The Link

POCKET PARADIGMS
BY SAM SMITH


PART TWO

Link Back to Part One


Multi-culturalism

If humans were truly moral, the concept of race wouldn't even exist. It has no biological, and only a limited taxonomic, justification, serving largely as an excuse for one group of humans to do harm to another. Still, our desire to separate ourselves from those unlike us is much deeper than we are willing to admit. As Ruth Benedict pointed out, a great many tribal names mean simply "the human beings. " Outside the tribe are no human beings. "We are not," she surmised, "likely to clear ourselves easily of so fundamental a human trait."

Once we accept the unpleasant persistence of human prejudice, once we give up the notion that it is merely social deviance controllable by sanctions, we drift away from a priggish and puritanical corrective approach towards one that emphasizes techniques of mitigating harm, towards what Andrew Young has called a sense of "no fault justice" and towards emphasizing countervailing human qualities that can serve as antibiotics against hate and fear. We move from being victims to being survivors. We start to deal with some of the real problems of creating a multicultural community; we actually start to envision it, to build it not on false politeness but upon realistic interdependence.

Such communities, the sine qua non of a functioning America, will not be constructed by laws, pronouncements from deans of freshmen or civil rights leaders. Nor can we continue to treat multiculturalism like some overbearing parent saying to her toddler, "Now go make friends with that nice Nancy.' It didn't work when we were six and it's not working much better now.

Multicultural communities will be constructed not by the hustlers of the diversity trade but by a growing local and personal regard for common sense, fairness and, yes, reasonable self interest. The new multicultural community will work because it is jointly and severally proud of itself, leaving behind the self-hate that so often accompanies the hatred of others. It will work because there are adequate jobs for people of every group -- thus eliminating one of the primary causes of ethnic triage, and it will work because our educational system will teach not a prudish diversity but simply the way the world really is, which among other things, is very diverse. Our children will learn to enjoy and incorporate this diversity and as they do so will undoubtedly find it odd that their elders couldn't get any closer to the matter than a rigid and legalistic sensitivity.

Perhaps this is why ethnic restaurants are among the most successful practitioners of multiculturalism in America. Why is it so hard for universities to deal with multicultural issues while the Arab carry-out across from my office offers a "kosher hoagie?" It is, in part, because most of us are like Bismarck who said when offered German champagne that his patriotism stopped at his stomach. It is also that the ethnic restaurant offers a fair multicultural deal: a good living for the owner in return for good food for the patrons.

For multiculturalism to work, we need a willing suspension of our politics as well as the creation of places where this can happen, both neutral places and places where we can participate in another culture that will leave us feeling that something good has happened. Outside of restaurants and ethnic nightclubs, this is now rarely available in America. We are not taught the pleasures of diversity, only its problems and burdens. We are seldom invited to enjoy other cultures, only to be sensitive towards them and -- unspoken -- to feel sorry for them. Thus, inevitably, we tend to think of multiculturalism in terms of conflict and crisis.

Neighborhood government

NEIGHBORHOOD GOVERNMEN offers an antidote to the chronic gap between government and governed, There is, after all, little reason to cling to the notion that the solution to our problems is to spend more money on a form of government that has increasingly shown its incompetence. To say that because the crime rate is rising sharply we should therefore double the size of the same police force that has thus far been unable to cope with it; to reward with more concentrated power a city government that has spent decades on absurd, disruptive and cruel planning; to continue to vest the power of educating our children in an administrative system that appears to lag as far behind the human intelligence norm as the children its miseducates do in reading and math -- surely this can have little logical justification. Neighborhood government is another way. It is not some utopian scheme but a pragmatic approach. It is, in fact, contemporary large city governance that is utopian in that there is no empirical evidence that it works. It is under this form of government that we generally find the worst crime, the worst education, the worst health, the worst pollution, and the highest unemployment.

New world order

THE NEW WORLD order emanates from a mandarin class that is neither left or right. Its members often are the sort of which it has been said that when they are alone in a room, there is no one there. In such a culture the marketplace of ideas essentially shuts down. There is no longer any real politics, only deals. No victories, only leveraged buyouts. No ideology; only brand loyalty. No conservative and liberal, only Coke and Pepsi.

The mandarin class prides itself on its wisdom and intelligence, but its greatest true skill is the circumnavigation of guilt. No embarrassment is too great, no crisis too unnecessary, no expense too inexplicable, and no war too unjustified.

