Showing posts with label government shutdown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label government shutdown. Show all posts

Friday, October 11, 2013

Let them eat squat


Marie Antoinette infamously said "Let them eat cake" when the French people had no bread, and then she lost her head.

Now, in the third year of America's tea-party hostage crisis, the guillotined queen of France ain't looking so bad. At least she didn't personally thrust the hungry masses into pauperism, and at least she offered them cake as an option.

For the Republicans' whack-job wing, otherwise known as the tea party, that's not nearly Darwinian enough. With the ongoing government shutdown it brought upon us -- not to mention the sovereign default and resulting financial carnage it would like to serve for the next course -- tea partiers in Congress seek to create the poor whom they would sacrifice to the god of natural selection.

This brings us to the plight of rangers and civilian workers at Grand Canyon National Park, as reported by The Los Angeles Times:
Patrick Dotson was in crisis mode. The Grand Canyon Community Church pastor had just emailed a state food bank with an unlikely request: Rush food to one of the world's seven natural wonders.

Then came the knock on the door. A U.S. Park Service ranger asked whether Dotson could expand the small food pantry that was being run out of the church's garage. "He said, 'We've got families struggling here. How can we make this bigger?'" Dotson said.

The U.S. government shutdown has turned a prestigious national park where millions come each year to relax and recreate into a realm of high anxiety. Hundreds of employees are stranded without work or pay, prompting the donation of hundreds of boxes of food for families that have nowhere else to turn.

About 2,200 people remain inside the isolated Arizona park, 1,800 of them employees of private concessions that make the place run — the people who change the hotel room sheets, serve the meals, sell the gift shop mementos. Many are entry-level, minimum-wage workers with families who live paycheck to paycheck.

And while concessionaires are offering free rent and meals to those out of work, dependents often do not qualify. Families who rent apartments and send their children to a school near the park's famous South Rim have been left to their own devices, forced to rely on savings and fast-emptying supplies.

The result: Dotson's food pantry, which normally serves a dozen families a year, now has its hands full. The impromptu pantry has been moved to a community hall, where volunteers distribute boxes containing rice, beans, peanut butter and tuna.

Dotson requested the assistance of Phoenix-based St. Mary's Food Bank last week when he noticed that donated food at the church was quickly disappearing. He knew things would worsen as Washington's standoff dragged on.

Wednesday brought news that future handouts would contain perishable items such as lettuce and other vegetables, sending a buzz through the park, said Sarah Stuckey, a spokeswoman for St. Mary's.

"It's just a very strange situation for all of us inside the park," Dotson said. "There's a lot of nervousness here. People are worried. They're asking, 'How long is this going to last?'"
HOW LONG is this going to last -- this reign of congressional terrorists? How long will we live with the threat of "Give us what we demand, or we'll wreck the government, victimize the marginalized and blow up the economy"?

My fear is that the U.S. Constitution is unequal to the task of excising a fairly elected cancer from our body politic. That was John Adams' fear, too:
But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
MORALITY and religion are passé in postmodern America, some of the still-religious are bat-shit crazy for the tea-party terrorists, and "avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness" have become the ultimate public-private partnership today.

We're drowning in all that and Honey Boo Boo, too. We elected the bat-shit bastards who threaten to be the end of us. And short of a Latin American-style military coup, it beats me how we get out of the fine political mess we've fashioned for ourselves.

It just may be that we have to lie -- fitfully and uncomfortably -- in the bed we've made.

The good news, however, is that the United States has been this divided before -- faced down an existential threat from radicalized, extortionist lawmakers before -- and we're still here. We found a way to remove the malignant tumor from the heart of our national fabric.

The bad news is that about 625,000 Americans died in the process.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Whither North Dakota?


Apparently, the government shutdown has dried up all funding for education.

But if you're going to have an epic geographical fail, you'd just as well put it on Facebook. Especially if you're the chief meteorologist for a local Fox affiliate in Florida. Which we all know is somewhere between Cuba and Egypt.

Rare is the government that is smarter than the people who put it in power. In other words, to quote Dr. Zachary Smith, "We're doomed! We're doomed! We're all going to die!"

Tuesday, October 01, 2013

Looking in the mirror and seeing Congress


Charles P. Pierce cuts loose on Congress on The Politics Blog in Esquire today.

Why? Because somebody had to.
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.

We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.

We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
THIS IS WHAT we've come to. Government by terrorism -- or extortion, if you want to be polite about it. I don't.

Right now, the Republicans are applying the tactics of your average al-Qaida cell, blackmailer, extortionist or neighborhood thug to the art (and I use that word loosely) of governance, such as it is today. The difference is in degree, not principle.

If they don't get their way -- if Obamacare isn't done away with -- somebody's gonna get hurt. Better yet, everybody's gonna get hurt.

When I was in college, America was enraged and frustrated by a hostage crisis that lasted 444 days. Now we have government by hostage crisis, and it's been going on for almost three years. It has become "the new normal."

Worse, we did this. We. Did. This. We elected these ayatollahs in blue suits. They do exactly what their pollsters tell them we want them to do.

We have exactly the government we deserve.

Half of us want to sacrifice the concept of a sustainable society to whatever the hell our inner spoiled, horny brat tells us is hip and happenin' at the moment. We've decided that we're cooler and smarter than the fossils who preceded us, and we're going to do what we want, when we want, and the future can go to hell.

Consequences are for squares. Or bigots. Whatever.

MEANTIME, half of us have decided that the entire concept of commonweal is a communist plot. We ask the question that Cain asked of the Almighty in Genesis -- "Am I my brother's keeper?" -- then unhesitatingly answer it ourselves with a resounding "Hell, no!"

Abel was a loser anyway.

This half of us is smarter and better than Those People, and we're going to do what we want, when we want, and our neighbor can go to hell.

This is the country that elected this bunch. One party is as bad as the other, in general, but today is the jihadis . . . er, the GOP's . . . day.

Both approaches to civic deviance have left us where we stand today, which is on the edge of the abyss, stomping the precipice with one foot as we dangle the other over oblivion. I wonder how that will work out for us.

Maybe we'd just as well live for today . . . because tomorrow is going to be a real bitch.