If you’ll excuse me now, I’ll have my face buried in 105 minutes of CGI apes and James Franco. Hello air conditioning, goodbye cognition. When you come back inside this weekend, some things to enjoy:

• A guide to creepy islands, from Carcass to Mafia to our favorite: Funk Island!

• New baby or new house: which has more awesome gear?

• John Flansburgh and Jonathan Coulton talk about their feelings.

• We can help you understand the debt ceiling, sorta!

• Hüsker Dü, 1983 to 1987, in order.

Photo by Marc Flores

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

SWEET ADDITION

whoever
will

&
will

more
thee

sweet
addition

thou
spacious

not
hide

shall
others

my
fair

water
rain

&
abundance

being
add

one
more

no
no

all
one

CIVIL LOVE

more
thou

roses
&

&
sun

&
bud

all
faults

authorizing
compare

myself
amiss

more
than

to
fault

is
advocate

&
plea

civil
love

that
needs

sweet
me

BECAUSE SONG

love
tho

love
show

love
whose

owner’s
every

new
but

I
greet

in
sing

&
riper

summer
now

when
hymns

but
wild

common
dear

like
I

because
song

& BRIGHTNESS

from
power

with
heart

make
sight

&
brightness

thou
things

very
thy

there
skill

worst
best

who
make

more
hear

love
others

others
abhor

thy
love

worthy
be

Michael Schiavo is the author of The Mad Song and the chapbooks Beautiful School, 275 Ocean Avenue, Ranges I, and Ranges II. He lives in Vermont.

For more poetry, visit The Poetry Section’s vast archive. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

16. “Love Shack” — The B-52’s

15. “I Touch Myself” — Divinyls

14. “Tainted Love” — Soft Cell

13. “Loser” — Beck

12. “Lose Yourself” — Eminem

11. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” — Bob Dylan

10. “Love Is a Battlefield” — Pat Benatar

9. “True Colors” — Cyndi Lauper

8. “Summer Nights” — Grease

7. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” — Simon and Garfunkel

6. “Mr. Jones” — Counting Crows

5. “I Want to Know What Love Is” — Foreigner

4. “Roxanne” — The Police

3. “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” — Whitney Houston

2. “Keep on Loving You” — REO Speedwagon

1. “Total Eclipse of the Heart” — Bonnie Tyler

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

“The search is on in Bavaria for an Austrian cow named Yvonne who has been on the loose since May when she escaped from the farm where she was being fattened up for slaughter. The wily runaway has become a local celebrity of sorts in the southern German state. She has outsmarted police officers and has become known for grazing at night, like a deer. But her days of freedom might soon come to an end, as officials in the Mühldorf district have decided that, for security reasons, she can be shot.”

In the case of the Danziger bridge shootings in New Orleans, after Katrina, five police officers have been convicted of an impressive array of charges, ranging from conspiracy to obstruct justice to false prosecution to planting a firearm to falsifying victim statements to fabrication of witnesses to “deprivation of civil rights by shooting.” One of the victims was developmentally disabled and was shot in the back… seven times. The police officers were not, however, convicted of murder.

by Matthew Creamer

The first thing you need to know about the Delaware River Tubing Company is that it’s located in the New Jersey borough of Frenchtown. It was so named for the tongue of its early settlers, many of whom followed the flight of a Swiss opponent of the French Revolution to the leafy lands along the lazy, shallow, deeply brown river that‘s a natural divider with Pennsylvania. The French appear to be largely gone, though at least one of the town’s residents is well known for spending some time in the Old World: Elizabeth Gilbert is right here in Frenchtown, where she is writing a novel, and the husband she snatched up at the end of Eat Pray Love operates a Southeast Asian import shop.

The second thing you need to know is that, in contrast to the hamlet that gives it a mailing address, a trip with the Delaware River Tubing Company is not a quaint affair. To approach it on one of the blistering days that have afflicted the lower 48 states of late is akin to rolling up to a firebase or a refugee camp.

Immediately visible is an endless flow of school buses coursing through the company HQ, plopped in the parking lot of a roller rink. So is a large crowd (or rather, an assemblage of crowds) that, upon closer examination, show themselves to be sweaty, confused and polyglot. Among the babel were both the North and South Jersey dialects, as well as Spanish and Arabic. There was what appeared to be a heat-resistant Indian family draped in traditional clothing marching towards the vast stacks of vessels, speaking a language unidentifiable to my Hindi- and Gujarati-speaking wife.

