Paul Krugman:America Is Not Yet Lost

[cal04]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/opinion/08krugman.html

We’ve always known that America’s reign as the world’s greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic.

What we’re getting instead is less a tragedy than a deadly farce. Instead of fraying under the strain of imperial overstretch, we’re paralyzed by procedure. Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland.

A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.

Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison.

[frazzled]

1. Gee, I'm surprised he didn't recommend the traditional Czech remedy--

Defenestration.

They'd just throw someone out the window when things were getting politically tough.

The First Defenestration of Prague involved the killing of seven members of the city council by a crowd of radical Czech Hussites on July 30, 1419.
Jan Želivský, a Hussite priest at the church of the Virgin Mary of the Snows, led his congregation on a procession through the streets of Prague to the Town Hall (Novoměstská radnice) on Charles Square. The town council members had refused to exchange their Hussite prisoners. While they were marching a stone was thrown at Želivský from the window of the town hall.<1> The mob became enraged at this event and, led by Jan Žižka, stormed the town hall. Once inside the hall the group threw the judge, the burgomaster, and some thirteen members of the town council out of the window and into the street, where they were killed by the fall or dispatched by the mob.

The Second Defenestration of Prague was central to the start of the Thirty Years' War in 1618. ... At Prague Castle on May 23, 1618, an assembly of Protestants, led by Count Thurn, tried two Imperial governors, Vilem Slavata of Chlum (1572–1652) and Jaroslav Borzita of Martinice (1582–1649), for violating the Letter of Majesty (Right of Freedom of Religion), found them guilty, and threw them, together with their scribe Philip Fabricius, out of the windows of the Bohemian Chancellery. They fell 30 metres<2> and landed on a large pile of manure in a dry moat and survived. Philip Fabricius was later ennobled by the emperor and granted the title von Hohenfall (lit. meaning "of Highfall").

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague

[Odin2005]

2. I've always thought that to be the best name for an historical even ever.

It almost sounds like a band name. :rofl:

[Recursion]

3. Even better, "the defenestration of Prague" is not specific enough

You have to specify which of the two defenestrations you mean.