Trying Hard to Relax and Have Fun

By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website

15 June 19

’ve been a grind for many years, chained to my oars, and I am in serious need of frivolity, so last Friday my wife and daughter and I boarded the Queen Mary 2 in New York and sailed out of the harbor and under the Verrazano Bridge bound for England with a dance band on board, a casino, deck chairs where one can lounge and doze and do nothing meaningful whatsoever. A big band plays nightly in the enormous ballroom and there is a multitude of serious dancers on the floor who know the jitterbug, the foxtrot, the tango — really know them, don’t just stand and sway rhythmically — and a handsome Irishman belts out “Night and Day” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” There are impenetrable Brit accents everywhere and elaborately polite service — waiters who say “Thank you” at every opportunity. The bottle of English ginger ale says, “Upend before pouring” — when was the last time you saw “upend”? The sign in the toilet says that the plumbing does not operate on a “cistern system” but a pressure system so do not flush while seated. There is the sunny aft deck where I can lie and not read a book. So what do I do? I think about work.

It’s easier for a carpenter. Security personnel will not allow you to bring a power saw aboard a ship. But a writer brings a laptop and a briefcase with him and he is right back where he started.

This is why I write limericks. They’re trivial and nobody will publish them, so writing them is not like actual work with a purpose, it’s more like throwing flat rocks sidearm to make them skip on the surface of a lake or river.

I left my home on the prairie
To sail away on the Queen Mary
In black tie and tux
With big muckety-mucks
Fred Astaire and Cher, maybe Cary
Grant, hiding in the library.
I’m paying big bucks
For six days deluxe
In salt air, enjoying myself
On the Atlantic
Where the Titanic
Sank back in nineteen and twelve.

We are heading for a wedding in a village in Portugal where, after the vows are said, there will be an all-night party, which apparently is traditional there. I can’t remember having been to an all-night party ever in my life. I come from people who, after a wedding, head for the kitchen to help clean up. Even the bride and groom do. I guess this will be different.

Meanwhile, we’re halfway across the Atlantic, and the vibration and slight rocking of the ship make a person drowsy. We sit in a half-stupor staring at the vast flatness of water around us, walking the promenade deck, one-third mile in circumference, burning off the pastries. We sit in a lounge and drink tea and people nearby ask us where we’re from and I overcome my Minnesotaness and join in a conversation. Their name is Sweeney, they’re from Virginia, he was in military intelligence, she teaches freshman composition at a college. We order another pot of tea.

It’s a sedate life on the ocean, no need for sedation. In the fitness center, the young and restless are pushing themselves to exhaustion, and in the lounge, the old and comfortable are savoring the lack of newspapers so there’s nothing to be angry about. (There’s a TV screen in the cabin but I don’t care to figure out how to turn it on.) If I wished, I could go to a salon and hear a lecture about wasps, the kind who sting. Instead I go hear an Irish comedian tell old jokes — the one about the pope driving the limo, the one about the vacuum cleaner salesman visiting the rural cottage, the one about the man walking by the lunatic asylum, and it’s lovely to hear them again, delivered with a lilt.

Meanwhile, I walk around with pen and paper. It gives me a sense of purpose. I come from serious people. Relaxation was not our strong suit. I might be happier in a black tux waiting on customers. So I pretend to be on vacation while pursuing my career as a limericist.

I sit on a ship on the sea
And experience infinity
With nothing to do
Except look up at you
While you sit staring at me.

It’s a profound limerick, what Sartre and Camus and Kierkegaard were going for, and I did it in five lines. I’m happy.

Bernie Sanders, Socialist New Dealer

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

15 June 19

For decades, neoliberal Democrats have chipped away at the gains made through New Deal reforms. Bernie Sanders wants to deepen and defend those gains.

esterday, Bernie Sanders gave a much-anticipated (and, in some quarters, much-derided) speech on democratic socialism. Socialism is an ideology that, in the United States, has more often than not been cast as a kind of deadly foreign pathogen that, left unchecked, will tear through American society, destroying its democratic institutions, warping its children’s minds, causing pestilence and drought, making pets turn on their owners, soda turn flat, and so on.

Though no doubt infuriating some on the Left, Sanders — who’s weathered decades of this kind of thing — wisely situated his vision of socialism in the long tradition of US progressivism and, crucially, the New Deal liberalism forged by Franklin Roosevelt that dominated American politics until somewhere around the late 1970s.

“Over eighty years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped create a government that made transformative progress in protecting the needs of working families,” Sanders said on Wednesday. “Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we must take up the unfinished business of the New Deal and carry it to completion.”

Sanders’ association of the New Deal with the socialist tradition may irk some; after all, a better welfare state isn’t actually socialism, no matter how much the Republicans say it is.

