Body Politic
Breaking Barack
Like the story of an upstart senator from Illinois, the saga of Walter White, the Mr. Chips-turned-Scarface at the center of “Breaking Bad,” started out simply enough. Saddled with a cancer diagnosis, a son with cerebral palsy, and an unexpected pregnancy, the brilliant chemistry teacher turned his talents to manufacturing meth—just to leave enough for his family before he died.
It Might Have Been
Deathbed narrations of decadent men fascinate us. These haunted, semi-lucid ravings attract us for their reflective melancholy that dissolves the gaudy veils of wealth and power around rotten cores of misgivings and dejection. Orson Welles created the anguished Citizen Kane who can only call for his childhood sled in his last minutes, and Carlos Fuentes set an entire novel in the dying words of the megalomaniacal tycoon Artemio Cruz. Seeing the finality of our end, often rudely unannounced, brings our suppressed uncertainties to the fore.
A Tale of Two Cities
That the consummately professional and tirelessly effective law enforcement agencies working in Boston are overseen by such a disenchanting, dysfunctional, and disastrous bunch like Congress is unsettlingly uncomfortable, even beyond the usual cognitive dissonance endemic to Washington.
The Ideas Deficit
Deficit hawks, bolstered by self-interested billionaires like Pete Peterson, campaign for severe entitlement reforms, including raising the age at which seniors receive Social Security benefits. The fiscally austere mistake the deficit as a result of runaway government spending instead of weak demand caused by the recession, where deficits actually improve overall demand.
Game of Drones
President Obama, flagrantly trampling over campaign promises to “usher in a new era of open government,” is comfortable constructing a misinformation machine of Orwellian proportions. Any other country maintaining a policy of outright disavowal of hundreds of secret strikes, keeping a classified kill list that includes teenagers, and assassinating its own citizens without trial would have long ago been condemned by the U.S. as undemocratic and totalitarian. Hell, America might have even invaded it by now.
