Let’s be honest. The problems governments face in this country, at both the national and local levels, are beyond solution.
Nationally, we’ll not only never pay off Washington’s debt, as soon as rates rise we’ll have to barter our few remaining real assets for new higher speed printing presses just to service the interest payments. We may get out of Iraq or Afghanistan one of these years, but some other place will crop up to be an international crisis that only we must confront because no other country sees the point of doing so. Actually paying for universal health care? Please. Do even the basics to protect the natural environment? Yeah, yeah. yeah. And at the state and municipal levels of government meet even basic retirement promises for former employees? Don’t ask and I won’t tell.
So if the function of governments in this country is no longer to adequately address real and pressing issues, what is it? What can it do to cover over the fiscal, ideological, and foreign policy holes we’ve dug for ourselves over the years. Why make us laugh, of course.
I don’t want to put down President Obama by suggesting he doesn’t have a sense of humor. He does. Of sorts. But does this guy make you smile when he discusses serious matters? Does your mind automatically switch into a “life is too silly to take seriously” mode at these times? Heck no.
But if you were Italian things would be different. The exquisitely absurd Silvio Berlusconi, whose governance is described more fully and accurately in supermarket tattle rags than in the likes of our own New York Times, he’s the true embodiment of what a mature civilization puts at the top when things are just too beyond redemption to…well, to be redeemed.
I don’t wish to denigrate the New York Times, however, in its own coverage of the beyond-functionality American politics. This very day columnist Gail Collins described some of the shenanigans on view daily in Illinois. In so doing she nicely evoked a state of things at the state level in this country that nicely defines the old Land of Lincoln as a present day Land of Political Vaudeville where people hungrily turn to the local news for the latest hilarious performance.
You want to be miserable and see what this country has become politically? Read Bob Herbert in The Times. For life affirming silliness, tune into Gail Collins.
As for me, well, I, too, on many occasions am stuck in the old rant and rave and hope things will get better in consequence mode. In my saner moments, however, looking over the day’s news, I seek delight in the inanity of it all — and so can now hardly wait for President Palin to take the reins of government.
You think Silvio is the acme of Groucho at the helm? Trust me. Compared to President Sarah, he’s moose meat.