Two worlds, two productions, one over-the-top and raising fears of bankruptcy, the other steady as she goes -- and (so it seems) never the twain shall meet. And yet look again and those two worlds will fuse before your eyes, those two Washingtons will meld into a single capital city. Then it will be clearer that the actors at center stage and those traveling in the provinces are putting on linked parts of a single performance. The financial problems of one will turn out to be inextricably linked to the other; the lack of an effective stimulus package in the first connected to the endless series of stimulus packages -- all that failed "nation-building" in the imperium -- in the second.
Like some Roman god, it turns out that schizophrenic Washington has two faces, each reflecting a different aspect of American decline. In one, everybody can spot the madness. In the other, it's less evident, even though untold American treasure -- literally trillions of dollars communities here desperately need -- has been poured into a series of wars, conflicts, and war preparations without a victory, or even a significant success on the horizon. (Greeted as if World War II had been won, the killing of Osama bin Laden should have been a reminder of the success of the Global War on Terror for a man with few "troops" and relatively modest amounts of money who somehow managed to land Washington in a financial and military quagmire.)
One American world, one Washington, is devouring the other. Think of this as the half-hidden psychodrama of this American moment.
Put another way, for months Americans have been focused on raising that debt ceiling, as onscreen countdown clocks ticked away to disaster. In the process, few have asked the obvious question: Isn't it time to lower America's war ceiling?
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books).
Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt
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