A Fish Tale

It was one of those stories that's supposed to just make you feel better about things in your own country, sort of the way going to the county fair can make you feel better about the people in your own family. With the deadlock in Washington reaching new levels of idiocy this week, and the debt ceiling deadline looming on Thursday, business and community leaders from around the world have been calling for an end to the shutdown and a resolution to the debt ceiling before the US political crisis touches off a world-wide economic disaster. This has led to incredulous comments from community leaders in several foreign countries, asking if anyone else in the world could possibly be as outlandish as the Americans are being at the present time. So if there was ever a time to run a news story saying "At least we don't have any giant brass monuments shaped like a puffer fish in the United States," now was probably that time...

You can pick up the original story from the New York Times (complete with some really amazing pictures) here if you want to, but it’s pretty straightforward: in Jiangsu Province in eastern China the city of Yangzhong has constructed a 2,300-ton brass monument in the shape of one of the beloved river puffer fish native to the Yangtze River. The fish tower is 15 stories tall, 295 feet long, and features an elevator to take visitors to the top of the structure in order to view the local sights. It’s certainly a remarkable promotional tool for the local gardening expo, and unique enough (and whimsical enough) to draw news headlines as far away as New York City. It’s unfortunate that it would appear in the International news at the same time that the Chinese government has been committing itself to new austerity measures…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that there is anything wrong with a city or local community developing tourist attractions in order to bring more visitors and more money into their economy. For that matter, a project like this has to have created (or at least sustained) a huge number of jobs in the construction, transportation and metal-working industries in order to create and assemble the Fish, all of which would have far-reaching positive effects on the regional or national economy. Even more to the point, perhaps, it takes time to design and build a 2,300-ton bronze monument, which means that this project had been going on for a number of years before anyone got around to announcing the new austerity measures. The timing could undoubtedly be better, but when you get past the apparent absurdity of the story you realize that while the giant fish may be gaudy there is actually a strong argument to be made in favor of the project…

What seems to be getting lost in all of the shouting these days is that the present situation in the US has also been building for a number of years, and is also much more complex than meets the eye. The polarization of the political process in America did not begin two weeks ago, with the end of the funding agreement; it didn’t start last spring during the fight over sequestration and it didn’t begin with the passage of the Affordable Care Act. The storm currently breaking over Washington has been brewing for decades, and a large part of it has to do with people on the far Right (who seem to believe that we are living in the End of Days, and it’s every man or woman for him/her self) and people on the far Left (who seem to believe that everyone can have everything they want and no one should ever have to pay for it). What’s ironic is that the people who build giant brass fish during an austerity program think the people who are fighting over access to affordable health care are silly, while the people who are destroying their own government, international reputation, economic stability and way of life think the people who build giant brass fish during difficult economic times are funny…

It amazes me sometimes that there’s still a planet here to live on. And I worry about how much longer that will be the case with shenanigans like these becoming commonplace…