Those buses transport the customers to a designated launching spot on the Delaware, where all will begin their four-hour glide. That much is clear, but instructions on how to inject oneself into the river fun are not plentiful, as my wife and I learned on a recent broiling Sunday. We made the 90-minute drive from New York after due diligence demonstrated without question that if one is going to go tubing in the metro area, Frenchtown is the place to be.

We asked a few question of one of the longhaired collegiate types that, along with the closer-cropped never-gonna-be-able-to-retire types, fill out the staff. That got us to the shed where $64 dollars got us two tubes, or donuts. We declined upgrades that might have gotten us a tube with back support or paddles. There’s no real guidance on how to choose the tubes; you just see which fits your ass. We also received two wristbands, one for transportation, the other for a “BBQ meal.” (On this day, heavy tubing demand meant that they were out of their usual meal wristbands. Ordinary rubber bands were being used — and thin ones at that!)

Before you get to the food, however, you have to get to the water. That journey involves a short ride on one of those school buses that seemed to reconfigured expressly for the transporting of tubers (those who ride inner tubes, not tubers). The seats don’t face front, but rather each other, creating a wide enough aisle to accomodate the rafts. There are two drawbacks to this otherwise genius design:

1. How to use this system wasn’t communicated clearly in all cases and, in the cases when it was, the rider often either a. Didn’t understand or b. Disregarded the instructions.

2.The infiltration of non-tubular vessels, including elephantine rafts that require long paddles and a sort of bastardized kayak that, as far as I’m concerned, should be outlawed.

The all-too-common effect was to create a pile of tubes, rafts and kayaks, wasting space and time and, well, what else is there? Adding even a minute to vacation bus trips is never welcomed. The confined space, plus the seating arrangement, plus the preponderance of Northeastern skin on display, but in the shade, and therefore minus the glaring summer sun that serves as a much-needed blinding agent in most flesh-baring contexts, made for a rather grotesque equation. Sure, there was the body hair, but more alarming was the volume of moles whose size, color and fearful asymmetry screamed out for dermatological exam.

But this doesn’t last long. After a short, not-very-bouncy ride, it’s a quick, somewhat scary scramble down some muddy sandbags and, bang, you’re in the Delaware River.

Now what?

For many of you, tubing — or “toobing” — probably conjures Mountain Dew-fueled, hyper-adrenalized attacks on the rivers wild put in place by God only so you could motherfuck them into submission. But its origins are genteel. Tubing received media attention when Princess Panthip Chumbhot of Nagar Svarga invited close friends to her estate for inner tube trips down the Chong Lom. Smashing into rocks or drowning wasn’t the main danger, as a Sports Illustrated article from the time tells us: “A murderous bandit chieftain named Tiger Sangat has set up headquarters in a far corner of her acres, which makes it necessary for two armed guards to keep the princess company wherever she goes. For them it is often a pleasantly cool duty.” Realizing she was on to something, she started charging regular folk five baht a ride.

Princess Panthip Chumbhot would likely be proud of what Delaware Tubing Company has made of an enterprise that probably yielded some nice pocket change for her. With buses departing roughly every five minutes, the operation dumps New Jerseyans into the water with a brio that Tony Soprano might appreciate. The downside of injecting yourself into that sort of volume is that any hopes for a quiet journey of water-born reflection are dashed in the early minutes. The pink, blue and yellow of other people’s tubes are everywhere — touching you, even. The river is not wide; there’s not a lot of room to escape the schools of tubers. Big extended families or unnaturally expansive packs of friends float together, often tethered by rope. Their conversations, often just giddy call-and-responses of bad river-themed jokes, were very much audible and very much awful.

One fellow got our trip off to a Biblical start, screaming for no apparent reason, “Let there be light…”

“And God said let there be light and there was light,” someone else on the river corrected him in surprisingly accurate but not particularly devout fashion.

“….and hot dogs. And malt liquor,” finished the first.

For all the talk about alcohol, there’s less drunkenness than you’d expect. There is a fair amount of friends and family being loudly rude to each other, calling each other “dirtbags” and what not. A “Roseanne” script it is not. While we waited in line for the wristbands, a teenaged girl asked her father if their brood should tether their tubes. “Neh, I wouldn’t mind if I lost you,” he said, patting his belly and looking around for some sort of approval.

