Tenets of the Catechism

Harry T. Cook

12/05/08

Thanks to my daughter who keeps track of such things on her MacBook, I saw over the holiday weekend a reprise of the Sarah Palin-turkey farm interview. Not only were viewers treated to the bloodletting of seasonal fowl bound for Alaskan Thanksgiving dinner tables, but to more of Gov. Palin’s robot-like recitations of the Republican catechism.

Asked by the interviewer about her post-election agenda, she said three different times that she was committed to “rein in the growth of government.” In keeping with the depth and brilliance of television news reporting, Palin was not asked how or why any alleged growth of Alaska’s government should or needed to be reined in. The comment passed as if in a fourth-grade confirmation class: “Yes, Father, I believe in the Holy Trinity.” In a dog obedience school, Palin would have been rewarded with a Milk Bone. How quaint and mistaken it now sounds to hear the recorded voice of Ronald Reagan say, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

In his wild swing away from espousing New Deal liberalism, Reagan became a limited-government zealot parroting the conservative strophes composed to drown out the crying need to regulate the worst instincts of capitalism. Government, said Reagan, had to be gotten off the backs of people. No sooner did he say it than government began to foreclose women’s reproductive rights and the freedom of gay and lesbian persons. Government should be removed from people’s backs, but not the privacy of their medical care or their bedrooms. It is Reagan’s heirs and Palin’s promoters who have been using taxpayer dollars by the hundreds of billions to rescue their Wall Street backers, thereby causing government to loom ever larger in the body politic. What other aspects of government growth does Palin have in mind to rein in? Surely not its military, which could be called upon to deal with any Russians who might be wont to paddle their kayaks across the Bering Strait and on to Alaska’s beaches.

Surely not her older relatives’ Social Security and Medicare benefits that would forestall the need for Palin to fork over a portion of her generous government pension to help them in their later years. “Smaller” and “limited government” have become to conservative politics what the rote responses to catechetical questions are to confessional Christianity. Their repetition gives them the patina of orthodoxy and, in turn, the force of revealed truth.

On behalf of the families of my late mother and father whose lives and well-being were saved by the big government of the New Deal, I say the positive and helpful growth of government is just what we need right now. Just ask GM’s Rick Wagoner and his fellow supplicants or the boys at A.I.G. or Citibank. I speak here of “government of the people, by the people and for the people” — the people being the government itself. The infants who of late have been running this country into the ground have needed, as it turns out, the nanny state they so belittle and shun. Sarah Palin should rein in the growth of turkeys and keep her hands of my government.

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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