By Slim Wolfe
Wolves, tigers, and Tasmanian devils at the door, and an elephant in the room: presidential election campaign 2012. The elephant is the slow-witted public, ready to blame the incumbent for everything unpleasant since the war of 1812; whose main skills seem to be brand-name recognition and arrogant instant gratification. The elephant candidate is the one with a three-syllable name, handy for voters with short memories.
Lions and tigers: The Asian economy now colonizing us. Haven’t sent gunboats up the Mississippi yet, but America is no more the only superpower. The world’s Muslim population doesn’t like our partisan meddling, military aid to Israel, drone-kills of innocents, or consumer-decadent ways. Can’t say I blame them at all. Militant policy seems to be a force of nature, an animal need. Kill for peace. Then there’s climate change and the population bomb. Democrats seem a little better able to grapple with the energy issues, when they’re not heating us up with more weapons.
Another beast at the door is migration. I grew up in the glitter and squalor of the Big Apple and darned if I can figure out why anyone would forsake the boonies for all this neurosis, but here they come. The narrative has been steered to a myopic vision of self-interest: fences and the National Guard. Maybe some solar panels, some internet, and cannabis farming will make the third world hinterlands more appealing than the menial jobs and major hassles they get on this side of the pond. They’ve had the corporate squeeze-out, the World Bank sugar-rush, and the “white man’s burden” NGO schemes, Rolling Stones t-shirts and smart-phone bank accounts, but they’re still hungry and restless. Maybe someone will invent a kind of socialism which doesn’t go rancid, and the peasants will be content to work the back forty and plant trees. And not find themselves in the middle of a conflict.
On the home front there’s talk about less government, but there may not be much agreement about the particulars. Does mandated health insurance mean we can quit inspecting our food processing industry? Can we fire the Secretary of State? One less loose cannon to pay! Can we quite making college loans and hope we have enough trust-funders to staff all those technical slots we’ve come to depend on? America has always been about government: government sweeping the natives under the rug to make room for railroads, settlements, commerce; government propping up right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, Africa, and Asia to make room for Coca-Cola, United Fruit, or some oil or rubber interests.
In some ways I’d like to see less government, like in regulation of rural owner-built homes. But as Ed Quillen once pointed out, if your house catches fire in an urban neighborhood, it’s not just your personal affair. Government has evolved for a reason. If your drive to Denver from Salida took you over a series of eight or nine privately owned and maintained toll roads, in varying states of repair, you might wish for a unified, standardized system. Balkanize air traffic control, and you might end up with a lot of crossed signals and downed aircraft. Eliminate public education and welfare, and we might be back to roving gangs of bandits on a large scale. We might balk at this or that application of government, but we’re no longer a nation of independent farmers and artisans (more’s the pity) and it’s handy to know that the nut we buy today will thread nicely onto the bolt we bought yesterday, and the pound of flour at store A is the same as the pound at store B. If you favor all-around less government, don’t run for office, and don’t vote.
I was admiring a custom home the other day. It wasn’t a McMansion, or even ostentatious, just a two-level southwestern with some nice touches, and I felt a little pang of envy. Did I miss the mark in this life? Could I be sitting pretty on a treed lot in a desirable subdivision, with a snazzy breakfast nook and a two-car garage, if only I’d taken the elephant-people’s advice, borrowed money from the folks at age twenty, started a successful business? I doubt if either of my parents had ever seen a house with a two-acre lot and a supplemental outside stairway leading to a wraparound upstairs deck … I don’t remember seeing one myself, until I was in my early twenties. Can you come by that sort of money raising chickens or high-priced Italian herbs? Well, maybe if you’ve got a couple dozen underlings who live in substandard shacks. Ahhh … the American Dream. I’m not complaining about my little desert hideaway, or saying bad things about the folks who have the means to hire my services, but the disparity between the haves and the have-nots who nominally live in the same nation is staggering, and you can’t just chalk it up to lack of willpower. Some people take root in rich sandy loam while others come up between a rock and a hard place, and maybe a society of good gardeners has to be willing to soften up those hard places for the benefit of everyone concerned. The classic rags-to-riches tale is Genghis Khan, after all, so let’s not pretend that “exceptionalism” is an American exclusive. Is the class war just a figment of our pinko imagination? Did Dick Cheney and Carl Rove ever work on a construction gang in a blizzard for a piddling hourly wage?
What’s so special about America if not class mobility – and some people say we’re falling behind on that score as well. The major impetus for settling the “new world” was financial adventurism and exploitation: cotton, tobacco, textiles, timber, shipping, not too different from the “new worlds” of South America, Africa, Asia, except maybe that it was easier to sweep the natives under the rug and make a little wiggle-room for independent high-spirited “settlers” (who would later need railroads and Sears-Roebuck, and to fill the ranks of the army.) Cyberspace may have put some new wiggle-room in play, but we won’t be gaining any farmland to feed our hungry Mouseketeers, at least not this side of Mars. We’ve stuck ourselves in squarish boxes and mundane pursuits, we can pipe in our trivial entertainments and our flood of information, so where’s the “exceptional”?
I keep imagining a line-item democracy, the universal comprehensive ballot-initiative government. Yes or no or how much? Money for the military? Health and Education? Commerce and Development? Put ‘em on the ballot, let the people be the executive and legislature. Chop everything above the level of department administrator. Dictatorship directly from the people, quit sending money up in smoke for these elections, just an embarrassment, the whole event, really. Waste of a good Harvard education.
Nobody digs down to the nitty-gritty why and what if. America, god shed his grace on thee, meaning, me, so just let me make my bundle; don’t ask me about Locke or Smith or Hegel or Kant or Trotsky, god doesn’t care about all that. If you don’t have the juice in your system to claw your way up out of the working class, go hang out with some of our new arrivals and learn how to sell something.
Shouldn’t we at least have the entertainment of a three-ring election circus? We can choose from at least three or more of everything else, so who’s paying who to muzzle the Ron Pauls and the Ralph Naders? Maybe Obama wouldn’t sound so bored if the competition was a little more substantial upstairs.
Should corporations get a better break than people, yes or no? Should we make an effort to quit running on hydrocarbons, yes or no? Can we terminate our pregnancies, yes or no? Voting for a name on a placard with a few blandishments thrown in at the side isn’t a democratic election; it’s a game of Russian roulette.
Did we have a plebiscite on “Over the River?” Should we insist that giant cocoons must produce giant caterpillars who crave a diet of McMansions and McMotels? Who but a chump would be content to be employed at 1/500th or even 1/20th of what the big guys get? Is that exceptional, or what? Can we vote on it? Not the smiling face, but the point of truth itself.
Slim Wolfe sells rural-chic furniture and other items made from Uncle Sam’s firewood allotments, bakes bread and gardens a lot.