It’s also worth noting that the whole area is quite clean, perhaps due to the trash-fetching dog named Peace, described by Delaware River Tubing, Inc. CEO Greg Crance in this TV interview.

After the impromptu Genesis reading, I was struck by the feeling that this racket might get tireseome over the 3.5 to 4 hours it takes to travel to the bus pick-up point. As I flopped backward onto my tube, with the hazy sky gnawing at my SPF 50, the river slow and tepid like a warm bath, the dolts screaming, a question arrived: Is there anyway out of this? There really is not. As my wife pointed out — frequently and for no certain reason — a health emergency probably wouldn’t receive quick treatment. (She also pointed out regurlarly and perhaps significantly that there are no bathrooms.)

After a while it took a turn for the better. That’d be when the strains of “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” could be heard, followed by “Jump,” emanating from the stereo of some kids hanging out on the river’s little islands. Being from Jersey means it’s likely hat certain things in your blood, among them the chemical ingredients of a plastic bottle and an appreciations for tomatoes, corn, blueberries, and hot dogs and hamburgers or, indeed, “hamburgs,” cooked outside on a grill, and classic or even “cock” rock. Any of those things will often make an otherwise shitty situation seem just grand and the combination of any two or can act like a shot of B12. So Poison giving way to Van Halen, just as signs for the “World Famous Hot Dog Man” appeared, worked in concert to turn this jammy around.

The “Famous River Hot Dog Man” and his presenting company are proud not only of the meal, but the meal’s girth. The wristband does not just get you a crummy hot dog; it gets you two hot dogs, a bag of chips or a frozen candy bar and a soft drink served in an unironic styrofoam cup. You can also sub out the dogs for a cheeseburger, as we did, in tribute to the company’s second slogan, “Where the Customer is King.” Upgrades are possible here if you want a veggie burger or chicken breast sandwich and don’t mind forking over a few dollars. And it’s ok if your money is wet, a sign tells you. We decided not to sit on the partially submerged picnic tables that comprise the island’s dining areas, because that would be weird.

The burgers are typical Jersey fare — tightly-packed, well-cooked patties slapped with a slice of American cheese — with a yumminess multiplied by being outside, on an island, in the middle of a river. The island is actually owned by the Delaware River Tubing Company, purchased in a visionary moment years ago.

Bellies full, we began the second part of our journey, which unfurled in a sort of unpeaceful peace. The trees on the banks form a membrane just thick enough to block out the sight of passing cars, if not their sounds, and a few small hills on the Jersey side break up the flat monotony. The not-terribly-swift current is broken up only by teeny rapids that give you a bounce or two. It’s comparatively exhilarating. There were other moments of excitement: a vaguely maniacal looking snorkeler muttering to himself, a powerboat zipping upriver, a few errant tubes with their owners trailing them furiously.

But, to be clear, you spend most of your time floating with a slowness that puts the mind on a current of its own. I couldn’t help but wonder what George Washington, who pulled off a river crossing just south of where we were to mount a surprise attack on some snoozing Hessians in Trenton, would think if he saw the long armada of tubers. His Delaware was icy and treacherous and his America knew nothing of “Proud to Serve” tattoos blurry on back fat or floating coolers festooned with the N.Y. Giants logo, our contemporary bric-a-brac of freedom. The revolutionary in him might flash his dentures at the thought of the endless ribbon of commonfolk marring the backyard views of the multimillion-dollar manses perched on the Pennsylvania side — one with what looked like a treehouse bigger than our apartment.

Or what would Elizabeth Gilbert think? Had she and she and Jose ever shuttered Two Buttons on a Saturday just to take this decidedly downmarket journey? If we read the Bali — or “pray” — section of her opus as the emotional synthesis of Italian gorging and Indian asceticism, is a tubing jaunt down the brown waters of the Delaware not merely an extension of the dialectic, and a more affordable one at that? Remember when Richard, addressing her as “Groceries,” told her, “Life didn’t go your way for once. And nothing pisses off a control freak more than life not goin’ her way.” Tubing is all about giving up control. You’ve surrendered your gadgets, your afternoon and any control over your direction. There is one drop-off point and one pick-up point and between, there is only the tube. You have little say over who’s around you.

