The Game on the Table Now

I just signed an online petition heading for President Obama's office, adding my voice to thousands of others asking him to abstain from offering cuts to Social Security in return for Republican action on the national debt. I signed and submitted my name even though I think we could and should make considered cuts in Social Security. Why do such a thing? Because our national political climate doesn't seem to have any possibility of our taking any considered, reasonable action anymore and, absent this possibility, I would rather have Social Security as it is than cut off another limb for the Republicans to gnaw at their budgetary feast.

Republican ideals are largely pretty much okay with me. Personal freedom, limited governmental instrusions, encouragement of enterprise. That said, as our nation is today, as Republicans pretend to serve their ideals, I actually do believe that Republicans, as a whole, are meaner than Democrats. They don't want to help the sick. (The sick should be out shopping for private insurance.) They don't want to help the elderly. (Cut Social Security. Cut Medicare. Heck. Kill them all.) And they certainly don't ever want to help the poor (If they really wanted the poor to be able to pull themselves up by their fabled "bootstraps," why would they be intent on decimating free, public education?).

Yet they seem to have no problem accepting Social Security payments themselves or applying for Medicare benefits for their own octogenarian parents. My father is a case in point. A lifelong Republican, such a Republican that he refuses to admit he's a Republican ("I have never joined the party. Never paid a cent in party dues. No man can be required to join political party in the United States of America."), even though he has voted for Republicans his whole life and was not above sending his four cute as buttons daughters all dressed up in look-alike dresses out with pamphlets for Barry Goldwater before we were sufficiently conscious to object.

My dad's mother lived with us during her last five or so years, a short and dowdy woman who spoke English with a European accent even though she'd lived in the States for most of her seventy years. I don't remember much of her as I was a thoroughly self-absorbed adolescent at that time, just her painfully thick, trunk-like ankles, the uneven shuffle of her walk, the bubbles of chicken fat on the surface of the soup she cooked in a big pot on the new, built in stove in our sparkling suburban tract house. She paid him rent. She had money to pay him rent for two reasons: Her husband, who died  young, had been a union man, a finish carpenter for Kohler Company, and Social Security. My dad was not a stranger to ranting about either trade unions or Social Security, especially when his brothers were over and drinking too many beers with him. And while I grant that I was 90 percent self-absorbed, I was not quite as unquestioning as the little blonde girl who smiled winsomely as she handed over pictures of an elephant wearing heavy black rimmed glasses; I had reached the fledgling point of social awareness that allowed me to ask my Dad, "But how can you be so against Social Security when it's what allows Grandma to live?" He didn't bother to answer. He didn't have to. He was a Republican. They never have to answer.

Republicans are meaner. They'll spend billions on prisons, rather than millions on schools. They'll endorse coverage for Viagra but not for birth control. They'll build roads for outmoded car traffic, but they won't pay workers enough to allow them to afford gas anymore. And now they are folding their arms akimbo, refusing to play with Democrats again until the Dems give them another free pass around the board, collect $200, get out of jail free, why not. They are better at stare-downs than we are. We hear a child cry in the next room and get antsy. We have a dish yet to cook for a potluck tonight. We have a blog to write. We blink. Over and over and over again, we blink.

This time, we shouldn't blink. We shouldn't even stare back at them. We should just go about our business. Even David Brooks, whom I am starting to like an awful lot, is acknowledging the utter untenability and incomprehensibility of the Republicans's position on the national debt, which President Obama is now trying to buy by offering cuts in Social Security. My dad had no problem accepting, truly, hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Medicare budget to ease my mom's passage through the last year of her life. This wasn't Social Security, but it's the same idea. Now he comments gruffly how the federal government should tighten their belt, as he has. Things just aren't right down in Whoville.

And I, knowing full well that Social Security benefits need to be re-examined if only because they serve the wealthy better than the impoverished, just wrote to Obama that he should not put Social Security on the table. It is not a bargaining table; it's a butcher block. Like the "Get Out of Jail Free" cards and a free ride to the $200 of the Go Square, they will pocket whatever we offer and walk away smirking. It's a ruthless game we play.

The winner of the staredown knows it's winner always takes all. There is no considered reasoning in American politics right now.