Waiting for Godot

Despite all evidence to the contrary, we’re still an achieving society.

Since each house of congress passed a health care bill and we’ve been waiting for our elected officials to find a way to create a joint bill, the media has been engaged in an increasing frenetic search for some distraction, a holiday, a scandal, a staged event, anything to avert our gaze from paralysis in the face of deliberate obstruction.

The events that have gotten the most exposure turn out to be those that celebrate achievement. The longest lasting was the winter Olympics. The media could find no celebrity to promote and looked for some way to prove we’re still the best. They settled on medal count, but at least some who watched the broadcasts were looking for stylized achievement, not instant bloopers.

The Academy Awards came next, which gave the media an abundance of glamour to inflate. While it’s hard to separate natural gifts from achievement with actors and easy to disparage peoples’ clothes, there’s never any question that honest effort is rewarded in technical areas like special effects.

We’re now left with amateur events, the basketball tournaments and American Idol, but we’re still looking for some alternative to our political impasse - some evidence that someone, somewhere can demand our attention through their ritualized demonstrations of skill.

As an alternative, we’ve been offered dramatic displays of self-destruction: a man who flies a plane into an IRS building, a man who opens fire on guards at the pentagon, young men who commit suicide. The media has kept them in the news as long as they could, but most viewers weren’t willing to romanticize such attacks on society as a substitute for positive political action.

Our longing for people to finally solve some problem may have lead many to expect too much from Obama. It will keep us watching and hoping, and increasingly nervous until something positive does happens. It the meantime, the distractions of circuses will continue to offer some reminder of what’s possible.