Deus ex machina

The people we count on to take reasonable care of us are letting us down. Like almost all Americans, I’m disgusted by our nation’s leaders’ handling of the debt ceiling crisis. The budget negotiations are where Congress fights out its taxing and spending plan for the next year. Raising the debt ceiling should be a routine procedural event that happens mostly out of public sight, a page 5 story at best. Instead, Republicans are using it as yet one more opportunity to pile on to President Obama just to make him look bad while they ignore our real problems, primarily crushing unemployment and millions of Americans living hand to mouth with little or no hope of improvement any time soon. Or ever.

And like almost all of us who voted for Obama, I’m disappointed in his performance. To give him credit, he’s trying to do what he said he would do when he came to Washington: create a new kind of politics that rises above party politics and special interests and instead engages in genuine problem solving. Still, it was at best an unrealistic hope from the beginning, and it was clear from even before his first day in office that Republicans weren’t playing by the same rules. Quite the contrary.

So now we have the Tea Party extremists holding enough votes in the house to defeat any compromise, even if it’s tilted heavily towards Republican goals. They hold such power because they’re crazy. Game theory points out that when one side appears completely irrational in its demands, the other side will always make major concessions. It also points out that when one side really is completely irrational, it will crash the system. You can only negotiate a hostage crisis if the bad guys haven’t already decided to get as much press as they can, then kill all the hostages anyway.

We’re the hostages.

All of this has been too depressing to write about again, so I’m glad to see in a poll published today that most Americans still give high approval ratings to at least one big player: God. A majority of fifty-two percent of Americans approve of God’s performance, though nine percent disapprove and forty percent are unsure. Only an even fifty percent approve of God’s handling of natural disasters, a surprising number since God causes natural disasters, but I guess half of the population thinks he does a good enough job cleaning up after Himself.

And a substantial majority of seventy-one percent approve of how God created the universe. I have to agree with them that the universe works very well indeed. I mean, look at string theory.

A majority of Americans still like Obama as a person, even though they disapprove of his performance. The poll didn’t ask if people still like God as a person, but apparently they do.

We sure need His help right now, some kind of "plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.” Deus ex machina.

What that could possibly be, God only knows.