Government remains closed; the Navy fires five $2 million missiles into the Atlantic for a 250th anniversary event.

The Navy turned 250 years old this month. The administration marked the occasion on Sunday afternoon at Naval Station Norfolk, in Virginia, with an event titled “Titans of the Sea.” The President spoke from a stage on the pier. The Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and the First Lady were present. Approximately 10,000 sailors were assembled.

During the program, five SM-2 surface-to-air missiles were launched from a Navy destroyer into the Atlantic Ocean. The unit cost on an SM-2 is approximately $2 million. The Navy SEALs descended from helicopters. Fighter aircraft conducted catapult demonstrations. The closing musical selection was “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People. The President, by his own remark from the podium, acknowledged that the event had taken on the cadence of a campaign rally.

The federal government had at this point been closed for five days. Air traffic controllers, who are designated as essential and therefore required to work, were working without pay. Federal museums were dark. The same week, the Office of Management and Budget had announced that furloughed federal workers were not entitled to back pay, a position that was reversed under court order later in the month.

The administration’s argument for the Norfolk event was that the Navy’s 250th was scheduled long in advance and that morale during the shutdown required the gesture. The argument has merit on its surface. It is undermined by the line item: ten million dollars of munitions, fired into the ocean, on an afternoon when the federal employees being asked to keep the runways safe were doing so without compensation.

A serious country does not necessarily cancel its sestercentennial celebrations during a fiscal lapse. A serious country also does not stage them as if no fiscal lapse exists.

The President said, from the stage, that he would personally make sure the sailors who turned out for the event were paid for the day. The mechanism by which the President of the United States pays sailors out of his personal account remains, on the public record, undescribed.

Calmly documenting the decline.