A sigh

 

If what the paleontologists say is true, homo sapiens has been walking around on this planet a pitiful 350,000 years. Of that amount, I, at 67, have been here 0.00019142857 of that time. It ain’t much. When I raise my eyes and look at the politics of my time, or the past 200 years or so (0.00057142857), I notice that I have been, except for certain exceptional periods, pretty much on the losing side of all political battles.

At one time, working class leftist politics was animated by the idea that it was inevitable. The working class, being the productive class, would eventually realize its power and overthrow the aristocrats and plutocrats and institute the reign of plebocrats – democrats.

That, I should say, defined politics in the supposedly “short” twentieth century.

The working class decisively lost. The plebocrats, it turned out, were bureaucrats from the Party. And on the other side of the wall, after a number of concessions were made after WWII and up until the sixties, the Free World reverted to the old capitalist order in which those who succeeded in maximizing their wealth a thousand and ten thousand fold more than those who produced the wealth held all the power and made all the decisions, although, as is right and proper, through various representatives who could claim to represent not only the interests of the richest but also, on marginal things, the interests of the rest.

Working class leftist politics, in my time, shifted its focus: it became a matter of those who had the most cultural capital. A wholly untrustworthy group, blind for the most part to their socio-economic function and retreating to a Left of the Mind. Not that I am bitching – I’m a camp follower of that group.

At certain points in my life, I have said, oh fuck it and unplugged from reading about politics – the politics of the 0.00019142857 of the time that homo sapiens have been here – because it was so frustrating. I was at a mook’s distance from any real power. I understood the non-voter better than the voter, really. Alas, I’ve grown old and no wiser, and here I am again, a wee little American pea, raising my voice against war, atrocity, and the bestial stupidity of the ruling class. I know in my bones what happens, having seen it happen over and over – the current crop of idiots will fall, and power will once more return to the technocratic representatives of the plutocrats, who will make little deals for us all, to an extent. The poohbahs of the left, with their cultural capital, will alternatively bitch and tell us all that our very lives are at stake if we don’t elect a buncha oatmeal to “fight” for us. And so on.

Well, what was I, a 0.00019142857-er, expecting?