On this date, little Sputnik was shot into space
Just one shot, of many, in a war-proxy race
There were thousands, or millions, who were all losing sleep
Cos an object above them was going “beep…beep…”
There were others, of course, who were not so entranced–
When they heard the “beep…beep…” they just got up and danced.
Louis Prima, “Beep! Beep!”, recorded 1957. Lyrics, if you want.
In honor of Sputnik, launched this day (October 4) in 1957.
No time for anything right now, but I had to share with you a wonderful piece of writing on the shutdown. Charles Pierce, writing for Esquire, pens “The Reign Of Morons Is Here“, and it is beautiful. First, the succinct summary of the situation:
In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress — or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress — a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party’s 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.
Then the analysis (this paragraph closing with the most appropriate metaphor I’ve seen on the topic):
This is what they came to Washington to do — to break the government of the United States. It doesn’t matter any more whether they’re doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party’s mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address in which government “was” the problem, through Bill Clinton’s ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being “over,” through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find “common ground” and a “Third Way.” Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country’s higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
I’ve only highlighted 2 paragraphs–the whole thing is well worth the reading.
And now I have even less time… dammit.
There’s nothing the government does, so I’m told,
That the free market doesn’t do better
So now with the government shutting its doors
And the market cut loose from its fetter
There is nothing to stop it from jumping right in—
Taking over, and doing things right—
Bureaucracy stood in its way until now,
But with government down, now it might!
So the kids who are staying at home for a bit
Cos the money was cut from Head Start?
The market should see an investment to make…
But they don’t. So the world falls apart.
The last time constituents voted, they noted
That one of the issues was health care reform
One candidate promised, “don’t heal it—repeal it”
And promised to take on the nation by storm
The nation, by whom they elected, rejected
The notion that healthcare was nothing but trash
The losing Republicans, routed, just pouted,
And bought local races with shitloads of cash
The courts said the law, despite bluster, passed muster,
So now, on the books, it’s the law of the land
Too late for opponents, so screaming and scheming
Is all they have left, which they simply can’t stand.
Within their own party, the fractions of factions
Are zealously fighting their way to the right—
Where once there were moderate voices, no choice is
Allowed to seem soft, or unwilling to fight
The ideologically driven are riven
By forces that split them and make them unwise
They’ll claim they’re just heading where freedom will lead ‘em
And death’s on the table, before compromise
But the thing is, they lost! There’s no mystery—history
Shows that such losses have happened before!
With the pathway the voters selected rejected,
Democracy fails… the alternative’s war.
Oddly enough, the Tea Party Republicans put me in mind of this verse… I wonder why. Man, for people who loves them some constitution, they sure are quick to abandon it when the process leads to someone else winning.