Dancing on the deck of debt disaster

latinadanza

If you hate government — and these days who doesn’t? — then I hope you weren’t at the corner of Michigan and Harrison on Saturday night, to see the kind of wretched excess that government run amok can create.

It would have broken your heart.

At least 1,000 people — easily, maybe 2,000, or more — gathered in the Spirit of Music Garden, a flowery corner of Grant Park. And they were dancing, hundreds of them, crowding a huge dance floor, doing the cha-cha and the merengue and just hopping around while Angel Melendez and the 911 Mambo Orchestra played hot salsa grooves.

It might come as a surprise to you, with layoffs and belt-tightening and the fiery hell mouth of financial doom opening up directly under us, that masses of Chicagoans still gather weekend nights for the city’s SummerDance. Nor is this an aberrant folly of one renegade city office — the Department of Cultural Affairs, the Office of Tourism, of course the Park District all have a hand in this scandal of publicly supported dancing.

Who knew about this? I certainly had no idea, right up to the moment my wife — of course — informed me we were going downtown to dance in a public park. My immediate, unarticulated thought was “Why don’t you just kill me in my sleep and get it over with?” I recalled visiting Taiwan, where people ballroom dance in the Taipei parks. There I spied, oh, a dozen couples, sedately waltzing under the trees. I caught sight of them from far away, too far to hear the music. It was a deeply melancholy sight, these older men and women, faces blank, silently waltzing in unison. And now I was to be one of them.

SummerDance was not at all like that. My I-don’t-want-to-be-here scowl melted as soon as I caught sight of the scene — the park ablaze with light, jammed with people, all ages, all races, sitting at tables, eating, drinking, joyous, dancing to an infectious Latin beat, not only on the dance floor, but all over, some dancing extremely well, some in fancy dance shoes and frilled dresses and Mambo King sports shirts, doing polished routines at top speed, feet flashing, hands fluttering.

I should make clear that I was joking when I described the event as “wretched excess” and a “scandal” etc. I think it’s great; I want the government to throw dances — though you might not. You might want the government to manage fisheries. And somebody else might want the government to support the preservation of historic barns. And even though I neither fish nor visit barns, I can understand those functions, and more.

That’s what makes me a Democrat. I’ve accepted the idea that other people exist, people who want other things, and grasp that we are all joined together in a common purpose we call the United States of America.

This blows the mind of a certain party (hint: Republicans) who are ready to shut the whole thing down, causing unimaginable disaster, because they hate the idea of a government, and have seized upon the strategy of the national debt — which we’ve had for years, which always waxes and wanes — deemed it completely unacceptable, and are refusing to extend the debt limit, which must be done to allow the government to function.

Don’t get me wrong. The government spends too much, wastes too much. But forcing the U.S. government into default over the debt ceiling is like burning down your house because you have a big mortgage. It’s nuts.

With the debt crisis coming to a head — one can only hope — this week, we are seeing the climax of an attitude that has built for years: the Reaganite notion that all government is bad and the less the better, period. The appeal of such a thought is easy to see. People do not like to pay taxes, and when narrowly framed in those terms, the path seems clear — slash taxes to a bare minimum, starve government and everybody’s happy.

As long as the focus stays on the tax cutting part, Republican cheers have drowned out debate. Now we’re at the “which-programs-get-cut” part, suddenly we hear the crickets.

Politically, this is a godsend for the Democrats — this crisis will be the rock that the Republicans wreck their 2012 hopes upon.

In terms of national unity, however, it shows how far apart we’ve cracked.

On a crowded dance floor, even a novice quickly realizes you have to consider everybody around you. One showboat couple doing an oblivious Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers act would knock over a dozen nearby dancers. Not that I saw any of that. People adapted, adjusted, dancing close, confining their flourishes. Everybody got along, life seemed sweet and musical. It’s so sad that many of our fellow citizens would only see it as a waste because they can’t hear the music.

Source Sun Times

Posted in dance debt disaster , dance steps , Dancing in Crisis 2011 , Merengue , Salsa , salsa dancing steps , Summer Dance