Next message: love must be blind, since they love it so much they don’t seem to realize that they themselves are part of the very cultural and economic complex whose downfall at the hands of an angry mob they are so looking forward to. It is this smug, self-deluding, mote-and-beam aspect of the current surge of anger that interests me: everyone is professing it, hailing it, egging it on - including those who are its natural targets, who are culprits by their very own description of the problem though they don’t always have the wit or honesty to see this. Perhaps they will have a few minutes to reflect on it in the tumbrel on their way to the public hanging: “Gosh, I wonder if I really should have given that last speech in Des Moines?”
Some thought of this kind is said already to have crossed the collective mind of the Bush White House, which was rumored last week to be seeking a cease-fire in the perk wars. Whether or not they were, they should have been, since no matter how low the public’s opinion of Congress may sink or how luxurious the legislators’ life circumstances may look, there is no way the administration can win an all-out war over whose perks are the most extravagant and outlandish, not even if it attempts the classic defense about how this is all for “presidential security.” Presidential security doesn’t apply to but a tiny fraction of the bounty.
Just a few words here on those Beltway perks we’ve been reading about. First, the stuff available to the legislators is peanuts compared with what is available in the upper political reaches of the executive branch, the Air Sununu kind of thing. Second, the driving impetus for acquiring it at all is generally not even what you might call the normal, if admittedly not admirable, one of greed or, say, just a desire for the comforts of life. Washington perks are overwhelmingly about status, not comfort. They are a government version of the classic office contention over who gets a philodendron plant or a phone with a rollover line. And as such, they may involve huge sums of money almost incidentally. The best example is the insane proliferation of security guards, cars and other appurtenances, not just to protect those who need it, but to signify the importance of those who don’t. Nobody wants public officials to be harmed, and yes, there are threats to be warded off. But excess and efficiency are not the same thing. Sirens blare and armed cavalcades roar up and down our main streets here with ever more urgency; regularly swarms of personnel are disgorged from vehicles to escort eminently unimportant people into eminently undangerous settings. Now this is a perk and it costs plenty.
Third and finally on this perks business, you need to understand that much of the cushion of ease and convenience provided your elected and appointed government officials comes not directly from public funds at all, but from the free-floating, pervasive, expense-paying lobbyist octopus on which all of political Washington kind of rides around. This octopus doesn’t murder; it uses its all-enveloping arms to hand out, eight ways at once. Its own payoff from the federal treasury comes indirectly or later in tax breaks, policy influence and the rest. It is this part of the picture in which you will find so many of those moralistic and/or revolutionary critics, commentators, policy gurus and pundits, the ones currently so relishing the public’s resentment against Beltway privilege and so fervently hoping for the worst. They are Chablis drinkers who have somehow persuaded themselves that they are Joe Sixpack and publicly come on that way, denouncers of privilege who, if their life depended upon it, couldn’t tell you who paid for the last 10 crabcake canapes they just dipped in that delectable mustard-mayonnaise sauce.
It is not, of course, just the Bush administration that has joined so vociferously - and unconsciously funnily - in the assault on Beltway privilege, nor the journalist/think-tank set, nor even those GOP congressmen who weren’t fully aware of how some of their own kind were going to get caught up in the flames. It is just about everybody. That is what makes it clear both that there is a problem of public disaffection with a presumed privileged class that has become detached from normal life and that there is not much in the way of a solution for it on the horizon. This latter bleak point is owing to the fact that nobody - absolutely nobody - will concede that he or she is not a victim, let alone concede that he or she may be enjoying some of the write-offs and breaks and other privileges that the country can’t afford.
The rich, who enjoy their own form of federal welfare, denounce the slatternly habits of the welfare poor. People who can easily afford otherwise raise titanic howls when the government tries to trim some relatively small part of the “entitlements” to which they have become habituated. All take refuge in the fiction that there would be no need to trim these emoluments if it weren’t for the monstrous greed-and-feed behavior of others, particularly people in government. All also take refuge in and seem positively to cherish the idea that they are being misused. Thus the rage for rage.
I cannot think that we in journalism or anywhere else on the political scene do them or ourselves or the country, for that matter, much of a service by standing on the sidelines and shouting “right on”–between mouthfuls.
