Irony Becomes Her

Welcome to the World

An item I recently was forced to read listed "pitfalls to avoid" as follows:

(1) Too much power in the hands of the executive, judicial or legislative branches.
(2) Control by chief executive dictator.
(3) Union of church and state.
(4) Retardation of scientific progress.
(5) Loss of personal liberty.
(6) Exploitation by corrupt government officials.
(7) Economic and social unfairness.
(8) Citizen taxation enslavement.
(9) Domination by a minority political group.
(10) Mediocrity becomes the norm, stagnating society.

The writer follows up this inspiring and original list with a diatribe on George W. Bush's adherence to it as a personal crusade. Bush is an automaton of evil seeking to establish a feudal system on American soil, with dirty-faced, aching, sleep-deprived slaves toiling to make him and "big corporations" rich.

This may seem like a clownish description, but it really isn't far from the rhetoric Bush-haters will use -- all, of course, for the noble purpose of ... of ... hmm, come to think of it, I can't really tell what the purpose is for it.

Before you think you're going to see a conservative propaganda piece on this usually non-political page, I contend that, had I read something from the opposite pole yesterday, I would also have used it as fodder for this muse. I try to work with what is available, and I can certainly find both left-wing and right-wing rants affixing blame for the imperfections of the world to a person or party other than queemself.

Back to the list. I find item (6) especially interesting. All empirical data point to the fact that when humans (the only species, so far, with which America has filled government offices) are involved in something, it becomes corrupted over time. By the grace of God reformers come and save us as a race from the brink of utter destruction, but the general tendency is entropic.

Based on the above, the more government officials there are, the more corrupt ones there are -- the more corruption there is. The only solution we can think of to eliminate corruption is to hire more officials to oversee the officials. The result: item (5).

Items (7) and (8), back to back, are the most pithy statement of the American political dilemma -- how exactly is the redistribution of wealth and status supposed to happen without high rates of taxation? Idealized mathematically, all but the one poorest person in the country must be taxed for this to happen equitably; taking into account the cost of a redistribution infrastructure, everyone would be taxed first before this Utopian equality would be achieved by returning the proper amount to each. Thankfully, the government officials in the idealized equation would not be corrupt and would distribute every penny honestly.

Finally, how are (7) and (9) to be rectified without (10) being the result? When all are the same, all will be "mediocre" -- there's just no way around it. Eurocentric and Aristotelian as it may sound, you can't have it both ways. One example to prove that words such as "mediocre" and "norm" are relative is the idea of "poverty" in the United States being transparently different from the majority of the world. Ninety-five percent of our population, residing in, say, Kenya, would be the "evil rich" to the poor there, and the American lower class's "enslaving" tax burden would be called "tax breaks for the richest 2 percent."

With people of such creed as the author of this list in power, the government will grow. Since he offers no solution (logically speaking, I have contended, no solution is possible) for eliminating all these items, that impossible task will be relegated to the god of America -- our compassionate, unselfish, loving, nurturing government. Meanwhile, Bush's successor will be subjected to the same vitriolic rhetoric by those of the opposite political philosophy.

posted by Lynn @ 6:16 AM