America, now in its third century of imminent doom

Jesus, by 10 a.m. I was ready for a scotch, no ice; the Sunday talk shows had droned depressingly onward and distinctly downward, assessing everything from mini-right-wing coups at the local community center to the looming potential of global warfare igniting in Iran, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or North Korea, or, just as likely, someplace we haven't thought of yet, just for a refreshing changeup in apocalyptic geography.

All that followed my usual morning embrace of the national press, a mercifully expeditious version of the above but every bit as much a downer, topped yesterday by two especially doleful ruminations: the Washington Post's Dan Balz's "Sunday Take," which zeroed in on President Obama's need to "rebalance" his administration's increasingly unbalanced infancy, and the NY Times' Frank Rich's worry about waiting for "some unexpected disaster to strike," while in the meantime "Beltway omens for the current White House are grim."

What it call came down to, it seemed in the broadest sense, wasn't so much that we should be on-guard, but that we're hopelessly pinioned between ancient, immovable forces of resolute status quoism and stumbling ignorance. That, anyway, is what I took from the written word, which was promptly confirmed by the spoken.

On CNN's "State of the Union," for instance, with respect to health-care reform, there sat Sen. Dick Durbin, trying his best to counter the smiley-faced humbug of Sen. John Cornyn. Yet what Durbin had to say -- or rather, wouldn't say -- was more of a blow to anyone's progressive morale than all of Cornyn's reactionaryism.

At one point, up went a graphic of Sen. Kent Conrad's latest observation that the sad reality for proponents of a public option is that there simply aren't enough votes in the Senate to get 'er done. What say you to that, asked moderator John King of Sen. Durbin, the latter of whom then said everything but Goodbye, public option. He held out some hope for a conference-committee solution, but his words seemed perfunctory at best.

Later, on ABC's "This Week," and again, on the issue of health care, George Stephanopoulos had paired up Newt Gingrich and Howard Dean. It was a revealing juxtaposition.

While Newt was throwing grossly pernicious, intentionally misleading hardballs about, say, health-care rationing, all poor Howard had to grip was weaker Truth. He had spent 10 years practicing medicine and Medicare never said No to a prescribed treatment, while private health-insurance bureaucracies habitually denied this and that. But in virtually every verbal instance, Gingrich got in the first punch: it was a lopsided mismatch of offense vs. defense, and human psychology generally dictates the former-as-winner within the subtle mental sifting of auditors.

Sandwiched, in my market, between CNN and ABC's offerings was "Meet the Press," in which host David Gregory at one point almost physically launched with a question about the wisdom of "the president want[ing] to expand government with not just a stimulus program but also a massive healthcare overhaul" -- the emphasis coming complete with a histrionic spreading-hands gesture and sardonic grin.

Yet "MTP" did contain one key and sudden moment of insight, however ricocheting, in my opinion, it may have been. Newsweek's Jon Meacham, as a guest in the Roundtable forum or whatever they call it, recalled that Obama had proclaimed "that the thing that has interested him most as president is that he thinks that the country is interested in complexity and will listen to explanations. I just don't think there's been that effort on health care, for understandable reasons. There's a hell of a lot going on."

True, and though it's also undoubtedly true that a better job of explaining could have been done -- despite the axiomatic predicament that "explaining is losing"; attacking always packs more punch -- the real and deeper flaw, it seems to me, is that the country was only momentarily "interested in," or perhaps only feigned interest in, "complexity."

Something suggested, I thought, in Dan Balz's piece. For he noted a Republican pollster's "observation ... that declining confidence in the president's economic policies has affected attitudes about the rest of Obama's agenda," principally health-care reform. Think about that: "declining confidence," even though economic indicators are on a near-comprehensive upswing, which in the long run, as President Obama has explained with pounding regularity, can be sustained only through comprehensive health-care reform.

Our declining interest in complexity was revealed as well in Frank Rich's "Is Obama Punking Us?" He wrote: [T]here is real reason for longer-term worry in the form of a persistent, anecdotal drift toward disillusionment among some of the president's supporters.... It's the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged -- that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to 'the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few' who have 'run Washington far too long.' He promised to smite them."

As Rich then hastened to add: "No president can do that alone, let alone in six months."

Or 220 years, for that matter. This nation's first presidency was rent by a raging struggle between those who represented "the interests of powerful lobbyists [and] the wealthiest few" and those who championed the Common Man; a sociopolitical contest which spilled into the following century and gushed throughout it and the next.

The conflict is a grinding, Sisyphean affair, but whose shortest-term outcome is, all too often, a "drift toward disillusionment." And that's when they win; it's what they count on.

So yesterday I passed on the scotch ... yesterday.