So I tell myself, in the unheated ardor of my drawing room in October. My grandfather's face looks down on me from atop the mantle, in the photo he had taken on a lark in Paris, what - sixty-seven? Sixty-eight years ago? A twenty year-old in the uniform of the First Army - first over the Rhine at Remagen, chasing Jerry back and foreclosing the anschluss. I'm sure he knew what hard times were like, a skinny Irishman with the Great Depression for a nanny. Yes, I'm sure he'd be sickened, sickened as I was, by the Democratic assault on America's fiscal future.

 

After all, the only true contribution of World War II veterans was that we could have exactly the kind of lives men like John Boehner and Lloyd Blankfein and Ted Cruz think we should have. This rolling blackout clapping its way across the country, along the power lines, into the heart of every community in America, is necessary. No, it does not speak to some sick selfishness at the heart of the American dream, some churlish disregard for community and sacrifice and child cancer patients which might indicate to some sane diagnostician that something has gone terribly wrong in this country. What other symptoms could there be?

 

The sickness is literally washing up on the doorstep from which our corrupt, repulsive rulers pontificate. In most cases, it can be ignored, so we can focus on the things that count, like keeping the Congressional Gym open. On that same National Mall which the Indian Summer Patriots are fighting to both defund and keep open, a man doused himself with gasoline and lit a match. John Constantino battled mental illness all of his sixty-four years, and it finally claimed his life, in a shocking and saddening final burst. This might seem like a noteworthy story, but, it wasn't. Barely stuck around. Better to descant on how the shutdown "saved the world," like Very Important Person Ezra Klein did.

 

Yes, the shutdown saved the world, but maybe not all the people in it. The great world turned on a dime the moment a mentally ill woman battling postpartum depression rammed her car into the White House gates, convinced as she was that Obama was jamming her mind with radio signals. She hurt a policeman on foot and rammed into a cruiser before our police gunned her down in her car in front of her toddler. And they were praised, even after their story changed.

 

You always praise the termination of the sickness - not its prevention. You can spend as much money as possible to scrape the dead off the sidewalk, but don't you dare say this is a country that breeds unhappiness like mosquitoes in a swamp. Some countries would hang our four hundred and thirty-five members of Congress from the Potomac Basin's cherry trees as a warning to any fresh carpetbaggers. Here - we make a fuss, and the squishy establishment liberals tut-tut, and the hard-right drives the jackboot deeper.