What if chaos is the point
Some years ago, magician Joshua Jay stopped by the newsroom and, using nothing more than a pack of playing cards, gave a remarkable demonstration of his skills.
You couldn’t detect Jay’s sleight-of-hand, no matter how closely you watched.
It is said that the mark of a good magician is getting you to look elsewhere through misdirection and deflection.
Right now, it feels like we’re being sawed in half — and not in a fun way.
Like a couple in the throes of divorce, we can’t even agree on why we’re so divided.
But what if all the bombast and outrageousness and food-fighting consuming us are simply the latest version of “divide and conquer?” What if chaos was the goal all along? We’ve been told over and over that nothing is getting done in Washington.
Wanna bet?
Just like a card trick, the popular belief that Congress is spinning its wheels causes us to ignore the people behind the curtain who are working the levers of power.
The rabbit and the hat
There are many cases when doing “nothing” is precisely the point, when playing the clock is the strategy by which certain goals are, indeed, being achieved.
Chaos and distraction often provide the cover by which they’re accomplished.
Mostly, those have to do with stripping help from the poor, like not renewing the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or getting the middle class to blame the poor rather than stagnant wages, and corporations who handed failed CEOs more in parachute bonuses than most working families earn in a lifetime.
Meals on Wheels isn’t the reason your kid can’t get out from under his college loans; someone in Congress is doing the bidding of that industry’s lobbyists.
Distraction is both the rabbit and the hat. For instance, we have a president who couldn’t be a newspaper columnist because he can’t take a punch. One of the most powerful persons on the planet won’t — can’t — turn the other cheek to the criticisms that comes with the job.
His ensuing Twitter fits and demonstrable lies result in seismic upheavals — both in defense and against — that cause the country to stop paying attention to the issues at hand. And it works.
Over and over.
Thus proving, yet again, that P.T. Barnum was right: “Want to draw a crowd? Start a fight.”
While we’re bickering over Colin Kaepernick and the politics of Harvey — both the hurricane and the letch — the current administration reduced funding for halfway housing for people coming out of prison, which all but guarantees relapsing for many. This occurred only mere months after the administration rescinded an Obama-era prohibition against new contracts with for-profit prison companies for federal inmates.
Think it’s a coincidence?
Now, maybe you don’t give a flying fig about ex-felons having structure and a place to live.
But you’d better.
Torches and dragons
Even the Russians have taken note of our prejudices, our family feuding and our ability to be distracted easily and are using them against us to turn our system inside-out. But some wide receiver knelt on Sunday. Tiki-torch Nazis march unafraid through American cities, California burns, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands languish and the Las Vegas massacres already have become so yesterday. Meanwhile, we’re debating the merits of Hillary’s response to, well, anything.
How good is the hocus-pocus? Saying “Merry Christmas” has been turned into a crusade, even though there are no dragons to fight and slay.
The nation is changing, and that scares some people and emboldens others. Former presidential adviser Steve Bannon readily has admitted his goal is the dismantling of government, so it stands to reason that some of the upheaval is not just an accident or growing pains.
While we get whiplash trying to keep up with the president’s latest tantrum, Americans in Flint still can’t drink the water.
It’s worthy of Harry Houdini.