Mr. Putin, Exceptionalize This! -- by C. Smith and J. Ross

A few weeks back, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Americans it was wrong to claim we are “exceptional.”  Not only does that go against Creator-endowed equality, Mr. Putin said, but Exceptionalism is “dangerous.”  

Perhaps Putin envies America’s place in the world. However, if the brinksmanship and stalemate in Washington, with Texas’ Ted Cruz at the helm, play out as it looks they might, Putin will soon have much to envy about “Exceptionalist” America.

Who else but the United States would dare default on its debt and drive the entire global economic machine into meltdown?  Russia? Nyet!   France?  Zut alors!  Germany?  Nein.  China?  No way.  Only the Great and Powerful U-S-A.

What could be more Exceptional, more unprecedented, individualistic, and American than to stall for the cameras, Green-Eggs-and-Ham style, while the stock market and global economy wait as prey?  While 1/100th of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body publicly dreamt of stuffing himself with White Castle sliders while sipping from the tarnished cup of the Tea Party, we have slid toward the abyss of political impotence and financial destruction.

To “low-information” voters who admire Senator Cruz for stalling his own party’s legislation, crippling the Constitutional requirement that our government back its financial obligations is apparently no big deal.  “Full Faith and Credit” could be a way to fund a megachurch, for all they care.  To Cruz, the point of a 21-hour soliloquy was not legislative success or truth-telling; his goal may have been the propagation of his own myth – and collecting signatures on useless petitions, ready to transpose those names to checks for his inevitable train wreck of a presidential campaign.

For more than 200 years, the United States has built itself into an Indisputably Indispensable Power - the “Shining City on a Hill.”  The current yip-and-yap may foretell the swagger with which the US will walk soon when it deposits its Exceptionalism in the bank (or debtor’s prison).  If the Treasury is right, October 17 is the last day we may borrow to pay off Congressionally-mandated spending, making the countdown to the most exceptional proof of our Exceptionalism a ticking bomb.  Even the most hawkish neoconservatives and Cold Warriors never imagined the Domino Effect this unprecedented American influence may have:  to bring to their collective knees the world's financial markets and economy in a crumbling catatonic heap.

Only the United States, in its truly unique and Exceptionalist fashion, may risk pulling the proverbial plug on the catatonic patient, the global economy.  The phrase "fiddling while Rome burns" might be apt, if only it acknowledged the cacophonous scratching of Cruz’s violin.  Who will pull the plug, inducing global chaos?  Will it be the silver-tongued Nobel Laureate, he of Obamacare?  Will it be the lost-shepherd, Speaker Boehner?  No.  It must be, it can be, the Grinch Who Stole Washington, the Texan who has proven he will talk all day, in the rain, on a plane, on a boat, or with a goat (as long as the goat writes a check), livestreaming his rhetoric to drive the news cycle.

Senator Cruz’s “I do not like the Obama-plan, I do not like it, Ted-I-am” bluster plays to the Far Right, but is fodder for the ever-self-proclaimed Always Right, whose puppeteered control of the GOP appreciates daily (regardless of pushback by Karl Rove and other Republicans In Name Only – the McCains, Grahams, and Corkers).  To both the Far Right and the Always Right, this week may be historic for unveiling another rhetorical superhero:  a cartoonish ideologue in a suit and imagined cape, as Exceptional a demagogue as we’ve ever seen.  Though Cruz’s marathon bombast won recognition, the forthcoming default might leave little capital for his roadshow to take to the international circuit.

***

Cruz’s all-night non-filibuster was anything but heroic.  It was, however, cartoonish.  Ronald Reagan, the conservative superhero who raised the debt ceiling on average every six months during a Presidency in which he tripled the deficit, knew how to compromise and see the big picture.  “I’m not worried about the deficit.  It is big enough to take care of itself,” he famously said, even as he castigated Democrats for delaying more than one of those 18 debt-ceiling increases while working out deals to keep the government running.

If only Mr. Cruz – like the Patron Saint of Conservatism Reagan – knew the difference between an exceptional clown and an Exceptionalist superhero.

Mr. Christopher Smith and Mr. Jon Ross are college instructors and writers in Vermont and Illinois respectively.

The United States of Stalemate, in Song: The Capitol Steps at Cramwell, August 2013

I am only two years older than the Capitol Steps, the much-lauded political/comedic/musical satire group that began as an act at a Christmas party for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1981. Producer and writer Elaina Newport is the last remaining member of the troupe who was a part of the group's initial, impromptu holiday performance, the one that would spawn their acclaimed and public debut run at the Shoreham Hotel, as well as establish their fame within, and beyond, the Washington Beltway. While cofounder Bill Strauss passed away in 2007, and longtime collaborator Jim Aidala appears to have left the Steps in 1994 after taking a high-level position within the Environmental Protection Agency (his LinkedIn currently describes him as a “Senior Government Consultant,” working through Bergeson & Campbell, P.C.), Elaina Newport has continued for over three decades to not only keep the Steps’ satirical repitiorie fresh, but to develop a steadily lucrative economic engine within an artistic and satirical enterprise. All of my life, the Capitol Steps have had plenty of fodder for their repurposed pop songs, with lyrics retooled to lampoon the scandal of the day: from “Thank God I’m a Contra Boy” (1986) and “Workin’ 9 to 10” (1987) during the Reagan administration to “Papa’s Got a Brand New Baghdad” (2004) and “I’m So Indicted” (2006) during the Bush years (their most recent recording is titled “Fiscal Shades of Gray”).  

