A Whimper
I suppose the crowning moment for a dysfunctional, parasitic organism is when it is finally able to detach from its host and operate independently. It’s starting to feel like our Congress has reached that point.
In school, pretty much everybody learns the principle that cheaters never win (at least in the end). I did a little thought experiment, if you will, to explore my natural concept of cheating.
I conceptualize a government, and then I imagine someone is cheating inside that government. What does that look like? My mind arrived at the concept of a coup. You break the power of the current rule of law, typically with some kind of popular or powerful support, and impose new rules.
The key concept here is that you broke rules to get your way. This violates the Booker T. Washington-esque principle of working within the system to effect change.
Maybe you just break a law. You slip a judge some money to get a certain decision, or perhaps you lobby excessively for a legislative change, or buy a presidential pardon. It doesn’t matter. You either crack the system or crumble it, but no matter what you broke a rule.
I then note that the situation in Congress doesn’t seem to match this concept.
I see a second-order cheating at work here; very post-modern, I guess. Here, you don’t break the system by violating its rules, you break the system using the rules. This is cheating with the brain rather than the fist.
We are in the midst of a dismantlement of our manufacturing capacity. Farming continues to consolidate. We are paying companies to plant trees to offset the charcoal we burn in our barbeques. We employ people domestically to draw software flowcharts that are zapped to India for development. We somehow manage to compete with the rest of the widget-producing world and be a/the preferred immigration location despite the growingly extreme lack of widgeteries. I assume this competitive advantage is not completely driven by Quik-E-Mart and Starbucks operations. So it’s working, somehow, at least for now.
In this way, I guess it makes sense that cheating would also become more cerebral.
But, in a coup you have people or guns (probably both). You have something behind you. Maybe a few Deists sitting around a table drafting up a pretty hard-worded document that later gets enclosed in UV-proof vacuum glass.
In the new model, all you pretty much need is a sketchy grin and a firmly extended middle finger. How did you get into this powerful role? It’s clearly a question for the ages for those in a mysterious position of power.
Does it matter how you got there? How do you stop someone who is playing by the letter of the law?
Americans are level-headed enough to pretty much rule out the idea of throwing everything off and starting again. Our system works quite well on the whole. But what are we going to do about Congress? At this point, they are operating in open disregard of the public’s support.
We think we have choice, but with the party in many ways dictating who makes it past the primaries, we get a bunch of yes-men with a few renegades who slip through the lines only to get pelted once faced with the machine of the system.
Matt Taibbi’s The Great Derangement had a pretty stunning recount of how Congress is effectively a petting zoo front propped up against the mechanisms of committees and party inner-workings.
Right now, we can’t do anything. I remember trying to read the language used in the bailout bills. It’s impossible. How can citizens get involved when things work like this? And isn’t that the most important rule of all?