There weren't fiddles in first-century Rome; there were lyres. And when the great fire of Rome consumed the city, there's little more than rumor and myth to say that he was playing anything—lyre or fiddle. But that's the historical analogy we have. It's a pregnant image, after all, and we've always favored casting the American republic as Rome of old.
These days, it's a hard analogy to shake.
Our political media and political representatives are consumed with the high theater of debt negotiations, playing the sweet song of shared sacrifice and debt reduction to themselves while America watches her jobs burn.
But we can't push the analogy much further. Even Nero couldn't have imagined that his fiddling would put out the fire. Songs don't put out fires.
I keep coming back to the Cranicks, whose home burned for want of a $75 dollar fee. Gene Cranick, you see, lived just outside the city limits of South Fulton, Tennessee, and those outside the city need to pay a fee in order to have fire service extended to them. It makes sense from a certain perspective: The Cranicks don't pay taxes in South Fulton, so why should they get South Fulton services?
Maybe they shouldn't. But when a fire comes, in a civilized society, we expect that if we call 911 the firemen who come will do more than just watch. Or cry and be sick, as some reportedly did and were.
Songs don't put out fires, though, and the Cranicks wailing song was as ineffective as Nero's, as ineffective as our Government's obsession with debt reduction will be in putting out the fire that ravages our economy.
And it gets worse. Maybe, just maybe, the Cranicks wouldn't have had to rely on a patchwork and fraying system of fees if the county stepped in, if the state stepped in. And maybe we could afford a real system of fire protection in rural areas if we paid a little more in taxes, if we treated government dollars for our social fabric as sacrosanct as we treat government dollars for yachts and private jets or government dollars for bombs and fighter jets.
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So why do we fiddle? Nero's answer was the easy arrogance of tyrants. What's ours? For the Republicans, the answer is overdetermined: a desire to dismantle government and the last vestiges of the New Deal, the pernicious influence of the Tea Party, the lie—so oft repeated they must have started to believe it—that debt reduction leads to economic growth, an overzealous desire to put more money in the hands of the already moneyed. Take your pick.
What's the Democrat's excuse? For some it's fear, I suppose. Fear that the Republicans aren't bluffing, that they might actually let us default. Fear that they might actually add fuel to the flame.
But somewhere along the way, it seems that at least some Democrats bought the notion that what America wants was a song. Ezra Klein writes: "Republicans have smoked out the fact that the Obama administration is desperate to strike a grand bargain over the deficit, and is willing to make much larger concessions than anyone realized in order to get one."
But grand bargains don't put out fires any more than songs. And the American people know it. As Digby reports:
What do you think is more important, reducing the federal budget deficit or reducing unemployment?
Reducing deficit 32
Reducing unemployment 62
So there's that.
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I keep coming back to fire. To the great fire of America, the one that ravages our cities and towns. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised any more that the beltway, the home of America's privileged and, often inexplicably, employed would focus on fiddling harder instead of putting out the fire that burns across Main Street