Skeleton Dance

This is not going too end well for us, despite Congressman Paul Ryan’s much-applauded “Path to Prosperity” proposal unveiled last week just before the whole battle degenerated into the ruse over abortion. The central truth that reflective persons can take away from these shenanigans is that American polity is unreformable. Nobody elected to congress will have the backbone to manage contraction, especially to cut payments to old people. The medical system can’t be fixed. It is made up of too many rackets benefitting too many enterprises and individuals. It just has to fail completely so that in the rubble of the system doctors and patients can reestablish some meaningful relationship between services rendered and the rate of payment.

The Obama health reform bill only illustrated the fatal weakness of progressive politics these days – the irresistible impulse to address issues of excessive complexity with added complexity. While most of the overt stupidity in our politics resides on the right, an equally disabling hubris and grandiosity reside in the political left. I suppose people who graduate from very selective and expensive colleges, and receive immense reinforcement from colleagues who preceded them there, develop an inflated sense of their ability to effectively manage things, especially complex things. Many of these young, bright people cannot believe that our creaking and foundering systems won’t yield to their managerial tinkering, and the net effect must be to turn them into very cynical careerists with nothing left but personal ladder-climbing and wealth accumulation – hence, the disgusting biographies of figures such as former public servant Lawrence Summers and Mary Shapiro of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The political left in America makes up in cynical cowardly avarice for all the mendacious stupidity on the political right, so we end up at this moment in history with a perfect blend of every bad impulse in human nature and none of the virtues.

Personally, I don’t see how breakdown and revolution can be avoided now. Anyway, outside of politics itself is a gigantic realm of other things that are not trending well at all – things that will aggravate and amplify every political blunder we make. The combination of the breakdown in the world’s oil allocation system and the disorders in money and banking are sure to obviate any momentary public relations triumph by one political faction over another. Reasonable people should expect turmoil going forward. The spectacles staged in congress are little more than skeleton dances performed by creatures lacking even the verve to be zombies and vampires.

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