The results of the town meetings aren’t too bad, probably because federal and state governments have usurped so much local authority that there isn’t much bad left for town meetings to do. Examining the budgets of the town governments in my area, I see that annual expenditure averages about $900 per resident. That’s not an exorbitant amount to keep our roads plowed and patched, our playground tetherball poles free from Americans with Disabilities Act violations, and our local malefactors under the eye of the law. (Typical police log entry, as reported in the region’s weekly newspaper: “Monday, Feb. 22—At 4 p.m., police received a report of a juvenile throwing rocks at people. Police spoke to the mother. No further action was required.”)
The school boards are another matter. The proposed 2010 operating budget for my local school district is $43,698,819. The district has 3,151 students. That’s $13,868 per student. The schools are good schools, as they should be for the price. Yet if we hugged our responsibilities tighter we could gather these students into groups of fifteen (the district’s high school has a teacher/student ratio of 1:15), employ a tutor for each group, and pay that tutor $200,000 a year. We could hire Aristotle. True, the kids wouldn’t have band practice, but they’d have Aristotle.
But, if we really want to do something good for America our best option is to get rich. Let’s say we become a Wall Street financial whiz, making $10 million a year just churning derivatives. And let’s say we try our best to cheat the IRS too. We’re still going to end up paying—what with income, capital gains, property, and sales taxes—a couple of million per annum into the public coffers. Let’s say we do this for twenty years before we’re arrested. That’s $200 million worth of road repair, trash pickup, help to the disadvantaged, and lethal CIA drones.
Now let’s say we don’t become a Wall Street financial whiz and join Earth First! instead and spend the next twenty years chained to a tree protesting something. For $200 million we could have bought the damn forest.
Whether we think politics is a bother or whether we are full of great expectations about all the good things politics tries to do, we have to scale back the scope of politics. Otherwise no good things will be accomplished. We can’t treat the American government like mom, expecting her to get us off to kindergarten in the morning, fix our meals, wash the dishes, fold the laundry, keep our house clean and our grandparents happy, do the shopping and the gardening, and still somehow make herself interesting to dad. That’s why mom snapped and started drinking and got in that car wreck.
6
All Hands On Deck
Of course there’s a lot of pent-up energy and aspirations in politics and politicians. And we do want to keep the political system busy and feeling fulfilled, lest politicians get loose in the neighborhood and do real harm.
I think we should provide politics with an important mission, something that will allow politicians an outlet for their love of bombast and glory seeking, that will get them outdoors and give them some exercise. Maybe the political system will slim down.
My idea is pirates.
For a breath of fresh air there’s nothing like the bounding main. The flap of canvas, the thunder of cannons, and the clang of bucklers being swashed will surely appeal to our overimaginative politicos. And getting everyone in our government to fight pirates will also silence peevish critics of the political system like me. All mutinous impulses on a ship of state are quelled by the sighting of a hoisted Jolly Roger.
We need pirates. And we’re in luck. There’s a whole country full of them ready at hand. Thank gosh for Somalia. In April 2009, when Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama was rescued from Somali pirates by U.S. Navy SEALs, I hoped, for a moment, that the Obama administration would be completely distracted by pirates and forget the rest of its idiot ideas.
Here was the first unblemished American military victory since 1991. And even in Kuwait we stopped short and stood around pulling our mandate while Saddam Hussein slaughtered all resistance to his regime. The Gulf War had nothing like this neat, clean pop, pop, pop—with three wicked freebooters sent to Davy Jones’s locker and another captured and hauled into the dock, there to face stern justice for brigandage upon the high seas.
Admittedly our bloodthirsty sea dog prisoner, Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, was notable mostly for sheepish grin, confused mien, and appearing to be about twelve. Still, I don’t think we gave President Obama enough kudos for his pirate-fighting triumph. We should have lit bonfires, set off fireworks, and crowned the president with laurel leaves, just to let him know that fighting pirates is the sort of thing that politicians should be doing.
Fighting pirates is bipartisan. Fighting pirates is a consensus builder. Even the Democratic Party is not so inclusive that there’s a pirate voting bloc that must be appeased. And if we have to gather all the hundred-foot yachts once owned by AIG executives and now in possession of the Troubled Assets Recovery Program and send these to the Horn of Africa to lure the Somalis from their pirate lairs, so be it.
What an improvement over the other challenges the political system faces. Pirates don’t invest in hedge funds, credit swaps, or toxic mortgage debt. Major pirate financial institutions never collapse and require infusions of government funds, because pirates bury gold doubloons in treasure chests and leave us maps marked with an X so we can dig up the gold and replenish the Federal Reserve without recourse to painful tax increases. Plus, if pirates do want a bailout, just toss them a rusty bucket.
Pirates have no need of health care reform. Eye patches, peg legs, and hooks are available over the counter at pharmacies, lumberyards, and hardware stores. Other pirate maladies may be treated by shaving their bellies with a rusty razor. Pirate retirement communities are nearby, within easy walking distance. And the planks are wheelchair accessible.
