The great 20th-century American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald often evoked the fleeting passage of time. He described the final weeks of summer in This Side of Paradise as that “sad season of life without growth.” On a particularly warm summer afternoon, The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan lamented her boredom. “‘What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon,’ cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’” Her friend Jordan Baker dismissed Daisy’s morbidity, reminding her that, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
The mood in Washington easily corresponds with Fitzgerald’s melancholic theme. Congress returns to Capitol Hill this autumn hardly rejuvenated. President Donald Trump, in survival mode without a substantive legislative accomplishment, will market tax reform. Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, estranged allies of the White House, will pursue their own tax reform plan while also addressing the devastating effects of Hurricane Harvey. Healthcare legislation appears terminal and unforeseen developments in foreign affairs could disrupt everything. And so Trump, along with a Congress controlled by his own party, begins the season without a clear legislative agenda or ideological path.
No comments:
Post a Comment