On getting what we want

It seems you can't wade through the morass of verbal contortions that pass for speechifying in an election year without stumbling over the word "accountable." This word is usually issued in the form of a candidate's declared intention to seize Washington by its woolly hide and bring it to heel. In a speech announcing his candidacy, John McCain promised to hold government accountable for the money it spends. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, believes "no one should be afraid to hold our government accountable." Barack Obama believes teachers should be held accountable -- as well as taxpayers, for not giving them enough money. If you sling a stick -- preferably a big, heavy stick -- at a Washington politician, likely as not the word you'll make him stutter is some version of "accountability."

The fiction is that Washington is in the fell grip of "special interests" (read: those interests which don't jibe with our own), and only someone pure and noble can seize the sword from the stone and restore our kingdom to its glory. Thus every four years a string of professional talkers whose skeletons are sufficiently stuffed into their closets enter the field to do battle, and the ensuing fray looks like a lunchroom slap fight at a MENSA conference.

It's enough to make you long for a return to the days of inbred monarchies, when conditions were tougher, to be sure, but at least there was no C-SPAN.

I had a political science professor who liked to quip that the problem with American government is not that it isn't accountable enough, but rather that it is too accountable. We run deficits because we want our government goodies but would rather have our grandchildren pay for them. We fight a two-front war without any visible sacrifice -- outside that of military families -- at home, because we like the idea of fending off the radical Muslim hordes, but not enough to do without the latest XBox release. We turn a blind eye to the perfect entitlement storm brewing -- Medicare, Social Security, and various and sundry unaccounted federal spending commitments -- because we are an Ecclesiastes 8:15 nation, and woe be unto any presidential candidate who would stand between us and our eating and drinking and merrymaking.

Going to Washington to make government accountable is like trying to steer a horse by his tail; it's a lot of malodorous fluff, and you're likely as not to get kicked. The people who get there, by and large, are followers posing as leaders, and they know better than to tell voters that we can't have peace, bread, and circuses without cost. Little wonder that the entire enterprise gives the air of a frenzied game of musical chairs, with the music box fed by a purse whose claimants are growing, and whose contributors are dwindling.

If we would have accountable government, in other words, we need citizens willing to be accountable, and I suspect most of us won't stand for that until we have no choice in the matter. Until that day comes, we'll squeal at the mention of any significant spending cut or tax increase, continue to know next to nothing about foreign affairs and everything about American Idol, and blithely wonder, in a decade or a century or however long it takes a great nation to lose its steam, why things aren't like they used to be.

It puts me in mind of H.L. Mencken's famous quote: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." Only it isn't just the common people, it's corporations and tycoons as well, everyone bellying up to the trough that is our national altar to the god whose name is: You Deserve It All.

And for the day when that altar is whittled to a tombstone, I can recommend the inscription:

America: They got what they wanted