pay almost 40% of the health care bill in the United States. 

But the real kicker, the thing that completely flummoxes me, is the direction in which these criticisms have been going.  Several chain e-mails and a couple of web site newsletters have spread the contention that the new health care legislation would institute “death panels,” for instance, that would “pull the plug on Grandma” (that’s President Obama’s phrase) because she was using up too much resources and, you know, she’s old, she’s going to die anyway.

In other words, something like a fifth of US voters think that Obama’s drive to provide universal health insurance to everybody in the country is a disguised maneuver to kill them.

But don’t get all superior to the ignorant fundamentalists–which is how they’re being portrayed by at least some of the Democratic Party–because I’ve just spent eight years listening to a big hunking pile of liberals and people on the left tell me that democracy is dead in America, Bush and Cheney are rigging the elections, the whole thing about 9/11 is just a ruse to declare martial law and suspend the Constitution, making W. President for Life.

There was no evidence whatsover that Bush and Cheney were getting ready to suspend the Constitution, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that the new health care reform bill includes “death panels,” or anything like them. 

What there is evidence of is a country that is not only increasingly without a shared narrative uniting all (or most) of its citizens, but a country in which two competing narratives are sucking in more and more of the electorate.

And the two competing narratives are not compatible, because they are essentially the same narrative wth different cast lists.   There is the Real  America, the Good America, over here.  There is the Bad America, the anti-America, over there.  We uphold the good and the right and the true.  They’re allied with the devil.  They want to kill us.

If you don’t want to confine yourself to  American politics, you can take this same paradigm global, because it will work with much of the media in Europe, and the peculiar form of “anti-Americanism” that is actually anti-some kind of fantasy with no basis in reality.

But then, aren’t the twin hysterias of left and right within America also fantasies with no basis in reality?  In Europe, I’ve been told that only the rich get health care in America (actually, everybody does, irrespective of ability to pay), that old people are left to starve (social security went into effect in FDR’s administration), that the movie Sicko was banned from screens across the Midwest (it went everywhere, and is now freely available on cable movie channels), and that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were a secret set-up by the Bush administration to allow them to invade Iraq (look, logic aside here, even Cheney could have done better than that).

Right wing America tells me that “left-liberals” are going to shred the Constitution, take away free speech and freedom of religion, and impose secularism on the nation.  Left wing America tells me that “fundamentalists” are going to shred the Constitution, take away free speech and freedom of religion, and impose Biblical literalism on the nation.

Neither side seems to be capable of thinking that the two different points of view could possibly live together under the dispensation the Founders envisioned–lots of people who didn’t agree on lots of things willing to put those aside every once in a while to get the roads laid and the bridges built and the mail delivered.

It may seem like I’ve veered off the topic of these posts, but I haven’t really.  We’re either going to find a shared narrative, or die. 

And there are certainly lots of different ways that we can find such a narrative.  One is to have one imposed by force, which is what the American left and right are really worried about.   There is certainly historical precedent for attempts to impose such narratives by force.  The history of Islam is virtually nothing else. 

Another way is to require a public acceptance of an official central narrative without delving too far into how thoroughly the people doing the accepting actually believe.  You wouldn’t think that this would actually work, but the Romans managed it for centuries, with the proviso that public acceptance constituted at least a declaration of loyalty to the government of Rome.

That particular option, however, requires that none of the constituent parts of your nation hold beliefs that preclude their aquiescence to that public acceptance.  “We don’t give a damn what you believe,” the Romans said to the Jews, “honoring the Roman Gods just means you promise not to rebel against Rome.”  “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” the Jews thundered back, “God himself said that.”

Oh, well.

The most successful way to solve this problem, however, is for a new narrative to arise to take the place of the old one.

It’s hard to say what will be successful in a narrative before it arises.  The story of some guy who lives poor, dies poorer and is executed as a common criminal probably did not strike the Romans as a serious threat to the Roman narrative, but it was. 

We can say some things about successful narratives, however.

First is that they have to be narratives–they have to be stories.  Lectures and logical proofs will not do it.

Second is that they can’t violate common knowledge unless common knowledge can be definitively proven to be false.  And even then, it’s better if they don’t present prospective believers with periodic knowledge shocks.  Think about reading a lovely novel that y ou’re really into when the author suddenly tells you that Paris is the capital of Italy.   It pulls you right out of the story and makes it that much harder for you to get lost in it.

Third–and possibly most important–it must speak to real, immediate, pressing human concerns.

Robert thought that the environmentalists were a good candidate for establishing a new narrative. . I don’t, because most of what they concentrate on is abstract to most people.  Global warming, evil corporations, the cultural constrction of gender–to the guy sitting in a diner at six o’clock in the morning, worrying about the results of his wife’s breast biopsy, it’s all going to seem a little remote.

Star Wars, now.  Or Harry Potter.  Or Middle Earth.

That’s something else again.