Latter-day Nostradamus

The book I picked up immediately post-West was Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness by Tony Kushner. The opening epic paragraph of ‘On Pretentiousness,’ the text of a speech he gave at a conference in Boston on March 3, 1995 is:

Everything I say to you tonight, indeed everything discussed at the conference this weekend, is overshadowed, if not actually overwhelmed, by the fact that down the seaboard, in D.C., the scariest congress this country has ever elected is energetically, industriously, enthusiastically dismantling the federal government. The America we live in today, still racked, starved, burned, brutalized and unrecovered from the pillaging it endured in the eighties, this present ravaged America will seem in ten years’ retrospect a paradise; that’s an easy prophecy; the future that’s being legislated into existence in these last few weeks is as we all know no future at all. All the important accomplishments of struggle, all the benchmarks of agonizing progress, are going up in great puffs of unregulated uninvestigated nicotine-laden tobacco smoke. In ten years’ time public education through high school will be nothing more than overcrowded indoctrination in Rightist political cant, supervised by Bill Bennett and his ilk, with no bad-tasting non-nutritional but at least free lunch. Affordable public education will be virtually nonexistent. This will help make people even more docile when faced with downsizing, which surely must produce prodigious rates of unemployment; and there will be no organized labor and no social net. Multinationals will have near-absolute sway over the workplaces and breathing spaces and landscapes and mindscapes and airwaves and information pathways; corrupt and unaccountable state legislatures will be big business’s eager foot-servants; minorities will have no legal protectional guarantees and will be ruthlessly dominated and policed by a pseudo-majority whose real power derives, not from brute numerical superiority, but from an unchallengeable stranglehold on realpolitik financed by multinationals. Progressive taxation will be a memory; the rich will be very rich. Searching police will need no warrants, recent immigrants will have no rights, the rights of the rest of us will go next, civil liberties will be lost, abortion rights will lost, civil rights legislation will be lost, health care is lost already. Laws that protect children from abuse will be lost. Laws that reinstate death penalties and limit the number of appeals a death-row inmate gets; laws limiting the possibility of suing miscreant corporations, or the government—these will be passed in every state. Guns will be available. Prisons will mushroom. Sodomy laws will mushroom. Public discourse will have degenerated to such abysmal depths that George Bush will seem to have been eloquent; there will of course be no federal funding for the arts or humanities. Colleges will offer courses in hokey-scientific theories of race-based genetic superiority, and on the history of the failure of feminism, and though abortion will be illegal, eugenics will be a coming thing. Research on AIDS, research on breast cancer will have stalled; pharmaceutical corporations and managed care corporations and insurance giants will control the medical front, concurrently racking up astronomical profit—the FDA, deeply flawed as it is and has ever been, will be a thing of the past and, dare I say it, missed. Some wizened Republican horror will occupy the White House, and whatever his name is he will be Nixon, he will be Reagan, he will, perhaps in name as well as in spirit, be Newt. You went to bed in 1994, and wake up: It’s morning 1953! Except in 1953 things were better.

At least sodomy has been legalized. . .