Because our opportunities are lost—so lost they never got anywhere near us—it’s easy and maybe comforting to forget about them. These opportunities are certainly invisible to politicians. They don’t see the businesses that weren’t started, the innovations that weren’t pursued, the charitable donations that weren’t made, and the beer I didn’t drink because a jerk professor and a college-town cop (talk about a fight I don’t have a dog in) drank it in the White House backyard.
Meanwhile politicians work themselves into a lather of rationalization about the benefits of government spending. In this they are aided by the more vile kinds of economists such as Paul Krugman and the late John Kenneth Galbraith. Using liberal political-economic reasoning I can prove... anything. I can prove that shooting convenience-store clerks stimulates the economy.
Jobs are created in the high-paying domestic manufacturing sector at gun and ammunition factories. Additional emergency medical technicians, security guards, health care providers, and morticians are hired. The unemployment rate is lowered as job seekers fill new openings on convenience-store night shifts. And money stolen from convenience-store cash registers stimulates the economy where stimulus is most needed, in low-income neighborhoods where the people who shoot convenience-store clerks go to buy their crack. I am simply flabbergasted that the Democratic majority in the House and Senate isn’t smoking crack and shooting convenience-store clerks this very minute, considering all the good it does.
And where are the missing opportunities? There were some convenience-store clerks who thought they were going to have an opportunity to do something, if only grab a smoke outside the back door on their break. But they’re dead.
The expense of politics is bad, the political destruction of opportunities is very bad, but nothing is as dreadful as the brain of a politician. Ha. Ha. Ha. What brain? Alas, it’s worse than a joke. Taken one by one, politicians are of dull-normal intelligence. They’re not Stephen Hawking, but they’re not Mark Sanford either, except Mark Sanford. But when you put politicians together in governments you get committees. In Congress they even come right out and call the committees committees.
We’ve all been on committees. We know what happens to intelligence and common sense when a person becomes a committee member—Committee Brain.
You live in a neighborhood with a playground. The kids in the neighborhood would like to play tetherball but the playground has no tetherball pole. A committee is formed to raise funds for tetherball: Committee to Raise Funds for Tetherball, CRFT.
CRFT is started by a group of pleasant, enthusiastic, public-spirited neighbors. The minute any of these neighbors becomes a member of CRFT he or she will begin to express his or her pleasant, enthusiastic public spirit by turning into one of the following:
The Fanatic
Everyone loves tetherball! Everyone will donate to CRFT! There are a lot of rich people in the neighborhood! They’ll all donate! Let’s set our fund-raising goal at one million dollars! I’ll “throw in” (prolonged giggling) five bucks to “get the ball rolling”!
The Martinet
We have to draw up a charter and form a nonprofit corporation with a chairman, a president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, development officer, human resources executive, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge on a tetherball pole exactly ten feet high. We’re talking about regulation tetherball, played according to North American Amateur Tetherball Association rules.
The Dog in the Manger
We need to get permission from the County Zoning Board, the City Council, the Parks Department, and adjacent landowners who may complain about tetherball noise. That part of the playground is too damp for tetherball. It might be federally protected wetlands. We can’t do any fund-raising without advertising. We can’t advertise without raising funds. The kids would rather have a tennis court.
The Person Who Is Stupid Even by Committee Brain Standards
So the rope, like, has a ball on it?
The Worrier
Padded pole, breakaway tether, a lightweight foam ball, and ban on playing after dark or when visibility is poor and when the sun is shining, to avoid UV ray skin cancer damage. The kids should wear helmets and kneepads and safety belts.
The Person with Ideas
If we call ourselves the “Committee to Raise American Funds for Tetherball—Yeah!” we can use the acronym CRAFTY. Let’s set up a challenge grant to erect a second tetherball pole in the inner city. “Midnight Tetherball” could be an alternative to crime for deprived youth. We can also promote tetherball as a way to combat child obesity, which would make us eligible for funding from United Way, and we should also apply to the Gates Foundation. Or invent a tetherball cell phone app and rake in the cash. We’ll have a tetherball league—no, three—Adults, Juniors, and Tether Tots. This could be a great Title IX thing. If our daughters are varsity-level tetherball players they’ll get into Yale. I’ll go on the Internet and check out tetherball coaching. I’ll bet the best coaches come from eastern Europe. We could probably hire the top coach in Bucharest for peanuts if we get him a green card. And from there it’s straight to the Olympics!
The Person with Ideas, None of Which Has Anything to Do with Tetherball
Is the tether biodegradable? Is the pole made from recycled materials? Many playground balls are manufactured in third world countries using exploitative child labor. Let’s be sure to utilize organic fertilizer and indigenous plant species when seeding the tetherball play area. Power mowers will contribute to climate change.
The Bossy Person
Who says the same thing as everyone else on the committee but louder.
The Person Who Won’t Shut Up
Who says the same thing as everyone else on the committee but more often.
