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Trust Issues

I keep coming back to this, have been one way or another ever since the Reagan ascendency: Why do the conservatives, who seek to capture it (well, who HAVE captured it), so hate government? Is this simply a political play to gain power, which assuredly has profited them these last few decades, or is it something else? Well, it has to be something else, else they'd not be returned to office in greater numbers, and Rush Limbaugh would have long ago lost his bully pulpet.

So what is it? Why do we hate government so?

I mean, I know why we mistrust it, for as a known liberal (somehow I always hear Joe McCarthy's biting pronunciation of "communist" when the conservative talking heads use the word "liberal"). I have this vague apprehension that I'm being spied on, catalogued, tracked as an undesirable; but that's government run amok, and is corrected, periodically, once exposed. And, anyway, I'm an insignificant fellow and that's just the paranoia talking.

None of which explains the national distemper toward a government of, by, and for the people.

But one encounters with increasing regularity the words of conservative mover & shaker Grover Norquist, "My goal is to cut government in half in 25 years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub," he said in the Nation, May 14, 2001.

Why such hatred?

I'm beginning to understand, though the lesson has come from oddly placed sources. I doubt it's making national news, but Kentucky's Governor Ernie Fletcher, the first Republican elected to that office in, I believe, 30 years, is in hot water and has already been obliged to pardon nine of his staff members before even the grand jury empaneled to investigate could finish its work, much less the first trial be held. The problem is that he (or his staff) are alleged to have systematically sought to evade the state's civil service statutes to pass out patronage jobs to their supporters. The Lexington paper cited some 3,000 angry supporters wondering why they hadn't already been hired as the instigation of the whole mess.

Now, it is argued that this is the rsult of 30 years of frustration and that the Democrats had run hob with the merit system. Which may be true, but still makes it no less...um...wrong.

Belated disclaimer: This is not about the facts of Gov. Fletcher's case. I cannot pretend to have followed it in great detail the press, much less to have any particular expertise in Kentucky politics. This is about the underlying message.

Which is that at least 3,000 of his supporters apparently felt -- rightly or not -- that they were entitled to state jobs when Gov. Fletcher took his oath of office.

This is, if true, a stunning kind of retail corruption. One friend simply shrugs and suggests that's how things are done here in Kentucky.

Maybe so. Maybe that's how things are done in many parts of the country where I have not yet lived. But I never gave money to a candidate, nor put his/her yard sign on display, nor pulled a lever in the voting booth in the expectation that there was a job hanging in the balance for anybody other than the official wishing to be elected. Some other things certainly hung in the balance, but they were ideas about how government might be improved, might be used to better our lives. Silly me.

If that's really how government works, no wonder those more cynical than I (which surely should be a very small number) hate it, wish to drown it.

I wish the drowning metaphor weren't the link to this thought, but it is and I'm stuck with it: If the debacle in New Orleans is any reflection of the willingness and competence of all levels of government to perform the fundamental tasks for which they have been constituted maybe the survivalists and libertarians have it right.

President Bush has promised to rebuild New Orleans without raising taxes.

Excuse me?

If ever there were a time it was appropriate to raises taxes, surely the catastrophic destruction of a major (not to mention historically important) city is such a time, even for a sitting Republican president (who, by the way, cannot stand for re-election).

No new taxes? Ah, so we'll cut more programs elsewhere.

Isn't that now New Orleans got into this mess, at least a significant part of the problem. Weren't Corps of Engineeers budgets deferred which might have given those now-broken levys a better chance of holding? And what of the wetlands everybody seems to agree needed rebuilding outside New Orleans, the crucial natural buffer which has been eroded by man's greed.

No new taxes, and we won't pay prevailing wages (pitiful though they were in New Orleans) for the construction, and the government will be bled still more. Even more so when Rita makes landfall, wherever and however she does these next few days.

Bleed the federal government dry (and, by extension, the states, to whom many of the needs and programs devolve) leaving corporate power absolutely unchecked. Corporations which have no national allegiance, no obligation to morality, and little apparent sense of the difference between right and wrong so long as money ends up in the right pockets.

We liberals have already learned to mistrust the Bush Administration. Somehow a great number of citizens seem unbothered by the fact that we invaded Iraq, a sovereign nation, on the premise that we had incontrovertible evidence they possessed -- and meant to use -- weapons of mass destruction. This new doctrine of the right to pre-emptive action was offered in a complete intellectual vacuum, without any public discussion, bolstered by the fiction that Saddam had something to do with 9/11, a fiction which a great number of Americans cling to. But we didn't have that evidence, none of it, as it has turned out. The fact that Saddam Hussein was an evil man does not give us the right to depose him, at least not the way international politics have traditionally been played. The world is filled with evil men who run dangerous countries. Maybe the people of Iraq are better off now than they were before the invasion, but the point is at least arguable, and hardly settled.

My point is that we were lied to, to what end I cannot guess. To enrich Haliburton? To pursue some utopian vision of how the Middle East might be transformed? For oil, found in Iraq in such quantities that we were initially promised it would defray the cost of rebuilding, a fairy tale long since planted in the back yard and turned to compost.

Taken in aggregate, these are the kinds of reasons citizens of the U.S. don't trust their government, don't believe it will do the right things, wish to bleed it into insignificance. They imagine their lives will somehow be better then, though I don't share their confidence.

This has to stop. Either we believe in the fundamental concepts of the United States of America, or we don't. Either we believe that government can be of, by, and for the people, that its job is to provide for our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, or we don't.

OK, so various aspects of government are corrupt. Big surprise, and hardly news, for it ever has been so. Power corrupts, all that. Or, in the words of Deep Throat, follow the money. The point is that as citizens we are supposed to be vigilant, to watch those who work for us, to manage them with our votes and our lawsuits and our shrill voices. If the government doesn't work -- and it clearly doesn't -- let's fix the darn thing. Not starve it to death.

I wish this were all more coherent, but I've banged at it long enough and shall now go back to the work of trying to make a music magazine. Bear with me. I'll write about music again, honest.

Posted by grant on September 17, 2005 8:32 PM | Permalink

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