Watching Sen. Specter fight his way through a town hall meeting in Lebanon, PA this morning has been an indescribable experience. But I’ll try.

Though I’ve never been a huge fan of Specter – in a country of transparently ambitious politicians, he must be the most transparently ambitious – it was tough not to feel for him as he tried to navigate a room full of people who don’t even seem to be speaking the same language as me anymore.

Thus far, the questions asked of Specter have come in the form of demands: that he sign any bill legalizing baby-extermination, government death squads or forced yielding of private bank account information at the peril of his immortal soul. None of that is not hyperbole. There seems to, quite literally, be no middle ground. Nobody expressing cautious doubt – which is, perhaps, the first clue that this is no longer an intellectual issue, but an emotional one.

Here’s the thing. These are all completely earnest questions – all-consumers from people who fear for their futures with the tenacity of your average Coast to Coast AM listener and mask that fear with petty anger. These are people who are furious now that they have discovered that there aren’t enough hours in a day – hell, hours in a year – for a representative to field all the insane questions that people want to ask him. Logistically, one man just can’t meaningfully answer millions of questions about petty shit. It’s just math.¹

The state of reading comprehension in America plays a large part in all of this. The Bill in Question, HR 3200, is freely available online. At one point, a man stood up and announced that he had spent the last two weeks carefully reading the 1017-page document.² Or trying to anyway – he conceded that it was written ‘like a Russian novel,’³ and that he had been having some trouble. Another man, a teacher, asked that Specter do his part to ensure that all future Congressional bills are written at a junior-high level from here on out.

Which is a nice idea, but it brings up a question that I thought we put away when we elected Obama: why are we so scared of the thought of electing people who are smarter that we are? As Jon Stewart joked, “In fact, not only do I want an elite president, but I want someone who is embarrassingly superior to me.”⁴

Amen.

Honestly, it’s tough to blame them for all this. Our Constitution, with its completely unrealistic promises of individual importance – at any given meeting there are hundreds of contentious people vying for thirty speaking vouchers, deli-style – has made us a country of uniquely self-entitled people. Moments like this, it really shows that the document was written by men who couldn’t possibly imagine that there would someday be 300 million people asking questions. And that most of them would not have the ability to understand the arcane language of legislation. ⁵

So what is all this noise? Is this what the breakdown of democracy feels like? Or is this what it feels like when democracy flexes its muscles?

This movement is millions of people screaming out loud, frustrated by how small their voices really sound. It reminds me of a political science class I took in college, when I came face to face with the regular frustration of having to listen to another student express viewpoints to which I was wholly opposed. You can’t help but cast the odd glance at the clock as the class period dwindles away to nothing. At these moments, it is easy to kind of give up on the idea of meaningful communication in a group setting. There’s simply not enough time to be fair. And, even if you wait your turn, the chances are good that the conversation will be so far away from where it was when you wanted to interject that there isn’t even a point. So you suck it up. ⁶

This is, in a nutshell, many moments rolled into one.

First, it has exposed the inadequacy of how our representative democracy handles angry mobs. And, hell, about the inadequacy of democracy in general for fairly governing 300 million people who have devoted their lives to self-service.⁷

Second, it is an important moment in sociolinquistics – the moment in history when the whole country became intimately aware of the significant limitations of spoken language. One on one, we’re fine. But the more people you add, the greater the chance of a complete breakdown. By the time you’ve got an entire room of people, the only hope for a civil discourse is social decency.

Last, it is an intimate psychological crisis. At one point in he distant past, it may have even been a waypoint on the way to adult development – the realization that the dynamics of group living often make it impossible to talk without a megaphone – but it isn’t anymore. Perhaps common American sentiment – self-empowerment – simply is incompatible with the notion of being one of a million (rather than one in a million). Self-sacrifice has never been less in.

Which is bad news for healthcare. And bad news for my worldview.

1. Maybe we need a President like Google. Human beings, with our unfortunate inability to gainfully focus on more than one conversation at a time, just aren’t cutting it. [↑]
2. Because it is typeset in Reader’s Digest-style large print and the line/word spacing is extremely liberal, this is probably something like reading the most boring, redundant 400-page novel you’ll ever read. [↑]
3. Probably an allusion to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but I can only imagine that Nabokov and Dostoyevsky would be equally offended by such a crass and comparison. [↑]
4. No citation – just a great quote I remember from an episode in 2008 [↑]
5. Or even the arcane language of your average run-of-the-mill newspaper, for that matter. [↑]
6. Or you just, like, stand up and shout it out and embarrass everybody, including the representative, who at this point resents the fact that he has to speak for idiots like you [↑]
7. Allusion to masturbation intentional. [↑]