IF YOUR GOAL is the economic well-being of the inner party rather than the general welfare, a strong case can be made that most people will accept their exclusion with quiet desperation. Thus you can cut their services and deny them aid and they will not revolt. For those few who show signs of trouble, you simply write laws that restrict their employment, take away their driver's license, or ensure them incarceration using whatever ruse, such as drug laws, that works.

Patriotism

THE TENDENCY of some to accuse other Americans of being unpatriotic because they oppose the Iraq war is not only libelous, it's dumb. Many of these same people have cheered or helped the most profound loss of American sovereignty in its history, namely that resulting from the creation of such increasingly plenary institutions as the World Trade Organization and NAFTA. They have helped to sell out their country to a mess of corporations developing the legal means to overrule America's laws and constitution. So when someone suggests that you're less than patriotic, ask them how they stand on free trade, because that's the biggest battle this country has ever lost.

WE pledge allegiance to the republic for which America stands and not to its empire for which it is now suffering.

Police

WE'VE GOT TOO many people in this country employed trying to prevent other people from being bad and not enough people employed helping other people to be good.

Politics

SOME of the most important changes in America have nothing to do with the president or even politics. Television, which would eventually swallow politics, was created without its assistance. The Post-It Note was the result of an technological accident. The decline in the birthrate never made it to a political platform. Younger Americans are eating less meat without the advice and consent of the Senate. And so forth.

POLITICS USED to be about remembrance. The best politicians were those who remembered and were remembered the most -- the most people, the littlest favors, the smallest slights, the best anecdotes tying one's politics to the common memory of the constituency. Politics was also about gratitude. Politicians were always thanking people, "without whom" whatever under discussion could not have happened. You not only thanked those in the room -- as many as possible by name -- you even thanked those without -- for "having prepared the wonderful meal which we have just partaken of." The politician was the creation of others, and never failed to mention it. Above all, politics was about relationships. The politician grew organically out of a constituency and remained rooted to it as long as incumbency lasted. Today, we increasingly elect people about whom we have little to remember, to whom we owe no gratitude and with whom we have no relationship except that formed during the great carnie show we call a campaign. Dallas coach Jimmy Johnson spoke for many contemporary politicians when he answered a question about his memories of Thanksgiving Day football games by saying, "Memories? That's not my style."

REFORM BREEDS its own hubris and so few noticed that as we destroyed the evils of machine politics we also were breaking the links between politics and the individual, politics and community, politics and social life. We were beginning to segregate politics from ourselves.

THE world of machine politics was not something handed down to the people through such intermediaries as Larry King It was not the product of spin doctors, campaign hired guns or phony town meetings. It welled up from the bottom. What defined politics was an unbroken chain of human experience, memory and gratitude.
Sure, it was corrupt. But we don't have much to be priggish about. The corruption of Watergate, Iran-Contra or the S&Ls fed no widows, found no jobs for the needy or, in the words of one Tammany leader, "grafted to the Republic" no newly arrived immigrants. At least Tammny's brand of corruption got down to the streets. Manipulation of the voter and corruption describe both Tammany and contemporary politics. The big difference is that in the former the voter could with greater regularity count on something in return.

POLITICS IS THE SOUND of the air coming out of the balloon of our expectations and it is the music of hope. Politics is laundry lists and dirty laundry, new hospitals and old hates, finding out what others think about it, and the willing suspension of our closest beliefs in order to get through the next month or year. It is, suggested one writer, a matter of who gets what, when, where, and how. Not least, as Paul Begala says, "it is show business for ugly people," a theater in which each voter and candidate writes a different morality play. In the end, the only test of political faith is when it is put to work. It is a test that is graded on a curve -- not by its proximity to perfection but by its improvement over all previous, adjacent and potential imperfections. Vaclav Havel says that "It is not true that a person of principle does not belong in politics; it is enough for his principles to be leavened with patience, deliberation, a sense of proportion, and an understanding of others." This is the part of politics that doesn't appear in any platform. Done badly, it becomes demagoguery and manipulation. Done well it makes every voter a part of the office the politician holds. It is a standard to which every person in office, including our presidents, can be held.