But it’s also a product of the carefully deployed pragmatism that has long defined Sanders’ political success. As Sanders said upon becoming mayor of Burlington forty years ago, “I know that there is little I can do from City Hall to accomplish my dreams for society.” Rather, Sanders’ goal, as it has always been, is to open the door of public imagination to the idea of class politics, to make life better for the poor, the elderly, and working people of all kinds, and to weaken the power corporations and the rich have over people’s lives.

And to this end, Sanders’s claiming of the legacy of the New Deal is something just about anyone — from those on the Left who want to go beyond the New Deal, to liberals who think fondly of it but are skeptical of trying to revive it — should take notice of.

This is nothing new from Sanders, who has long referred to Roosevelt as something like a political role model. During the 2016 campaign, Sanders name-checked Roosevelt on the debate stage as a leader he admired and even ran an ad comparing himself to the former president. He made a pit-stop at his gravesite, and in 2015, he explicitly compared Roosevelt’s political program to his own in a speech making the case for democratic socialism (something useful to remember for anyone who believes Sanders’ speech yesterday was some grave, out-of-character misstep that will send his poll numbers plunging).

But this effort to reclaim the mantle of the New Deal has particular significance in this race. The New Deal may not have been nearly as radical as the Left would’ve liked, both then and now, but it’s been a long time since the Democratic Party has harkened back to it. Sure, Democrats will give Roosevelt and his program a mention from time to time, as Hillary Clinton did in her score-settling book about her 2016 loss to Trump. But in front of a general audience, they’re much more likely to refer back to conservative heroes like Ronald Reagan, as Barack Obama frequently did during his presidency. In an age in which a Democrat declared big government “over,” Roosevelt has become the eccentric uncle the family prefers not to mention at dinner parties.

But more pertinent to this moment, the 2020 Democratic contest is shaping up as a showdown between the actual New Deal progressivism today’s Democrats only pretend to embody when the right audience is listening, and the Third Way centrism that made the New Deal tradition its sworn enemy. And the reason is not just Bernie Sanders — it’s also Joe Biden.

In presidential contests of the 1980s, the Democratic party went through a similar ideological reckoning, with Reagan’s landslide victories in 1980 and 1984 sending the party into an existential panic. It was especially acute in 1984, when the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, had long been identified with the New Deal tradition. Democrats were suddenly split between New Deal liberals — figures like Mondale, Ted Kennedy, and Mario Cuomo — and post-New Deal liberals, or “neoliberals” — including Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, and a young, forty-something Joe Biden (this was long before the “neoliberal” label became so toxic its adherents decided to claim it didn’t really exist).

After Mondale’s catastrophic loss, party members pointed the finger at New Deal liberalism. Mondale, they argued, had been too liberal, allowing Reagan to carry vast swaths of the South. Party officials like Dave Nagle, then the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, called for the party to jettison New Deal Democrats like Kennedy, reject “interest groups” — code for anyone who didn’t adhere to the Democrats’ imagined fantasy of a straight, white, middle-class man — and embrace the new breed of triangulating Democrats like Hart and Biden.

In 1987, as the first post-Reagan presidential contest approached, for the first time no “mainstream” Democratic candidate — code for anyone who wasn’t Jesse Jackson — came out of the New Deal tradition, with all the leading candidates preaching the necessity of breaking from the party’s golden age. These were candidates like Bruce Babbitt, Michael Dukakis, Dick Gephardt, Hart and, yes, Biden.

“Biden fascinates young audiences,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor in a June 1987 profile of the young candidate. “His words have an ’80s ring. He speaks the language of now. He’s up to date. This is no tradition-bound Democrat living in the shadow of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, à la Walter Mondale.”

As is well-known, Biden’s attempt that year to lure the youth toward neoliberalism by being the Poochie of the 1980s didn’t work out, largely because of a rather hilarious plagiarism scandal that saw his campaign go down in flames. But the fact that the White House eluded him didn’t stop Biden from having a hand in just about every Third Way disaster over the next few decades, from mass incarceration and mass surveillance, to welfare reform and banking deregulation.

So the irony here is palpable. Through his full-throated embrace of the New Deal and his declared intent to finish the work Franklin Roosevelt started nearly a century ago, Bernie Sanders — the independent socialist who has spent a career railing against the Democratic Party — is now the only political figure explicitly running on the party’s greatest tradition. Meanwhile, his most formidable rival at this point, a decades-long Democrat most associated with the party’s current establishment, is one of the men chiefly responsible for that tradition’s expulsion from the party — and, judging by his campaign so far, he’s in no hurry to revive it.

The New Deal may not really be socialism. But given how far the Democratic Party has strayed, perhaps only a democratic socialist could bring its promise roaring back to life.