I recently (yesterday?) mentioned Lawrence Lessig’s New York Review essay from December, 2021, titled Why the US is a Failed Democratic State. The occasion of it was a then-upcoming democracy summit to be convened on Zoom.
Lessig said the promotional materials promised the U.S. would listen and learn, and would acknowledge and examine the shortcomings of our venture to find a more perfect union.
I’m not certain who precisely is going to be showcasing our own “imperfections.” The agenda online is incomplete. But it is right that we “confront” these “imperfections” “openly and transparently.” Because what’s most striking about America’s understanding of our own democracy is our ability to see what’s just not there.
What’s not there is a majoritarian, uncorrupted government. I’d argue, and Lessig sort of notes this later in the essay, that another superpower Americans possess is not seeing what is there.
A common instance of this surfaced in a Bloomberg article about Biden signing into law the Inflation Reduction Act, known in these quarters as the Zombified Skeletal Remains of the Build Back Better (ZSRBBB, pronounced like a death rattle) plan proposed by Biden last year at a ten-year cost of $3.5 trillion.
Joe Biden on Tuesday signed what Democrats have named the “Inflation Reduction Act,” a $437 billion behemoth [emph. mine] of healthcare, energy and climate initiatives that’s actually just a smaller version of the president’s “Build Back Better” plan, the centerpiece of his legislative agenda.
If that’s a behemoth, coming in at a ten-year cost of $437 billion, which is less than 15% the cost of Build Back Better before weasels ripped its flesh, then what would be the latter? A super-behemoth?
And if $3.5 trillion across 10 years would have been a super-behemoth, what’s the $10 trillion we’ll be blowing for real on the War Department during that same period?
I’ll you what it is: it’s invisible, that’s what. The Bloomberg reporter doesn’t see it. Most people don’t see it, most of all when talking about spending in any other arena.
Democrats say the the IRAct will reduce our deficit by $300 billion across 10 years. We could save that same amount by trimming the War Department budget less than 5% annually, but most Democrats in the federal legislature voted the department almost 5% more than Biden requested.
Cut that budget by a measly 10% and we could save the best part of $1 trillion in 10 years.
(One can argue that we ordinarily don’t need to rein in the deficit; rather, we need to direct that spending elsewhere, but for purposes of illustration let’s say we’re motivated to trim it.)
I watched the first two seasons of HBO’s Westworld series, which features advanced androids capable of thought but bereft of free will. A recurrent incident in the show is one or another android confronted with something that could reveal to them their condition. The android will look at it and say, “Doesn’t look like anything to me.”
They can’t see it for what it is. Maybe we’re androids?
(Contributors to this post include Horace Silver’s Opus De Funk; The Alarm’s Omega; Fontaines D.C.’s Skinty Fia; and The Gland’s The Glands. Music recommendations welcome!)
In case you planted an Easter egg to see if I am reading, in the begining of the 6th or 7th paragraph from the end, I think you forget a '"tell".
Love the photos that start every article; this far. Your staff should be proud.