Most people (I hope, because I don’t want to think that I’m
excessively weird) have a guilty pleasure or two. You know,
something that you know you shouldn’t like but you do anyway and
feel a little embarrassed about.
Most people (I hope, because I don’t want to think that I’m excessively weird) have a guilty pleasure or two. You know, something that you know you shouldn’t like but you do anyway and feel a little embarrassed about. It’s a description that, for example, is often applied to watching soap operas or professional wrestling. For dieters it might be that midnight quart of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie for which you’ll hate yourself in the morning.
For me, it’s watching the agonizingly slow-motion train wreck that is the government of, by, and for me at what it thinks of as work. It’s very similar to the feeling I get when I happen on a rerun of Married With Children, which for those of you who never saw it was a Fox sitcom about a riotously dysfunctional family all of whose members worked tirelessly and brainlessly at cross-purposes with each other, thus insuring that no plan ever worked, no hope was ever fulfilled, no idea was ever realized.
You can see why I associate the two. In the latest episode of Congress of Children we are as I write baby-stepping closer and closer to a precipice which we in 235 years have never gone over before, which is to say we could, we might, it’s not impossible that we will become a deadbeat country. Now, everybody assumes that won’t really actually literally genuinely happen, I suppose because no one wants to run the risk of China commencing foreclosure proceedings and all of us having to move to some unoccupied corner of the planet and sleep in our cars, but who knows? Maybe they’ll inadvertently bluff and bluster each other into a past-the-deadline standoff that will take Congressional stupidity to a whole new level.
OK, so the consequences would be somewhere between really bad and quite horrible, but it does make good theater.
That’s because it’s something that at least appears to be really important, it’s not only unscripted, the players have no idea what they’re doing, and time is running out; consequently it has the elements of a trashy reality show mated with an HBO thriller, a whodunit with an unwritten last page. Survivor Washington: The Amazing Race to Insolvency: America’s Got Morons: So You Think You Can Govern? And it’s commercial-free.
The fundamental problem here son, is that somewhere along the last couple of decades we misplaced the two-party political system and now it’s catching up with us. Currently we have one political party and one ideological party, and since they have different rule books even though they both bear the name “party” they can’t play together any more successfully than could the San Francisco Giants and the New York Giants.
Now, there’s nothing inherent in an ideological party that makes governance impossible; For example, Syria is, pending further developments, governed by an ideological party. So is Iran. It just requires a dictatorship, and it is most unfortunate for the Tea Party Ayatollahs that here in America we’ve grown used to governance by mud-slinging, name-calling, grudging cooperation between two sides of an ever-changing political argument. When one side voluntarily chains itself to a set of permanent immutable overbroad pledges, vows, and promises made under pressure from a small, shrill fraction of the public cooperation becomes treason and practical governance ceases.
So what do we, the rapt viewers of this legislative Grand Guignol, do about it? Well, I suppose we could besiege the Capitol with the message that the Congressional GOP marionettes need to summon up the guts to tell unelected Washington lobbyist Grover Norquist to make himself a nice fire out of all their “no new taxes as defined by Grover Norquist until the end of time regardless of circumstances” pledges and go back to being a political party.
Or we could go the other way entirely and support the Tea Party’s goal of making America impossible to govern under any form but a one-party system which demands ideological purity on pain of severance from the body politic.
Living under the imposition of the will of a relative handful of influential mullahs might seem superficially distasteful to those accustomed to the ebb and flow of competing opinions but hey, no new taxes.
Or we could do as we’ve been doing: grab a cold one and a salty snack, recline the Barcalounger, and settle in to watch the show. It does make good theater, which might well have been Nero’s exact thought as he watched Rome burn.
Despite being an award-winning columnist, Robert Mitchell doggedly remains the same eccentric attorney who has practiced general law in Morgan Hill for more than 30 years. Reach him at r.****@*****on.net.
