Gotham Diary:
The Last Reel
16 October 2013

Taking the pulse of things this morning, I sense that the showdown in Washington seems to be regarded as an embarrassing contretemps that we’ll all be laughing about over the weekend. I don’t share this cocktail-party skepticism, this doubt that things could ever be different. I see kids playing with matches while mixing potions from the cleansers under the kitchen sink.

I have no idea what’s going to happen next. I have no idea what’s going to happen as a result of whatever does happen next. Or after that. But I see robustly ramifying slides into chaos. If I have a pet worry, it’s for the credit markets. Lots of metaphors for the credit markets come to mind, but none of them stretches far enough to describe what might happen to everyday life if the credit markets wobble, or worse. Metaphors are distracting, anyway. There is nothing metaphoric about the observation that it is healthy credit markets, no less than trucks and processing plants, that put food on the grocery shelves and batteries in the hardware store. And it is only slightly metaphoric to suggest that a credit markets crisis is a kind of fuel crisis. A food crisis — possibly a famine.

Famines are always possible, as are all disasters, and we cannot devote our lives to worrying about them. We do what we can to avoid them. But that’s just what is not happening in Washington. The nation is currently held hostage by a band of parliamentary insurrectionists who are determined to slow, if not stop,  the transformation of the United States into a federation of cosmopolitan regions. These won’t-be-legislators represent a by no means inconsiderable segment of the population. White, older, moderately affluent, and sentimental rather than thoughtful, these Americans believe that their country is sinking in a bog of quicksand. Maybe it is. In a few years, they’ll all be dead, and it’s not unlikely that they won’t be replaced by like-minded younger voters. But they can still scream, and that is what they are doing.

They don’t care if their cries — and their intransigence — spook the credit markets. Why should they? They have nothing to lose. Like a man in quicksand with no one nearby to help, they have already lost it.

They just want to be sure that we all get to know what it feels like.