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?

Communities Replaced By Kennels

I know I have high blood pressure, but I often do things that might make it worse. For example, I attended some subcommittee meetings of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County. I knew it was bad for my circulation when a speaker, talking about a program to permanently house homeless women, said that it was policy to try and keep the women's partners away (referred to collectively as "the boyfriends") on the grounds that they're "generally" "part of the problem."

I expressed the view that each case should be carefully considered. Human relationships should not be assumed poisonous as a matter of course, I thought. Social agencies should not be so arrogant, I thought, as to suppose that they can re-engineer society by means of a reckless, blind, wholesale destruction of its existing bonds, to replace them by the forced bonds of institutions and the artificial communities that social agencies invariably try to foster. Societies are grown, not manufactured. My caseworker can never be my best friend. The institutions I am thrown into should not force me to only socialize with fellow "clients." A twelve-step program can't be my family. And not every woman who is homeless is homeless because SHE has "a problem."

I tried to express these thoughts in the meeting, at which about 20 representatives of King County social service agencies were in attendance, and not one of them openly agreed with me during the meeting, although a few looked concerned that I might explode and soil their suits with my brains. I stopped going to those meetings about then, and I am quite pleased to report that, soon after, I stopped needing beta-blockers to keep my blood pressure down. So, there was good in the world, for a time.

But the nihilistic, life-rejecting, attitude that was in evidence at that meeting is still all around me, and I may have to take up the atenolol again.

Take the recent school closures. Apparently the idea is that one school is as good as any other. Hey, let's close ALL the existing schools and open up one great big one in a warehouse in SODO! A school's a school!

With all the money we could save by having only one Seattle school, we could pay the projected annual costs for the proposed Seattle municipal jail. Here's another cool idea: We could build the new jail for misdemeanants directly across the street from the one big school, and use part of it to house the kids when they're not in school. There would be no more arguments about who would have to bus to school!

After all, parents and families are part of the problem. Their insistence that "their" children stay with them prevents the city from establishing a convenient citizenry. The kids don't need the parents they have, and they would be far better off with the parents the city assigns them.

In fact, we can contract out the jobs of parenting to the same companies that will supply the new jail with its guards and managers. There isn't much difference between a jailer and a parent anyway, except that a jailer is a professional. One inadvertent advantage of the arrangement would be that when our kids grow up and become the outcasts of our society that we plan them to be, they will feel right at home in the Seattle jail. Because they WILL be home!

Assume the worst of human beings, plan for it, and thereby make it happen. Destroy human bonds and watch the inevitable result, namely a substitution of those bonds by vapid, sterile, institutional arrangements that are only communities in the sense that kennels are. Then, when everyone is reduced to the level of domestic dogs, you can say their dependence proves they needed you, and they needed the collars you thoughtfully provided them, and they needed their leashes. Convince even them, and they'll love you, lick your boots, and swear life itself was "the problem."

Dear Copyright Doctor

Another satisfied reader writes:

Dear Copyright Doctor --

You know what's wrong with you poor people? You're poor!

I mean, what do you think? That you don't deserve it? You're exactly where Jesus flang you! You reap what you sow, and you must have sewn nothing but [deleted]! Why should anybody care about any of you!?

Since I know you're an artsy freak, I wrote an artsy freak poem to explain it to you:

You're a loser and it ain't no accident--

All your karma has come, and it has went.

You had free will

but ignored the drill,

so don't cry for me to give you a cent!

signed Billy "Biff" Pill (an assumed name).

Thanks Biff! I really love to hear from my readers, and I can't get enough of your poetry! .

Your letter also touches on a subject that is near and dear to my heart -- to what extent am I responsible for all the stuff people pile on me? Did I really bring it on myself? If so, should I flog myself, or should I seek help? If so, who would I know that's good with a whip?

That brings to mind Mike Riley, Superintendent of Bellevue Public Schools. Not the whip part, the piling on part. As has been widely reported, Mr. Riley is an educator with a vision, and his vision has entailed doubling the book load on middle and high- schoolers in Bellevue. Come to think of it, that does call to mind whips too, doesn't it?

So my question is, did the middle-school kids have it coming?

That is not a rhetorical question! If it isn't the kids fault that they have received this fate, why would the Bellevue Schools have passed rules depriving those same students the means they have of coping? I'm referring, of course, to the banning of extra large backpacks at several middle schools.

Let me see if I can understand this in terms of the Billy "Biff" theory that seems to be operating here. The school administrators see the students coming in with giant backpacks. They even know why the students are using the big backpacks: the immediate reason is that they have more books. The administrators know that the students are just dealing with the situation.

But, in spite of knowing that, the administrators conclude that the students are doing something wrong! They define what that wrong is by passing rules against the use of extra large backpacks!

So the blame for carrying too many books around ends up heaped on the students. Why? Because the additional books prove they had evil thoughts when they were six? Because anyone unfortunate enough to grow up in a district where a Mike Riley is superintendent must be working off bad karma from their last life?

Absolutely. Biff says so. That's how Biff's theory works.

You may not even have a complaint. You may be, for example, homeless but happy, just pleased as a pet pig in a butcher shop to sleep on public dirt and get rained on every night. You may have never even asked Biff for that cent he was talking about.

But say the government passes a law that says that, whereas it is bad for your health to sleep on public dirt and get rained on every night, and besides it's public dirt and we don't want to see you sleeping on it, and besides we don't want you breathing our air anyway, therefore you're going to get a ticket every time you get caught, and eventually go to jail when you can't pay the tickets.

Biff's theory says that the mere fact that your means of coping has been ruled criminal proves that you had it coming.

People need to believe that sort of thing. Otherwise they couldn't possibly justify holding the homeless responsible for the natural consequences of their homelessness. They couldn't justify sending them to jail, just for doing what it takes to get by.

And you can see just how hard it is to stop people thinking that way, when

they apply the same kinds of arguments to innocent children.

Thanks for the illustration, Bellevue! And I hope you kids out there have all learned your lesson!