WIPE YOUR GLOSSES WITH WHAT YOU KNOW (JAMES JOYCE)

The current political "impasse" in the United States reminds me of the Queen's croquet-ground of Lewis Carroll.  The difference being that the novel has now been hijacked by airport literature.

It is painful to see how a world power is slowly accelerating the potential for sliding into the abyss.

It is to be expected that powers encounter bumps in the road here and there.  The EU is a demonstration of recurring malfunction.  Still, all those meetings and endless nights in spooky Brussels end up keeping the situation from getting out of hand.  Egos are bruised but the E.R. always remains open and the slow, frustrating, half-baked healing goes ahead.

In Washington the tone is different. Besides the real intricacies of budgetary and debt problems, the situation is rendered more toxic by a never-seen animosity between branches of government. All seem to be on the wrong page.  The President is undermining his stature at home and abroad by making rowing errors that unseat him.  The Democrats look like props of a "Cocoon" film remake.  The Republicans are lost in a biblical fratricide (what else?) Cain and Able episode.

Meanwhile, the world continues an accelerated jump into what becomes the "toxic globalization" (Adieu Fukuyama).

There is for the moment an accepted suicide pact in the United States wherein the Wagnerian has overtaken the Mozartian.  It would be senseless to attempt to separate the guilty from the innocent, since foolishness is an all-encompassing category.  If the debate were confined around the size and role of government, a philosophical resolution might emerge.  Unfortunately, the discussion looks closed to intellectual argument and has been reduced to mostly heinous personal attacks. 

Obamacare, debt ceiling, government shutdown are ingredients for a dangerous polarization but the real fight is elsewhere. It is a battle about prioritizing the parochial over the general. In the political landscape, common sense is slowly giving ground to what is becoming the dysfunctional. The world watches awestruck.  There are no actors in this play. The President seems to make all the wrong moves. The Democrats stand firm about what few understand (health care reform). The Republicans are divided between Jacobins  and Montagnards, erroneously giving their own civil war the importance it lacks.  This bad script needs a Frank Capra.

It becomes hard to fathom that those pathetic, mostly younger provincial players are unaware of the harm they might inflict on their country.  When Senator John McCain took Sarah Palin as his running-mate, he certainly did not think he had opened the door for mediocre intent or a disjointed worldview.  This American remake of a "trailer park Joan of Arc" paved the path for far more dangerous and formidable followers:  see Rand Paul, Eric Cantor or Ted Cruz.  Some might lack polished worldliness but in today's America the district overtakes the world.  The continuation of the American saga might lose speed while populism and isolationism take over the appeal of what was the "indispensable power." It is not too late yet, but when provincial attitudes start to prevail, empires tend to be bypassed and are no longer invited to the head table. They might also be "ignored" as happened in Asia yesterday when the absent "Pivoter" appeared reduced to "wallflower" status.