The Chinese go nuts once every 50 years or so. The last time was around 1966, when the country erupted into something called the Cultural Revolution, and leading political and intellectual figures were suddenly excoriated. Government bureaucrats and university professors, used to deference and kowtowing and lives of privilege, were turned on by the mob, paraded through the streets in dunce caps, forced to wear insulting sandwich boards, and remanded to work farms for reeducation and to learn a little humility.

Not an entirely bad system, when you really think about it.

I think one of my followers on Twitter put it best: “No matter which side of the health-care debate you’re on,” he wrote, “yelling at Arlen Specter looks like fun.”

It does, doesn’t it? Kind of a late-summer, throw-together-a-picnic kind of thing. Baseball games, the smell of cotton candy, Shakespeare in the Park, bellowing at your senator — it all has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

And how perfectly timed! Gas prices are creeping up, unemployment is floating around 10 percent, the economy just sits there like it’s waiting to hear from the local Death Panel — it’s no wonder a lot of Americans are cutting back on the two-week summer-holiday cash hemorrhage and opting, instead, for something the colorful phrasemakers in the news media are calling a “staycation.”

But just because you’re staying put for the summer, there’s no reason you have to splash listlessly in the above-ground pool in the backyard. Your senator is in town! Put on some clothes — it doesn’t matter what, really: if you wear something nice, they’ll just call you a Republican-party operative; if you wear a T-shirt, shorts, and a trucker’s cap, they’ll make sniffy, snotty comments about “white trash” — and head on over to the local community center and make some noise.

“I don’t have to be here,” Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Pa.) muttered to the angry crowd when his town hall spun out of control, which caused his town hall to spin even further out of control. It’s rare that something so perfectly crystallizes the emotional issue at hand, but Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Pa.), face squeezed shut, staring in baffled rage at the collection of T-shirts and potbellies and summer farmer’s tans that bobbed and pointed and shouted at him, sums up the American Cultural Revolution Tour of Summer ’09 perfectly. The only thing missing was the dunce cap and the insulting sign, but if you’ve got the right software you can burn one into the YouTube video.

Of course, the Chinese version took ten years to exhaust itself and involved a lot of unsavory things like work camps and show trials. Ours, with typical American casualness, is all about Facebook and the Flip camera, and the whole thing is going to be wrapped up by the time everyone’s summer staycation is over and the kids go back to school.

It’s strictly a summer affair — when there are soccer games to get to and the weather gets chilly, most of the firebrands will be too busy and distracted to head on out to their senators’ district offices to make a little trouble. Who has time, with kids to carpool and work getting stressful and now the holidays are coming, to ink funny hand-lettered signs and Xerox handouts and make the lemonade? No one, that’s who. So the town-hall shout-outs will stop — and so will the town halls and office ambushes, for the foreseeable future — and Americans will turn their attention to other things.

Also: They’ll have succeeded. Whatever health-care plan eventually gets wiggled through — and that’s a big assumption to begin with — it will be a pale, face-saving shell of a plan, thanks only to the bumptious mob of angry staycationers. Because, let’s face it, the Republicans in Congress, if the timetable hadn’t perfectly aligned with a recession and summer vacation, would have sat down with their Democratic colleagues and made a deal.

And that’s the bad news coming out of the American Cultural Revolution of Summer ’09: After all of the shouting and the YouTubing and the fun, they’re all still there, in Washington, cooking up mischief. Unlike the characteristically more efficient Chinese model, there is no second phase to the ritual humiliation. In China, it was 1) march discredited, bourgeois backslider through the streets on his way to 2) the Glorious May 4 Collective Radish Farm.

Who among us, deep down, doesn’t think that, say, Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Pa.) would benefit from a little forced radish farming?

Put it out of your mind. We’re going to let them all off the hook, in the end. We’re going to wrap up our summer tantrums and start thinking about Halloween candy and Thanksgiving plans and Christmas lists, because Americans, even self-described conservatives, are perfectly willing to accept big-government intervention — in the housing markets, in retirement savings, in elder health care, in prescription drugs, in agriculture, in you name it — as long as the progress is incremental, and as long as everyone gets some cheese. That’s how big-government liberals have succeeded in the past, and when they retreat to their blogs to lick their wounds and regroup, they’ll come back at us with a smaller, incremental, bite-sized “solution” that we’ll accept, and in ten years we’ll be sitting in the doctor’s office waiting for our local-medical-insurance-co-op-approved three-minute checkup and think to ourselves, “When did this happen?”

The fun, spirited, energized mobs that have terrified people like Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Pa.) and chased congressmen to their cars weren’t really arguing for a rational health-care system — they weren’t agitating for less government. In many ways, they were arguing for a more generous system, one that covers everything, for everyone. What’s the current controversy centered on? Death panels! Well, I’ll probably regret admitting this, but if I have to subsidize everyone else’s health care out of my paycheck, I’m going to demand death panels. I’ll take one look at my sad little pay stub and think: Pull the plug on Grandma!

Repealing the Ponzi scheme that is Medicare, creating a free-market-based health-insurance system — all of these things, or versions of them, anyway, are what conservatives know in their hearts is the right way to tackle the health-care problem in America. But that really wasn’t what all the shouting was about during Town Hall Summer. It was about the fun of watching Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Pa.) look like he was about to cry.

Which isn’t an entirely bad way to spend a staycation.