WE HAVE to move towards a politics that offers not a choice between left and right but between corporatism and democracy, not between big government and big business but between overbearing institutions and supportive communities, not between winning and losing but between power and sharing, and not between oppression and anarchy but between the force of the state and the good sense of its citizens.

IF YOU'RE GOING to be serious about politics -- the way a race track aficionado is serious about horses -- then the first thing you got to figure out is what's fact and what's fluff, what you can believe and what you can't. Fantasies are for sex, not politics. And democracies fail not because of excessive skepticism about their leaders, but rather due to a mass illusion that everything is going to be all right.

GK CHESTERTON, the British liberal and populist, argued that the only place a practical politician could start was with the ideal. Any other commencement of the political journey invites the creation of illogical and unsatisfactory remedies. The ideal provides a constant and necessary navigational marker from which one can compute a compromise's true cost in distance and time. Without such a marker, a purposeful trip becomes mere random motion. In politics, this can -- over the years -- produce directionless compromises lumped upon each other leaving us finally, with a system that nobody wanted.

Polls

POLLS are a standardized text by which the media ascertains how well we have learned what it has taught us.

Post modernism

IN THE postmodern society -- one that rises above the false teachings of ideology -- we find ourselves with little to steer us save the opinions of whatever non-ideologue happens to be in power. Thus we may really only have progressed from the ideology of the many to the ideology of the one or, some might say, from democracy to authoritarianism. Among equals, indifference to shared meaning might produce nothing worse than lengthy argument. But when the postmodernist is President of the United States, the impulse becomes a 500-pound gorilla to be fed, as they say, anything it wants.

UNLIKE MOST of the world's democracies, in America you don't need a majority to govern, you only need to be first. So firmly do we accept this notion that we are repeatedly surprised when a minority victor has trouble governing. We attribute the inevitable results of popular disagreement to a "failure of leadership" or "gridlock" rather than to an electoral system that doesn't even try to reach a consensus. This truth is rarely apparent because American journalists are more likely to believe in the two party system than they are to trust in God.

Power

TOO MANY, particularly in places of power, have become the spoiled brats of human progress.

President

WHEN we elect a president, we not only choose a leader, we describe ourselves.

Privatization

A REALLY SIMPLE RULE ON PRIVATIZATION: Ask the following question: Is this something about which citizens should have a say?
If the answer is yes, don't privatize.

Process

WHEN I was circulating a book to various publishers, one turned it down saying, "We're looking for civics, not solutions." I had long suspected that. Which is why we continue to have a Middle East peace process but no peace. And no one around here seems to mind.

I MEET A LOT of process people in Washington. They're like vehicles without a drive belt. They make a lot of noise; they just can't go anywhere. Getting things done is now a radical act. Then there are the virtual people. They only exist as images of themselves. Talking to one of them is like watching a bad cable show without a zapper. Some scientists believe that at the rate things are going, process people and virtual people will eventually evolve into species reproductively incompatible with the rest of us. There are already reports of process people and real people mating and producing only sterile offspring ~ a sort of mule that understands all the main policy points.

Public interest groups

GO BACK TO the 60s and Ralph Nader was about the only public interest lawyer in town who wore a suit and his wasn't pressed. Today, many advocacy groups have drifted into the lawyerly style and pace of the establishment they are supposedly trying to change. They have, in their own way, become capital institutions, part of the ritualized, status-conscious, and very safe, trench warfare of the city.

Reality

SOME TIME around the middle of the 1980s I suddenly noticed that the truth was no longer setting people free; it was only making them drowsy.

THE SYNTHETIC images once largely contained within the spheres of entertainment, recreation and culture have become ubiquitous. In fact, an extraordinary portion of the gross domestic product is currently devoted to deception in one form or another, concealed though it may be as marketing, advertising, management, leadership seminars, news, entertainment, politics, public relations, religion, psychic hotlines, education, ab machine infomercials, and the law. We have become a nation of hustlers and charlatans, increasingly choosing attitude over action and presentation over performance and becoming unable to tell the difference. It's not all that surprising because, whether for pleasure, profit, or promotion, and in ways subtle and direct, our society encourages and rewards those who out-sell, out-argue, and out-maneuver those around them -- with decreasing concern for any harm caused along the way.

