Down Curve "Learning"

Madame:

The piece you cite is telling, and the full article by Hedges is a masterpiece of intricate understanding, and comes extremely highly recommended to readers. 

What have we learned from this shutdown debacle and what are the effects? 

Possibly next to nothing. As Hedges points out, America seems to forget the next week what happened in the previous one, so little do we internalize political events.

There has been a good deal of talk on the chatterwaves about economic violence and legislative terrorists had been attempting to perpetrate a coup d’tat, or failing that, to obstruct and destroy. While I’m not sure where I feel on that interpretation precisely, I am thinking that many of them don’t need their party anymore, that a few main financial backers and they are secure in their gerrymandered districts. 

I am also thinking that some of them earnestly believe they are trying to check deficit spending run amok, believe they are trying to address, even in brute fashion, actuarial and other looming train wrecks.  And also possibly feel they are trying to check ever increasing executive power. While one could fault their blind, crude methods, one could at least understand the motive(s).

But other obstructionists don’t fit that mold.  They instead fit classic reactionaries.  Seeing that the country is changing, demographically in particular, and with it white dominance and even privilege, they don’t appear to think of it as their country anymore.  And therefore don’t much care if it wrecks, as THEY will be taken care of, regardless.

Or so they think.  Hedges’ last quotation in the full article is a chilling one.

Some other effects of the shutdown and brinksmanship with the debt ceiling:

1.     It is perhaps causing the “borderline” democratizing societies to doubt that democracy really works, and that’s a bad trend, one that played out poorly in the 1920s and 1930s.

2.     China, the rising power, is, citing American irresponsibility, calling for others to join it in thinking about fashioning a de-Americanized world.

The former “A” grade star, America, keeps turning in “F” work and expecting a pass.  And Hedges seems right on the money on far too many things. 

Just once I’d like to see us surprise him and prove him more than a little wrong.

It hasn’t happened yet.

Next week: The Prof’s trip to an academic conference in Canada, with comparisons with our northern cousins (and their comparisons with us!), politically, economically, and perhaps otherwise.