People who know me well know that my political views are a hybrid - I'm incredibly socially liberal (in fact I'm buying heroin from a gay BDSM enthusiast right now while putting the finishing touches on my homemade beer sales business) but economically variable.
You see, I’m a knee-jerk fiscal liberal. How can it possibly be that there are limits to what the richest, most powerful nation in the history of the world (and how good it feels to write that, ya know!) can accomplish? But of course, this lovely theory crashes and burns in practice. I would love, in an ideal world, for our government to handle feeding the poor and clothing the naked and fighting all the good wars and making peace in all the bad ones, but here in the real world, the list of low points in government competence just in recent years is longer than King Kong’s member and growing. Therefore all available evidence suggests that, no matter what my candyland fantasies are, the government is really bad at doing anything even slightly more important than deciding on which Thursday Thanksgiving should fall.
Let me share with you a story I heard recently. It’s a funny story, if by funny you mean “sad,” and it’s a perfect parable for why our government is not to be trusted under any circumstances.
You see, the small seaside town I live in is home to a National Park Service historical site, which as I’m sure you’re all aware means there’s some land, a brown building, and some signs around telling people what it’s all about. As far as parks go there’s a lot of cool stuff to draw on, including a fullsize working replica of a cargo ship from the great age of sail, numerous historic homes, and the good (?) luck to have been the site of a major event in early American history that still brings in tourists by the busload.
But for all the potential, the tours and interpretation at this park (“interpretation” in the public history sense of ‘helping people understand what they’re looking at and why it matters’) are kind of for shit, and I’ve always wondered why.
Back in the 1980s, my small seaside town was not as gentrified as it currently is, and very close to downtown there existed some pockets of serious sketchiness. At that time, the lead protection ranger (the guys with guns) at the Park was a guy whose name I’ll say was Duke. Duke’s job was to enforce the laws of the USA and the Commonwealth on the grounds of the park and in all the adjacent buildings it owned. He had a team of armed rangers who helped him with this important mandate.
One day, the local police force turned up in great numbers to a house owned by the National Park Service, and proceeded to invade the upstairs apartment, which was rented out to civilian tenants. It turned out that this raid was the culmination of a three-year investigation into a major drug trafficking ring operated out of that apartment, which I remind you was owned by the United States of America. Among the parties convicted of felonies were two of the park’s protection rangers, who had participated in drug transactions while armed, on duty, in the employ of the Federal government, on the grounds of the very park they were being paid to protect.
Duke was taken entirely by surprise by the raid; nobody had thought to tell him. It soon emerged that this was deliberate – the drug activity had gone on for so long, and so blatantly, that the local police were convinced that he was either in on it or spectacularly, stupendously, incompetent.
This being the US Government, Duke was not fired from his job for being stupendously incompetent at doing it. Instead, he was placed on a brief administrative leave and then moved to another department. That’s right… Duke, a dangerously incompetent law enforcement officer whose training was nonetheless in the area of law enforcement, was put in charge of the Interpretation department, with the historians and tour guides, where he remains to this day. That is why the tours for the most part suck at the National Park in my small seaside town.
In another more recent case, it took four years for the National Park Service to terminate the employment of a ranger at the same park who was convicted on child porn charges, including, I believe, some based on evidence found on his work computer.
So, as I prepare my 1040s this year, I thank the deity of my choice (“none of the above”) that the business of running our country is in good hands. Clearly the US Government is using my little National Park site as a holding cell for all the morons and misfits, the drain circlers and mouthbreathers, the nebbishes and ne’er-do-wells, who they accidentally gave jobs to and now feel too sorry for to fire. With all of them here, everyone else can go about the business of managing our nations’ affairs with the intelligence, decency, and wisdom that such weighty matters deserve.
Clearly.
on
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