Foreign policy is a moot point. Pirates are men without a country. Never mind that the country they’re without is Somalia. “You call that a country?” is the expert assessment we will receive from those with knowledge of the region between Mogadishu and Djibouti. Thus pirates don’t have to be sent off to the Hague to be sentenced to ninety days for genocide (time off for good behavior).
The use of pirates for political purposes has a long and happy history. The young Julius Caesar—inexperienced and previously elected to only minor public office—made his mark in the res publica by killing pirates. They captured him on a voyage to Rhodes. Caesar told the pirates that as soon as he was ransomed he would come back and slay every man jack of them, from captain to cabin boy. It will amaze modern politicians but Caesar kept his campaign promise.
Queen Elizabeth I, deft at courting public opinion, was hell on Spanish pirates, when she wasn’t busy financing English pirates such as Sir Francis Drake.
Thomas Jefferson sent Stephen Decatur after the Barbary Coast pirates. It was a PR coup. The marines are still going on about “the shores of Tripoli.” It worked out well for Decatur too. There’s a whole town in Illinois named after him (more than can be said for a certain former junior senator from that state).
Our politicians should be warned, however, that the victory over the Barbary Coast pirates was frittered away in negotiations with the bashaw of Tripoli. These were conducted by striped-pants cookie-pusher Tobias Lear, U.S. consul general in Algiers. When Lear realized what a screw-up he was, he committed suicide (a protocol that may be worth reintroducing at the Clinton State Department). Therefore President Obama must not be allowed, as is his wont, to talk to the pirates. Pirates get to open their mouths only to taste cold steel.
Pirates could make for a turning point in American political life. Yo ho ho and a bottle of... Well, the Somali pirates are Muslims. Yo ho ho and a cheekful of khat. Johnny Depp is even now holed up in the Hollywood Hills—an actor prepares—getting ready to play the role of Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, lone survivor of the attempt to commandeer the Maersk Alabama. And Disney’s new “Pirates of the Gulf of Aden” attraction will be quite a thrill for the kiddies. There’ll be live
AK-47 fire and rocket-propelled grenade explosions. Bales of cash from cowardly shipping companies and timorous European nations will fly in every direction. The ticket takers being hired are plainclothes Israeli security guards armed to the eyeballs. And, at the end of the ride, an imam will jump out of the dark and scare the dickens out of the children with a harangue on Islamic fundamentalism.
This imam is not to be confused with Iman the supermodel, now Mrs. David Bowie, although she too is of Somali extraction. And here is another thing that will serve to distract politicians—Somali pirate lasses. Somalia, whatever its other deficiencies, is full of incredibly beautiful women. In Somalia a girl like Iman is the girl that the hot girl brings with her to the khat shop so that the hot girl looks even hotter by comparison. (Not that I’m implying our president would be interested in this sort of thing, unlike the previous Democratic president.)
Somali corsairs will grab the fancy of the political establishment and sidetrack the politically engaged from nosing around in our private business. Sunday morning public affairs TV show bookers, talk radio hosts, NPR reporters, and the like will be jamming satellite phone lines to Eyl, Hafun, Obbia, and other buccaneer redoubts trying to get Somalia’s ocean marauders to change their names to something that’s easier to pronounce such as Blackbeard, Calico Jack, Long John Silver, or Johnny Depp.
Everybody loves pirates. Do kids ever put on eye shades, pull out laptops, and pretend to be policy wonks? Did Robert Louis Stevenson write Tax Revenue Island? In Captain Blood, was Errol Flynn portraying an innocent hero forced to become a New Deal brain truster and team up with Works Progress Administration cutthroat Basil Rathbone? Does Jimmy Buffett sing “A Liberal Looks at 50”?
I have an even better idea. Politicians, especially liberal politicians, could be pirates. They’ve already got some piratical ideas for the IRS. As a matter of fact, there was one pirate, a Captain Misson, who (according to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica) “was unique in combining active piracy with socialistic ideals. He reigned for many years over a Utopian republic in Madagascar.” A good place for the bunch of them.
Male liberals would have an excuse for wearing an earring. The liberal president could dump his stupid Portuguese water dog (talk about a name for a bad pirate movie) and get a parrot that sits on his shoulder. Every time Glenn Beck comes on TV the parrot would squawk, “Voices of Hate! Voices of Hate!”
Politicians could work the pirate angle a lot of different ways. It’s not like just being a politician where you’re pretty much locked into one plotline. You become popular. You become unpopular. You become a lobbyist. Piracy is more flexible. Politicians could fly away to J. M. Barrie’s Neverland where good triumphs and evil gets eaten by a crocodile. Barack Obama is Peter Pan. Dick Cheney is Captain Hook. Eric Holder is a ticking reptile.
Or politicians could play it for laughs and steal the script from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. The operetta ends with a daytime television–like scene—an Opraetta!—where it turns out that the privateers are actually well-educated people from prosperous backgrounds, but they have issues, like Nancy Pelosi. In fact the part of Ruth, “a Piratical Maid of all work,” is perfect for Nancy Pelosi.
Nancy Pelosi
One moment! Let me tell you who they are.
They are no members of the common throng;
They are all congressmen who have gone wrong!
(I’ve rewritten the libretto slightly, with Harry Reid in place of the Pirate King.)
