Call Me Fish Meal

Nobel Paul Krugman, emeritus recipient of the Absolut n Tonic Oslo Prize for Comparative Mixology, has called the recent Republican budget plans voodoo economics, whereas David Brooks is standing at the mineshaft door with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead. As I was saying, ahem. I would like to do away with the term voodoo economics, firstly. It has the reek of the black-frocked missionary sniffing down his nose at the primitives' animism without ever wondering if his own wine-and-a-cracker deity might not be just as phony as the numinous spirits of the riverbeds and pine forests. But despite Kruggo's high histrionics--cruel! mean-spirited! heartless!--I give him moderate credit for restraint. Brooks, on the other hand, is ready to sail off to Troy. "This is great. It’s democracy — how change begins." I've heard this same tone of grunt from the far side of a glory hole. What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm.