Shadow Walking in Washington

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

– MacBeth

To witness Washington’s latest self-inflicted idiocy is not merely sad, it is enraging.

There is disrespect for settled law on the part of the government-hating GOP, sure. There is a reckless, even malicious, disregard for the deep obligation we owe our public sector employees, who are left without a means to support themselves and their families.

And then, to pick out one small cost, there are the pre-schoolers who can’t go to Head Start, and their panicked parents. When asked whether the children were told on Monday that they may not be able to come back today, one program’s Administrator sensibly said that it would be “too frightening” for young children to be threatened with such an interruption in their care.

As well it would be. But it is frightening for the rest of us as well. This shutdown — in both its intractability and lack of rationality — trashes even the notion of a public function, and faith in basic order.

On the heels of our still-punishing economic recession, that shattering sound you hear may herald what some economists (as well as The Economist itself) are calling the siren song of the American Dream, a mythologized but aspirational State founded on our better instincts and a medicinal dose of hope.

And although you could not tell so from much of the media coverage, blame in this case is not bipartisan. It is, as the President said, the doing of a single faction in a single party. Yet the spectacular dysfunction that has resulted — the inscribing of this failure of logic or reasonableness onto the moving world — will have costs beyond the tallying up we can do in simple math related to foregone government functions.

With the threat of a far greater catastrophe wrought by this kind of brinksmanship around the debt ceiling still looming, and no obvious end point, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that we now risk becoming a hollow shell of an actionable democracy: One of those places — and the world is full of them — in which pomp and circumstance, the mere performance of power and political ritual, replace meaning. A place in which chaos lurks around the corner, and the profiteers from chaos are not far behind.

I happened to be on Capitol Hill yesterday for meetings, just doing my job. “Tap-dancing over the void,” a senior Senate staffer joked through a grim half-smile. Between meetings, there was an eerie quiet.

We all would hate to be a witness when the wheels finally come off the carriage, but I walked between appointments with growing unease: through gilded-but-empty elevators, near-abandoned hallways and over the oddly desolate sidewalks.

Passing the Capitol’s grand edifices (which I normally feel proud of despite my pretense at jadedness) yesterday gave me a queasy feeling. And somewhere in the stillness it hit me: for the first time I can recall since the nuclear arms race staggered to a close in the late 1980s, I am nervous for my country.