WE LIVE IN A TIME of democratic disguises when everyone -- at least until they reach their place of employment -- can be whoever they want. A nation of poseurs treating life as though it were an endless masque ball. Those who fail at the deception are the poor, the fat, the shy, the awkward, and the otherwise terminally declassé. For the rest, a manic preoccupation with style and attitude tempts them to become not a reflection of who they are but what they want others to think they are. Our primary business as Americans is to fool each other.

IN A SOCIETY INFORMED by theme park information and run by theme park rules, replacement reality becomes the property of the management. Life becomes a giant magic show in which the audience is not allowed to see the real action or the mechanisms that create the real action, but only a dramatization of the action. Our participation is limited to the consumption of false images and false words as we become permanent hostages of the prestidigitators. Even a moderately skeptical and energetic media might help us remember again. But the media is an essential part of the legerdemain, making information ever more a lever of control rather than of freedom. Just to glimpse the problem could change the way a journalist wrote or spoke of the world. But the rules of the magic kingdom rigidly discourage that. In a postmodern world, truth is part of the privilege of power and to question received truth is to forego received power.

Religion

RELIGIOUS POLITICS is absolutely fair territory when it leaves in its wake war, a crusade against another religion, ethnic cleansing, the destruction of constitutional government, or the endangerment of domestic tranquility.

IF Pope Benedict XVI talked about Jews the way he talks about gays or treated blacks the way he treat women, what would we call him?

THE RELATIONSHIP between the American media and the Catholic Church can fairly be described as necrophiliatic: the only thing that really matters about the church is the Pope and the only really good Pope is a dead one. Once dead, whatever God does with the Pope's body becomes somewhat redundant. The press has already sent him to heaven, giving him credit for things he never did and avoiding some of the things he did that are not sufficiently encomium enabled.

Sixties

In my neighborhood, the Age of Aquarius often looked more like a war zone. Many of the people there were not part of a counter-culture but of an abandoned culture.

Systems

COMPLEX SYSTEMS usually try to save themselves by doing the same they have been doing badly all along -- only harder. This is because the salvation of the system is implicitly considered far more important than the solution of any problems causing the system to fail.

The "system" is not America. The "system" is not us. It represents neither the land nor its people, neither our ideals nor our souls. Rather the "system" is a set of institutions, values, rules and forces that have been imposed on our lives and upon the culture of America. One reason so many of us feel disaffected is because we know in our hearts -- even if we can't find the right words or actions -- that much of what we find in the "system" no longer matches what we believe America should be about. Yet the "system" runs America.

Struggle

THE ADVOCATE, the committed, the seeker, the free thinker, the rebel may live in a world that is seldom depicted let alone honored. They may be ignored, disparaged, or even punished; they may lack constituency, funds, or moral support. They may, like the urban itinerant Joe Gould, feel most at home "down among the cranks and misfits and the one-lungers and might-have-beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats." Yet in the end, they can attain that most precious victory of remaining truly human, a state confirmed not by their ultimate triumph but by their interminable effort, and not by their fame but by their fortitude.

Terror

We have just completed another year during which the vast majority of the media and our politicians have refused even to discuss the remedy to our fear of attack that is the cheapest, most effective, the least deadly, and least likely to ruin our constitution, democracy and national sanity - namely a positive change in our foreign policy. In fact, it is only remedy that is likely to work. The course currently supported by our politicians and media is not only ineffective, it encourages the very terror it professes to oppose by enlarging and intensifying the constituency of those who despise our country

The media has has repeatedly misled and lied to the American people concerning the practicality of the war on terror and has kept from its pages and airwaves doubts on this score. In this it has behaved with a reckless negligence which, if committed behind the wheel of a car, would be considered criminal. The only way out of our crisis is to reduce the anger of the most rational, thus also reducing the constituency of the least rational. Yet we have done nothing since September 11 to improve relations with the Arab and Muslim world, and we have done nothing to make Israel do likewise. Instead we have persisted in constructing an illusion of security and a fantasy of strength and alienating aggressiveness that can be penetrated at any moment by a sufficiently determined though not particularly skilled adversary. We do not have homeland security, only a homeland hubris that may prove, in the end, to have been our real enemy.

THE WAR against terrorism is the political equivalent of a stock market bubble - hope, hubris and hyperbole parading as fact.

