Oh My God...Wait...We Aren't Dead...Yet...

One theory about how the Oracle of Delphi got her supposed precognizant powers says that she sat atop a volcanic seam that spewed hallucinogenic gases. But I didn't need to huff any gas to see this one coming. In a followup to my blog post Oh My God! We're All Gonna Die!, as predicted, Congress passed a debt ceiling increase in the nick of time to prevent a catastrophe. Or so we were led to believe. We'll never know.

And I don't have the expertise to say one way or the other, except to say that this whole event fit the Crisis story plot almost exactly. The climax was the passage of the debt ceiling in the eleventh hour. The stakes were high. The clock was ticking. It's almost like some action-hero is fiddling with the wires to a bomb, trying to figure out how to defuse it, then finally does so with one second left. Take, for example, our writer-hero Richard Castle who, in one episode, had to defuse a dirty bomb in the heart of New York City. He does it, of course, with mere seconds to spare. I sometimes expect him to reflect that his life works out into clearly delineated action-packed episodes, the fictitious author noticing that his life would make a pretty good TV series. Life does indeed seem like that. Except--at least in the case of the whole debt ceiling debacle--it's manufactured. It suspect that if the debt ceiling had never been raised, sure it would have negative consequences, but it'd be more drawn out. It wouldn't have been a catastrophic point. And that just wouldn't have made a good news story because the fear would no longer be as eminent. And I'd bet the media would've found something else to talk about, some other partially-manufactured Crisis to scare us and get us to stay tuned. Instead, the debt ceiling was increased and the news media is now in the wrap-up, denouement-phase of the narrative. But like any good series writer, the end of one story has hints of the next. The market is still jittery and the FAA is under a partial shut-down. Can anyone say "sequel?"