The Here and the Now of the Land of the Space of Today

Thought I might post a few Jurassic thoughts on our current Finnegans Wake-like national situation....

I think we're all liable now and then to point out the flaws in both political parties – one thing to consider, though, from a somewhat Aristotelian classificatory principle, is that all forms of government have problems "proper" to them. In the case of a republic like ours, certain amounts of short-sightedness, jockeying for position and influence, demagogic nonsense, and insider corruption are part of the beast. We might as well remind ourselves that there's no point in demanding that our pols adhere to impossible ideals of pure and disinterested government. It's good and even necessary to have ideals, but nobody is likely to live up to them anytime soon, if ever. (Wilde said that a map without utopia isn't worth looking at. As usual, "the Oscar" was right.)

It might be prudent to look at our form of government, then, somewhat in the manner of a biologist studying a wild animal – the critter may have some health issues (old wounds, pathologies, and such), but the question is, can said critter function well enough to get by and even thrive? If so, it's doing just fine. What many people seem to find frightening about the present is the possibility that we have indeed come close to the point of our form's demise. The near collapse of the financial system is a potential death blow to democratic rule. You can't have capitalism or democracy without a fair amount of stability, and we have been looking shaky in recent months.

Anyhow, I believe we can remain viable if we begin to deal with the simple facts that 1) we have been acting as if capitalism were a god-sent system rather than an imperfect vehicle for the satisfaction of unending human desire and 2) we want to denounce government and yet receive all sorts of good things from it, for which we expect to pay little or nothing. I'd like to keep the good things and add health care and improved education to their number, but we can't do all of it by borrowing trillions from China and elsewhere for unending decades. The only reason we get away with it, I suspect, is that everybody else is too afraid of us to let us suffer the consequences of our foolishness. (And of course those consequences would hit them, too.) And now we end up having to shell out astonishing amounts to the players in our broken financial sector. It's daunting, but we have tremendous potential and can get through this mess. President Obama's insistence on moving forward with some "big-ticket" initiatives makes a lot of sense: it's part of setting our house in order, arranging our priorities. We need to make our decision for Christ, so to speak, and figure out what really matters to us. If we can do that, the politicians will – after their messy fashion – follow suit.

Those who say that spending our way out of a depression/recession is irresponsible make a little point and miss a much larger one. We are already "through the looking-glass." To suppose that fiscal restraint will spur a return to normalcy is to suppose too much: if "the market" rights itself by its own means, it may do so in a fashion that does fundamental, unsustainable violence to those who are subject to its operations. Systems can be fiendishly viable while millions who depend on them go without: think "private health insurance." Allowing the economy to go into free-fall could yet render all talk about "returning to normalcy" pointless. Evidently, the ultra-conservatives who keep prating about fiscal restraint can't wrap their minds around this danger, mostly because they think whatever the market dictates must be right.