George Orwell Had the Wrong Date

My problem is with the false bravado, the Texas Bullfrog puffery, which consists of all hot air and no substance. I’ve no problem with “if you’ve got it flaunt it”, however when there’s nothing behind the screen, then we’re talking Wizard of Oz style slight of hand creativity. Or, in Tex slang, “all hat and no cows.”

The list of inadequacies is appalling for any modern President. A string of major mistakes in Iraq that could only have been written by Max Sennet. A level of uneven economic growth created by uneven taxation policy and big business favoritism that is splitting America into a minority of “haves” and a super majority of “have nots” and the devil take the middle class backbone of the country. An administration with a fundamental inability to govern, to perform the standard requisite tasks of government, to respond to emergencies, and protect our borders from unlimited illegal immigration, protect our ports, or our air travel industry.

Even more irritating is the irrationality of blaming the previous Clinton administration every time there is an airing of yet another failure of the Bush Administration. This is infantile behavior. You expect this is young children, not adults nominally in charge of running the third largest country in the world. Five long years after 911, illegal immigration across our borders is almost unchallenged, a miniscule percentage of inbound ocean cargo containers are inspected for terrorist tampering, our commercial air cargos are not inspected for bombs before loading into aircraft, legitimate air passengers are harassed to the point that if an alternative existed, they’d use it. Five long years in which Republicans held the White House and both houses of the Congress. They simply don’t know how to govern.

How did this come about? The Republicans finally found a “mouthpiece” that could memorize his stump speech and stay on point and deliver a consistent line of palaver, forgetting that a $49 Chinese tape recorder could do the same thing. Leadership of a great nation also requires the ability to assemble an executive team comprised of something more than “yes” men, ideologues, and inexperienced enthusiastic “believers”. The inept administration we actually got was buoyed by their own rhetoric, and their unrealistic, unfounded, and untested beliefs in their own rectitude and soundness. More, they were unwilling to consider that anyone else also might have good ideas, especially anyone that did not wholeheartedly agree, swallow the party line hook, line and sinker, with their version of the “truth”.

This administration has sailed the USS Hubris into uncharted and unrecognized international waters and managed to strike more mines, reefs, and shoals than Gilligan. Their swollen cranial balloons, unpunctured by scientific facts not found in King James, nor connection to common sense realism has bloated government expenditures run by an incredibly corrupt Congress and big business bribe handlers, a.k.a. lobbyists, into a new form of contorted and mostly unrecognized Orwellian nightmare where mere disagreement is grounds for destruction of careers and lives.

To ever turn government over to Big Business is a fundamental political philosophical error. Perhaps it is even a moral issue and error. Business managerial trained persons instinctively seek narrowly defined short term advantages, without an ability to see beyond the boundaries of immediate self-interest. Government, to be effective in doing what government is expected to do, needs leaders trained to seek the broader, wide ranging, long term advantages for the whole society, the whole population of the nation. This perspective is not taught in even the very best business schools. Apparently ethics are also not taught there any longer.

Business is concerned with the bottom line for the next quarterly report and executive bonuses. Government is concerned with the needs of the country over decades and centuries.

For example, for both humanitarian and crass economic reasons it is in the best interests of government to be able to respond to the effects of natural disasters that affect the lives of large numbers of its citizens. As humans we simply have some level of care about people that are a part of “our” group. In economic terms, it is better for everyone to help people get back on their feet as quickly as possible and contributing again to the national economy.

If we take the example of floods as a naturally regularly occurring disaster, there needs to be a short term response solution and there also needs to be a long term solution. I can’t begin to list all of the major “Floods of the Century” in the United States alone that I have witnessed during my sixty-five years. Obviously someone isn’t able to count, or read a calendar. However, in the short term, government bears some responsibility to assist people in time of floods. Save them from drowning. Put up barriers so that people do not drive their cars into deep waters. Evacuate people from situations where they are trapped and without the necessities of life. Provide a national system of flood insurance, since “insurance companies” are incapable of doing this.

In the long term, government has had time to find, learn, and figure out what parts of the country have naturally occurring floods on a regular to irregular basis. Government needs to encourage either a movement of concentrations of populations out of the great normal flood plains, or impose building restrictions that negate the effects of flooding. Homes and businesses, parking lots and freight yards, and major travel routes should, long term, be built only on natural hills and heights, or be artificially elevated on mounds, levees, pilings, bridges, trestles, and stilts. In this way, eventually, there is not a continuing, regular disaster, but a normal, natural flood cycle that controls the damage of floods and allows the normal underground water recharge and siltation fertilization cycle to continue as it should.

Floods are an example. The same kind of long term scenario can be extended to other natural phenomena like earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, droughts, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and tetse fly infestations. More, the same kind of long term government solutions need to be applied to man-made disasters and problems like acid rain and a national energy policy, reforestation, control of dust bowls, irrigation, electrical generation by hydro, solar and wind farms, a national farm land preservation policy, affordable housing, improved public education, and public transit systems.

(c) Copyright 2006: George Wallace recently published a book on religion which lashes out at nearly all of the comfortable ideas about God, the trappings of organized religion, and the priesthood. His pithy comments and suggestions for a return to a God-centered personal religion will interest everyone. This article may be freely reprinted so long as all copyright attributions, and the full content of this resource box are included. www.OhGodIsThatYou.com

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