AMERICAN POLITICS HAS A BAD CASE OF SUBJUNCTIVITIS

By Jerry D. rose

A spectre is haunting our public discourse, the spectre of subjunctivitis. True, this disease has not been defined in medical manuals; nor has the epidemiology of its distribution been tracked by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. So far the term has been used only for a cutesy title of a blog, and by an least one forlorn member of a fraternity of people called grammarians who are trying to teach students to write in something resembling the English language. One of this number, Roy Clark, calls the subjunctive “mood” the linguistic disease that occurs when “your verbs get blurry.” Rather than employing verbs indicatively as in “I am going to town,” interrogatively as in “Are you going to town?” or imperatively as in “you must go to town,” there are expressions like “I really should go to town” or “If I go to town I’ll miss Jeopardy.” As an example of subjunctive language, he uses this line from Romeo and Juliet:

See how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek

Shakespeare’s use of the subjunctive mood aside, I am interested in subjunctivitis as a disease of our political life today. Barack Obama has been elected President with the overwhelming support of progressive Americans who, by definition, are eager for change and with the expectation or hope that his election would bring about that change. Yes we can! (can like hope is a subjunctive) and the question is what happens when hope is frustrated by reality, when change doesn’t come, when the declarative or factual realities are inconsistent with the subjunctive hopes. We hoped for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and no further commitment of military forces for other conflicts; the declarative reality is that we have a factually open-ended commitment to keep our forces in Iraq “as needed,” and we are seeing an escalation of U.S. troop forces in Afghanistan and “pressure” being put by our government on Pakistan to carry on the “war on terror” because to do so is in the “interest” of America. We were promised a solution to a poor and expensive health care system and are seeing an indicative reality today of single-payer insurance being taken “off the table,” a table whose seating involves almost exclusively the titans of the medical services and insurance industries.

From a sociological perspective, it becomes very interesting to see what happens when people’s hopes or expectations for the future get slapped in the face by the realities of their actual experience. Some social psychologists refer to a condition of cognitive dissonance, when people experience a discrepancy between their ideals or expectations and the realities of their actual existence. The obvious way to “resolve” dissonance is for people to recognize the fallacy of those expectations and move on to perhaps other expectations and goals for themselves. An interesting case study in cognitive dissonance by Leon Festinger and his associates suggested that people may resolve dissonance in quite another way. He studied a group of Chicago residents who believed that the end of the world would come on a certain day and a group of them gathered at the place at which their prophecy had promised that they would be picked up and carried to safety. When that time arrived and the world didn’t end and their ride to safety didn’t materialize, “When Prophecy Fails,” the name of Festinger’s book, they simply readjusted the timetable for the end of the world and believed in their prophecy with renewed faith.

Barack Obama’s book title “The Audacity of Hope,” indicates a similar tough-mindedness in the face of discrediting realities that Festinger reported for the folks in Chicago. Again, what has happened to his supporters when their audacious prophecy of a “transformative” presidency fails, by virtually every indicative measure of failure, only a few of which were cited above? To a remarkable degree, I have found, Obama supporters have, like the people studied by Festinger, readjusted their timetables within which the prophesied changes will come into being. One of the most “audacious” of those failed prophecy re-adjustments appeared in a recent article by Robert Kuttner in Huffington Post in which Kuttner provides a scathing indictment of Obama’s apparent “capture” by the very Wall Street forces which he proclaimed as the opponents of his “populist” New Deal-type agenda; only to revert to a very subjunctive mood at the end of his essay that Obama might yet pull another FDR agenda of becoming more liberal in his policies as time goes by and he experiences “pressure” from the likes of labor unions, after which he may begin to “reform” Wall Street itself. He admits that there may be no more likely of this happening than that his beloved Red Sox would win the World Series; but hey, hope springs eternal does it not; and Obama critics will be urged again and again to “give the guy a chance;” the prophecy has not failed, it will only take more time (and in a popular variant on this theme, after a great deal of “grassroots pressure” to hold Obama’s “feet to the fire” of his campaign promises).

In my frequent comments on the Common Dreams website, I have encountered and tried to confront a large number of these these “prophecy fails” thinkers like Kuttner. These include: James Ridgeway, William Greider, Norman Solomon, Robert Naiman, Sara van Gulder, Katerina van den Heuvel, David Lindorff, Danny Schechter, John Nichols and a few others. It’s same tune, different verse, as these “Progressives for Obama” express severe reservations about Obama’s policies but seemingly are unable to cut themselves loose from the subjunctive mood expressed by Romeo about Juliet’s glove. If wishes were horses, then beggars could ride. The wishes of Obama’s supporters are far from being the horses that can be ridden into a progressive future, but that doesn’t stop these wishers from entertaining the fantasy that, at about the same time that the Red Sox (or better still, the Chicago Cubs) win the World Series, we not only can but will fulfill those audacious hopes that have so far eluded us.

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Jerry D. Rose – Editor, The Sun State Activist