The Specter of Defeat

To read some of the coverage of Arlen Specter's political re-affiliation, you would think that he is the most significant leader the country has seen since at least the time of FDR, if not Lincoln or Jefferson. While one would not be surprised to find that Wobblin' Arlen often imagines himself carved from granite and wearing a toga, it is less clear why the rest of us should share this opinion.

Specter has for many years been the Republican party's least rigid opponent and the Democrats' least reliable friend. Tempting as it is to view his betrayal as a pivotal event in the nation's politics, we are living in precisely the same world today as we would have been, had Pat Toomey not promised to administer a Ned Lamont-esque primary defeat. The difference is illuminating. Joe Lieberman, whose Democratic alignment is entirely sincere, took his beating in the primary as a good party man, before whipping Lamont in the general election.

The Republicans will almost certainly gain Senate seats in 2010, with the cry "don't let them have 60 seats" likely to play strongly in many seats now considered safe. Roland Burris, Chuck Schumer, and Chris Dodd are all to some degree embroiled in scandal, and power is rarely conducive to discipline in office. The world has changed drastically in the past 6 months, and the 18 ahead are unlikely to be any less momentous.

As to the future of the Republican party, the Democrats and liberal media voices have pronounced the last rites over its body more times than Madonna has discovered religion. We cover elections as horseraces and imagine that either man could at any time change places with the other, but it is almost never so. Election results are the produt of the interaction between great cycles in public taste, which are driven by demographic and economic forces that reciprocate over the course of decades, with the epicycles of events.

It is a great conceit to project the future based on a few observations of the present. The Democrats lost three times with increasing severity from 2000 to 2002 and 2004, and yet these changed neither their governing philosophy nor their future electoral prospects. All parties reek of defeat and desperation when their cycle wanes. I see nothing different in the present moment. The "fierce urgency of now" is a constant, as "now" is the sole moment in time with which we are in direct communion. It is only with the leisurely remove of history that we can more clearly discern that who today appears to ride astride the events of his time, is almost always the horse.

Big Government and the FEMA Coffins

While I find the Libertarian Temptation more compelling as time passes, I remain of the opinion that in the world as it exists today, there are certain Important Jobs for which government is by far the best qualified batch of rotten bastards to do. The threat of Plague afoot in the realm concentrates the mind to grapple with such bitter and uncomfortable eventualities.

Among them is the story of the FEMA coffins (Google it for yourself), which has been making the rounds of the fever swamps for at least a year or two. In brief, an investigative citizen-journalist claims to have uncovered a secret storage site where the state has stockpiled millions of cheap plasto-coffins. From there it devolves directly into the usual Mad Libs routine of conspiracy theory, and if you read enough discussion boards you'll find out that the government knows but can't stop it, is the cause of it, that it started with the Republicans or the Democrats, Al Qaeda, the Pope, is a manufactured virus or a natural mutation, that it will wipe out 90% of the population, or one city will get nuked, and so on. They're not worth tangling with because it's always turtles all the way down.

A lot of people start by saying, "the government really doesn't have a stockpile of a million coffins," and go on to explain that it's an ordinary commercial distribution center (roughly 2.5 million people died in the US last year and needed to be buried somehow), or that the video is entirely fake or heavily exaggerated.

Me? I hope that the government really does have a stockpile of corpse-handling accessories in some geographically-convenient location(s). Let's face it, sometimes Shit Just Happens. The list of unlikely-but-possible scenarios that cause a really large number of our fellow citizens (and undocumented workers eligible for government-provided cheap-ass body disposal) to unexpectedly leave this mortal coil is neither short nor reassuring. What I can say with conviction is that if the Mexico City Pig Sniffles should cause half of my neighbors to croak, and me and the other half are forced to plant them in holes in the local dog park to prevent a zombie apocalypse, you can pretty much write me off as anything other than a rifle-toting revolutionary.

I really hope the CDC can prevent the pandemic, or at least limit us to a small number cinematically-heartbreaking scenes where attractive young couples are separated into groups of Grim Survivors and Noble Martyrs. But should that fail, the goddam National Guard had better show up with hazmat suits, rifles, and trucks to cart away the dead.

It is against this gruesome backdrop that I live out my greatest disgust with Big Government's sense of priorities. At this moment we're confronting what is arguably the most ominous threat to our collective health in a decade (if not a generation), with virtually none of Health and Human Services' senior offices filled. Our first real alert to the situation in Mexico came from Canada. Institutions rarely become more effective or intelligent with increasing size, and the bureaucratic imperatives that drive government make this tendency even more injurious than in private enterprise.