It is disorienting to prepare for an extended series of
public lectures on the thought of Karl Marx while simultaneously obsessing over
the minute-by-minute reports of the negotiations regarding the government
shutdown. I can understand why Marx
holed up in the British Museum for years while preparing to write Capital.
I am reasonably comfortable about the lectures; the shutdown not so
much.
Did Chuck Schumer do the right thing or was he a traitor to
the cause? Lord, I don’t know. I have never so much as served on a town
recycling committee. My practical
experience with negotiations does not extend farther than getting all of the
Den Mothers of the Northampton Cub Scout Pack on the same page in the planning
for the annual bake sale and auction. The
Democrats are in a very weak position legislatively. They got the Children’s Health Insurance Program
renewed for six years at the cost of a weekend shutdown that was probably less
disruptive than a winter storm. In
seventeen days it will all happen again, unless the bipartisan group of Senators
can bring a DACA fix to the floor of the Senate and pass it. If that happens, will the House go
along? It hardly seems likely, in which
case we could never have gotten a DACA fix in the first place.
Cable News commentators are talking disapprovingly about the
leftward tilt of the Democratic Party, so that is good news. The North and South Koreans are going to
field a joint ice hockey team, which gives me hope [does anyone know whether
they are any good?]
It is all too much for my aged brain. I am going to return to Chapter One of Capital.
1 comment:
That is an interesting point about the point of forcing a DACA debate and vote in the Senate while it would go nowhere in the House. That said, I think I recall that you did far more than organize bake sales and auctions in your political navigation of the turbulent waters of a philosophy department divided between an analytic South and dialectical North.
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