This is a funny place, Washington." Thus spoke Timothy Geithner, secretary of the Treasury and anxious jogger in "Too Big to Fail," in a video interview conducted by Politico. Geithner, my credulous friends, was being ironic. He pretended to be shocked by the way Washington worked, but he really wasn't. That's i-ron-y. Throughout a career that makes for a candelabralike résumé, Geithner had swung between Washington and New York, with a layover in Tokyo. He worked for Kissinger Associates, the International Monetary Fund, the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Federal Reserve, Treasury. He's a macher. So he presumably must know what's real, what's tomfoolery. He has regularly met politicians at cocktail parties and swanky dinners; he has munched peanuts in the Oval Office. "Think about this," he said. "If I understand this, which I'm not sure I do, House Republicans introduce a bill they say they are going to oppose, ask their members to vote against and then go tell investors of the world not to pay attention." Despite his faux befuddlement, Geithner knows his way about the labyrinth: "This is all theater. Beneath the theater, people are trying to work together." The debt ceiling will be raised, the deficit cut, default avoided, Armageddon postponed. Why? Because there is no choice. Geithner lacks even a contingency plan if he turns out to be wrong (of course, irony squared, no one believes that either): "The U.S. will never default. Our plan is for Congress to pass the debt limit."

With a flash of a crooked smile, Geithner offers secrets of the temple; well, maybe it's more a tour of the local Masonic lodge. He is speaking, it is true, to the dried-up core of the Washington press corps, brined in cynicism, adept at winks, nods, free canapés and ironic narratives. But he was also beamed to the Internet: to us. What was he really saying? That two worlds exist. That the visible world of stirring speeches on C-Span to empty chairs; of stump demagoguery and fantastically toxic commercials, is a false world, a theatrical world, a world of deceptive gestures and lewd tweets. As Rousseau said: Close the immoral theaters! The true world, the real world, the world from which real history will emerge shaking a hairy leg, is the invisible world. So lay me down to sleep. Switch off the cable and pray to your beloved leaders. They may behave like ignorant, red-faced fools with cameras whirring (because, presumably, you like your leaders that way), but they will, as Spike Lee once said, Do the Right Thing. Because they must. Because it says so in the mini-Constitution Geithner stashes in his breast pocket.

Alas, doubts creep in. What if Geithner is wrong? After all, on HBO, he seems a slender reed against an onrushing flood of a crisis he apparently failed to anticipate. So Mr. Secretary, in that affair, what was real, what were theatrics? Were those credit default swaps real, or were they mere props, like the invisible crane that hurled actors across space and time in "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark"? What was going on behind the scenes, before the meetings, sub rosa, sotto voce, between the lines? Why, from your castle keep at the New York Fed, couldn't you sniff those rotting mortgages? And new doubts emerge. Perhaps, Mr. Secretary, you are leading us astray with all this talk of parallel universes and counternarratives. Who are you, Philip Roth? You have your own agenda, a dark, complicated menu shaped by your résumé that is available on the Internet. You walked in Robert Rubin's shadow. You communed with Larry Summers. You can order food in Mandarin. You are intimate with debt, an initiate of central bankocracy. You yourself, Mr. Secretary, are a Beltway habitué, shod by Wall Street. The mind reels.

And so this is where we find ourselves: Sanity requires us to take a generous view of our public leaders on faith. On instructions from Mr. Geithner, we should sit back, crack open a Bud Light Lime and believe that Congress will do the right thing, meaning it won't obliterate the economy to make a stupidly theatrical point. The debt limit may be an absurd, artificial mechanism -- one unknown to foreign going-straight-to-hell, drama-loving nations -- but to those who believe debt is intrinsically evil, both fiscally and metaphysically, it has taken on a monstrous reality, a harbinger of apocalypse. It would be comforting to accept Geithner's clean-edged distinction. But once you are introduced into this two-toned world, the colors begin to bleed, and it grows increasingly difficult to separate the two. You develop a craving for free canapés. Washington isn't the only funny place, Mr. Secretary. Not by a long shot.