The Person Who Won’t Show Up
Unless his or her vote is crucial, in which case he or she shows up and votes the wrong way.
You
You actually do all the work and call forty people and ask them each to donate $10, and half of them do, and you raise the $200 needed, only to find out you need $200,000 because the House of Representatives’ Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee’s Select Committee on Opportunities in Physical Education’s Subcommittee on Americans with Disabilities Act Compliance has delivered a report to the House/Senate Joint Economic Committee, which has referred legislation to House and Senate conference committees to reconcile a bill requiring all tetherballs to be wheelchair-accessible no matter how high the tetherballs fly in the air.
Given the complete dominance of politics by Committee Brain, the wonder is that anything gets done, and the horror is that it does. What government accomplishes is what you’d expect from a committee. “A camel is a horse designed by a committee” is a saying that couldn’t be more wrong. A camel is a seeing-eye dog designed by a committee and available free with government grants to the halt and the lame.
Yet committees are ancient and ubiquitous in our civilization. Moses goes to a business conference with God and the next thing you know, Exodus 32:1, “the people gathered themselves together.” And someone says, “All in favor of worshipping a golden calf...”
Same thing in the Roman Senate: “All in favor of relinquishing power to Caesar, then stabbing him...”
And again in the boardrooms of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Fannie Mae: “All in favor of investing in loans to people who made loans to people who made loans to people with houses that aren’t worth pissing on if they catch fire...”
Committees persist although their decisions are invariably stupid. Therefore committees must provide some value to our civilization with their stupidity. And they do. In fact it could be suggested that our freedoms find their surest protection in stupidity.
We owe the thought to Lord Brougham, another of nineteenth-century Britain’s great defenders of liberty. As a Member of Parliament, Brougham carried the bill to make slave trading a felony in 1810 and was instrumental in
passing the Reform Bill of 1832 that widely expanded the electorate and made seats in Parliament more nearly representational. Brougham (who, incidentally, had a style of fancy carriage named after him, set the fashion for going to the Riviera, and became himself quite stupid later in life) said, “All we see about us, Kings, Lords, and Commons, the whole machinery of the State, all the apparatus of the system, and its varied workings, end in simply bringing twelve good men into a box.”20
In other words, what makes and keeps us free is a committee—the jury. Governments have the legal monopoly on deadly force, and, in a free country, the thing that prevents the government from forcing us into prison or onto the lethal injection gurney any time it likes is the need for a jury verdict. Our government cannot inflict any punishment or penalty upon us unless what we have done is so obviously wrong and outrageously bad that even a feebleminded, asinine, obtuse, muddled, stubborn, and silly committee, which never agrees on anything, agrees.
Stupidity is our unwavering safeguard. And one that, it is to be hoped, will protect Joe Biden when he’s arrested for shooting convenience-store clerks.
7
Morality in Politics
And What’s It Doing in There?
Morality is important to politics. Important is not the same as necessary. You can remove morality from politics like you can remove the head from a chicken and they’ll both keep going, politics much longer than the chicken. Politics will continue to run around, flap, and spurt blood forever without its morality.
What’s important about morality in politics is us. We own the chicken farm. We must give our bird-brained, feather-headed politicians morals. Politicians love to think of themselves as “free-range” but they do not have the capacity to hunt or gather morals in the wild. If we fail to supply them with morality, politicians begin to act very scary in the barnyard. These are enormous headless chickens and they have nukes.
But, while we all say it would be good if politicians were moral, we all get a little nervous when morality in politics is advocated. We worry about the separation of church and state. We are afraid that “morality” is the thick end of whatever is the opposite of a wedge and that this tool will be used to knock church and state back together with a bang that will result in, at best, the Taliban and the Spanish Inquisition, if not Sarah Palin.
None of these is a good idea. Yet separation of church and state is a problem that’s well addressed by the First Amendment. We should be demanding separation of state and coven.
Maybe politics is inherently evil. Maybe politics is so evil that anything we do for it, even attempting to supply it with morality, just feeds the beast. I trust this isn’t true but I can’t say the thought doesn’t trouble me.
The sum and substance of politics was expressed in the 1860s by prescient Russian radical Nikolay Chernyshevsky: “Man is god to man.”21 The faith of politics is in the holy goodness and correctness of mankind (as soon as humanity gets politically corrected) and in the collective mystical solidarity of that reformed mankind. These impious sentiments were nicely put by the poetic genius—and political idiot—Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul,
Whose nature is his own divine control22
Making man divine takes some doing. But there have been numerous volunteers for the task, starting, predictably, with a French philosopher. Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–71) made the awful pronouncement that “It is... only by good laws that we can form virtuous minds.”23 This notion was taken up with enthusiasm by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manisfesto.
You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois... This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.24
Then the idea was put into force by the likes of Leon Trotsky who, writing in 1924, sounds more full of romantic crap than Shelley.
Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser, subtler. His body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more melodious.25
If he lives.
