Kirmizi_ada

For once, I’m through with taunting Congress for its addle meekness.

Okay, it was a bad bill, and fortitude would have called for something more cataclysmic: a bonfire of vanities ending in at least two years of 18% unemployment, festering gaslines, miles of shut storefronts, deserted gated communities, and a chilling, raw opportunity to rediscover what about being American is really worth the karmic hassle.

But the gentlemen and women of the various States bowed and began manufacturing money instead. Second-grade math students of the world, cover your ears!

I think this is my fault, actually, and not that of our 435 round-shouldered worker-bees under the cupola. Anyone who has behaved as permissively as I have for the last eight years is the sole and cardinal bearer of blame for the baroque state of monetary value and civic confidence in twenty-first century America. I knew exactly what kind of corrosion was afoot. I could smell it every time I bought a two dollar scull-cap at the Walgreens, transfered balances to a glistening new credit card to avoid the annual fee on the old one, or listened to my bridge partner talk about “flipping” houses in the Vegas suburbs. But instead of startling to my feet, I kept reaching for the Terra chips.

Since way back during the Contract with America, my own nodding attention-deficit in matters of federal policy has been fueled by a kind of insulating cynicism about public affairs, a studied divestment from everything my activist elders in the 1960s and 1980s hoped that I might remember in precisely these kinds of dark times. To their dismay, I privatized myself instead.

How many smoke signals does a citizen need?: a joint resolution on the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists” (Sept. 18, 2001); HR 3162 (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001); extraordinary rendition, warrentless wire-tapping, shock-and-awe, David Iglesias, Valerie Plame, Alito, Roberts, FEMA, the Dixie Chicks? So many canaries fleeing the beltway you can hardly see the sky.

So where was I? Happy to have survived Y2K and needing a break from vigilance, I wanted to enjoy the consoling company of the like-minded I had traveled so far to find. And Cheney-Bush’s dry-drunken joyride through the amber waves of grain gave me the perfect alibi to check out, to opt for what was once called, in 1930s Germany, “an inner emigration."

Seven years later, the blame for the bailout is at my feet, in my pocket, on my ATM screen—where it belongs. The question is: where's an American to put his queer shoulder, now?