Le Plus Ça Change . . .

This piece was written in February 2003 and was intended to be an op ed for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The sloppy record in my computer does not tell whether or not it was used. (But to search in the morgue of the P-G is more of a nuisance than is warranted.)

Crashing Through the Looking Glass

Rudolph H. Weingartner

            We’ve moved into a topsy-tervy world Alice never dreamed of.  If living in it didn’t have such horrendous consequences, that tale would be even more amusing than those of Lewis Carroll.  Our betters—the people we have chosen to govern us—seem to have imbibed of a potion that has them turn our world upside down.

            The majority of the federal appeals court in St. Louis, to begin our journey, ruled the other day that a deranged prisoner may be forced to take a drug that will, while it functions, make him sufficiently sane to meet the Supreme Court’s sanity requirement for being executed.  That’s like forcibly attaching a prosthesis to a one-legged captive so that he can be made to jump from the frying pan into the fire.  The fact that the “restoration” of the prisoner’s sanity would lead to his execution was irrelevant, the court’s majority declared, to the appropriateness of compelling him to be sane, at least while he remains alive.

            This ruling affects but one person now and probably not many in the future, but is nevertheless a good example of the wackiness that resembles nothing so much as an infectuous disease.  Many have made fun of the nuttiness that has urged us to buy duct tape and plastic sheeting to protect our houses from chemically or biologically polluted air.  But I’ve not seen comments about the magnitude of that project.  I calculateed that my comfortable middle class home would require 422 linear feet of duct tape plus 430 square feet of plastic.  Given that we are a population of 290 million and assuming that on the average four people live in a housing unit and, further, that my own commodious dwelling has four times the barricading requirements of the average, the country would need about 7.7 billion feet of tape and approximately 7.8 billion square feet of plastic to keep all of the US breathing easy—at least at home, since I haven’t included places of business.

            Probably, this Homeland Security recommendation was just another effect of the disease that has been spreading through governmental circles.  But when the exhortation to buy was followed by the injunction not actually to use this gear, it is easy to become suspicious that the real point was to give a boost to the homewares industry.

            We do, after all, know that the economy needs tending to, even if we don’t think it should be done in the way that our infected Washingtonians have in mind.  The massive tax reductions that have been proposed have been much discussed.  But that plan has not been clearly enough juxtaposed with the desperate straits in which our states and cities find themselves—the worst in more than half a century.  What are these states and cities doing to alleviate their fiscal woes?  Both Democratic and Republican governors and mayors expect to raise taxes in order to pay unavoidable bills, in the absence of adequate help from Washington.  Alice would have a clever verse to describe this nuttiness.  I can only fall back on two clichés: money is being taken from Peter to pay Paul and we know full well who is at what end of the stick.

            How Washington is infected by topsy-tervyness in international affairs has been consuming hours of television time and acres of newsprint.  Our betters come close to shirking their responsibility concerning a present danger while obsessively pursuing a future possible one.  North Korea actually possesses nuclear bombs plus the capacity to send them overseas, while Iraq, which we threaten with immanent war, has not yet managed to get that far.  Our government is rightly concerned about the lack of assurance that Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons have been destroyed.  No doubt, that lethal material is being stored in hard-to-detect bunkers.  Yet at the same time, a war is in preparation that, if it breaks out, will surely bring those weapons out of their hiding places—to be used on us and our friends.

            Our friends—that is, if we still have any.  Perhaps the deepest symptom of the upsidedown disease that has conquered Washington is its attitude toward the nations with which we share this planet.  Globalism is our policy Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  At bottom, there is but one economy, we insist, that transcends all national borders.  Togetherness is the watchword on those days of the week.  But when the occasion arises to do something together—prevent global warning, create a court that encompasses that globe, or prevent a vicious dictator from acting up, it is Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday.  On those days, Washington is for going it alone and unilateralism wins out. We are prepared to turn all of our friends into antagonists so as to avoid the compromises that are inevitably exacted by cooperation. This is a unilateralism that will isolated from all who matter on this globe for countless years to come.

            Reality is not where Washington sees it. We badly need an antidote that will reverse the disease that has gripped the city from which we are governed.