So you're going along, smirking or gnashing your teeth, with visions of Denny Hastert and Mark Foley dancing in your head; the issues pretty much defined -- Hastert out, Hastert in, Democrats in power, Republicans in power. And then...
And then North Korea joins the nuclear club.
To appropriate Dr. Johnson's observation about the impressive productivity of a writer facing the gallows, it concentrates the mind wonderfully. Or let's just say it should, despite the present junior-high state of mind that reigns in our centers of media and political power, a state we could sum up thus:
Gotcha!
No, got you !
Nyaah, nyaah, you missed!
And so on. Whoever once had misgivings about the extension of the franchise to 18-year-olds may drop them like a hot potato. The middle-aged now act, if anything, goofier and more recklessly than such 18-year-olds as have the maturity and decency not to exercise the franchise.
The great carnival of 21st century American life rolls forward, exhibiting more and more of the self-regarding, self-destructive passions to which we are sadly accustomed.
Prior to 9/11, the big story in Washington, D.C., the one over which everyone salivated while awaiting the next salivating development, was the disappearance of former Washington, D.C. (not Capitol Hill) intern Chandra Levy and her supposed relationship with Democratic Congressman Gary Condit.
Prior to this week's successful North Korean nuclear test, the big story had been a gay Republican congressman and his contact (nature not wholly defined yet) with teenage congressional pages. Continued... |