You submit yourself to the current until the end. We washed up at another set of sandbag steps and filed up them, along with another few dozen disgorged tubers. The bus we took back to the roller rink was even more disorganized. It was dominated by a single family that chattered happily in Arabic and, flouting all relevant design principles, made an unruly pile of their vessels. The patriarch wore a Phillies cap, its maroon “P” the only thing that signified to us, besides their breathy repetitions of “insha’Allah.”

Matthew Creamer has lost to IBM’s Watson, survived a chemical weapons incinerator, gotten to the bottom of an urban legend in Alabama, and made it in and out of both Cuba and NYU legally. He is an editor at large at Ad Age and can be found on Twitter.

Vintage Delaware tubing photos by Joe Shlabotnik, from Flickr.

by David Roth and David Raposa

David Roth: I’ve been on vacation in a place without TV and alarmingly rich in Phillies fans. But I wanted to clear something up with you in re: Yadier Molina’s Crazy Eyes Killer routine with that ump.

David Raposa: Thank you for reminding me to witness that bit of TV history (before MLB brings the Sledge-O-Matic down on YouTubers). What is your question, esteemed colleague?

David Roth: Do you think that, since he got that neck tattoo, Yadier feels like he needs to act tough? Like step out of Bengie’s shadow, not be known as The Molina Who Can’t Eat All That Many Pancakes?

David Raposa: I thought Coco Crisp cornered the pro baseball market on neck ink.

David Roth: I mean, he’s definitely the most gangster Molina at this point. Although previously I think it was Jose, because he wore an edgy “hockey-style” catcher’s mask.

David Raposa: Given the youngest Molina lost his cool over a pitch that looked like a pretty good strike, I’d say he’s just taking after his reasonable and sober bastion of a managerial genius.

David Roth: That is, he is tanked up on Old Grand-Dad and listening to Bob Knight’s “I’m Fucking In, You’re Fucking Out” motivational tapes and doing his best not to start screaming profanities at all times.

David Raposa: Something like that. So, since you’re a professional sports writer, maybe you can answer this: is there an easy one-stop place to find contact info for former or current MLB players?

David Roth: Not really. The Beef ‘O’ Brady’s near Dodgertown is good during Spring Training. Also if you could hack Ken Rosenthal’s cellphone, that would be good. I’d imagine the pictures are horrifying, but at the very least I bet he has Brandon Inge’s number.

David Raposa: I’ll call up Rupe and see if he can set that up.

David Roth: What’s this for? Not that I don’t endorse hacking Ken Rosenthal’s phone for no reason.

David Raposa: I’m working on a “where are they now” piece about Moneyball. Now Scott Hatteberg has my cell phone number.

David Roth: How deep are you going? Did you Google “Mike Magnante Kia” and find his dealership?

David Raposa: I have been greasing palms to get the won-loss records of Chad Bradford’s high school teams. Getting my Pappademas on and all that.

David Roth: Here’s a thing that happened while on vacation: I was in a liquor store with my dad, and the Phils were on TV. Ryan Howard at the plate. My dad turned to me and said, “Look at this big boob.”

David Raposa: Go, Mr. Roth!

David Roth: And then Howard hit a 840-foot homer, on the next pitch.

David Raposa: No, Mr. Roth!

David Roth: He kind of like stood up while he did. It was a monstrous home run.

David Raposa: Did he glare at your dad through the TV camera before starting his trot?

David Roth: As he rounded second base, he threw one of those Subway Big Philly Cheesesteaks through the TV and it hit my dad in the mouth.

David Raposa: “Eat fresh, asshole!”

David Roth: So what’d I miss while I was down there? Did A-Rod act like a replicant with frosted tips? Did the Cubs make ridiculous personnel decisions? Did the sun come up?

David Raposa: Well, A-Rod’s guilty of playing poker!

David Roth: So guilty. I love that the first iteration of that story was him playing with Ben Affleck and Tobey Maguire.

David Raposa: Engaged in illegal activities with Daredevil and Spider-Man! J. Jonah Jameson does not approve!

David Roth: Nothing A-Rod does is recognizably human at this point. I guess that can manifest as grace on the field, but holy shit is it ever full-tilt poreless-marzipan-faced robo-weirdness off the field. Even his mistakes — which should be the place where the very handsome, very rich, very virtuosic superstar dude comes down to earth — just make him less identifiably humanoid. Losing $300,000 to Tobey Maguire is so embarrassing. Because you know he’s just going to spend it on… actually, I have no idea what Tobey Maguire does. With his money or in general. You have to assume designer drugs, right?

