DISORIENTING

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.