In the famous Monty Python parrot sketch, Michael Palin’s understandable outrage at being sold a Norwegian Blue that was actually “stone dead” as he put it, does not get him a new bird. What it does get him – from the John Cleese character who originally sold it to him – is a barrage of obfuscating re-specifications of the bird’s condition. No matter that the bird by this point “has passed on….is no more…has ceased to be” – is, in fact, “AN EX-PARROT;” and no matter that its current capacity to stay upright is entirely due to the foresight shown by John Cleese in nailing it to its perch. The new owner is simply told that the bird, far from being dead, is “resting,” “stunned,”  “prefers kipping on its back,” and – my favorite – “pining for the fjords.”

The sketch works, of course, only because both Palin and Cleese had access to a thesaurus. The humor comes from the play on words. Well, a thesaurus is working overtime in Washington D.C. right now, though its use is making nobody laugh. There is obfuscation aplenty, and it is thickening: which is why I recommend “pining for the fjords” to any of you who, like me, are growing increasingly outraged by our mainstream media’s inability to “tell it as it is.”

Wednesday’s London Guardian newspaper carried a full report under the banner heading “Barack Obama battles left and right for debt ceiling agreement,” documenting the manner in which he was playing the role of “mediator in direct talks to prevent government bills going unpaid, interest rates soaring and US stocks plummeting.”[1] The paper then briefed its UK audience on the unfolding political drama in Washington, the detail of which is well known to any political junkie based here in the United States. And buried deep in the article was this comment from Ron Haskins: “the Democratic party on average is further left, and the Republican party on average further right, so they are trying to cut a deal between folks who are more driven by their ideologies and principles.” The Guardian, that is, treated its UK liberal readership to the standard “plague on both their houses” interpretation of what is going on in Washington DC right now – the kind of interpretation David Brooks deploys too[2] – the “ it is all so much more complicated than either pure free-marketeers or simple-minded Keynesians seem to grasp” argument.  In the hands of either Hoskins or Brooks, The Guardian’s interpretation is one designed to make us grateful for the courage and foresight of a centrist political leader who is willing to demand the surrender of sacred cows on both sides of the aisle. It suggests that political division is the main problem in play here, and that rising above politics is its only solution.

The signers of The Declaration of Independence combined political courage with intellectual honesty. Indeed for them, the first was entirely rooted in the second. As they said, since “prudence…will dictate that Government long established should not be changed for light and transient causes,” “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that” those proposing radical change “should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” This they duly did in what is now the Republic’s founding document.

The job figures for May were truly ghastly. In a month in which the economy needed to add 150,000 jobs simply to keep pace with the growth in the labor force, the private sector created 83,000 jobs and the public sector actually lost 29,000. Nearly 14 million Americans remain involuntarily unemployed.

When the President came to Winston-Salem in North Carolina last December, and first laid out his “sputnik moment” analysis of our contemporary situation, the whole emphasis of his address that day was on the need to strengthen our educational base in order to compete effectively in the global economy of the twenty-first century.

            The Center for American Progress issued a fascinating and important PolicyLink paper early in April 2011: Prosperity 2050: Is Equity the Superior Growth Model?[1] Written by Sarah Treuhaft and David Madland, both its content and its title raised a central question of our time: whether it is “possible that the traditional assumption that there is a tradeoff between growth and equity is wrong, and that broadly shared growth is ultimately better for the economy?” The tentative Treuhaft/Madland answer to this question was that

If it is true that those whom the gods would destroy they first send mad, then currently we are in serious trouble in Washington DC. For in the political theatre we have just witnessed – around the shutdown of the federal government – there has been madness aplenty: a madness indeed which, unless quickly and effectively challenged, will inevitably rewrite the entire Obama play, to his immediate detriment and to our long-term cost.

             The dominant discourse in national American politics these days is a discourse on deficits. The leadership of the Republican Party, emboldened by their mid-term capture of the House, regularly informs us that “we are broke, and that we need to do something about it.”  By “we,” they invariably mean the federal government. By ‘broke,” they mean the scale of borrowing currently necessary to balance the federal government’s books.

         These are frenzied days in Washington DC. They are also particularly dangerous ones for publicly-supported institutions that Republican politicians happen to dislike. With the threat of a complete government shut-down as their ultimate weapon, House Republicans are entering this year’s budget round with some very clear targets in mind. High on that list of targets is the $445 million federal subsidy to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  The President’s 2011 budget proposed to increase that subsidy by a meager $6 million.

            Elections happen very quickly when they come, but they are not won, or indeed lost, simply in the moment of voting. Winning and losing elections is the business of the space between elections. We are in such a space now; and if we are not careful, the business we are now in will prove to be the business of losing.

           You may not know it, if you watch only Washington Beltway politics, but we are currently in the midst of a housing crisis of monumental proportions. It is a housing crisis initially caused by the inadequate regulation of private sector mortgage lending when George W. Bush was president. It is a housing crisis which was subsequently transformed and compounded by the large scale involuntary unemployment which the 2008 financial crisis and resulting recession left in its wake. It is a crisis which the Obama Administration inherited, and which has deepened on its watch.

            In last week’s State of the Union Address, President Obama replayed themes he had touched on here in North Carolina when speaking at Forsyth Technical College in December.[1] He spoke of competitive challenges and the danger of a loss of global leadership.

It has been very difficult in these last few days to decide whether or not to respond to the House Republicans’ first major political initiative of 2011 – their introduction and passing of the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act. Why respond, when responding suggests that the initiative is sufficiently serious as to warrant a carefully crafted reaction? Why respond, and give the initiative a legitimacy it probably does not deserve? It has been very difficult to decide.

“When you are in Washington, remember what the voters back home want – less government and more freedom”[1]

(Jim DeMint, welcoming tea-party backed victors in the 2010 mid-term elections)

This is no ordinary day in American politics. This is the day power officially shifted in the House of Representatives from Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats to John Boehner’s Republicans. This is the day the inmates retook the asylum.

The community college in my small North Carolinian city received a  presidential visit on Monday. The President came, spoke and left, in a visit that would have been only locally newsworthy but for the importance of what he said. Barack Obama came to Winston-Salem to celebrate America’s community colleges and to stress their importance in the re-energizing of the American economy. In a characteristically long and carefully constructed speech, the President made the case for greater spending on both education and research as the way to avoid U.S.

Rome lived on its principal until ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia Road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt – and the carts brought nothing out but loads of dung. That was their return cargo….