Island Nations

“If all the year were playing holidays, / To sport would be as tedious as to work.” Folks say these things, but really, who believes them? Now that the chill is nearly gone from the air and the workload is at last much lighter, my peers, at least, seem as if they’d be quite alright having these final few months extended—if not forever, then at least a bit longer. Thinking somewhat fantastically on how one might go about this, I turned to Adolfo Bioy Casares’ “The Invention of Morel”—that odd, slim 1940 volume Borges wrote “may be described, without exaggeration, as a perfect novel.” The premise is that a scientific genius invites his oblivious friends for a week-long vacation to a mysterious Polynesian island, where a machine records their actions; these actions are then frozen, so the machine can run them on loop after they die, reproducing reality again and again.

Clearly this is not the way to spend quality time with one’s loved ones—for one, you might condemn them eternally to scratching an ear every Wednesday. But fewer than 18 hours from now (if you’re reading this Friday morning) the U.S. government may come as close as it can to freezing itself in time—through what it refers to blithely as a “government shutdown.” If the House and Senate cannot compromise on the proposed budget cuts, then a number of federal offices will temporarily cease to operate, with the exception only of “essential services.” The National Park Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Internal Revenue Service, and various other organizations (some to be missed more than others) will simply suspend their activity. Zoo animals will still be fed, we are assured, but likely more out of the instinctive decency and blind ritual accompanying any threat, than from any too deep-seated sense of morality: the same way, perhaps, that one pulls on pants before fleeing a fire.

In these last few, crucial hours, Obama remains standing firm, calm king of his isolationist empire. The BBC reports that he has repeatedly reassured journalists he and Vice President Biden are “prepared to meet as long as possible to get the issues resolved.” Still, steadfastness only works if the other side isn’t equally mulish. Led by determined Tea Partiers and Speaker John Boehner, Republicans are demanding $61 billion in spending cuts—far more than Democrats are willing to grant. Such cuts are necessary to help the economy recover, the GOP insists. So too, they say, are the social policy riders conspicuously appended.

In fact, a government shutdown might not be the worst possible outcome. Compromise will be necessary, if not now then later—but if done too soon, it implies a sort of moral victory for the Tea Partiers that Obama and others are loath to admit. A shutdown would be expensive, and clearly less than ideal; what it would not be is anything new. Both Clinton and Regan, presiding over Houses of warring political convictions, saw their fair share—according to the Washington Post, six shutdowns occurred between 1977 and 1980; nine occurred between 1981 and 1996; and one particularly long one lasted from mid-December 1995 to early January 1996. Each time, the House managed to talk its way out of the deadlock—this is not the world of the genius Morel, and it does not exist in limbo forever. The shutdown has thus become almost a part of the political process, a kind of necessary hibernation—if not a holiday from work, then a rejuvenation of purpose. Government workers have spoken of experiences with previous shutdowns as humbling, reminding them of how inessential many of their jobs really are. If a shutdown does happen, one of the few elements inspiring any real pathos will be the thousands of unread visa applications molting in a back office, to which only Obama will now have the key.

When an island barricades itself off, it not only keeps others out; it also locks itself in. In a London Review of Books piece this week, David Runciman writes on the ways the offshore tax havens of island nations—most of them ex-British colonies—allowed Qaddafi to stow away his massive fortune so effectively. (Speaking on Kashmir in a visit to Pakistan this week, David Cameron confronted his nation’s own past with admirable honesty: “I don’t want to try to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of the world’s problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place.”) Even given the bungling of NATO airstrikes, it appears Qaddafi’s luck has definitively turned for the worse. “Crousseau on a raft sought Johnjack’s rational island,” punned Anthony Burgess’ poet in “Endberry Outside,” rather too pleased with himself—somehow the line evokes, for me, the dictator’s mad, isolated, misguided reasoning, which for so long met with no serious challenge. But there he sits now—locked in his Tripoli bunker, hardly on holiday, not a beautiful woman or almond dessert in sight. An island of his own, what more can he do now than relive these past decades, and their endless variations on the same mistake?

Jessica A. Sequeira’11, a former Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.