Thus the virtuous “new man” imagined by politics comes to rule over heaven and earth. Call him “Ben.” Or call him “Jerry.” He rewrites Genesis so that Adam loses all of his ribs, and half his backbone, to ensure that the Garden of Eden is fully representative of the spectrum of human sexuality. Endangered species go first into the ark. (Now, how do we get those brontosaurs out of the vegetable garden?) Moses is called to the mountain-top to receive the Ten Thousand Nice Ideas urging the Israelites to be “in touch with their feelings” and deploring speech that’s “hurtful and divisive.” Joshua blows his horn and the residents of Jericho join in on recorders and tambourines. There’s no capital punishment in the Judea of Pontius Pilate, Jesus does three to five in imperial minimum security. He writes The Gospel of Prison Reform and starts a socially conscious, sustainable small business by using his heavenly powers to invent refrigeration. The symbol of universal salvation is ice cream. We are blessed with an infinite number of cleverly named delicious flavors. But we are required by law to use someone else’s tongue to lick them.
Politics violates not only the first commandment about who’s God, it violates the other nine as well. Politics could hardly function without bearing false witness. Likewise, without taking the Lord’s name in vain. The more so given that, in politics, the Lord who is so loosely sworn by is you and me—mankind.
In modern government politics has taken the place of mere tyranny. The result has been more killing in the past century than in all the preceding centuries combined. Covetousness and stealing define redistributive politics, and, without redistribution, politics would have no political support. And graven image is as good a way as any to describe the fiat money by which redistributive politics operates.
Politics’ insistence upon involvement in every human activity, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, is more anti-Sabbatarian than golf. The Social Security system is no way to honor thy father and mother. As for adultery, there was, and there may still be, Bill Clinton.
Even to be “politically engaged and informed” may make us one of the devil’s party, driving around town with a “Vote Satan” bumper sticker. Listen carefully to that most politically engaged and informed radio network NPR and hear the evident relish with which it reports misfortune, inequity, and suffering around the world. The unspoken gleeful message is, “More occasions for more politics!” Nor are conservatives without delight in others’ misery. How we long for unemployment, anxiety, anger, and fear of bombs in boxer shorts on the next election day.
I believe in original sin, and politics may be its name. However, unlike some of my fellow Republicans, I do not believe God is involved in politics. Observe politics in America. Observe politics around the world. Observe politics down through history. Does it look like God is involved? When it comes to being a political activist, that would be the Other Fellow.
This said, unless we intend to climb the pillar of Simeon Stylites and evict Simeon or go off the grid with a one-man militia in the Bitterroot Range or otherwise isolate ourselves from every arrangement among persons—even the Dalai Lama hasn’t been able to manage it—we need another way to approach morality in politics.
Morality is a larger sphere than politics—thank goodness, literally. The relationship between things that are moral and things that are political can be shown with Venn diagrams. This is a method invented by British logician John Venn26 to illustrate the categorical propositions of logic. Here, for example, is a Venn diagram of the categorical proposition known as “universal negative”:
And here is a Venn diagram of politics and morality illustrating the categorical proposition known as “particular affirmative,” which can otherwise be stated as “most politicians will burn in hell:”
If the circle of politicians fell completely within the circle of morality, none of us bitchmongers in the media would have a job. Fat chance of that. Even if a miracle happened and politicians and
voters became saints, there are aspects of politics that fall outside morality.
There’s no perfectly ethical way to conduct taxation or utterly good method of exercising public domain. Some injustice in letting the guilty out of jail must be preferred in our legal system to the greater injustice of jailing me. Then there’s war. The reasons for a war may be highly principled. The conduct of a war can not be.
And religion doesn’t work. Even the most religious among us shouldn’t get ourselves so sanctimoniously confused that we think religion and morality are identical. It’s not a one-circle Venn diagram.
The most important part of politics in a free country, the law, falls mostly into the category of being good while God isn’t looking. God is love, and the law won’t even cuddle.
The fact that law can’t be made identical to morality is not just a matter of the legal impracticalities in punishing all moral lapses. (You can make me share, but you can’t make me care.) In a democracy the law must be exact, so we know exactly whether we’re obeying it and exactly how to change it if we don’t feel like obeying. Love is not as exacting as law. Even our mothers wouldn’t love us if it were. But they do.
Mom’s fond trait (and we’ll put her in the nursing home anyway) stems from the same root as all morality—from the Old Testament love, when the Lord “saw every thing that he had made, and behold, it was very good,” even the bugs. From the graciousness of the Buddha whose first precept was “Not to kill, to have regard for life, human, animal, and vegetable, not to destroy carelessly.”27 Not to ride our bikes across the lawn of our mean, crazy neighbor Mr. Norbert. From the mercy of Christ who told us to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Never mind that Mr. Norbert is chasing us with a rake. And from the opening words of the Qur’an, which have nothing to do with wiping Israel off the face of the map (something the Romans had done already in 70 AD), but say, “In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.”