One of the nice things about managing the local arts council is that I get to meet a lot of interesting musicians.  Musicians are different from normal people in a number of ways, but most musicians are harmless (unless they’re into drugs).  And because musicians do have an unusual perspective on life, musicians frequently find themselves in unusual situations.

Unusual situations are, of course, fodder for some great stories, like that of a guitar player friend from Rapid City. He once went out for ice at 2 a.m. and forgot which room the band was staying in at a motel (it was one of those where all the doors open to the parking lot).  Not wanting to wake people at random trying to find his friends, he ended up sleeping in a tree the rest of the night.

Recently I got an email from another musician friend that tells of an even worse experience, and since it came to me over the Internet I know it must be true.  (After all, everybody knows that everything on the Internet is true.)

This friend (a different friend than the one who slept in the tree) is also a guitarist and plays as many gigs as he can.  And because he is just one of millions of guitar players out there looking for work, making money from his music requires going lots of different places and doing lots of different things (he calls himself a “full service” musician).  As a result he gets a lot of unusual performance opportunities and often has good stories to tell.  But his most recent has got to be one of the best (or worst, depending on how you look at it) that I’ve ever heard.

Here’s how it was explained in the email: “The other day I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man. He had no family or friends, so the service was to be at a pauper’s cemetery in the back country. As I was not familiar with the backwoods, I got lost.

”As I opened the door to my car, I heard one of the workers say, ‘I never seen nothin’ like that before and I’ve been putting in septic tanks for twenty years.’ “

I’m pretty sure this story really happened because that’s the sort of thing that happens to me every now and then.  And besides, since I got the story over the Internet, it has to be true…

“One useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.”

President John Adams

Recently an editorial in Pakistan’s The Express Tribune called the United States a failed state due to the “breakdown of governance to the detriment of the populace as a whole.”  America has a complicated relationship with Pakistan, and one can suppose the resentment many Pakistanis feel towards America influenced this view.  Still, when a government shuts down because its politicians can’t work out their differences, the populace does suffer.  So maybe if the shoe fits…

Not only did the shutdown hurt government workers and visitors to national parks, Creighton University economics professor Ernie Goss reported last week that the shutdown contributed to “worsening business conditions in nine Midwest and Plains states.”  Goss, a conservative who oversees the Mid-America Business Conditions Index said, “The partial government shutdown…pushed overall economic conditions lower.  A fairly significant number of companies reported reduced hiring and temporarily cutting employment as a result.”

Congress’ inability to govern has had an impact beyond the Midwest and Plains.  According to a study commissioned by longtime Republican deficit opponent Pete Peterson and summarized in an editorial by William Falk in The Week,  “if not for the multiple ‘financial crises’ created by Congress over the past two years, another 2 million Americans would have jobs.  The unemployment rate would have dropped below 6.7 percent, and the growth of the GDP would be about 4 percent, instead of 2.5 percent.  The robust economic recovery everyone’s been waiting for would finally be underway.”  Falk went on to say “the analysis, conducted by Macroeconomic Advisors, a nonpartisan consulting firm, found that Congress’s fiscal-cliff and debt-ceiling emergencies have …paralyzed the entire [economic] system with uncertainty.  America’s economy, in other words, is being actively sabotaged.  Such self-destructive behavior is anything but conservative: Vigorous growth would flood the Treasury with tax dollars and shrink the deficit.”

Falk added: “one of the flaws of democracy is that a small group of angry zealots [Tea Partiers] can exert oversized influence.”

Falk suggests that Tea Partiers represent the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, but as Jeff Shesol pointed out in NewYorker.com, “On the central issues of the day, the ‘extremists” of the Tea Party are merely repeating…the same dogmatic positions the GOP’s ‘moderates’ have staked out for years: abhorrence of Obamacare, adamant disbelief in climate change, loathing of government, and unquestioned faith in tax cuts and free markets.”

It was Republicans’ “unquestioning faith in tax cuts and free markets” that led to the Great Recession.  Although not in full control of the government since, Republicans have also crippled our recovery.

In Mexico we’re being likened to “a banana republic” and China is using the shutdown to dismiss calls for greater democracy there.  Democracy, as they see it, has now proven it ‘can’t keep libraries open, let alone finance lifesaving medical research.’

Ajit Sahi, writing in Tehelka in India, has pointed out though that it isn’t democracy that’s to blame here – it’s our “partisan drawing [gerrymandering] of congressional districts” – something that’s not permitted in other democracies.  State legislatures have allowed Falk’s “angry zealots” to seize control of the House of Representatives by drawing districts in such a way that Republicans need fewer votes to win (if not for gerrymandering, control of the House would have shifted to Democrats in 2012).  This unfair voting practice has led to the failure of our Congress and caused great damage to our economy.

It’s hard to imagine America ever becoming a failed state, but it should be a wake up call that much of the world thinks we already are…