Friday morning I began writing a blog post about the absurdities in and around the “bipartisan infrastructure deal” announced the day before. Then I stepped away from keyboard for a while, and before I resumed writing, parts of the Jenga tower had already begun caving in.
There’s a small life satisfaction, there, although people are scurrying around trying to patch up this dumb thing, and I don’t presume the effort is at and end.
I do believe that the most important point is the same, regardless. Republicans’ shiny-object obsession with bugaboos, conspiracies, and other made-up bullshit, has a counterpart among too many Democrats as well as the culture at large. This center-left obsession is with, perhaps fittingly, obsolete conceptual infrastructure.
Customs, norms, rhetorical clichés, mental clichés, bipartisanship, filibuster, reconciliation; it’s an obsession with the score of a game which no longer serves any purpose at all, in large part because only one of the participating teams is trying to play said game. Despite which, this ridiculous scrum continues of spectators and one team ferociously debating tactics and points, while the other team (and an increasing number of referees who have joined their team) simply play Calvinball.
From this starting point, it seems like a pattern of over-complicated and inherently dishonest “deals”—Obama’s 2016 attempt to waltz the Trans-Pacific Partnernship through Congress, Republicans’ 2017 game of hot-potato over healthcare repeal, and now the “two track” infrastructure scheme—is not a coincidence but basically inevitable.
The old is dying. The new cannot yet be born until more people pull their heads out and confront reality. Here, meanwhile, are some of the morbid symptoms.
