thoughts from an empty head

Scenario: you have a car. This car was once a very nice car; all gleaming and shiny, this car could rings around the fastest hot rod imagined. And you love this car. You pamper it with only the best waxes and hand wash it to a brilliant shine.

Time marches onward, though, and pretty soon, your beautiful car is not so beautiful anymore. Pings and knocks can be heard under the hood. Stalling is becoming a frequent occurrence. The muffler no longer muffles as well as it used to. You start to see strange stains on your driveway – blue and red and black and green.

Being a conscientious car owner, you drive your four-wheeled beauty into a mechanic. Now, this mechanic was referred to you as one of the best. He was renowned for taking old jalopies and refurbishing them into vibrant street machines. But, on your arrival, you find that there is a new owner of the shop, a fast-talking, aggressive little guy who tells you that he is way better than the last guy, who could never do anything right. He hooks up your car to his computer and easily finds about a dozen areas where the car needs immediate work. You really can’t afford all of the work he insists needs doing, but he swears that he can cut a great deal with you. Hell, he practically tells you that all of the work will cost next to nothing, such a wizard is he with repair. You reluctantly agree to leave the car with him for a few days.

Days pass. The wiry little mechanic calls frequently and tells you that progress is good, but he keeps finding things that are wrong with the car, which adds to both the time required to repair the car and the amount of the bill, which he is vague about. Nevertheless, you miss your car, so you tell him to push on.

Finally, after a few weeks of working on the car has passed, you decide to check on the progress in person. You catch a bus and make your way to the shop. You arrive at the shop and, to your horror, see parts of your car strewn across the side lot next to the shop, some of them charred and scorched. Your once beautiful car, what’s left of it, is raised on a lift, pieces dangling from the chassis. Portions of the body are scorched. There is a permeating odor coming from the inside of the car, almost as if the car had been immersed in water and then left out in the sun to molder.

The mechanic comes out of his office, wearing a wide grin and telling you how pleased he is with the progress made on your car. After watching you stammer and seeing your face turning fifty shades of red, he quickly talks about how damaged your car was when he received it, blaming the problems on the previous owners of the car. He tells you about all of the hard work he did rebuilding your vehicle and yammers incessantly about how much the previous mechanic had wrecked much of the shop, necessitating a lot of work with inferior tools. He blames the previous mechanic, you somehow notice through your rage.

The police finally arrive, guns drawn. Why wouldn’t they? You’re busy chasing around the mechanic with a large wrench. His partner, a bald, smirking old man, called them when you started yelling about what you were going to do with the mechanic’s inferior tools and speficially where you were planning to insert them.

The end result: you have no car, you’re in jail, and now the mechanic is telling everyone that you are to blame for the condition of the car. And the judge is a friend of his.

How outraged do you think you would be?

I tell this little tale of woe as a way of answering a question posed by my good friend Sean on FriendFeed earlier in the day. I posted a link concerning Dick Cheney’s nascent inability to follow any explicitly written law. Sean’s response:

But please tell me, why should I care about this? Why should I waste my energy getting upset about something like this? I am shocked, SHOCKED, to find a politician hiding and lying about something. (Casablanca reference)

Hmm. And double hmm.

Ordinarily, I would just pop off a quick rejoinder and be done with the matter. But Sean’s response really got me thinking: why would anyone waste any effort with outrage? Bill Cosby once said it best: politicians are like small children – they will only tell the truth when pain is imminent. So why bother getting mad about it?

And the only answer that made any sense to me is this: because they didn’t deliver. We hired them to do a job, and the current White House, in concert with their accomplices in Congress and the Supreme Court, blew it. And what excuses do they give us for such shoddy workmanship? It was the previous president’s fault. It’s the liberals. It’s the courts. It’s always someone else – never their own incompetence.

And you know, the excuses are really getting tired.

The only thing that grates on me more than the stupidity that our current system engenders is the complete and total apathy of people who would readily complain if it was their own ox being gored. Cut off their cable service, shut off their water, jack up the price of their petrol, let them not get a raise that they feel is due, have the local fast food joint put mayo on their sandwich when they specifically said “no mayo” – do any of these minor inconveniences upon them, and they wail like a baby who just had their favorite choo-choo train taken away.

But let some charlatan break their country in two and endanger their lives and their freedoms. Have some shadowy government agency they didn’t elect spy on them. Watch them steal millions of their tax dollars and give it to their criminal friends in business. Marvel at the brilliant incompetence that allowed 10,000 of their fellow countrymen to die unnecessarily. And what is their response then?

Bah, that’s just politics as usual.

If you can’t at least muster an ounce of outrage about everything that was done in your name, then what good are you?