David Raposa: Hairplugs and ab implants, of course.

David Roth: Money well spent, I guess.

David Raposa: Oh wait, are we talking about Maguire or A-Rod? Oh! Look at me, stunting like a NY Post columnist.

David Roth: You’ve got what it takes. Now gain sixty pounds and buy a Hawaiian shirt and repeat that joke for 30 years.

David Roth: Nothing that A-Rod does will ever be stranger or more objectionable than dating now-school Madonna. Going to secret kabbalah classes. Getting $85,000-per-session spiritual backrubs from Deepak Chopra and thinking it’s okay.

David Raposa: Watching the “Music” video alone, wearing a centaur t-shirt and nothing else, manscaping his unmentionables.

David Roth: That’s Wednesday for him. I think he has a Connecticut manse that’s just for that. What’s the Madonna song where she raps? There’s something about “I do yoga and pilates/And the room is full of hotties.” I like to imagine A-Rod putting that on to pump in the weight room.

David Raposa: Oh lord, “American Life.”

David Roth: A-Rod rapping it in Buffalo Bill mufti is disturbingly easy to imagine.

David Raposa: What is it about A-Rod that makes everything he does a) a league-wide concern and b) utterly embarrassing in a ripped-my-pants-bending-over way?

David Roth: It is amazing, A-Rod’s permanent clownshoes. But Jeter is basically as weird. It’s a bad look to date Madonna — and it’s really bad — but Jeter was in a relationship with Mariah Carey. Which is like living in a cave in a diamond-studded mountain of cocaine that periodically erupts, volcano-style, with champagne-lava and high-E notes.

David Raposa: And no one cares about any of it! You didn’t watch the HBO “Derek Jeter 3K” special, did you?

David Roth: No, I didn’t. There’s too much to live for. Was there a searing interview with Jordana Brewster? “He never flushed. I mean never.”

David Raposa: His Jeteness was like some sort of cliche automaton that was about to blow a sprocket and start disobeying the laws of robotics. He’d be going on about blah blah teammates blah blah career, and then he’d say something like, “I have lots of multicultural friends. Like Gerald Williams and this Hispanic guy.”

David Raposa: I think he runs on a slightly more robust version of Windows Vista than LeBron James.

David Roth: So how close to off-message did he get? “I love Jorge (Posada), we’re like brothers. So I’m especially sad that he’ll be left behind when the Rapture happens because of his stupid fucking ears.” He’s like McCain on the campaign trail in 2000 — every time he says something catty in re: his obviously diminishing skills, the press dudes take him off the record.

David Raposa: Well, he did threaten revenge on some conditioning coach for some practical joke, and he didn’t come off quite as charming as he had hoped. He should’ve kept the machete out of the shot.

David Roth: I have lots of multicultural friends in baseball, too, you know. But imaginary.

David Raposa: You like to surround yourself with a variety of people from different boroughs of New York to keep yourself grounded?

David Roth: No, I imagine an Ichiro Dunn-Guerrero and we go to dinner. But it’s similar. They both keep me grounded.

David Raposa: Oh, wait, I have an actual, honest-to-goodness, mind-blowing quote (not really): “I like to eat … I guess that’s the best way to put it.”

David Roth: That is essential information! What is it in reference to? His ill-fated pro-bono endorsement of Chi-Chi’s?

David Raposa: His personal chef cooking a meal for him and his Rainbow Coalition.

David Roth: How is he less embarrassing than A-Rod? I am coming around on this.

David Raposa: I don’t know! Is he so unbelievably handsome in person that beat writers can’t bear to besmirch his good name?

David Roth: He’s not going to set you up with his exes, dudes. Mariah Carey is off the market. She is married to Xanax now.

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

David Raposa writes about music for Pitchfork and other places. He used to write about baseball for the blog formerly known as Yard Work. He occasionally blogs for himself, and he also tweets way too much.

Photo by Keith Allison.

by Mike Barthel

For all the political heaving to-and-fro that characterized our recent efforts to raise the debt ceiling, what President Obama signed on Wednesday wasn’t really a piece of budgetary policy. Aside from raising the debt ceiling, cutting loans to grad students and capping the budgets of certain programs (like disaster relief), it didn’t do anything to affect the debt. What the Budget Control Act of 2011 represents, rather, is the rulebook for an entirely new game. A special joint Congressional committee will meet in November and attempt to agree on $1.5 trillion in debt reduction. (The Congressional Budget Office will serve as the refs.) If they fail to come to an agreement, the consequences will not just be electoral or economic. This failure will also trip a “trigger” mechanism that will require automatic cuts in a whole host of programs dear to both parties.

