Not long after Katrina blew across the Gulf Coast and
uncovered a sorry state of disaster readiness, a colleague circulated that humorous
commentary that’s makes the internet rounds every year or so. It’s about the
discovery of a new element: governmentium.
Governmentium, says the tract, is the
heaviest element known to science; consists of a neutron and large staff of
assistant, deputy, and assistant deputy neutrons; is held together by forces
called morons; and is surrounded by vast quantities of peons. Its presence can
slow a reaction from seconds to days. Scientists believe governmentium
is formed when the morons reach a certain density, called Critical Morass.
Trash-talking government can be satisfying, and justified…
if your life has been disrupted by drones from the Department of Redundancy
Department, or destroyed by a viral tax auditor. Maybe you’re frustrated
because that dark-skinned B student was helped into UC Berkeley, while your straight-A son had to settle for Sonoma State. Maybe it
was from seeing people floating face-down in the flooded streets of an American
city, days after a fully-foreseen natural disaster.
Where did government go wrong? It was literally a life saver
for the nation in the 1930’s, its New Deal reversing the economic death spiral
of the Great Depression. Government broke the back of racial segregation
in the early sixties, and brought Lake Erie back from the dead in the
seventies. Government promised, at least, to eliminate poverty in America.
Some of government’s bad reputation was government’s fault.
But a good part of it was by design. The truly compassionate Republicans wanted
to encourage personal initiative and responsibly, and with their moderate Democratic
allies like Clinton changed the welfare system, arguably for the better. But for
the truly corrupt Republicans, like Tom Delay, government exists to help
channel the public’s money into the pockets of Delay’s corporate sponsors like
Enron and Halliburton. Few express this concept with such candor as Grover Norquist, the field marshal of the Bush tax plan: “My goal
is to… get government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Grover must have been thrilled to see his vision realized in post-Katrina New
Orleans. Now they’re using hurricane reconstruction costs (with huge no-bid
contracts) to justify further cuts in services to the poor.
The idea of government is simply to do in common what people
cannot do alone. Government is not, as Molly Ivins says,
good or evil; it’s a tool, like a hammer. What it does depends on who’s
swinging it. The serious problem with government today is not with the morons
and assistant deputy neutrons. It’s with the cronies and phonies. It’s with a
system where citizens are discouraged from contributing to improving their
government because it appears the dollar has a tighter grip on the hammer than
the voter.
Several years ago, I led a group of Petalumans
seeking to engage students in a curriculum on sustainability, as a means of
getting the kids and their parents involved in the General Plan workshops. We
invested dozens of hours in the project, talking with teachers, school and City
administrators, and preparing materials. On the night we sought the School
Board’s approval, a local developer-friendly politico told the Board to be wary
of Mr. Hagen’s hidden political agenda. The injection of doubt was enough to
cause the controversy-averse Board to back away from the project.
Fast forward to 2005. Planning
Commissioner Stephanie McAllister’s protest resignation brings about a long
overdue reform, preventing developers from bypassing critical review from the
Commission. Her mission accomplished, she withdraws her resignation, but the
developer-friendly majority won’t allow it, and instead appoints my project-killing
politico as her replacement. Not to be outdone, the local Democrats experiment
with their appointment “loyalty oath”. And in Rohnert Park, one form of
gambling organization (real estate speculators) is making a killing selling
their land to another gambling enterprise (the casino operators, who will
recover their investment at the expense of our communities.) Last but not
least, we have Prop 75, designed to stifle the unions but not the corporations.
It’s government to the highest bidder,
folks: if we don’t fight back, we’ll get what they pay for.