WTF?

Professor J,

Sorry about the title but it kind of sums it up.

It's a very Fahrenheit 1984 New World.

As I'm writing this it looks like the government shut down is going to end and the debt ceiling is going to be raised. We won't be defaulting on any loans.

Until after the first of the year. Then we get to play this game again.

Our short term thinking is getting shorter. Terrifyingly so.  Our attention span, shrinking to mere nanoseconds, seems keep us from staying with problems long enough to work out effective long term solutions. When we started writing this blog and having these discussions we would probably have defined the short term as the next election cycle. In the case of the Presidency that would have been a mere 4 years, hardly time to get much done. Now thinking even 2 years ahead seems sagelike in comparison to what we do.

We are now making decisions only only to fend off disaster a few weeks into the future. We play increasingly close to the edge, with higher and higher stakes at risk should we get it wrong. 

And the people in power don't seem to look like they are interested in getting it right, or what that might even look like. It seems to me that what is now called governing is like a picture copied over and over. The further you get from the original the less clear it is. Resolution is lost. It seems as if they are all wondering aloud to each other, "What is it supposed to look like, again?" Well, they would if any of them could honestly admit they haven't a clue how to fix it.

 I just watched an interview with a congressman from Kansas who said he didn't believe Standard and Poor's estimate that the shutdown has cost the US economy 24 Billion dollars. He didn't trust them and wanted the numbers from the Treasury.

Which is, of course, only partially operational. Because of this guy and people like him. When the interviewer reminded him of this fact he casually said. "That's right."

Has rational thinking really disappeared so completely?

I give up when Grover Norquist starts to sound like the voice of reason.

Or maybe that's a sign of hope. 

I nearly didn't write anything tonight and just posted our friend, Chris Hedges' article from a couple of days ago, The Folly of Empire:

The last days of empire are carnivals of folly. We are in the midst of our own, plunging forward as our leaders court willful economic and environmental self-destruction. Sumer and Rome went down like this. So did the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Men and women of stunning mediocrity and depravity led the monarchies of Europe and Russia on the eve of World War I. And America has, in its own decline, offered up its share of weaklings, dolts and morons to steer it to destruction. A nation that was still rooted in reality would never glorify charlatans such as Sen. Ted Cruz, House Speaker John Boehner and former Speaker Newt Gingrich as they pollute the airwaves. If we had any idea what was really happening to us we would have turned in fury against Barack Obama, whose signature legacy will be utter capitulation to the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry, the military-industrial complex and the security and surveillance state. We would have rallied behind those few, such as Ralph Nader, who denounced a monetary system based on gambling and the endless printing of money and condemned the willful wrecking of the ecosystem. We would have mutinied. We would have turned the ship back. 

What was I really going to say that was better than that? 

And in case you missed it, my good man, it's perfectly appropriate to keep making comparisons to Rome. Sadly so.