“There’s never been anything quite like the trigger,” Justin Marlowe, a professor at the Evans School of Public Affairs, said in an email. “Congress hasn’t done much on deficit reduction in the past few decades because most members have much to lose and little to gain if they take deficit reduction seriously. In that sense the trigger is a game-changer. It shifts the default from inaction to action.”

Though it’s not much used in politics, new media folks have a term for systems like this which embed artificial consequences or rewards in a real-world situation: gamification.

The most basic example of gamification is Foursquare. You use your smartphone to interact with the real world, and if you do it in a particular way, you get badges and honors. While these virtual rewards can sometimes end up having material value, the most surprising thing about gamification is how effective even those virtual rewards are at motivating behavior. Badges and trophies without any monetary value work as tiny ego boosts to goad our continued engagement with a task. That’s why they’re now everywhere: by setting small, achievable goals and offering virtual rewards for fulfilling them, an organization can get people to participate over long periods without explicitly requiring a long-term commitment. And by choosing which tasks are rewarded, participation can also be shaped toward particular ends. (That’s why I played the Zen mode of Fruit Ninja three days in a row: I wanted that achievement.)

“The basic design of our system of government is very game-y,” said Gabe Zichermann, co-author of the forthcoming Gamification by Design. “We run contests once every two years to decide who wins a coveted seat that gives you some voting power over others. It taps right into the model of incentive and reward at the heart of gamification design. People want status, access and power, and that’s what the political system offers.”

Thinking of democracy as “game-y” might seem disrespectful. But without those rules — the rule of law — the only limits on sovereigns are the limits of their power. Democratic reforms like the Constitution placed artificial limits on an otherwise monarchical system in order to achieve more just outcomes; the whole point is to make players answerable to some outside power, to create human referees where before there was just God and the mob. Elections act as a threat, forcing our elected representatives to pursue particular goals or get kicked out of the game. Another element of game structure is our system of checks and balances, which shapes certain kinds of behaviors in the different branches. And all the rules Congress has established over the years in order to determine how laws get made and enforced (filibusters, committee assignments, rules of debate) offer incentives for certain behaviors and disincentives for certain other behaviors. To say that politics is a “game” is to impugn the system. But in a very real sense it’s entirely accurate. Without the game, we would have only divine right.

At times, new rules for the political system have come from the public, rather than from the government itself. Through the use of state-level electoral mechanisms like referendums, initiatives and constitutional amendments, voters have instituted disincentives for raising taxes (by requiring a supermajority in state legislatures), legal prohibitions against running up deficits (by passing balanced-budget amendments) and even set up individual-level goads for lawmakers to conduct their budgetary business promptly by threatening to cut legislators’ pay if the state budget isn’t passed by a certain date.

However well intentioned these efforts, the results for the political system have generally been catastrophic. California’s maze of amendments and initiatives have hamstrung the state from making budgetary decisions; the 1978-instituted property tax freeze alone has severely restricted revenue, which has essentially required cuts in social spending. Meanwhile, balanced-budget amendments, which exist in 49 states, have prevented legislatures from preserving funding to social programs during economic droughts, requiring them to go to the federal government for help (which increases the burden on taxpayers nationally). It’s no accident that these initiatives are often sponsored by conservative activist groups or independently wealthy individuals. The aim isn’t to make government run better — it’s to prevent government from running.

The federal government has also, at times, taken active steps to put mechanical limits on its ability to function. This generally hasn’t gone well. As Marlowe notes, “Most legislatures, especially Congress, have a hard time pre-committing themselves to future action.” The 1985 Graham-Rudman-Hollings Balanced-Budget Act set up a similar system to the debt committee’s trigger, but as the Times noted in an editorial on Wednesday, “Lawmakers used tricks and loopholes to get around them.”

