Vic Socotra

19 August 2009

Event Horizon

(“Event Horizon” Trailer, a film by Paul W.S. Anderson, 1997)

I was not going to get dragged back into the issue again, but it is Rahm Emmanuel’s fault. He provoked me, just when the next event on my horizon was the Big Pink pool and the cool sweat on the outside of an icy-cold beverage.

The President failed to mention health care for the second consecutive day, not that he has not been thinking about it. Apparently he wants to get on to his unscripted event, which is a vacation without a major cloud. He left it to the redoubtable Rahm Emmanuel, White House Chief of Staff, to sum up the state of play as we all look forward to a little time off before Labor Day.

According to the Times this morning, the heated resistance displayed in the Town Hall formatted meetings during the August recess has convinced the Administration that the Republicans have drawn a line in the sand, and there will be no concession. Conquer or die, if you can be permitted that sort of metaphoric passion on a very warm day.

That means the Democrats are going to have to slug it out internally, Progressive versus Moderate, to deliver some sort of bill.
I swear I will write the “single payer” column one of these days, but this isn’t it. You will probably not get what you expect in that one, since I think that is the only way out of this mess, but I will put that aside for the moment.

The reason things are happening the way they are is the event horizon. You can look it up, if you want, but in the interest of saving time, I’ll define the term this way: In Einstein’s theory of general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in the space-time continuum that normally surrounds a black hole.

In that place, an event cannot affect the observers; light emitted from beyond the horizon can never reach them, and any object that approaches the horizon from the observer's side appears to slow down and never quite pass through the horizon.
The traveling object, however, is an independent actor, and experiences no strange effects and does, in fact, pass through the horizon in a finite amount of proper time.

You see immediately where I am going with this, right?

The event horizon varies for all the actors and observers here in town. The Blue Dogs and the Progressives in the House, for example, have an event horizon of two years, a good chunk of which has passed already. They are going to have to deal with the wreckage of this mass of legislation in the very next general election.

Rham Emmanuel is dealing with a four year event horizon, with the real possibility that it could be double that, if he can deliver something, and then fine-tune it well enough to work in a way that is not a disaster.

The Senate, of course, operates on a six-year cycle, which eliminates any particular need to panic when the House does.
It is all supposed to work this way, so that not everyone in town is panicking at the same time. The Founders knew a lot about how people work, even if their understanding of general relatively might have been a bit primitive.

The rest of us are locked into our own event horizons, and we respond accordingly. For example, the $700 billion that Hank Paulson dropped into the financial black hole may have been enough to have saved Wall Street. We won’t know, but if the recovery has fitfully begun, it can only be partially attributed to the second (and first) stimulus produced by the Obama Administration.

We have only seen about 20% of that money spent, intentionally, if we can believe the Administration, since it is intended for longer-term goals which are not completely transparent to the casual observer.

Accordingly, the second stimulus has an event horizon that is about the same as the House of Representatives.
I don’t know about the energy bill. I think we just committed the nation to something pretty amazing in terms of public policy. But that event horizon has passed. If anyone has a clue, if anyone has a clue about that, don’t hesitate to drop a line.

I don’t want to bash the Administration just because it doesn’t know much about governing. It is still young, after all, and don’t get me wrong, they campaign like Big Dogs, best in class.

But governing America is something quite unlike governing Chicago.

The event horizon up in the Windy City is generational, and hereditary, like any monarchy. There is only one party, after all, and you can understand with that background why Mr. Emmanuel has been insisting on the all-at-once strategy for all this change.
There has been some push-back on that from the members of his party who won their seats from previously Republican districts, and whose support is not a matter of predestination. Mr. Emaunel understands that, and wants it all now, before people have a chance to see the astonishing breadth of the change they are attempting to institute.

The shouting at the Town Meetings is part of the response. “We call it ‘Astroturf,’ ” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissively. “It’s not really a grass-roots movement.”
The Speaker has a point, though she misses another big one. She has a bit of a blind spot, which is quite understandable, being a product of another one-party town whose fiscal and social policies have bankrupted the Golden State.

Senator Lloyd Benson of Texas is often credited with coining the phrase about outside agitators masquerading as concerned local citizens. He was of the opinion that a wise elected official could tell the difference.

I don’t know what that says about Speaker Pelosi- she should know that the original Astroturfer was progressive Chicagoan Saul Alinsky, a man with a very long event horizon indeed.

Oh well. My event horizon is governed by the object hurtling toward me right now, which is the timecard at the office. Maybe the Doppler-shift engendered by the morning meeting and the crisis de jour will enable me to lurch on tomorrow to a more salubrious view tomorrow.

I do know that watching Rahm attempt to seize control of the three health bills in the House is going to be a thrill to watch.

It is a pity this is all so important that we will not be permitted time to think. The event horizon of the legislation is about two more months, and this is going to be fun to watch, even if the events beyond the horizon are unseen- for now.

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