47. "Politicians suck."

That's what I heard Americans on the street, asked about the debt-ceiling crisis, saying all day yesterday into CNN microphones. They hadn't had a chance to read Terry Smith, the small-town newspaper sage I have quoted before. If they had they'd be saying, "There are exact causes of this crisis and we've got to distinguish those that are merely annoying from those that are imperiling the nation. I find X (a particular cause) most perilous and I blame Y (particular Republicans or Democrats) for introducing it."

If you're not talking like that you ought to get off the street. Hide when you see a CNN camera approaching. Americans can't appear before the world saying, "Everything sucks." They can't appear saying, "Politicians suck." Why? Because then they'd have to say, "Democracy sucks," and they can't say that because they'd have to keep adding "but sucks less than other forms of government" and on and on. There's no good way out of that language mess.

Smith finds the greatest peril in those pledges that 95% of Republicans in Congress have made "to never raise taxes anytime, anywhere or for any reason." This keeps them from accepting compromises that give them nearly all of the other things they want —compromises of the kind, I might add, that contending parties in other Congressional conflicts would have been glad to make, and that, in conditions so perilous to the republic, would have been embarrassed not to make.

The only people happy here might be teachers of Philosophy 101 classes. They have been given a wonderful example of "one-principle absolutism," the simplest of all solutions to problems of the good life and the just state.

It's a solution that pretty quickly fails the tests of experience. Take "thou shalt not kill" as your absolute and you fall before the Nazis. Take "no discrimination" inflexibly and your planes fall to the terrorists who get through. Take "unconditional love" unimaginatively and you're enabling the alcoholic you need to get tough with. History is full of failed absolutism.

How does flexibility and imagination do in history? How about the Swiss? There they are, a nation divided into three language groups, each in cultural sympathy with a surrounding country. By all historical experience they are a powder keg, waiting to blow up the next time their European brothers are engaged. What do they do? Suppress expressions of sympathy. Yes, abridge free speech, that most absolute of present American principles. Not that they don't like free speech; they love it. But they see that it, like every other value, has to be adjusted in the light of a greater value, like peace. It's an adjustment their history tells us to admire. How was it achieved? By constant, fatiguing attention to the compromises that had to be made.

So, might "pay attention" be the one principle we can call absolute, never needing adjustment? No, because human beings can't pay equal attention to everything. They constantly need to proportion it. There's no way to avoid adjustment.

Does this call now for a good scolding of the extreme Tea Partiers who forced the pledge? Of course, but no more a scolding of them than a scolding of the extreme ACLU members they see themselves opposing. They are actually brother absolutists. After 9-11 it was clear that the principle of individual liberty would have to be adjusted against the principle of national security. "No sir," said some members. "Not anytime, anywhere, for any reason." Refusal to adjust is not a measurable feature on the right-left scale.