In 1990, federal lawmakers tried to institute a system called Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) in which any new spending would have to be paid for by corresponding cuts or revenue raises, and failure to do so would result in, again, mandatory cuts. In practice, however, it never worked out. The high level of tax revenue resulting from the tech and housing booms put few limits on what could be spent without incurring a deficit, and again, Congress used creative accounting rules to achieve technical compliance. As the Congressional Budget Office put it, “To comply with the letter of the law while boosting discretionary spending above the [legal] limits, lawmakers used a number of approaches” such as paying for things in other years, delaying payments, or designating certain items as “emergency” costs which were thus exempt from PAYGO rules. The act authorizing PAYGO, the Budget Enforcement Act, was quietly allowed to expire in 2002 to make way for the deficit-creating Bush tax cuts of 2003. While Democrats in Congress re-instituted the rules in 2007, they were broken in 2009 so that the stimulus package could go through.

You can even find an example of this rule-bending in the current bill (pdf). On pages 25 and 26, the “paygo scorecard” is adjusted so that the balance of current spending and revenue is “0 (zero),” which would indicate a perfectly balanced budget. Of course, we don’t have a perfectly balanced budget; we are still very much in deficit. So why would Congress do that? Well, since the debt ceiling compromise does institute some cuts in spending, according to PAYGO rules Congress would then be free to create new programs or tax cuts equal to the amount we just reduced the deficit by. But since that runs counter to the entire purpose of the debt ceiling compromise, the bill tells the people keeping score to reset the status quo. In this case, the rules aren’t doing anything to reduce the deficit; they only make it temporarily harder to increase the deficit to a higher amount. In game terms, this is equivalent to changing the rules halfway through. It’s an obvious rule patch done to avoid gameplay derailment. Which isn’t to say that it shouldn’t have been done. A real need for just such rule-altering is why gamification is so problematic for policymaking: it’s hard to justify sticking to artificial rules when the consequences would be so massively undesirable.

Despite the failure of previous gamification moves, hope endures for the trigger. After all, as Marlowe said, it’s a new thing. But signs are not good.

In an email to me, Zichermann identified the design of the trigger as being notably problematic for achieving positive outcomes:

This is a negative-trigger design — very similar in concept to Aversion Therapy. In short, if you fail to do something in an allotted time, you will be punished. Good games rarely use this as a long-term strategy, but it can often be found as part of a short-term design. Most good games and gamification use positive reinforcement instead of punishment because it’s been proven to be more effective.

Marlowe agreed, pointing out that the focus on short-term consequences offered little incentive for promoting long-term goals:

I think the “Super Committee” will have an acrimonious debate but will eventually find the required additional $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction. The question is whether that reduction comes from tangible policy changes that taxpayers can understand, or from budgeting and accounting gimmicks. If most or all comes from gimmicks the mechanism will have worked in the technical sense, but it will also feed the perception that taxpayers can have fiscal discipline but not have to live with its consequences. In that sense, the “trigger” will probably fail because it will likely focus attention on current taxing and spending, and not enough on the far more important question of how much government can we really afford?

The situation, then, is this: the original implementation of the political game offers certain incentives to elected officials. As Zicherman put it, “The system rewards them for acting in the short-term interest of getting re-elected.” The trigger mechanism allows individual politicians to escape those consequences by putting responsibility for the details of the deal on the joint committee. But by so doing, it also offers an incentive to solve the current problem without looking to the longer-term issues that are the real problem. Meanwhile, the old rules never get rescinded, and just keep piling up, creating more and more restrictions on policymakers’ ability to act.

That’s the thing about games: they’re only as good as the rules allow them to be. And it’s hard to introduce new rules into a game that’s already ongoing. Instead of starting from behind the veil of ignorance, players know what position they already hold in the game. Thus, instead of striving for an abstract notion of fairness, they’re likely to only support new rules that benefit them in some way. And that’s where we are in politics right now. Faced with a game that seems to be dysfunctional, it’s understandable that we might want to change the rules (or even make up a new game entirely). That might work. But if history is any guide, it’s unlikely that such revisions will have their intended effect.

Mike Barthel has a Tumblr.

Photo by Nan Palmero.

Do you have black bear hunting in Maryland on your “bucket list”? It should be. Learn about this great opportunity.less than a minute ago via web

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The Chilean student demonstrations are really amazing — at least 527 or possibly 552 or could be 800 people all told were arrested yesterday (often, let’s say, not nicely), and students occupied state TV offices to get the message out in a traditional fashion. The higher education system is now predominately a group of for-profit businesses, and the students are organizing on the principle that going permanently into debt for education is not a way a country’s education system should be run. How about that. Today, student organizers are turning down a vague proposal from the government that increases some public funding. Good!