Prophylaxis, and Other Notes
Asguard said:
1) why are there no constitutional provisions to deal with a situation like this? ie if the congress refuses to pass the budget why can't Obama sack the congress and send you all to an election?
Because the Founders, as with assault weapons and televangelism, could not foresee everything. The idea that men of state should behave in such a crass, repugnant manner as the Republican Party wasn't so much outrageous to them as unimaginable—completely beyond the horizon, kind of like a nuclear weapon and the answer to the eventual question about why the founders didn't provide for exploratory processes when we claim celestial bodies for the nation.
In truth, if they could have known it would come to this, they would have done it differently, I think.
2) why would the US public allow this to fly? if anything like this happened in any country I could think of they would face political devastation in the next election, no matter WHAT policies are at stake if you can't keep the government running you don't get to BE government. Yes I know technically the government is the democrats (Obama) and we are talking about congress but still
Because truth is a commodity that can be negotiated in the United States. The truth here is not defined as any sort of accurate representation of anything, but whatever story you can sell people on. There is an old joke about why Jews have large noses—"Because air is free"—that sort of makes the point insofar as it doesn't have to stay a Jew joke anymore.
Why are Americans polluting the air? Because we can't sell it, so fuck you.
Why are Americans polluting the water? Because we won't be bound by quaint notions of right and wrong, so fuck you.
Why are we letting so many of our people die for stupid reasons when their illness is easily treated or even prevented? Because we can't charge rent for the privilege of being alive, so fuck you.
And so on, and so on.
Why are Americans so often clueless? Because the truth can't be owned, so fuck you.
If we can't own it and amortize it, Americans will very frequently decide to fuck it. And fuck you in the process.
This is the American way. It is the American heritage we aren't supposed to discuss in polite company, with "in polite company" being a euphemism for "with anybody, including our own individual selves, ever".
This disaster? This is what the people want. Or, at least, this is what enough people want. They made sure this would happen, went out of their way to lie and cheat and fight to make sure it did.
And the thing is that we do have one bedrock principle that everyone will fall back to at some point, even if they never believe in or apply it:
We will allow the goddamn KKK to march down Main Street if stopping them means there is no free speech.
The upside to that point, though, is that the KKK is a former glorious tradition now reduced to a shadow of itself that cannot even be respectably called a sad joke, though people will allow it to exist that they might continue to shame its idiocy.
The flipside to that upside, however, is that the KKK is not a major political party, and the GOP is.
You have every right in this country to voice your opposition to it. In theory, we draw the line when you undertake actions to harm the United States and further empower our rivals. However, conservatives, increasingly needing some sort of dispensation, perhaps under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), get some sort of bizarre exemption, and seem to think it's their right and duty to conspire against the United States of America.
And if you watch our history, you'll see it. The reason the Democrats are often so flaccid in the face of right-wing extremism is that the left has already had its turn in the wilderness. Think about the idea that from January 1969 to January 1993, Democrats managed to put
one president in the White House, for all of
one term that became infamous as the worst presidency ever (it wasn't) until George W. Bush settled the question, except, of course, that conservatives get a pass on their disasters, since everything conservatives do wrong is entirely the Democrats' fault, anyway, well, yeah, there's a reason the Democrats spent the first few years reeling under the Tea Party siege; they forgot the right-wing exemption, and thus spent too much time wondering why the Republicans weren't disqualified after they lost their minds—by the time it got to conservative supporters physically assaulting black and gay lawmakers in order to express their displeasure over having lost the Obamacare fight on a straight, up-or-down vote, it was quite clear that we were somehow obliged not only to let this right-wing pageant of hatred and stupidity proceed uninterrupted, we were also supposed to applaud and tell them what good and noble things they were doing for us.
And I know that last paragraph seems a bit hyperbolic, but if you watch how things actually go, it's true:
Conservatives are entitled to greater leeway than anyone else. It's customary, a result of the conservative outlook aligning with the traditions people are trying to conserve, like religious and ethnic supremacy in a secular, pluralistic republic.
But even more than that, the present insanity is also attributable to the idea that people don't believe things are really going on.
For instance, we've had a house guest here, a friend who needed a place to crash while away from home for a week for work. I wandered through the kitchen last night, under a specific request to leave politics, anthropology, psychology, and history out of anything I discussed, since other people don't actually pay attention to those things—and, yes, while that last is sarcastic, wait for the punch line—and tailored my words: "All I'm going to say about it is that we officially went into shutdown a few minutes ago."
Just that statement confused our guest. My housemate explained, "The government just shut down."
"What? What do you mean? What happened?"
"Well," I explained, "basically House Republicans said no Continuing Resolution to fund the government unless we get rid of Obamacare."
Stunned, our guest looked to my housemate.
"I know that sounds like a joke," I said, "but it really is pretty much that simple."
My housemate nodded, and explained how confused she was by the whole thing.
