Former athlete

One more entry in the frightened-or-baffled-by-the-news series here.

Yesterday's New York Times featured a story entitled "Across Nation, Budget Talks Stir Pessimism." The gist of the story is approximately as follows:

"A quick, informal selection of voices from across the country over the weekend found both pessimism and cynicism about the state of negotiations in Washington, resignation about the partisan jousting and more confusion than conniption about what exactly will happen if the president and his Republican opponents cannot make a deal to raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2. And neither side, they say, looks good."

 The story carries on with a series of man-on-the-street interviews, largely with professionals of various stripes. As the writer tells it, even people who work in fields that will be directly affected by a default care very much. "I have no interest in it," says a woman who works in a financial services office in San Francisco. A financial-products trader describes the possibility as "a storm out in the gulf" and goes back to drinking in a Manhattan bar.

Meanwhile, I ("a waiter living in Brooklyn," the Post writer might say) am pretty freaked out. What do these people know that I don't?

Maybe nothing. One respondent tells the reporter that she doesn't think in trillions, but hundreds or thousands, so the possibility of a sovereign-debt default doesn't seem "real." I can sympathize, but my deeply imperfect knowledge of the consequences of a default doesn't make the notion any less worrying to me. I'm sure as shit not following the Casey Anthony trial instead, unlike the woman who works at the San Fran finance firm.

The retired cop from Fresno strikes me as a little more sympathetic (not punk rock, I know). "Whatever is going to happen is going to happen, and at this level, we're just going to have to deal with the fallout." That's about where I am, and I probably have a lot less to lose than he does.

Ultimately, I think that the reason this whole debt-ceiling kerfuffle bothers me as much as it does has nothing to do with the actual consequences. Rather, I'm upset because it's a demonstration of just how ineffectual our vaunted representative democracy has become.

As I've mentioned before, there was a time when I truly believed in the American model of government. When I read about the debt deadlock, it's like running into an old friend who was once a gifted athlete and has since become a junkie. The Republic has always been far from a paradise, but it's looking like absolute dogshit right now.