Monomania

If this blighted decade in American political history has taught us nothing else, it’s taught us this: we are governed by a pack of cretinous monomaniacs.

This was brought forcefully home to me when I read about the stimulus package that Bush proposed last week, to save us from the recession he’s spent the last six years more or less guaranteeing we’re going to have. It’s an $140 billion package designed to put $800 in the pockets of consumers, in the hopes that they will immediately turn around and spend it, thus perpetuating the pathetic charlatan’s sleight-of-hand that the American economy has become: an economy kept afloat by rabid consumer spending and a punctured housing bubble whose ludicrous, speed-fueled mania served to obscure the rot at its core.

Framing the package as a tax rebate allows Bush to argue that the people who don’t make enough money to pay taxes shouldn’t get a piece of the pie, and that businesses should, thus doing his duty by the supply-side gods that Saint Reagan voodoo’d into existence, so many years ago.

So this proposal may be pretty stupid, but it’s not in the least bit surprising. Because the people who make these decisions have two basic solutions to every problem they encounter: go to war, or cut taxes. There’s nothing to attack here, really, so the only other option is to cut taxes. There you go. Simple. ¹

I find it mind-boggling and sad that the huge, complex, fantastically expensive machinery of government should be employed in the service of these facile, binary decisions. Because when the question comes down to one of a very few options, you really don’t need that many people crunching the numbers. There’s a fairly basic algorithm at work here.

To wit — does it:

• Speak a funny language? or
• Not worship at the altar of capitalism? or
• Not do what we tell it to do? or
• Have something we want?

If yes, and it doesn’t supply us with oil, then attack.

Otherwise, cut taxes.

That’s it. I mean, yes, there’s a lot of rhetoric and propaganda that goes along with this stuff, crazy twisted ratiocinations, specious arguments, etc. But that’s basically it. A sampling:

1. Our economy is tanking! [Cut Taxes]
2. Iran might possibly get nuclear weapons, someday, maybe! [Attack!]
3. The government has too much money! [Cut Taxes]
4. The government has too little money! [Cut Taxes]
5. The government has exactly the right amount of money! [Cut Taxes]
6. Whoops, my bad, Iran isn’t developing nuclear weapons after all! [Attack!]
7. We’re at war! [Cut Taxes]

It’s not just the Republicans, and it’s not just the politicians. The media, in their zeal to reduce everything to a series of buzzwords, lays waste to vast swathes of ambiguity. Evangelicals. Soccer Moms. NASCAR dads. Black people and white people and latinos. And so on. We’re all stripped of our humanity, pigeonholed, laminated, and laid bare on the tables of the punditocracy to dissect like the content-free abstractions that we’ve become.

Here’s hoping that whoever moves into the White House a year from now is enlightened enough to understand that the country’s problems are not a playground for their pet ideologies, and that policy grows up from a process of reasoned thought, not down from a small grab-bag of vetted, preordained solutions.