Great Daddy State

In the meantime, drivers are met with “closed” signs at Department of Motor Vehicles offices two days a month, environmental programs are left unattended, piles of dirt mark where highway lanes are to be built to ease the state’s infamous traffic congestion, school systems mull layoffs and counties prepare to sue the state for nonpayment of bills.

That is today’s New York Times describing life in the state of California, a harbinger of where things would be heading nationally if John McCain had brought his co-Republican Bob Foreheads, whose ideological rigidity now threatens to turn into rigor mortis, to national office. And this is just the beginning. Governor Schwarzenegger must find $41 billion in spending cuts or ‘new revenues’, much like his unlamented predecessor attempted before he was kicked out.

California’s drama is a fine practical lesson in the reigning attitudes dating from the 1980s about bad old government and nasty old taxes, which must be opposed forever and always in all circumstances. Jowly Howard Jarvis, who brought tax revolt into vogue with Prop 8, now rules from the grave as the movement he founded is revealed in all its perverse glory for what it is: an exercise in egotistical wishful thinking in which people insist that they be provided with everything they need while someone else pays for it.

So now you have the Golden State heading into the cellar of state rankings in educational attainment alongside Mississippi and Louisiana, with other quality-of-life measures soon to follow. Reagan’s anti-state triumph is appropriately complete in the state that created him, and the result is scorched-earth collapse and dysfunction.

Hatred and resentment of the government nonetheless coexist with insistent, blind worship of The Fatherland, the nation-as-mystic-entity, which is a puzzling aspect of Reaganism and all reactionary thought. How peculiar that the same conservatives who claim with immovable insouciance that ours is ‘the greatest country in the world’ simultaneously experience no disorientation at the steady decline of its alleged marvels.

Wherein lies this ‘great’-ness for them? Perhaps like the Mughal empire, it is enough to know your armies are superior in force, your monuments the most spectacular, your realm limitless. Thus greatness is coincident with size, invention, the capacity to inspire fear, in short, pyramidic.

By contrast, weary liberals such as myself, exhausted by awe, place more stock in what we might understand as greatness of spirit including concern for the weakest. Decades of Reaganite testosterone poisoning have discredited that posture and is now discredited in turn notwithstanding the reconsolidated partisan glee accompanying the Republicans’ newfound budgetary caution. These Johnny-come-latelys to fiscal prudence display the same indifference to consistency as their howling troops who demand that the libraries open and the streets be swept but would prefer the revival of slavery before volunteering a penny of tax from their own pockets.