The budgetary theater of the absurd

As we step onto the stage for the next act of the budgetary drama, things seem to make less and less sense. The budgetary solution shimmers on the road ahead, then evaporates as members of Congress repeatedly present legislation that either cannot pass or will not meet the needs of the other chamber.

Only the world of theater can provide the metaphors that describe where we are.

For the last two years I have been describing the budgetary point and counterpoint, the moments of high drama and unresolved outcomes, as an Indonesian shadow play. The budgetary players are actors manipulating two dimensional puppets, backlit through a white sheet. To the audience, the puppets seem real, the actions seem productive, but in the end it is a show.

Today, we have graduated from the shadow play and have entered a more surreal, or even nihilistic drama.

Might we be in a Pirandellian world, where six players (Boehner, Pelosi, Reid, McConnell, the president, and his veep) desperately try to figure out what the script is, what their roles are, and search for a playwright who can get them off the stage.

Or are we in the Sartrean world of No Exit, where nobody can get out of the room and the players all look smaller and smaller in each others’ eyes?

Perhaps it is a Beckettian universe, an apparent Endgame which does not end, but is a series of meaningless interactions that end where they started, but actually went nowhere.

Or even the more nihilistic world of Macbeth, where the characters have become poor players who strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more. Players who have been weaving a horror story in the sky that is, in the end, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing."

As John Boehner refuses to talk, the president shouts into the Learian wind about the storm to come, and senatorial fingers point at each other, we are, perhaps watching the surrealistic world described by Ionesco in the Bald Soprano. We can only exclaim, as his players do: "How curious! How bizarre, and what a coincidence."

How interesting to watch; how little to behold; how invisible the outcome. Only dramatists could improve on this "reality."