And, see, just because of the amount of MSNBC in the background, and the amount of politics that has crept into CNBC's financial analyses, she has become aware of the stunning details she has long overlooked. And it's true; some people watch soap operas, some follow sports, and I get my fix from political drama—my housemate started to understand how that works. She really had thought I had lost my mind about what was going on in that part of the news until her television habit became more than
Squawk Box and watching people buy expensive houses in third-world countries on HGTV. When Foster Freiss popped off with the line about keeping an aspirin between a woman's knees, Andrea Mitchell might have been shocked by the crass idiocy, but my housemate suddenly awoke to the cold recognition that
this is really happening. And, now, each time the GOP does something newly stupid, she is slowly adjusting to the reality that yes, this is really happening. She's not an idiot and never has been, but once you
notice, so to speak, it's really, really hard to
forget.
We crossed a threshold sometime in during the Dubya years, and most Americans didn't notice. We also crossed a threshold in 1993, and most Americans didn't notice. Vicious is a cornerstone adjective for American politics, but conservatives not only set up the Arkansas Project to craft lies about the Clintons and invent scandals, but they actually went after the president's kid. I mean, think about that; it's such bad press that even today it's a bridge too far for
Rush Limbaugh. Yes, really. He has a team that suppresses that footage whenever it surfaces, and he will publicly assert that the incident never happened, as evidenced by the lack of footage, which you would think would be all over the internet. (Whatever copies haven't made it to the internet are on videotape, so ... yeah.) And then think about how things changed during the Iraqi Bush Adventure Pep Rallies. When we pass these milestones, benchmarks, whatever you want to call them, people often either don't notice because they're not paying attention, or else not perceiving or comprehending the
magnitude° of what they're watching.
The thing is that the public is facing one of those potential shockwave moments, and the question is whether they will respond with ego defense or actually attempt to wrangle with the problem head on. It's kind of a shocking situation if you're still wrapped up in the notion that "America"
is the shining city on the hill, instead of simply recognizing our society's mythic potential. If one becomes too accustomed to the presumptuous comfort that this sort of embarrassing, lowbrow, mostly-filler, no-meat sausage grinding doesn't happen here, trying to make heads and tails of it all can be exponentially harder than it is for those of us who follow politics as a passion or, indeed, virtually across the board on this one, actually cover the Beltway for a living.
The seasoned political hands are astounded. The veteran talking heads are flummoxed. The armchair pundits and publick house professors are opining as only fools can. And yes, that all includes me, somewhere, though I hope to come in
somewhere above the valence of fools. Of course, the barstool beats the gutter, I guess.
The point being that there are many Americans who woke up this morning to find their shining city on the hill inexplicably aflame.
The people doing it can't explain it. The people analyzing the people doing it can't explain it. The people meta-analyzing the analyses aren't coming up with anything. I would suggest the key lies in the unrecognized dialectic of neurosis, but apparently I'm among an exceptionally rare species on that point.
It is a Freudian theorem that each individual neurosis is not static but dynamic. It is a historical process with its own internal logic. Because of the basically unsatisfactory nature of the neurotic compromise, tension between the repressed and repressing factors persists and produces a constant series of new symptom-formations. And the series of symptom-formations is not a shapeless series of mere changes; it exhibits a regressive pattern, which Freud calls the slow return of the repressed, “It is a law of neurotic diseases that these obsessive acts serve the impulse more and more and come nearer and nearer the original and forbidden act.” The doctrine of the universal neurosis of mankind, if we take it seriously, therefore compels us to entertain the hypothesis that the pattern of history exhibits a dialectic not hitherto recognized by historians, the dialectic of neurosis.
—Norman O. Brown
Not that holding the key tells me where the lock is. That is to say, even if I'm correct on this point, it doesn't get us any closer than the starting point it provides. Trying to read this neurotic hot mess is like trying to read tea leaves in a moneyshot; the sample data is spattered all over the graph. Trying to find the seed that roots and bursts forth with such self-gratifying produce is an exercise best undertaken only with careful prophylactic reassurance. Vaccines, hazard suit, the proverbial ten-foot pole ... all of it.
These are Interesting Times, there is no denying. Our ministry remains ... dysfunctional.
But, oh, the pretty lights. They
do put on a show.
____________________
Notes:
° magnitude — Fun with magnitude. Did you ever see Steve Martin in L. A. Story? I'm thinking of the café earthquake scene, as they all sit there calmly and guess the magnitude of the temblor.
One of my college friends was from San Francisco, and explained his experience during the World Series (Loma Prieta 1989) Quake. Essentially, the game goes to adverts for a side change, and he gets up to do a couple things. Go to the bathroom, smoke some dope, make a sandwich, all that. While he's making the sandwich, the earthquake hits. He guesses a lower magnitude, and goes on with making the sandwich, but here's the thing—his house is on the hill, and in good, stable rock. He finishes making his sandwich, returns to the game, and on his television the waterfront is on fire. That would not have happened in a 4.0 quake. It was a fifteen-second 6.9 with a surface magnitude rated between 6.6 and 7.4 depending on the station, 25 miles south of San Francisco, eleven miles down. The Bay Area got kicked, despite San Francisco rating only light to moderate potential damage (VI-VII) on the MMI. Oakland, to the other, rated moderate/heavy to heavy (VIII-IX).
But, yes, my friend completely missed the magnitude.
Works Cited:
Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959.