For a number of years, the Steps have been operating multiple touring companies, allowing for the troupe to perform—literally—in more than one place at a time. During most of the calendar year, the Steps operate a touring company that, not unlike the traveling versions of Broadway musicals, fills medium-size venues from coast to coast; in summer, however, in addition to the gaggle of former Congressional staffers-turned-amateur Vaudevillians that take the stage at the Reagan Building amphitheater in Washington, DC on Friday and Saturday nights, a separate, revolving subset of the cast performs almost nightly through August at Cramwell Resort, Spa & Golf Club in Lenox, Massachusetts: this perennial gig/residency seems to be the Steps’ incubator for new bits, there among the Guilded Age mansions of the former elite, now tucked neatly between golf courses in the Berkshires (“contemporary comfort with the experience of a luxurious bygone era,” reads Cramwell’s ad copy).

Neil Diamond titled his live-from-the-mid-1970s album "Hot August Night." This evening with the Steps was the opposite: torrential rain drove the golfers from their courses, streamed across the parking lots and winding driveways, and soaked the manicured lawn of Cramwell. The basement of the Olmsted Building resembled the recreation room of a posh assisted living facility, where its tanned, pastel polo-shirt’d crowd smelled of nothing but money. A crowd of maybe 150 filled the 200 chairs arranged in the room, where an Electro-Voice PA and four mics on stands sat before the Steps’ banner, beside which sat pianist Dr. Marc Irwin, ready for his cues. Earlier on that Friday afternoon in August, Tiger Woods, having risen like a phoenix from scandal, had come in 9 under par at Bridgestone—big news to the idle rich. Even bigger news: there was only 1,001 days left in the Obama presidency. It would have been a reasonable guess, that somebody in the room would play a heavy role, in picking the next head of state.

I was surprised to see The Steps’ show at Cramwell was more of a ‘recent greatest hits’ compilation than a breeding ground for new material; the Battle Hymn of the Republic(ans), the medley from the musical Grease reworked to represent the broke country in Europe (“Hopelessly Devalued to You”), and a predictable tribute to the NSA, featuring the clever lyric “I know your new pin/I know every sin.” The crowd was least emphatic about the version of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” that recounted the IRS’ intentional targeting and auditing of political opponents; the only song that forced some to leave the show parodied gas guzzling SUVs, using Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American.” And a few songs were clunkers, if only because time had not been kind to the subjects of the satire: a jovial actor with an explicit faux accent pretended to be from Afghanistan, before dancing merrily while singing “On the Sunni Side of the Street.” Though the Steps’ lyrics to the pop classic included one great line (“our state bird is the… DUCK!”), the laughs were hard-earned: all week, news of continued rocket attacks curdled the humor, making it nearly unpalatable. An Obama impersonator sang a soliloquy based on the Sam Cooke hit “Wonderful World,” but I couldn’t buy it, the portrait of a naïve, media-obsessed Barack crooning “don’t know much about agencies […] I only know what I see on TV.” This, alongside full skits pretending that Chris Christie saved the Hostess Twinkie, a monologue-in-progress featuring a detective sent to track down Edward Snowden, a hypothetical meeting between the two female Supreme Court justices in the restroom (they end up singing the praises of Antonin Scalia, to the tune of Roger and Hammerstein’s “Maria”), and a nearly-toothless send-up of the Rolling Stones’ recent tour  (no jokes about the ticket prices!) summed to create a wonderous, if generally impotent, ninety minutes of theater. Biggest (and inadvertently, the most cruel) laugh from the crowd? A casual joke from the detective mentioned above, about having ‘less work than a West Virginia tooth fairy.’ The hardest truth for the crowd may have come in the skit about the President of Mexico wanting to “immigrate to Casa Blanca […] to do twice the work for half the pay.” Do the golf caddies and groundskeepers, servers and barkeeps of Lenox, Massachusetts, get paid what they themselves would consider livable wage?

While the Capitol Steps’ final number—a spastic review of their history of parody, through keen use of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”—did end with a sign that read “don’t blame  us—you voted for them!,” I was still left feeling that the spirit of the show could have challenged the audience more effectively: there are individuals and organizations that, were they to satirize, would get them effectively banned from the erudite Cramwell. Yet The Steps’ are somehow aware of these unspoken taboos (not even their opening number, a full intellectual assault on the stalwart Congressional Republicans, made mention of John Boehner), and are able to play it as safely as possible, in order to maintain their own reputation—were social justice or political mobilization their game, but alas, bringing an audience to the very brink of revolt, and no further, is more lucrative than poignant. While I understand that there was more than one troupe of the Capitol Steps operating on the night that I saw them perform, these individuals and groups earned no mention whatsoever in The Steps’ August 2013 shows at Cramwell: Rand or Ron Paul, Ben Bernanke, the National Rifle Association, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Roger Ailes, Michelle Bachmann, the Occupy Movement, Twitter, Mitt Romney, George W Bush, Donald Trump, Rick Perry, the Koch brothers, Alec Baldwin, the “1%”, Michael Bloomberg, Jon Stewart, Facebook, Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Bill O’Reilly. There is a club, and through the lens of national media, it’s unclear who was in it, has been, and is not still a member—the hefty ticket price (ten more bucks would’ve gotten one onto the lawn, to see Phish at SPAC) allows The Steps’ to safely assume their audience at Cramwell was seeking a specific brand of political satire. Perhaps my idealism had left me hoping to witness how a group of former Congressional staffers in an off-Broadway venue, having lived through some of the virtual and rhetorical wars of our nation’s capitol, would feel compelled to use the end of their show to challenge: of participation, a call-to-action, over a sardonic ‘told-you-so.’