So saith Winslow I. Wheeler, director of the military reform project at the Center for Defense Information and a former adviser to Senate Republicans. He was commenting on the continued production of "The Plane That Won't Die," the C-17 Globemaster III, which first flew in 1991. It is built by Boeing, courtesy of Congress, the Air Force, and numerous subcontractors which hire workers in congressional districts here and there across the land. That's a lot of payroll helping to keep local economies afloat. In a world ruled by pork, payrolls are the fat of the land.
As a result, when the dreaded government Budget Cutters move in to cut production, or, heaven forfend, phase out a cash cow (in order to phase in a new and bigger cash cow, invariably), what is said is one thing and what is done another. According to the NYT article today, (P. C1):
There are many hidden agendas at work, since production of the plane means so many jobs. And the gap between what various people say, and what they do, is often vast.
Or at least half vast.
So what's a Kabuki dance?
Japanese Kabuki theater evolved over centuries to become a stylized form of poplar drama noticeably distant from its original realistic roots.
While beauty of formalization is one of the aesthetic principles upon which the art of kabuki as a whole is founded, it is most effectively demonstrated in the acting--the most important aspect of kabuki. When a kabuki actor prepares himself for a role in a classical play, it has long been customary for him to begin by studying the model style perfected by his predecessors.
Such a model style, even if intended originally to produce a realistic representation, has been highly formalized and become symbolical in the course of the development of kabuki. Thus, even in the realistic kabuki play, the most trivial gestures are frequently closer to "dancing" than to "acting." Almost every gesticulation is accompanied by music.
There are many cases where such symbolization has been carried to the extent of abstraction, so that the formalized action of the character is no longer relevant to or even in direct contact with any rational interpretation of the role.
What you see is not what you get.
Kabuki in Washington politics is where the Congressman smiles and tells you s/he's all for your great idea but votes against it in the end. This gives rise to one of the great aphorisms of Washington reality:
An honest politician is one who stays bought.
And Jesse Unruh's line:
Money is the mother's milk of politics.
There's no sense in dragging this out. My father used to tell me:
Don't believe everything you read, and only half of what you see.
Which was usually followed by:
And remember that the hand is quicker than the eye. That's why there are so many black eyes.
As Mark Twain said about his own father, it was odd that the older he got, the smarter he became.