Think tanks

THE EASIEST WAY for the media to give the impression of independent analysis is to call upon "experts" at the various think-tanks around town. Many of these experts are, in fact, former government officials biding their time until recalled to the inner sanctums of power or are currently serving as consultants to those in office. While think tanks can sometimes be productive -- the libertarian Cato Institute is an example -- and occasionally provide a haven for truly original thinkers, they primarily function as the Catholic Church of conventional politics, their priests propagating the faith, blessing the faithful, redirecting the errant and showing up at fundraising dinners to add a little class and offer the benediction. And their collection plates are regularly filled by large corporations with some distinctly non-academic goals in mind.

Truth

The endless argument about who said what to whom about what in order to get us into the Iraq war demonstrates an illusion about honesty shared by all sides. It is yet another iteration of a phenomenon I first noticed during the Edwin Meese nomination hearings. It became clear then, and so many times since, that America - including its politicians, media and ordinary citizens, had accepted a legal definition of honesty, to wit: if a public person can not be proved to have lied by the rules of a criminal court, he or she can't be called dishonest and, in the case of a nominee, remains qualified for office. In other words, our standard for confirmation to high office had become no better than that for acquittal of a common thief.

This stunningly low bar has been implicitly invoked many times - most recently and dramatically to exonerate our two latest presidents - and it helps to explain the decline of American politics. Once you leave your judgment of politicians to a court or a prosecutor, it is far too late to do much about them.

Consider, for example, some common synonyms for honesty: sincerity, integrity, frankness, candor, openness. Is there anyone, even on the Fox Network, who would argue that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al at any point displayed such characteristics in dragging us into the Iraq disaster? And how is it that we place such a lower value on such virtues than we do on the question of whether the aforementioned told a prosecutable lie?

In 2003, I was asked by Harper's to compile a history of the beginning of the Iraq war told entirely in lies by Bush officials and advisers. As I began to work on the project, I was reminded over and over of how little lying often has to do with court-defined perjury. It more typically involves hyperbolic hoodwinking, unsubstantiated analogy, cynical incitement of fear, deceitful distortion, slippery untruths, gossamer falsehoods, disingenuous anecdote, artful agitprop, and the relentless repetition of all the foregoing in an atmosphere in which facts are trampled underfoot by a mendacious mob and their semantic weapons.

One does not have to analyze such language legally to understand its evil. One need only have enough understanding of the manner of the honest, the sincere and the candid to know almost instinctively when their opposite is in command.

Yes, some of the Bush capos may have done it so poorly from time to time that they can be successfully prosecuted. But our ultimate standard for judging their words and claims - whether as a Sunday talk show commentator or as an ordinary citizen - should be an ethical and not a legal one. If we let such con artists get away with their ultimate trick - which is having us believe that if we can not prove their swindle we must accept it - we will have fully surrendered to their treachery.

War

The untold truth is that the post-WW2 American military hasn't that much to be proud of. It fought to a draw in Korea, was humiliated in Vietnam, removed a drug dealer from Panama but left all his peers and all the drugs, slunk off from Somalia and was careful not to hang around too long in Haiti. As for the Gulf -- well, Bush and Thatcher were ousted from office in its wake, but not, unfortunately, the intended target.

Washington

MUCH that is written about Washington stays comfortably within the two by three mile area in which one finds the White House and the Congress, the Supreme Court and the State Department, the Pentagon, the Watergate and the National Press Club. As typical pasture in the American west, this spread could support about 120 cows and their calves.

ALTHOUGH THE MEDIA presents Washington as a city grappling with the major issues of our time, much of the town's workday is absorbed by highly specific concerns. The president is worried about the spin to give a statement or appearance. The lobbyist is obsessed with a very particular amendment to a very particular bill. The size of the capital's bureaucracy is necessitated in no small part by the number and specificity of regulations it must administer. And woe to the member of Congress who lets larger concerns surpass the parochial needs of the district.

Thus Washington is awash in the politics of particulars. Go to a congressional hearing concerning something you consider a good idea and you are likely to be startled by the number of people and interests this benign concept will allegedly injure.

The town's most common skill, its trade of choice, is finding what is wrong with something. For the bureaucrat, this eliminates the need for action. For the politician, it lessens risk. For the lobbyist, it means points with the client. For the public interest group, democracy and justice are at stake. And for the lawyer and reporter, it is just instinctual. All day long, Washington hums with people trying to stop other people from doing something, and with considerable frequency they are successful. At times Washington seems a series of endless loop videos in which policies are debated, lobbied and almost acted upon before the tape repeats itself once more.

