Bread and Circuses

You know…I really hate you all sometimes. Not you, close friends and loved ones. You simply exasperate me occasionally.

No, I'm talking to everyone else in this country. That's right. For the first (and please gods, last) time, I'll be taking a page out of Colbert's playbook and talking directly to America. Specifically (because I'm fairly certain this is in no way the fault of the various soil layers I'm standing on) the American people. 

Read: the incompetent morons. 

Have a look here:

This is a fabulous news aggregator, which you should use because it's awesome. It is also not the point of this exercise. As you can see by the tab in the upper right corner that's highlighted red, this is what the US cares about right at the time this blog started to be written.  

For clarification, the bigger the block, the more hits the story has, the brighter the block, the more recent it is.

America's biggest block? Sports. Specifically, a story of the triumph of a franchise in joining some bigger franchise aggregate that will let them play more games and therefore make more money. 

Funny aside, ever notice that we never call business mergers and partnerships triumphs, but when sports teams make conferences everyone gets excited? Kinda the same idea there, people. Just saying.

Anywho. 

Notice what you don't see, though? Red. Red being the color of world news. 

For comparison, here's every country covered by this aggregator, all interests highlighted:

What the…

Yups. The rest of the world is watching as our politicians play Monopoly with our economy. Again.

Oh, but it's about Obama so it must be the AP or something, right? Nope. That story? That's an Australian story written by the French equivalent of the BBC and circulated in multiple countries. 

No seriously. Here's the map without the US in it:

Noting chan — oh, no, no, wait…there's fewer sports stories. And the world column got bigger.  

What the bloody hell, people? Is watching men in tights chase an inflatable ovoid back and forth across an artificial grass plain so important to your life that the country you live in can just handle itself? 

Are you so trusting of the people you just re-elected that you're going to leave the country in their hands and go home? Seriously?

These are the idiots that tanked us in the first place. No sides here, I hate them all. And the rest of the world gives more of a damn about what they're doing than you do. 

What's that? You don't even know what this cliff thing is? Well, for starters, it's not a cliff…it's more of a slope. Cliff is a term journalists latched onto because it sounded scary and scary words make people more likely to tune in. 

But basically what's going on: a few months back, there was this whole to-do about the debt ceiling. Some guys wanted to raise it, other guys wanted to keep it low and cut spending. The debt ceiling, to be clear, goes up every year. Like clockwork. So even the president was sitting there looking at the guys who were freaking out and going, "Dudes. The fuck?"

At the last freaking minute before the US would have had to shut off and reboot because there'd be no budget agreed on that would pay for all the debt we owe, there shone forth the light of compromise.

The debt ceiling went up, but Congress had to find a way to get the budget under control or a whole bunch things will happen that will ensure that no-one is happy. Basically, taxes will rise and spending will get slashed over a period of ten years. 

Now, that may not sound bad. Nothing to worry about, just a little trimming around the edges.

Have you looked at Greece lately?!

That's what happens when a fragile economy takes spending cuts and tax hikes to the face. That will take months to happen here if it happens at all, mind you, but stop and think about how bad the last recession was. Do we really want to risk another one?

Will that happen? Probably not. We'll probably slide into the whole mess sideways like Greece did, through overspending. Because Congress can absolutely vote to just postpone the whole thing so they don't have to deal with it.

That's right. The compromise that they agreed to, that's given them most of a year to come up with a functioning solution, will be ignored now. Because they've basically been grandstanding for the press for most of that time, seeing as how it's an election year.  

So yeah. Now that they've got the important part of their job (getting re-elected) out of the way, they can go home for the holidays, postpone the whole mess, and wait for their constituents to go back to ignoring them —

Oh right. Y'all already doing that, huh.

While the rest of the world gives a crap about whether we're starting the long slide into a depression and potentially dinging their economies on the way down, we're watching football. 

Dear gods, I hate you all so much.