Government.
... as a concept, it's something we tend to think of as a distant force: at best, a sort of distant, mechanical "thing"; at worst, a malign "beast" squatting in the dark and nibbling at our tax money. To a certain extent (as I've discussed before), this is a calculated illusion: it's in the interests even of those branches of government that have means of enforcing their edicts that don't require action by other branches of government to appear to be, in John Adams' phrase, a "government of laws, not of men." To a certain extent, an "ideal" bureaucracy would function nearly like a computer: it would have certain functions, which it would mechanically fulfill except where its instructions call for it to be less-mechanical.
As a culture, we seem to have developed a habit of portraying government workers as either ruthlessly efficient, power-hungry, or inept. It's similar to how lawyers are portrayed: to see Hollywood tell it, the legal community often seems to be made up of people who functionally are their professions. But of course, we're not: we're people with jobs, not a job (or a title) that wears ten thousand faces.
The same is true of anyone else.
So, naturally, the reality falls short of the ideal-- but I don't think that's a wholly bad thing. Government, seen up close, is like any other human institution: it's made of people, and thus organic and squishy. It's a flesh of human interaction stretched over what is supposed to be a solid, ordered skeleton. Sometimes its purpose (to manage a great mass of humanity) becomes corrupted because it is too mechanical. Sometimes it becomes corrupted because, being composed primarily of people, it is not mechanical enough.
Too warm. Too cold. Too simple. Too complex. People are like that, and that trait of ours flavors everything we do. We get emotionally involved, we handle things badly, we forget stuff, we screw up.
I bring this up now mostly because of the ongoing political hoo-ha over the size and scope of government, and because of encounters with people in the position of having to deal with aspects of this "machine." The idea of government as a "beast" seems to rest on a sense (in our deeply individualistic culture) that the government is somehow nevertheless a single "thing." The more closely I look at it, the less it looks like any coherent single entity. It's not a single "beast," not even a mythical, many-headed hydra. It's less like a creature, and more like clockwork geography, a sort of cross between a mass of gears and a populated landscape.
And, in theory, it's supposed to serve us. It's a tool, one that's supposed to work for us all. Maybe it does, and maybe it doesn't, but again I find myself wondering what the average "Tea Party" member (more like Whiskey Rebel, really) thinks the alternative is, what sort of flower will bloom most vigorously in the absence of that tool's influence, however imperfect that influence might be.
It's not Ma & Pa's Corner Grocery, that's for sure. There's another kind of human machinery out there, and it doesn't work for "us," unless "we" have money to lend it. It works for its shareholders, to exclusion, and where the governmental machine does not extend its squishy, wobbly gears, this other type of machine is free to thrive.
