No, You Can't Have a Pony

It's time to grow up.

by Jeffrey C. Billman

EDITOR'S NOTE: After this newspaper went to press, U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich announced that he would, in fact, vote in support of the Senate health care bill.

We have a serious problem.

Actually, we have serious problems: wars, trillion-dollar deficits, human rights crises, terrorism, 46 million uninsured Americans, 9.7 percent unemployment, climate change, failing inner-city public schools, states and cities, like Philadelphia, facing massive budget shortfalls.

We are living, of course, in a time of immense consequence. It hardly takes an overactive imagination to construct worst-case scenarios. It does, on the other hand, require creative license to imagine a return to the peace and prosperity of the roaring '90s, when the stock market rained dividends like manna from heaven.

But more than these serious problems, we have a serious problem: that is, the absolute lack of seriousness in our discussions of how we solve these problems. Talk about health-care reform, you hear "death panels." Talk about global warming, you get politicians mocking scientists. Talk about reining in entitlements and creating long-term fiscal sustainability, and Congress can't even create a bipartisan deficit commission because Republicans are worried that such a body might — might — recommend some tax increases. (President Barack Obama had to create it himself, though it lacks any real authority.) Talk about closing Gitmo, and you get relentless fear-mongering — even attacks on the lawyers who represent Gitmo detainees as traitors (see Cheney, Liz) — as if the justice system is somehow ill-equipped to deal with terrorist thugs.

You see this problem manifest when supposed deficit hawks who prattle on about eliminating earmarks raise holy hell over the slightest thought of trimming the $782 billion defense budget, which approaches twice of all of Congress' non-defense discretionary funding. You see it when the same people who fell over themselves to vote for George W. Bush's unfunded Medicare expansion now proclaim themselves champions of fiscal responsibility, while voting against a health-care reform package that would actually reduce the deficit (and in the process, voting to maintain a system that kills thousands of people a year, because insurance companies deem them insufficiently profitable to cover).

It's time to face the cold, hard realities: By 2014, the annual interest payments on the national debt will exceed the amount Congress spends on all domestic programs combined, roughly $516 billion. We will, at some point soon, have to increase government revenues to maintain our economic viability. You don't get tax cuts and fix the debt.

Sorry, you can't have a pony.

Yes, I'm talking about congressional Republicans, but not exclusively so. Take liberal purity troll U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who last week pledged to vote against health-care reform — even if his vote doomed the bill — because it doesn't have a public option. Or U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., who also suggested that he would vote against the Senate's health-reform bill, which would provide coverage for 31 million Americans, because it would not allow illegal immigrants access to insurance exchanges (a DOA idea if I ever heard one).

Closer to home, you see this lack of seriousness with South Philadelphia High School principal LaGreta Brown, who showed up at the School Reform Commission's March 10 meeting not to talk about the racially charged violence at her school, or the way the District botched its handling of that mess (see Isaiah Thompson's excellent report), but to kvetch about the fact that a Philadelphia Inquirer cartoonist had made fun of her. And to make her point, Brown brought with her the president of the local NAACP and union officials, all of whom claimed to be ever-so-offended by the image of Brown sleeping at her desk while violence raged. Of course, the racial tension at South Philly High was brewing long before the events of Dec. 3, and school officials were caught totally flat-footed. I can't really say whether Brown was asleep at the proverbial switch, but her reaction — "I'm not clueless!" she proclaimed — and the fact that this is what the SRC chose to spend its time on, does not bode well for Philadelphia students, roughly 40 percent of whom will drop out before they graduate.

It's time to grow up. Serious problems require serious people offering serious solutions: not those who cater to the lowest common denominator of ill-informed idiot mobs; not those who put utopian principles above pragmatism; and not those who would deflect from their own failure by crying racism.

(jeffrey.billman@citypaper.net)