HOW ONE COMES to matter in Washington politics is guided by few precise rules, although in comparison to fifty years ago the views of lobbyists and fundraisers are far more significant than the opinion, say, of the mayor of Chicago or the governor of Pennsylvania. This is a big difference; somewhere behind the old bosses in their smoke-filled rooms were live constituents; behind the political cash lords of today there is mostly just more money and the few who control it. Thus coming to matter has much less to do with traditional politics, especially local politics, than it once did. Today, other things count: the patronage of those who already matter, a blessing bestowed casually by one right person to another right person over lunch at the Metropolitan Club, a columnist's praise, a well-received speech before a well-placed organization, the assessment of a lobbyist as sure-eyed as a fight manager checking out new fists at the local gym. There are still machines in American politics; they just dress and talk better. There is another rule. The public plays no part. The public is the audience; the audience does not write or cast the play.

OFFICIAL Washington -- including government, media and the lobbies -- functions in many ways like America's largest and most prestigious club, a sort of indoor, east coast Bohemian Grove in which members engage in endless rites of mutual affirmation combined with an intense but genteel competition that determines the city's tennis ladder of political and social power. What appears to the stranger as a major struggle is often only an intramural game between members of the same club, lending an aura of dynamism to what is in truth deeply stable.

FEDERAL WASHINGTON is a culture in which much seems to happen but little gets accomplished. It is a culture in which neither the battles nor the words about them are necessarily real, in which the interests of the federal enclave inevitably proceed those of the country, and in which speaking of something is considered the moral equivalent of actually doing it. It is a culture that can admit neither to itself nor to the larger world the degree to which its various systems are out of control. Nor can it admit that when it defines corruption only by its most precise legal limits it exempts itself from any broader decency. It is finally a culture that has been remarkably successful at isolating itself from the reality it is attempting to govern. The abstract, soulless security of the capital protects it from the pain it causes, the suffering it neglects and the concerns it can quantify but not ameliorate. Here statistics substitute for tears, data for anger, and mechanically modulated voices recounting promises never to be fulfilled serve as a placebo for real hope and joy. It is, in the end, the place described in Tennessee Williams' Camino Real: "Turn back, traveler, for the spring of humanity has gone dry in this place and there are no birds in the country except wild birds that are tamed and kept in cages."


JUST AS the Soviets tolerated free thought only within the limits of "socialist dialogue," so debate in Washington is circumscribed by the limits of what might be called Beltway discourse. Ideas that adjust or advance the conventional wisdom are valued. Those that challenge it are ignored or treated with contempt. Beltway discourse is informed by a number of disciplines but tends to ignore others. The teachings of law and political science as well as those of economics and similar pursuits of quantification are considered important; those of history, anthropology, religion, literature, philosophy and the arts tend to be discounted.

ALTHOUGH the media presents Washington as a city grappling with the major issues of our time, much of the town's workday is absorbed by highly specific concerns. The president is worried about the spin to give a statement or appearance. The lobbyist is obsessed with a very particular amendment to a very particular bill. The size of the capital's bureaucracy is necessitated in no small part by the number and specificity of regulations it must administer. And woe to the member of Congress who lets larger concerns surpass the parochial needs of the district. Washington is awash in the politics of particulars.

THE TOWN'S most common skill, its trade of choice, is finding what is wrong with something. For the bureaucrat, this eliminates the need for action. For the politician, it lessens risk. For the lobbyist, it means points with the client. For the public interest group, democracy and justice are at stake. And for the lawyer and reporter, it is just instinctual. All day long, Washington hums with people trying to stop other people from doing something, and with considerable frequency they are successful. At times Washington seems a series of endless loop videos in which policies are debated, lobbied and almost acted upon before the tape repeats itself once more.

THE ABSTRACT, soulless security of the capital protects it from the pain it causes, the suffering it neglects and the concerns it can quantify but not ameliorate. Here statistics substitute for tears, data for anger, and mechanically modulated voices recounting promises never to be fulfilled serve as a placebo for real hope and joy. It is, in the end, the place described in Tennessee Williams' Camino Real: "Turn back, traveler, for the spring of humanity has gone dry in this place and there are no birds in the country except wild birds that are tamed and kept in cages."

