Where’s the Shutdownageddon?

I’m old enough to have survived not one, but two Armageddons in my short but eventful lifetime.

Yes, before the pedants chirp, I am using the eschatological a-word in the biblical sense. A bloody ruction between forces light and dark enveloped my world. The violence, the great, sweeping violence, swallowed much life, leaving little but crumbled rubble, pools of blood, shattered bone, disgorged innards, patches of smoldering refuse, flayed flesh waving like pennons from bent metal pikes.

That I emerged intact from such an incardine götterdämmerung speaks well of the Lord’s blessing upon me. And upon our capital city. For both of these incendiary affrays left blasted heaths on our once-Rome, with many a spare Sperry boat shoes and split Lululemon leggings left in the immolated wake. But a three-million-member army of desk-riding bureaucrats is hard to keep down. Through sheer collective will, they banded together to fleece taxpayers a hefty one-time back payment and set about once more upon their nationally necessary vocation of compiling Excel files.

In short, like the sooted-face Londoners after the Blitz, or the stray singed survivors of Nagasaki, our tireless fed deskwarmers, through grit and determination, reflickered our imperial helm along the Potomac. America’s federal masters rehewed their concreted friezes, cornices, and crenellations, from which they can once again cast their penetrating gaze upon the nation.

What? Why the perplexed look? Your mien is positively fatootsed. You don’t recall those grimdark days when the heavens cleared and fire rained upon the earth?

Two words to jog your memory: Ted Cruz. And another lexical duo to resituate your remembrance: border wall.

Back in 2013, the exhibitionist Texas senator acted as tip spear in a Republican ploy to shutter the government over ObamaCare funding. He railroaded his fellow senators into holding out for a top-top-shelf ask, leaving the government briefly underfunded. The gambit was, in the journo retail, worthy of a Hague tribunal. Headlines about packed food kitchens in Anacostia, eviction waves in Clarendon, bread lines longer than the queue at Georgetown Cupcake, and Deloitte middle managers hanging themselves off the Key Bridge ensued. At one point, Nancy Pelosi was even considering curtailing her insider trading to just a singular six-figure selloff a week. Then-President Obama even summoned the Joint Chiefs, then going sans-paycheck, to a top-secret Situation Room meeting to discuss running ordinances on Teddy’s hometown of Calgary.

Six years later, the hanging of the “Sorry We’re Closed” sign over the Washington Monument elicited even louder howls. Donald Trump, prepping for his first reelection run, tried sandbagging Democrats into ponying up for his Brandenburg Gate along our southern partition by withholding his famous loping Hancock from a simple financing measure. The entire halt-hold lasted thirty-five grueling days, spanning Christmas and New Year’s, when the District went dark with the lone exception of Santa’s tracker. President Trump was called everything from petulant crybaby, to spoiled toddler, to bawling juvenile, to tantruming teen, to truculent manchild, to crackery doddard, with the entire contents of the “Tyrant Synonyms” handbook spliced in. So normal, mainstream Orange Autocrat coverage, but with an added distemperish twist.

Another six sequência and we’re back in the same slough of discord—except this time no Chicxulub meteors are plummeting towards Topkea. Three weeks into Washington’s siesta, as of this writing, fire-and-brimstone reporting is absent in leading papers. “On day 15, there are zero stories about the government shutdown in both the print [New York Times] and print [Wall Street Journal],” NBC analyst Brendan Buck observed. He followed with “Washington Post too,” which, if memory serves, published front-to-back tear-jerkers on infants shriveling up from a lack of EBT milk during past closures.

What accounts for the sharp duality in perception? Why is the current curtain close a sunny shutter where the chickadees still warble, the Metro still streaks the rails, and the White House’s East Wing receives a rigadoon reconstruction, while afore operational abeyances were more shitshow than shutdown?

Rather than strain my keys to make a trenchant, inviolable point, I’ll let one of the jennies speak for her party: “Shutdowns are terrible. Of course, there will be families that (sic) are going to suffer. We take the responsibility very seriously, but it is one of the few leverage times we have.”

Leverage indeed! Before, Sen. Cruz burned D.C. into an ash heap to stop the first ObamaCare bucks from flowing downriver. A decade later, Democrats wield the same flamethrower and shoot the same nihilistic glares to keep the dollars surging, yet the broadsheets are mute. No published scare-headers about Hell’s vacancy and MAGA devils walking freely.

Philosopher Brien Leiter described the press as “epistemic mediators” due to the news providers influencing how events are understood. Major-paper editors taking alike situations, framing one as cataclysm and the other as airy calm, all to plume its preferred political wing? Well, I dare wager that our pundocracy isn’t on the up and up!

Meanwhile, every morning I take my life in my hands swerving and sliding in crunch traffic on Virginia 267. Nearly a month into another Washington standstill and I still can’t tell what, if anything, has actually shut down.