UNCLE SANTA

(For free downloads of the Hot Plate! show, please email karlstraub@hotmail.com. He'll respond pret-ty quickly, unless he's in the shower or something. Even that loophole will close soon, as he's looking into a new app that allows extreme entrepreneurs to retain full phone functionality even in the shower.) 

Every time I go to a Chinese restaurant, I drive by numerous yards with giant blow up cartoon characters. For demographic reasons, I suppose, there's a whole stretch of road where this phenomenon plays out, but there is one particular yard that never misses a holiday. If there's a cutesy mythological character associated with an American holiday, this family will have giant blow up cartoon figures that reflect that holiday, grinning colorfully and waving at motorists  

  I'm always driving when I see this stuff, and "fleeting glimpse" accurately describes what I usually get, so I can't really definitively say that what i saw today represents a tipping point of some sort, but I can say this. Today's fleeting glimpse is the first time I've ever seen a cryptic mixture of different holidays. 

  They had Uncle Sam, but also Santa Claus. 

  America has had a long love affair with these symbolic cartoon characters. When I was a kid in the 1970s, it seemed as if no product was sold in this country that didn't use a licensed cartoon character to sell it. There's a very fine line between Santa and Ronald McDonald. (Note: apparently the idea that Coca-Cola wholly created our image of Santa is fatuous, but they did drive it systematically into our skulls to sell soda.) 

  And Uncle Sam appears to be another cutesy character used to sell something delicious but unhealthy, namely the notion that the USA is some sort of benign and benevolent actor, with sentimental attachment being the appropriate emotional response. 

  I don't share the left's need to refute that at length, even though I used to. But at its worst, this kind of childlike attachment to a comic book level idea has awful consequences. 

  At this moment, the Trump-era GOP is attempting to sell something to their constituents which doesn't, in fact, exist. For many years, the "Party of Lincoln" has used homophobia, racism, and misogyny to get their voters off the couch. It's been pretty effective, as chronicled again and again by analysts with qualifications I don't share, but another thing has also been happening. The myth that tax cuts and giant military spending are a smart combination, along with the liberal version of higher taxes and giant entitlement spending and military spending that's fractionally less profligate, has left us with huge deficits. There are many other problems too, which I'll pretend that I could lay out for you if I had more time, but the upshot of it is that we spend money we don't have on things that sound good, but don't always work. 

  This means that sooner or later, people with shitty lives, whose jobs and health have left town while foreigners have moved in, start looking for a cartoon villain. And in many cases, the GOP establishment is now seen as part of the problem even by the people that vote for them. This demonizing isn't entirely wrongheaded, of course. From my perspective, both parties tell a bunch of people what they want to hear, and them after the polls close, business as usual kicks back in. The GOP has doubled down on short term wins for years now, and this means they have all three branches of government but can't govern. That is only partly because they don't have a plan, and used all their resources and our money for obstruction, paying lip service to the myth that they knew how to do things right and would do so if we gave them a chance. That's all true, but there's a deeper problem for them, and for the rest of us. It's not just that they don't know what they're doing. It's that their party is not even remotely unified. They all voted for Trump, but that's like saying they all picked Door Number Two. Trump's psychology has made him one of the modern world's most energetic and intuitively effective salesman, and their psychology made them buy into it to varying degrees, but all Republicans don't want the same thing. It may be possible to figure out a health care approach that Congressional Republicans will embrace and make into law, but since compromise is only understood today as a heinous thing, it may not be. Doubling down has been encouraged by both parties, and the Balkanized media has arguably been even more effective in spreading this toxic idiocy, but people who have smoked, drunk liquor, and eaten crap all their lives still want their health care. Thus, they have a party choked with people who both hate Obamacare in principle and want to cherry pick the things about it that benefit them. This isn't sustainable, and while Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan may be brilliant enough to thread the needle, with non-compromising guys like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz walking around in those hallowed halls, I doubt it. 

  Since they cleverly tried to use reconciliation to push the ACA repeal through without Democrats, this has left them in a situation where they can't move on to other parts of their agenda. Even a buzzerbeater that gets the repeal over against all odds will only be a short term gain, I would guess. Tons of the people taking advantage of the ACA live in the very places that elected Trump. People like my brother in law rightly point out how the flaws (lies, if you prefer) of the ACA made their health care worse and/or more expensive. Nothing I've read that involves numbers and serious analysis suggests that repeal or replace will turn that around for everyone, and it will be interesting to see how the anger manifests itself in that event. Will Obama still be blamed, somehow? Will Trump escape responsibility by tweeting some clumsily expressed spin listing the people who we should blame? 

  Hard to say how it will all shake out, but I doubt there will be anything approaching a satisfied majority. Will this result in a Congressional course correction in the midterm  elections? It's a coin flip. 

  The health care crisis could probably be solved by a mountain of effort on the part of a professionally qualified Congress, and two parties willing to work together on a compromise that reflects a heroic level of integrity. 

  It's probably more likely to be solved by giant blow up Uncle Sam and Santa Claus.