IF THE federal government were a city it would be the third largest in the country --- bigger than Chicago. It takes a lot of energy to run Chicago, but then that's Chicago's business. It takes a lot of energy to run the federal government, but the federal government is supposed to be doing something other than just running itself. Nonetheless, in that government every decision of every day must be weighed against two often uncomplimentary sets of requirements -- those of America and those of the system that runs it, the de facto third largest city in the land. Even in the best of times, the system may come first; in the worst of times its demands become obsessive as it struggles to maintain itself.

THE NUMBER CRUNCHERS form an important Washington subculture, led by the uncritically accepted shamans of economics. The latter's success with ex cathedra calculations has encouraged much of Washington to speak so confidently about numbers that one almost forgets how many of them were once only English majors.

The effect of numbers on the city has been profound. At times it seems that there are no governments anymore, only budget offices. The idea of a budget bureau at the federal level only goes back to Warren Harding. As late as 1975, Austin Kiplinger could write that the president's budget officials were outnumbered by those of the various departments and thus "have to be especially sharp" and make up in clout what they lack in numbers. Today, few feel sorry for the White House budget squad, which has not only replaced many of the functions of departmental financial officials but those of the departments themselves.

As the numerologists rose in power, programs increasingly became transformed into line items. Numbers began serving as adjectives, ideas were reduced to figures and policy became a matter of where one placed the decimal point.. Thus, what should be a debate about programs becomes one about arithmetic.

Every day in Washington, many of the best and the brightest occupy themselves computing figures, defending them before Congress, citing them before a trade association or recalling them on C-SPAN. Adding and subtracting are among Washington's favorite activities, often providing a digital shield against discussing what the figures actually represent.

IT IS TEMPTING to see all politics in terms of techniques, tactics, symbols and strategies. This is how much of the press views the matter, a practice that tends to project Washington as an Olympics for political athletes whose performances are judged not by their value to the country but in comparison to their peers. As in conventional sports the differences can be exceedingly small yet produce a cascade of journalistic superlatives.

I AM ON MOST days an exile in my native town, living in a place whose values I don't like, whose symbols are jarring, whose language is neither colorful nor convincing, whose obsession with security just creates new fears, and whose ambience often has all the soul, substance, and permanence of a downtown hotel lobby

Weather forecasts

BETWEEN THE TIME your editor awoke and the time he got out of bed this morning, three to four inches of snow had disappeared. Between breakfast and four pm another two inches vanished. At this rate we may be facing a serious drought by bedtime.

Why bother?

Let's turn off the television, step into the sunlight, and count the bodies. As we were watching inside, the non-virtual continued at its own pace and on its own path, indifferent to our indifference, unamused by our ironic detachment, unsympathetic to our political impotence, unmoved by our carefully selected apparel, unfrightened by our nihilism, unimpressed by our braggadocio, unaware of our pain. Evolution and entropy remained outside the cocoon of complacent images, refusing to be hurried or delayed, declining to cut to the chase, unwilling to reveal either ending or meaning.
We shade our eyes and scan the decay. We know that this place, this country, this planet, is not the same as the last time we looked. There are more bodies. And fewer other things: choices, unlocked doors, democracy, satisfying jobs, reality, unplanned moments, clean water, a species of frog whose name we forget, community, and the trusting, trustworthy smile of a stranger.

Someone has been careless, cruel, greedy, stupid. But it wasn't us, was it? We were inside, just watching. It all happened without us -- by the hand of forces we can't see, understand, or control. We can always go in again and zap ourselves back to a place where the riots and tornadoes and wars are never larger than 27 inches on the diagonal. We can do nothing out here. Why bother?

Why bother? Only to be alive. Only to be real, to be made not just of what we acquire or our adherence to instruction, but of what we think and do of our own free will. Only, Winston Churchill said, to fight while there is still a small chance so we don't have to fight when there is none. Only to climb the rock face of risk and doubt in order to engage in the most extreme sport of all -- that of being a free and conscious human. Free and conscious even in a society that seems determined to reduce our lives to a barren pair of mandatory functions: compliance and consumption.

Words

WE DON'T HAVE to worry about Trojan horses much any more. The real danger comes from Trojan words and phrases — appealing statues of rhetoric concealing the enemy.





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