Clown college, U.S. Congress-style

In the land of ago, when I was a wee shoolboy with Coke bottle glasses and a well-worn slap bracelet, I knew this kid who developed a system for extorting favor from his parents: He’d hold his breath until his face turned blue as a Smurf’s butt cheeks. It never worked, as far as I could tell. Whenever the little snot wanted the newest video game or an extra ten minutes of play time, he’d enact Operation Tantrum, melodramatically puffing out his cheeks in a manner reminiscent of a South African tree frog. The only thing he ever showed for it was an erosion of brain cells and the vacant scowl of a bad-tempered village idiot.

In thinking about the current U.S. Congress, that was about the best analogy I could come up with.

Oh! Snap! Score one for the Gassman! But seriously, these people are morons.

Now, I haven’t exactly developed a reputation for trenchant political analysis. There are people who do that kind of thing far better than I do. My tastes run more toward the absurd; frankly, I’m more at home talking about Superman and fake vomit than the ins and outs of American government. It’s not that I don’t have opinions; I research candidates, I vote, and I read voluminous tomes about long dead patriots and ex-presidents, which places me squarely in the social domain of cat-loving librarians. Grimly, I follow the news, and things bother me.

But I’m generally quiet about these matters – until something happens that hits a little too close to home.

“Shutdown means no new beer from craft brewers.” That was the headline. The government shutdown, aside from making us look like a country run by drooling lobotomy patients, had apparently closed an obscure agency that approves new breweries, recipes, and labels – this according to an Associated Press article that, ironically, made me wish I were drunk. The story recounts the sad tale of Mike Brenner, who dreams of opening his own brewery, but was being hop-blocked by congressional incompetence. His plans, you see, need to be approved by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, a little known arm of the Treasury Department. Brenner expected to lose thousands for every week his opening was delayed. Meanwhile, suds-loving consumers like you and I came dangerously close to losing out on an amber colored treat, likely decorated with a Viking power-lifting dragons on a boat made of dead bison.

The explanation from deadbeat lawmakers is that it was for the good of the country.

All this, of course, was spurred by the Affordable Care Act, the sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system. Never mind that it hasn’t yet achieved its full implementation, or that its merits and flaws have yet to be wholly delineated by the sheer inertia of its reality. No, these knuckle-dragging troglodytes have already decided that the Act is, in one congressman’s words, “the most insidious law known to man” – more insidious, apparently, than Jim Crow segregation, slavery, Nazi-era ethnic cleansing, and the Spanish Inquisition. Delaying the law, or outright defunding it, is the goal. Which only make sense if you’ve spent the past week huffing exhaust from the tailpipe of a Dodge Ram.

Because there’s no reality in which a government shutdown is a mature, grown-up reaction to political differences.

Look, this isn’t a screed in defense of the ACA. The law eats up more pages than the collected works of Tolstoy, and reading it would seriously cut into some quality Mario Kart time; I’m not about to profess any expertise on the matter. I, like most Americans, will be feeling my way into the new health care system the way you orient yourself in a dark basement: Slowly, and with caution. And maybe some hockey pads and a miner’s helmet.

But lawmakers are supposed to pick up where my knowledge of the law leaves off – and many of them don’t, offering quantifiably false statements about “death panels,” which sound like the judges in a zombie version of American Idol. These are the mouth-breathing dunces who temporarily prevented Brenner from opening his business. And while craft beer is a wholly serious matter – these days, there’s little else to help us cope with widespread ineptitude – our suffering brewmaster was far from the only shutdown victim. Veterans pursuing their education didn’t receive federal tuition assistance. Nutrition programs, foster care payments, financial assistance for the poor and anti-elder-abuse programs were hit hard, particularly in the Native American community. Private businesses at or near federally operated parks opened their doors to silence and tumbleweed. And why? Because a gaggle of Washington do-nothings took the Operation Tantrum approach to governing: Holding their collective breath until their faces turned blue.

All for the good of the country, of course.

I know I’m supposed to offer some kind of prescription at this point, but how do you fix something so systemic? Not to be all doom-and-gloom, but a pair of statistics don’t help the outlook much. The first, from veteran pollsters Gallup, finds that public approval of Congress has tanked to about 11 percent; not surprising, given that most of the schmucks on Capitol Hill conduct themselves with roughly the intelligence and decorum of acid-dropping circus clowns. The second stat, reported by Outside the Beltway, finds that in 2012, the re-election rate for congressional incumbents was 90 percent. For those keeping score at home, that means nine out of 10 of these bozos got to keep their jobs.

Taken together, what do these stats imply? That everyone hates congress, but nobody’s willing to change it.

It would be too easy to say that the American people are getting what they deserve. It’s a representative democracy, after all; congress is a reflection of us. We hire these idiots. But I refuse to believe that any nation, founded on our principals, guided by our ideals, outright deserves this level of lunacy. Anonymous once said, “Scratch a cynic, and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.” And so there’s a flame of idealism in me, still gently flickering, that gives me the faintest light of hope – hope that Americans will put down their iPads, turn their backs to reality television, and pay a little more attention to the things that matter. Because this isn’t a game. We’re playing for keeps, and it we don’t step it up soon, then we’ll deserve every ounce of what happens next, and have no one but ourselves to blame.

For the good of the country, we can, and should, do better.