When Right Is Too Durn Complicated

[from 9/9/10]

I was impressed this week by Tony Blair’s characterization of George W Bush. He said Bush has immense simplicity. That is some humongous accuracy.

I’ve been thinking about that, and how George was a “git’r done” kind of guy, and realizing that there’s a lot to be said for that. I mean, I never much cared for what he got done, but you know, sometimes having things happen that are bad is better than having nothing happen at all. At least you can react.

One of the things George W Bush got done was “No Child Left Behind,” an immensely simplistic law with an immensely stupid and offensive title (it’s a veiled reference to Christian end-times mythology). In fairness, Ted Kennedy supported it, and it passed both houses overwhelmingly, proving immense simplicity doesn’t only belong to conservatives.

The liberals liked NCLB because it gave more federal money to schools. The conservatives liked it because it promised to shut off funding to schools that performed badly based on the immensely simplistic measures of standardized tests.

So why am I talking about all this now? Since when do I care whether other people’s spawn get good educations or not? Hah! Never!

But I know a winning idea when I see one, and I’m going to run with it! Here’s my proposal: A “No Civilian Left Dead” Act.

There’s already a lot of federal funding for state and local police. That’s because Homeland Security funds “first responders” and part of the whole “terrorist/ bad guy / foreigner” thing that we have simplistically decided to respond to is the drug distribution that we’ve simplistically decided to make illegal. So let’s say your police department wants more cool guns. You tell the feds you need them to “defend” yourselves from drug dealers, they might just give you the money to buy them.

But guns aren’t everything. You also want money to pay you and your cops more, so you all can take in an opera or a musical, time to time, or buy toaster ovens.

So here’s the plan: We pass out way more federal money to state and local police departments. We suggest they use it for “peace-keeping,” wink-wink, but really they can use it for anything they want, even live Chippendales revues, if that’s how they roll. This will get the conservatives aboard, they love throwing money at people in uniforms who order other people around. So long as they’re American uniforms.

But here’s the catch that’s going to make the liberals happy. We keep track of all these police agencies, and count how many civilians they blow away in the course of any given year.

We don’t let them say, “No fair, our district has more criminals than other districts, that’s why we have to kill more.” We tell them, “If you have more criminals, it’s your own fault. We gave you the money to keep the peace. The more people you have to kill, the more you prove you are failing your mission.”

Of course, where the immense simplicity figures in, is that when we decide a police department is failing their mission, on account of having to kill too many people, we will just stop funding them altogether, as if that was all it took. Hah, hah! If only! But that kind of stupid thinking was good enough for the Republicans and Ted Kennedy and “No Child Left Behind,” so it’s good enough for me!

Hypothetical questions for further provocation:

The Soviets allegedly had so-called Potemkin villages where spies could immerse themselves in American culture before trying to operate here. Do you think US police departments should have training programs of that kind to teach law enforcement officers how human beings act? If there were such programs, might cops be trained to know what carving is? Or is that beyond their natural abilities, akin to trying to teach a dog how to finger a clarinet? Are you like me, and thinking of the word “finger” a lot lately?