New year, old tensions, same story

I glimpsed the usual global destruction -- ancient hostilities in deadly confrontation, led by presumably intelligent adults who still retain faith in the doctrine of final (and therefore endless) retaliation -- but, wanting to begin this year on a happier note, I hastened to America's backyard.

First up, there was The Washington Post's David Ignatius likening our economy to a meteorological disaster; sure, it's still a relatively happy "dark thundercloud" for now, but just you wait, likely it'll soon be "a pelting hurricane."

Well, how about a foreign perspective on local goings on, I thought -- perhaps one with a famously stiff upper lip? So off I went to the Guardian's Timothy Garton Ash, who, unfortunately, was even gloomier than Ignatius:

"2009 will begin with a wail, and then get worse," he chimed. "Millions of people have already been put out of work, across the world, by this first truly globalised crisis of capitalism. Tens of millions more will be made jobless soon. Those of us lucky enough still to have work will feel poorer and less secure."

Good God, pass the strychnine tablets.

Nor could Ash resist citing this little gem of despondency: "To celebrate his Nobel prize in economics, Paul Krugman promises us months of 'economic hell.' Thank you, Paul, and a happy new year to you too."

Ah, but what was this I espied in the L.A. Times? It had the smell and feel of good news:

"President-elect Barack Obama is preparing to lead a full-scale marketing blitz to pass the massive new stimulus package that he says is needed to revive the slumping economy and put the nation on the course he laid out during his campaign."

Positively Rooseveltian, I thought. We're inching closer to an energized recovery: Happy days may not exactly be here again, but soon, with a new executive and new Congress in charge, we'll pull together and lick this thing.

"We'll fan out," said senior adviser David Axelrod. "This will be a public process. We'll make clear to people why we need to do what we're doing, why it's the size it is, what the individual component parts are, and why they are an important part of the equation in terms of short-term recovery."

All sounds perfectly reasonable, no? Of course it does. And because of that, you may have a difficult time, as I did, absorbing the hardcopy that then followed:

"But [Obama's] stratagem … could inflame partisan tensions…. He has called for a new, bipartisan approach to politics, but a classic partisan standoff is developing over his stimulus package…. By mounting an aggressive public relations campaign, Obama may be seen as bypassing the GOP en route to a major legislative victory. For a new president who promised bipartisanship, Obama's methods could leave Republicans feeling isolated and marginalized." Hence vindictive.

In short, reported the Times, Senate Republicans might resort to a filibuster of the stimulus bill, despite the urgency of its passage.

I have racked my brains since reading that, trying to imagine the deepest reason why, after the beating they just took, Republicans would want to impede the economic recovery process.

For sure, their public contention is that they merely want to rein in a lot of politically drunk pork-barrel spending and they want to be players in "crafting the bill -- something they contend hasn't happened yet." But those are just fancy p.r. fireworks, and the "p" they're playing to is merely their rapidly diminishing base.

Yet by impeding the recovery process, they would only diminish that base even more. So Republican intransigence must arise from reasons deeper, far deeper, than mere political persnicketiness.

And just about now is when it hits you -- the big bloody picture that has gotten us where we stand today: Humanity is just plain stupid.

By that I don't mean we're intellectually incapable of comprehending how to put an end to so many needlessly harmful confrontations, for the way to do that, as we all know, is to simply end them. Now. Just stop. No more doctrines of final retaliation, no more materialized ancient hostilities that guarantee future hostilities -- in a few words, no more tribalism.

But we can't seem to break the devout cycles of ideology of which tribalism is the purveyor -- we'll go to our deaths before confessing we're wrong, or at the very least, that the other guy may be just a little more right, whether the dispute is over land or money or even ethereal beliefs.

Because as humans that's what we do: We behave stupidly, which is to say, tribalistically. That's scarcely an insight -- yet it's our chief but most overlooked attribute. And that's why every new year looks so much like the last one.