If the Cubs win, maybe America can find a fresh start

Bob Dylan said it most explicitly, or so claimed the interviewer in a Playboy interview in 1966:

“Popular songs … are the only art form that describes the temper of the times. The only place where it’s happening is on the radio and records. That’s where the people hang out. It’s not in books; it’s not on the stage; it’s not in the galleries.”

Those of us who were there in the audience in Newport in the early 1960s would agree and it is nice to see the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awarded Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, finally falling into agreement.

{mosads}We are a people of the people and the sublime and serious will find archetypal expression there in the gritty streets of Detroit and in the waving grace of the vast and endless Great Plains, even while the arcane political theorists and Europeanists wish us to be someone else; wish us to turn back; wish us to be what we used to be; wish us to be what we were before we got here. Not going to happen. And I for one am delighted to be here.

It is in the pop culture perhaps from which the serious people turn away where history occurs unnoticed. I made the case in The Hill years back that the TV show “Lost” was such an event in which the writers played beneath the eyes of the censors much as Fyodor Dostoyevsky as the Russians did more than a century ago, to bring a subtle and timely message. And that message returned again and again in the fascinating “Lost” narrative to a specific number considered mysterious: 108. It is the number in which the circle completes itself; that is, it is the number upon which the world ends and begins again.

And we have been hearing it all week: 108, the number of years that have passed the Chicago Cubs by in their quest for victory in the World Series.

We might consider this a harbinger; a call to begin again. And we might as well begin again in Chicago. Because right now, this week and very soon after, we may well have come to the end of things.

Are the Clintons part of a “crime family” as the well-regarded former assistant FBI director James Kallstrom, suggested in a radio interview Sunday according to a report in The Hill.

“It’s obvious the American political system is breaking down,” writes columnist John Kass in the Chicago Tribune. “It’s been crumbling for some time now, and the establishment elite know it and they’re properly frightened.”

The venerable Doug Schoen, longtime Democratic consultant, was not far off in his comments Monday in The Hill:

“After the past eight years wherein America has become progressively more and more divided and a campaign season that has magnified these divisions, I fear for that we will not be able to withstand this kind of continued scandal.”

The problems we face today and going into the future are systemic; they go to the core of our being.

“Is this election the start of a new American era?” I asked here at The Hill back in September.

Emphatically, yes.

“The state of the state needs to be examined. Questions should be asked, like how did Jefferson’s America become a federation of sociological, political and cultural tribes and hyphenated ethnicities instead of states? How can that be fixed? How did the Supreme Court become fully partisan and how can that be repaired? How did Congress become so reactive to its lobby interests and cash instead of to its people?”

And more.

I cited the great ambassador George Kennan, called the “wisest of the wise men,” in his late work, “Around the Cragged Hill.” Kennan had claimed in 1994 that America today had no vehicle for long-term planning, such as the policy planning commission he created in 1947 at the request of then-Secretary of State George C. Marshall.

“The candidates and senators default back instead today on think tanks or policy apparatuses,” I said, “which perpetuate old geopolitical ideas well beyond their shelf life. Kennan had long lost faith in them and we might be grateful in this election to Republican nominee Donald Trump for ignoring them, as well, to force a season of fresh thinking.”

Kennan proposed then the idea of a “council of state” to consider and reassess the future. But who would form such a committee today? The Supreme Court, the political parties, the judiciary, the executive, the press, indeed, all but the Army seem to varied degree collaborationists in this decline.

But Schoen and his crew from Fox Report, including Harris Faulkner, Pat Caddell and John LeBoutillier might begin to give it a thought.

And there is so much to think about before a Hillary Clinton presidency brings impeachment, before a Donald Trump presidency brings a coup d’etat, before Texas bolts and takes a dozen red states with it.

But perhaps Doug Schoen and company can find a fresh beginning again in Chicago, even if the Cubs lose.

Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.