In Politics, the Summer of Reruns

"Hegel writes somewhere," wrote Karl Marx (though the original reference has never been found), that history generally happens twice, first as tragedy and then again as farce. Marx first offered up this by-now chestnut in an essay titled The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and his subject was, of course, familial successions.

Karl would have been right at home hereabouts. Having bested Elizabeth ("don't use my initials") Dole, George W. Bush has practically won the Republican nomination. Albert Gore Jr. is of course still favored on the Democratic side. Hillary Clinton is off to the races in New York. And Larry Summers, nephew of two Nobel Prize winners in economics (Samuelson and Arrow), runs the world from the Treasury Department.

Faint echoes equally govern our policy discussions. The Republican Congress has recycled Ronald Reagan's tax cuts, both in income taxes and that perennial favorite, relief for capital gains. They even propose to repeal the estate tax -- now there's a policy to enshrine the dynastic principle. Luckily Clinton will veto what the Congress may pass.

Meanwhile on the cultural front, the summer brings us Woodstock '99, made-for-TV and enlivened only, at the end, by a few acts of arson. Not to mention the real sadness of that airplane crash off Martha's Vineyard, whose aftermath was, it must be said, dignified by the family's refusal to offer up echos of the great funeral 36 years before. ...