Notes On A Shutdown
"Hey, don't blame me - I voted for Gary Johnson."
Alright, you know what? I’m just going to come out and say
it: I don’t give a shit that those World War 2 veterans weren’t able to visit
the memorial in Washington DC. Not a single shit! I have nothing but respect
for their service to their country, but the fact that they weren’t able to
visit the World War 2 memorial has absolutely no emotional impact on me.
I mean, maybe it would if everything else was working, but
the shutdown has created a situation where children dying of cancer are unable
to be treated and Capitol Police are chasing down kamikaze drivers and self
immolators without getting paid. In light of all that, I’m really not too upset
that a bunch of elderly veterans’ vacation got ruined.
These people fought in the largest armed conflict in human
history, for fuck’s sake – I think they can handle mild disappointment.
*
The recent salmonella outbreak in Foster Farms chicken,
which was able to spread undetected thanks to FDA and CDC furloughs, is the
part of the shutdown that has so far had the biggest effect on me.
Throughout my upbringing my parents warned me so much about
the health risks of undercooked chicken that leaky packages of chicken breasts
sometimes show up in my nightmares. Needless to say, I’m taking this very
seriously and abstaining from all chicken for the duration of the
shutdown.
This creates problems for me because I’m surrounded by
literally hundreds of different
businesses where you can trade money for delicious hot chicken, usually wrapped
in foil. Zankou Chicken! Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles! Birds, a restaurant in
Hollywood that only serves chicken.
As a lazy bachelor who doesn’t do a lot of cooking, this has really put the
squeeze on my diet.
But I’m not taking my risks here – the outbreak originated
in California, so to walk into a fast food restaurant in California and order chicken would be like playing some sort of
reckless game in which your fate is entirely left up to chance.*
*Kind of like that game where two people drive right towards
each other until somebody turns away – you know, the one they play in Footloose. What did they call that game,
again?
Looking on the bright side, this has helped to curb my Baja
Fresh habit, and now I’m saving a little more money. So I’ve resolved my budget deficit…
*
Do you ever get the impression our nation is run by a bunch
of college freshmen? Because about the only thing Congress has been able to do
this year is blow every goddamn deadline they have.
Remember back at the beginning of the year, when the
Sequester was the worst thing that could possibly happen? Everybody – the
media, the president, economists – told us in great detail how the spending
cuts of the Sequester would kick kids out of Head Start programs and delay
important medical research and make it rain dog blood unless Congress could
pass a budget by March 1st.
And then Congress didn’t pass a budget by March 1st
and the Sequester happened and was as bad as they said, and after a week or two
the conversation changed to, “Okay, this Sequester thing sucks, but what’s really important is that the government
doesn’t shut down in October. That’s going to be way worse than this.”
And as we got closer and closer to the shutdown everybody
talked about all the terrible things that would happen if we shut down the
government. And then that happened, and all the terrible things have begun to happen, and now everybody is saying, “Okay, this government shutdown thing
sucks, but what’s really important is
that the government doesn’t default on its debt next Thursday. That’s going to
be, like, 17 trillion times worse
than this.”
And now that we’re getting closer and closer to next
Thursday suddenly there’s all this talk about how we might be able to go a couple days past Thursday before we actually
default on our debt, and it’s like, maybe if you just wrote your fucking
research paper now you wouldn’t have
to figure out a new lie to get an extension from the professor, y’know?
It would restore nearly all my faith in our elected
officials if just once we could resolve an impasse without it turning into an
episode of 24 – everybody running and
screaming and torturing each other until we barely save the day at the last
second. But I guess that’s not going to be feasible for as long as 20% of our
legislature is made up of people who touch themselves when they see Washington
get destroyed in Independence Day.
*
I have to say, though, if this is what the collapse of
Western Civilization is going to be like, I’m really not impressed. Yesterday I
went out for poutine; today my roommate watched Ghostbusters in the middle of the afternoon. Unless things get
significantly more fucked up in the next eight days I’m going to go ahead and
say that economic catastrophe is by far the most boring type of catastrophe.
I’m not one of those dipshits who thinks that there’s
nothing wrong with the world’s biggest economy failing to pay its credit card
bill – I know a lot of people are suffering now, and that billions more will be
if nothing changes by the end of next week. I would greatly prefer it if we
avoid widespread suffering and turmoil.
But if we have to
have widespread suffering and turmoil, this isn’t the kind I used to fantasize
about in fourth period Spanish. If we default on our debt I don’t get to
fashion crude armor out of street signs and bolt it to The Mystery Wagon and
then drive around in a leather jacket with a shotgun scavenging for supplies
and fighting mutant raiders. All that happens is everybody becomes really,
really poor.
But I guess that’s still preferable to healthcare.
Truman Capps freely admits that he would be the
first to die in a Mad Max style apocalypse.