“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” This quote from the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci seemed to suddenly lift the veil on what head spinning times we live in.
It struck me as it is similar to how I often explain to my students why seventh graders seem so, often times literally, insane: the child you were is dying, the adult you will become struggles to be born. Hence, tweeners! It is a natural progression, and the madness will end pretty much when “ … teen” becomes “ … ty.” Have hope, I can tell them, this will pass.
But what struck is the Gramsci quote “the new cannot be born,” as in is prevented from. That very attempt to prevent the birth of the new, as Gramsci said, creates “a great variety of morbid symptoms.”
Perhaps that is what we are living through. Whatever came before — the New Deal, post-World War II consensus, Pax Americana, the rights revolution — is dead. What comes after that is what the worldwide right-wing is trying to prevent, or, if you will, abort.
As nothing could be more anti-nature than that, we do get these freakish symptoms: people unable to determine who or what is kneeling on them decide the best thing to do is burn their own house down! For make no mistake, the Supreme Court of the United States has just announced it is open season on all rights or protections not explicitly listed in the Constitution, except, of course, for guns.
At long last, having run out of foreign enemies, the right is now tearing up the floorboards of our (and its) own house! When they cannot find any enemies — or explanations for their anger — in that rubble, they will set in on fire. The best we can expect from the right wing is a simple Homerian “Doh!” when the flames start to lick their own feet.
But we won’t laugh.
The clear assault on any notion of “We the people,” “inalienable rights,” majority rule, voting rights, privacy rights or even the right to save ourselves from climate change is not so much a plan as a desperate dance to prevent that new from being born.
We see confirmation in other nations beholden to strongmen, and especially in Britain where “Brexit” is the best example of this perverse desire to abort what comes next. Like it or no, the European Union is the most evolved place on the planet, an example of what seeks to be born. Brexit was both a rebellion against a dense faceless bureaucracy, but also a rebellion against what strives to be born.
Brexit was a disaster for Britain in all ways. And yet it will be decades before a new generation can fix that. That former Prime Minster Boris Johnson, the main force behind Brexit, has now resigned in disgrace will not change that calculation.
Britain cannot now save itself from itself.
Sound familiar?
And the EU at least has a grand plan of sorts for all of Europe, now so much more cutting edge since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. (Putin’s war is another example of trying to prevent what seeks to be born. Why else does he invoke Nazism to defend it?)
But America has no grand plan. Our version of Brexit is that many folks now want to withdraw, not from an international organization, but from our own founding principles — and not even those of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but from simple majority rule!
This is why so many fret over a civil war — there is no way to know what freakish creature might emerge from so unnatural a process as stopping what seeks to be born. It is harder here in Massachusetts, in some ways. We suffer from “Blue State Blues.” We are mostly spectators to the national calamity in the making. Massachusetts will not strip away voting, abortion or LGBTQ rights. So, we watch the frontline states battle, but only from afar. And this can lead to a sense of hopelessness.
I have the cure for that. Listen to a piece on “This American Life” called the Pink House (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/774/the-pink-house-at-the-center-of-the-world) about the women who work at the abortion clinic in Mississippi at the center of the Supreme Court ruling. Now imagine these women, working everyday at an abortion clinic in Mississippi (as in Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam”) who find out their battle is lost after 20 years.
When asked what she planned to do, the clinic’s manager took a long, deep breath, and said she would open another clinic in a nearby state.
That is sand, that is courage, that is grit, that is perseverance. That is all we need, indeed all we have. As the old saying goes, “Don’t mourn! Organize!”
Joe Gannon, author and teacher, lives in Easthampton. He can be reached at opinion@gazette.net