The dispute had been running for six months and it would run for six more if left to its own momentum.
He had been watching it from New York, tracking the specific pattern of a disagreement that both parties had decided was more useful unresolved than resolved, because the unresolved version gave each of them something to gesture at when other things needed to be obscured. This was a common mechanism. He had seen it many times in many forms. It was useful to understand that people manufactured their problems as often as they encountered them.