President Obama
No American can hear this and not make amends,
Because, with all our faults, we love our congressmen.
I pray you, pardon me, ex–Senator Reid,
Pols will be pols, and hacks do have their needs.
Resume your ranks and legislative duties,
And take my daughters, all of whom are beauties.
The president will want to cut that last line. But it will be a great show. Best of all, we’ll get to hear Obama sing:
I am the very model of a Democratic president,
With plenty of ideas vague, expensive, and irrelevant,
What I’m saying may be nonsense but I’m saying it emphatical,
What I’m doing may be lousy but pretend it is pragmatical.
The locusts have no king, yet they go forth
—Proberbs 30:27
1. I don’t know why. Goethe’s Faust is derivative. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons is awfully original.
2. Oakeshott’s exact words: “Politics I take to be the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together.” The definition is not, in fact, from “Rationalism in Politics” but from his Inaugural Lecture at the London School of Economics, delivered in 1950.
3. I also like his spotty education. And here I’d like to thank Ramona Bass who, while reading a rough manuscript of my book, e-mailed me to point out that Paine’s name is customarily spelled with an “e.”
1. But “freedom” is less highfalutin and more of an Americanism. Theodore Parker, a prominent abolitionist, may be partly responsible for the American usage. He is certainly responsible for the American definition of democracy. Parker gave a series of speeches in Boston in the 1850s. Abraham Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon attended one of these talks and gave the following transcript to Lincoln, to obvious effect.
A democracy—that is a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government of the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness’ sake I will call it the idea of Freedom.
2. Although, as I write, the Supreme Court has overruled some of this legislation. Corporations, as legal persons, turn out to have the same rights to free speech as we personal persons. Corporations are people? Who knew? This may explain how I got screwed by British Petroleum the other night after a few too many drinks at the Capital Grille.
3. Paris, September 6, 1789.
4. Chapter 13.
5. Book III, chapter 2.
6. The Wealth of Nations, Book II, chapter 2.
7. The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, chapter 1.
8. The Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter 11, conclusion.
9. The Wealth of Nations, Book II, chapter 2.
10. The Wealth of Nations, Book II, chapter 2.
11. The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, chapter 7.
12. Dugald Stewart, Collected Works, vol. 10, Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith et al.
13. The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, chapter 1.
14. The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, chapter 2.
15. The Wealth of Nations, Book V, chapter 2.
16. But good news for Birthers! While the nativity of the current chief executive may have occurred in Hawaii or in Kenya or away in a manger, no crib for his bed, here are eight presidents who definitely weren’t born in the United States of America: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry Harrison.
17. Santayana managed to ignore World War II. He was in Rome when the conflict broke out. He moved into an Italian convent and stayed there until his demise in 1952. (What Santayana was doing in the Italian convent we don’t know. But he wasn’t killed and he wasn’t married to death.)
18. Acton, Essays on Freedom and Power, Boston, 1948.
19. “Seminal” is such a PBS word, as close as PBS comes to talking dirty. And Free to Choose was indeed a companion piece to a 1980 PBS special by the same name. The dirt, in this case, could be heard thumping on the lid of the Carter presidency’s coffin. Jimmy Carter must have realized that when, as a liberal Democrat, even public broadcasting turns on you, you’re dead as a smelt.
20. “Present State of the Law,” 1828.
21. Cited in The Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes, New York, 1990.
22. Prometheus Unbound (1820), Act IV.
23. De l’Esprit, or Essays on
the Mind, London, 1819.
24. Part II: “Proletarians and Communists.”
25. Quoted in A Concise History of the Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes, New York, 1995.
26. If Professor Venn had had any idea how his diagrams would be used in PowerPoint presentations, he would have shot himself, but not before tracking down Professor Pie, inventor of the pie chart, and shooting him first.
27. Per Buddhism: Its Doctrines and Its Methods, Alexandra David-Neel, London, 1939.
28. The Wealth of Nations, Book V, chapter 2.
29. Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory’s View, ed. Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz, Stanford University Press, 1961.
30. Note ugly drop in personal income tax receipts since 2008.
31. For puppy training.
32. Pacific Research Institute, 2008.
33. Policy Analysis no. 654, November 18, 2009, “Bending the Productivity Curve—Why America Leads the World in Medical Innovation.”
34. “Months to Live—At the End, Offering Not a Cure but Comfort,” by Anemona Hartocollis.
35. WWW.BARACKOBAMA.COM/ISSUES/HEALTHCARE/.
36. U.S. Census Bureau, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006.” (P.S. Don’t feel obligated to read all the footnotes in this chapter. They’re here to show that I’m not pulling numbers out of your ear the way the Obama administration is.)
37. “Rite of Passage? Why Young Adults Become Uninsured and How New Policies Can Help, 2008 Update,” Commonwealth Fund, New York, May 2008.
38. U.S. Census Bureau figures cited in “O’s Health Rx: Cover Illegals,” Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, New York Post, July 21, 2008. And, yes, it’s the same Dick Morris. And, no, I wouldn’t listen to him either if it weren’t for the fact that, like any good conservative, I’m convinced that the Census Bureau is an all-knowing secret agency.