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The Eau de Politic

A federal shutdown closes government, and a staggering 800,000 employees are sent home. A tiny skeleton crew of just three or four million struggles to keep the machine going, as the Washington Post explains: “That leaves about 1.3 million ‘essential’ federal workers, 1.4 million active-duty military members, 500,000 Postal Service workers, and other employees in independently-funded agencies who will continue working.”

It’s like your neighborhood supermarket goes out of business, so the dairy section and the meat section and the produce section and the canned foods section are all still open, but most of the candy aisle is locked up.

Like everything else, the federal “shutdown” is pure theater, raw idiocy orchestrated for shock effect. Some federal employees must now do more work to close things that are just naturally open to the public; in South Dakota, National Park officials closed a state highway turnout to keep tourists from casting their gaze upon Mount Rushmore. You can’t look at that mountain—the government is closed.

Par for the course, symbols and gestures deployed to no intended effect. Late last month, the president of the United States journeyed to New York to address the world at the United Nations General Assembly. Syria’s leader, President Obama announced, had crossed a line that demanded concerted action from humanity itself: “[A] leader who slaughtered his citizens and gassed children to death cannot regain the legitimacy to lead a badly fractured country. The notion that Syria can somehow return to a pre-war status quo is a fantasy.”

Now it’s October, so Syria is so totally yesterday. This week, international inspectors “have begun work on ensuring the destruction of weapons.” Syrian government personnel chopped through some equipment and weapons, theatrically, and Bashar al-Assad has apparently regained the legitimacy to lead a badly fractured country.

The political gap between saying and doing isn’t a failure; rather, it’s our politics at their essence, the very thing itself. The function of American national politics is the deployment of symbols: today these symbols, tomorrow some other symbols, yadda yadda. The machine is not meant to make anything; it’s meant to project images of things being made. The signature progressive achievement of the current administration, a Heritage Foundation-originated, Big Pharma-written mandate requiring individuals to purchase the product of private corporations, isn’t working as planned this week, many years after being passed into law. The failure, Reuters explains via White House spokesman Jay Carney, is the result of people actually using the thing: “Carney said a particular component of the system within the account registration function was not able to handle the high volume, causing problems for consumers at the registration process.”

Government created a program, and people used it; therefore, it crashed.

People, come on. Stop doing that. Just consume the symbol, and leave the product alone.