by
Barry Farber
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You’ve heard of “The Mouse That Roared.” Sequester is the “Lion That Hiccuped.” Warning: This does not mean America is safe.
Historians have an annoying habit of swinging backwards on new
headlines like monkeys, looking for bygone parallels that may or may not
tell us useful things. The painlessness of the sequester reminds this
amateur historian of the “Phony War,” the eight months of World War II
after the Germans swallowed Poland, and Britain and France declared war.
The world yawned. Comics in England called it the “Sitz-krieg,”
opposite of “Blitz-krieg.”
Author Martin Gross has written several best-selling books on the
dismal state of America’s finances, beginning years before anybody had
ever heard of Barack Obama. His latest is “National Suicide: How Washington is Destroying the American Dream from A to Z.”
Gross insists America could cut, not the paltry 2 percent demanded by
sequester, but a full 10 percent without serious pain. Gross calls
America’s government “dysfunctional” and proves it with documented sagas
of, for instance, his investigating of a federal expense nobody had
ever heard of. Apparently, there was a taxpayer-supported “Office of
Former House Speakers” complete with furniture and four or five
employees doing God-knows-what for those who used to be speakers
of the House and sometimes weren’t even in Congress anymore! Can you
guess how many overlapping “rural” programs Gross found? There were over
a thousand, some passed as long as 80 years earlier.
Martin Gross told a national radio audience last week that he expects
a Communist-style revolution, civil war and blood in the American
streets, all within the next eight years. Gross isn’t running for
anything and isn’t trying to sell his four-year-old book. He was a
stalwart of the Democratic Party in New York, ran Adlai Stevenson’s
campaign on Long Island and was John F. Kennedy’s floor manager trying
to win the vice presidential nomination in 1956.
You can’t dismiss such a qualified observer’s predictions merely
because they’re so horrible. You owe him a little wine-tasting and
blood-testing first.
The most effective answer to national crisis is setting quarrels
aside and pulling together. How well do you think America is doing in
that regard? Have you ever seen a mature nation behave worse in a
crisis?
In New York City there were two blackouts, 12 years apart – 1965 and
1977. In that first one, New York was drenched with honor. Journalists
around the world compared the population of New York to Londoners
during the Blitz. The second one will be remembered as “The Night of
the Animals.” The police couldn’t stop the looting. They didn’t try.
They confined their activity to keeping the looting orderly, so
different gangs smashing store windows and walking out with sofas,
washer-dryers and home-entertainment systems wouldn’t attack one
another.
It’s called “deterioration.”
