With just a little over 24 hours left before the End of Everything, it appears that Congress has brokered a deal, just in time for the average American to not give a shit or understand what's going on at all.
This was easily the dumbest political crisis in US history, rooted in someone's (I'm still not sure whose) implicit belief that the best solution to a long-term problem is to make it an immediate problem that is roughly twice as bad.
In fact, this whole thing is so stupid that the only way I can really contextualize it is to frame the entire thing via quotes from Grant Morrison's "Doom Patrol."
Why "Doom Patrol"? Because "Doom Patrol" is the comic in which crises that don't makes sense are addressed by people who don't know what they're doing, often resulting in a solution that is almost as bad as the original problem.
***
1. The debt problem:
"Stop it? It can't be stopped now. The Decreator is annihilating the universe, bit by bit. This is only the end of the bloody universe we're talking about now."
2. The Tea Party steps onto the scene:
"Those are the leaders of the cult? Puppets?"
"Discarded childhood toys, grown bitter and deformed and hungry for revenge. Painted gods, by whose power existence itself is brought to an end."
3. The Tea Party explains their position:
"But this is insane, what could you possibly achieve by destroying everything?"
"Achieve? We achieve nothing, literally nothing."
Early Tea Party rallies were small affairs, and they had trouble deciding on a motif.
4. Opposing camps in Congress lay out their respective ideologies:
"I am a liar and I do not know why there is something instead of nothing."
"I am an honest man and I do not know why there is something instead of nothing."
5. Normal Republicans address the Tea Party:
"Please, I'm not really involved with these people, they've led me astray. I...I have asthma! I'm on medication! My dear mother is in an iron lung and I'm her only link to human society, have pity!"
6. House Speaker John Boehner explains how he can look at himself in the mirror every day:
"I suffer from a rather unusual disease, such that if I were to see any reflection of my naked face I would immediately cease to exist."
7. And acts accordingly:
"Thus do we present this absurdist ritual for your entertainment. Follow us into the golden country, into the empire of the senseless!"
8. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid marshals his party:
"Well, not long now before the end of the universe. Does anyone have any brilliant ideas before we all disappear completely?"
9. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi chimes in:
"Well...I mean, I just wanted to say...well...can I go to the bathroom please?"
10. President Obama changes his position in the middle of changing his position:
"It's activated by paradox modulation. Any contradictory ideas or images can open a way in."
The Democratic party's liberal wing did their best to influence the process.
11. Editorial writers critique the state of government:
"My dear ludicrous friends, standing there like lost property no one wants to claim, with stupid names and even more stupid costumes, look at us! Are we not final proof that there is no good, no evil, no truth, no reason? Are we not proof that the universe is a drooling idiot with no fashion sense?"
12. The negotiations begin:
"By the end of the first day I was completely insane. Minutes became centuries, became millennia, became eons. After several billion centuries I was convinced of my own serene divinity."
13. Further negotiations:
"Dada is the Kingdom of No, where even language fails, where words become futile!"
14. Final negotiations:
"Then came the War of Nerves, in which each side would ignore the other in an attempt to irritate the enemy into submission."
Some lobbyist groups are stranger than others.
15. The solution:
"We couldn't stop the Decreator, so we just slowed it down."
"But it's still destroying the universe?"
"Yes, but it's doing it terribly slowly now, so slowly that no one need ever know that the old place is coming undone."
16. Harry Reid explains how this outcome could possibly have happened:
"I'm a notorious and compulsive liar. I just wanted some booze. I simply refuse to bear any more of this hideousness without it."
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