Given one of the largest stages in the world, here’s what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had to say about the United States’ budget crisis, and specifically Republicans’ depressingly meager efforts to begin cutting:

“The mean-spirited bill, HR 1 … eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts. These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.” – Harry Reid

To which Alabama’s own Mary Katharine Ham added:

“John Boehner’s America is a land in which cowboys would be forced into back-alley poetry recitations.” – Mary Katharine Ham

Heh. Loved the line, but this was actually a matter of some gravity for me. Ladies and gentlemen, you know I believe in American exceptionalism. I think this is the greatest country in the history of the world, and despite the continuous assaults on it, I think it continues to represent the liberty-loving’s best hope for happiness. I haven’t changed my mind on that.

But that said, consider for a moment what Reid said above. I mean, don’t process it as a sound bite—really think about it. It’s absolutely appalling, betraying a stupefying and complete disconnection from reality. The United States is more than $14,000,000,000,000 in debt. Our deeply unserious president is obliviously hammer down, talking up high speed trains, wind farms, and God knows what else, and eagerly adding more debt at a pace so much more rapid than any previous administration, direct comparisons are essentially nonsensical. It’s like comparing and contrasting a jet airliner and a pair of roller skates as modes of transportation.

That Reid, at this juncture, apparently thought it potentially persuasive to babble about federally funded cowboy poetry festivals as a blistering attack on a Republican budget proposal is depressing. That it has not generated nationwide outrage is horrifying. Not nearly enough of our country understands what is happening to us.

Frankly, I wonder sometimes what percentage of the U.S. population could even explain where the debt comes from.

I’m not going to predict the collapse of Western civilization here, but I’ll say this: that widespread ignorance guarantees that this is going to get a lot worse before it gets sustainedly better.

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