I tried to reproduce last Sunday’s Doonesbury cartoon in lieu of today’s post, but my digital skills weren’t up to the task, so I will have to describe and discuss it instead.
The comic strip’s radio personality, Mark, gets a call from Al Gore. The conversation focuses on what Mark says was Gore’s “jam”–government efficiency. Gore explains that it had indeed been his “job one” as Vice President, and that in the space of seven years that effort had reduced the federal workforce by 426,000 workers, consolidated 800 agencies and eliminated 640,000 pages of rules.
When Mark says “Wait. Why didn’t I know any of that,” Gore responds “You didn’t notice because the process was carefully planned and responsibly executed. It never disrupted essential public services. Compare that to now.”
As I read that comic strip, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. (Okay, I did both.)
In just a few panels, Gary Trudeau made an essential point: if your intent was really to improve service delivery, to root out fraud and waste (and in most bureaucracies, very much including government, waste is a far more prevalent problem than intentional fraud), you would go about that task carefully. Responsibly. You wouldn’t approach it with what Paul Krugman has aptly called a group of Dunning-Kruger interns and a meat-ax.
You would take the time to determine what each agency did, and take care not to lose valuable institutional knowledge with your layoffs and firings–especially when that knowledge was essential to the management of things like atomic weaponry. You would learn the vagaries of government’s (frequently antiquated) digital systems, and avoid jumping to incorrect conclusions, avoiding ludicrous and easily debunked assertions that millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security checks.
It has become abundantly clear that Musk’s manic exhibit with a chain-saw was a perfect representation of his real motive: to destroy the federal government–what the Rightwing crazies call their war against “the administrative state.”
I think there are two distinct reasons for pursuing that destruction, although they are not mutually exclusive. (Musk rather obviously falls into both categories.)
One motivation for the chain-saw approach is the naive and increasingly divorced from reality belief that we don’t really need government, except perhaps to maintain law and order. All those regulations that–among other things– keep your groceries safe to eat, prevent your bank from ripping you off and keep your airplane from crashing, and all those silly programs that do things like feed schoolchildren and support cancer research–and especially all those intrusive rules that prevent you from discriminating against people who have different skin colors, genders or religions–all of that activity is an unnecessary intrusion on your individual rights.
Once Musk bought Twitter and turned it into the cesspool of bigotry and ignorance that is now called X, his belief that government should operate minimally– and only for the benefit of rich White men– became clear. (As if we’d failed to notice..)
The second motivation is greed. We’ve seen the billionaires “bend the knee” to an administration that is hell-bent on destroying the economic system that facilitated their acquisition of wealth, evidently in the belief that when markets crash and they are free of regulations and that pesky rule of law, they will be in a position to buy low. (Their accompanying belief that they will be able to sell high after a time, however, is fatally flawed–stock values are unlikely to rebound in the absence of a stable democratic society, just as America’s reputation as a reliable ally is unlikely to recover in our lifetimes, if ever.)
Sometimes, uncomfortable truths are better conveyed by humor than by the efforts of would-be pundits writing blogs like this one. People of a certain age still quote a very famous Pogo strip for an essential insight: We have met the enemy and he is us.
The question we are now facing is: how many of us are willing to confront that particular insight? How many of us are willing to accept the unavoidable inefficiencies and annoyances that come with a government able to serve us all–and to fight for its preservation?
I guess we’ll find out…..
Comments