CSotD: Buzz kill
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I suppose I was in elementary school when "Rebel Without A Cause" came on TV. I wasn't old enough to care about the movie, but I was most impressed with the "chicken" scene where Buzz's sleeve gets caught in the car's door handle and he plunges to his death.
Several decades later, I am most impressed with Drew Sheneman's take on the "fiscal cliff," and, in particular, the "get out and push" suggestion.
It is certainly a game of chicken, and, having now seen the movie several times at ages where I could get into it, I realize the point of the scene was that chicken is a stupid, pointless, destructive game and that, even if nobody gets killed, playing "chicken" is a sign of people without a lot of purpose, direction or judgment.
Back when the budget deal that is about to come due was crafted, there were plenty of voices warning that, while it did indeed offer the solution both sides claimed to want, it was going to take some deep cuts that would empty out the pork barrel and then some.
In other words, yes, it cut the deficit, but there was in it an element of playing chicken, because it required the kinds of hard choices everyone thinks everyone else should be making.
"Everyone else," that is. Not them.
It requires deep cuts.
But not to the planes being built in my state.
And not to the benefits being extended to my constituents.
Nor to the highway projects in my district.
In the words of Marat/Sade:
However hard we try to bring in the new it comes into being only in the midst of clumsy deals
We're all so clogged with dead ideas passed from generation to generation that even the best of us don't know the way out
We invented the Revolution but we don't know how to run it
Look everyone wants to keep something from the past,
a souvenir of the old regime
This man decides to keep a painting
This one keeps his mistress
This man keeps his horse
He [pointing] keeps his garden
He [pointing] keeps his estate
He keeps his country house
He keeps his factories
This man couldn't part with his shipyards
This one kept his army
and that one keeps his king
And so we stand here and write into the declaration of the rights of man
the holy right of property
And now we find where that leads
Every man's equally free to fight fraternally and with equal arms of course
Every man his own millionaire
Man against man group against group in happy mutual robbery
I wouldn't cast the Democrats in the role of Marat, mind you. But neither is this a lukewarm, on-the-one-hand-on-the-other stalemate. There is one side that has gone to great lengths to block legislation, that has refused compromise, all the time complaining that the other side has not accomplished anything.
And they are the ones who insist that there must be a stop to spending.
Until it's time to step up and do it, time to stop with childish, self-serving arguments in which macroeconomics are reduced to the equivalent of family finances, albeit a family in which nobody ever has to take a second job to make ends meet, because it makes much more sense to simply stop feeding the children or going to the doctor or heating the house in winter.
(I suspect that, when Jesus asks, "What father among you, if his son asks for bread, would give him a stone, or if he asks for a fish, would give him a snake instead of the fish?," these self-proclaimed Christians assume that he is asking for volunteers and wave their hands in the air, hoping to be among his chosen.)
Well, Jim Backus didn't have the spine to provide what his son really needed and maybe the parallel is stronger than I thought.
Meanwhile, providing a framework that would allow the demanded cuts to happen was very much a game of chicken, because nobody was ever going to actually follow through.
A thrilling game, but stupid and pointless.
And the unhappy outcome is someone else's fault.
Always.
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