Playing Chicken Day

T

oday is the ninth day of Χmas, Isaac Asimov’s birthday (observed), the Feast Day of Saint Macarius of Alexander, and Run It Up the Flagpole and See If Anybody Salutes It Day. In Haiti it is Ancestry Day, and it’s Berchtoldstag in Switzerland. It is the twelfth day of President Trump’s partial shutdown of the American Government in protest over his not getting his way on funding a pet project. It is the last day of Republican control of the U. S. Government.

None of this exactly inspires me, to be honest. The American government shutdown is both stupid and suicidal, with Trump playing chicken with the incoming Democrats, who have nothing to lose. It’s like the scene in Groundhog Day when Bill Murray bets that the train is going to swerve first. It’s probably not going to happen, and there’s no reason that it should happen.

I don’t know why my party—the Republican Party—has decided to embrace such anti-American values as torture, welshing on debts, and breaking contracts. (Americans have of course done such things all along, but that doesn’t make them American values. What makes them values is embracing them, and celebrating them.) I guess I don’t care that much either; it’s just another milepost in American’s long degradation and fall.