Yes, the shutdown is alarming in many ways. It hummed along for some time, because after all it was just government workers that were largely harmed, a few inconveniences for people here and there, and a few national parks getting trashed, though the effects of these things were amplified somewhat thanks to social media and the like.
But now more people are wringing their hands as the food inspections grind to a halt, and the latest tech IPOs get held up, and - gasp - the bean counters are getting antsy because the shutdown is having "real" effects on the "economy," that vengeful god that upon being denied its unlimited growth, takes a break from consuming the exploited blood and sweat of its constituents and shifts to simply crushing them as it grumpily contracts.
And anyway, the optics aren't good, which is always a big deal in this country.
The intractability and dysfunction of the government is scary enough, but then you get to thinking about the nature of the impasse and the shutdown itself.
Let's see, a lot of the argument surrounding the shutdown is based on premises that are complete abstractions and established conventions, which collectively arrived at, allow for the coordinated operation of the U.S. government. They're fabricated metaphors and stories which, if adhered to, happen to most benefit bankers, investors, and CEOs when they are working normally, let alone when they are pawns in conflicts of governance between various rival economic factions at loggerheads.
Yes the wall is racist, mean and preposterous, and a mere symbol in a debate that purposefully obscures the international structures of capital, worldwide divisions of labor, past and present migration, and the like. But the premises surrounding budgets, spending, and taxation, which undergird the conflict and which have sparked other shutdowns, are just as self-defeating, at least if you want a prosperous society and not one sucked dry by financial parasites and oligarchs, and they are widely agreed upon by both parties and virtually all of the establishment news media, including the "liberal" side.
Even if these "deals" and "compromises" are actually worked out within the confines of our collectively agreed-upon governing logic, the vast majority of society still gets screwed. We still agree to match spending with taxes, and constrict government spending and administer austerity, and leave the majority of economic stimulation to private monopoly, which comes attached with interest rates.
What's more, the ruling class continues to rule with no real conception of the seriousness of the problems we face. In the larger scheme of things, it is a struggle over nothing, taking place in a fantasy land that was built to sustain continued exploitation and extraction of the wealth generated by the body politic.
This is a nothing-struggle that takes place with real energy and resources, energy and resources that are now "borrowed" because they should have been put into renewables and clean energy decades ago. We can't even call it a losing struggle! The struggle itself is lost, and lost at a time when any struggle in itself is generating energy that needs to be carefully spent.
