A Big Staff Doing Big Stuff with a Big Stick

You’re in power – in a democratic or social democratic nation, a socialist or "soft authoritarian" one-party state, an out-of-touch monarchy, pretty much anywhere but an out-and-out fratricidal dictatorship – and you like it, so you want to stay in power. Whatever the form of government, the method is the same: Make people dependent upon you, and you’ll have control over them. Exert control for long enough, and the social sinews of a free society – responsibility, industriousness, creativity, perseverance, initiative – go flaccid in decaying nations and never develop in oppressed ones, and many people prefer to “go along to get along” wherever they are, anyhow.

In America today, set up by astutely manipulative PR and roped in by the brain-numbing verbal bonbons of Demopublican robocandidates, people obligingly vote themselves into as comfy a cocoon as their 50-plus-percent overall tax rate will buy them, with costs ever spiraling due to inflation, imputed interest, corporate welfare, a laundry list of kickbacks and the general economic wear and tear that results from foisting an overlarge, labyrinthine protection racket such as the U.S. government onto 300 million people who, in large part (and in the service of a large number of diverse ideologies, religions and philosophies) wish to be left alone to devise their own best lives and maybe hold on to a buck or two, okay, can you dig that?

Whoa. Yep, that was one sentence, all right. Your brain may be out of breath. Check now.

You all right?

Okay, then, back to the harangue: Dependent people lose their freedom skills. When that happens, the government becomes central to people’s lives, exerting life-controlling powers as it aims to know everything about everyone and handle every detail of daily life. Did I say “benignly”? Benignly, of course, because the intent, not the result, is the measure of success. Our wanna-be rulers wanna be nice rulers. Mostly nice, anyway. This is the kind of “nice” I mean:

“We put people first. We even give them money. We need them in our corner when we shake down the tobacco companies. Of course, some backward types don’t like the fact that the U. S. government is litigating against legal corporations selling legal products that the state, at several levels, subsidizes – but, hey, there’s no accounting for taste. Which is okay, because in this Administration we have no taste for accounting, either! We figure we owe the money to ourselves anyway, right? So not only can we use the power of the state to bend people to our will and dispense the most crass patronage – we can charge it!”

This is, without fanciful slogans and multimedia soundtrack, the Democratic Party platform. But the regnant Republicans have been just as bad the last eight years. They are not even quite an opposition party; more like unindicted co-conspirators.

So, the heck with the two institutionalized parties, and their orchestrated media squabbles, their sound bites and their news-screwing. The chance of either major party adding a “Leave People Alone” plank to its platform is zero, I’m afraid. From a recognized, revered trait of Americans, acknowledged in Supreme Court opinions, the desire to be left alone has gone from quite laudable to almost illegal in two or three generations. The sheer weight, breadth and depth of state intrusion into our everyday lives, unconscionably vast and pervasive, cannot but smother initiative and spontaneity, cripple industry and industriousness, and either engender resistance or develop dependence in people.

But now, just to move the paradigm forward and to the right a tad, forget intentions, good or otherwise; forget policy pronouncements and political posturing; let’s talk simple, crushing weight. Sheer bulk, and sheer bulk alone. Might may not make right, but it certainly can be counted on to make trouble, just by its nature – its large nature.

First off, everyone of every political flavor should be able to agree on a few very basic statements of fact – plain and simple facts, not interpretations, not policy implications or political imprecations. Two of those, certainly, are that the U. S. government is (1) big and (2) powerful.

Add up the employees of the federal and state and local governments, and the budgets, and the buildings, and the company cars, and the copiers, coffee machines, and dusty banker boxes that dot the bureaucratic landscape, and you’ve got a big bunch of – well, staff and stuff, I suppose. Really quite large quantities of staff and stuff, frankly.

Who could argue with that? On top of that hardware heap you have, what? – three-and-a-half million federal employees alone, not counting the armed services? Plus a few million more state and local clerks, councilmen, sheriffs and wardens. So it’s not a value judgment or a political position to say merely that the U. S. government is big. As for this latter part of the proposition – defining “powerful” – we offer up just a few words. Hiroshima. Gulf War. Kosovo. Iraq. No analysis, interpretation, spin or B.S. Whatever your viewpoint, the U. S. has had some big-time, first-place bombfests, and some are still underway.

Big and powerful. A big staff doing big stuff with a big stick. No matter how much the national greatness neocons want to claim him, I don’t think Teddy Roosevelt would sign on to their Bismarckian program.

I’m not sure Bismarck would.