Well at least I didn’t call ‘em chumps.

Or fat-asses.

Or my army of walking organ banks.

Or Liberals.

It seems like a small thing, what we call people.

For example, as long as it's not pejorative, what does it matter if guys can call each other “guy” or “dude” or “pal” for decades because we don’t have the slightest fucking idea what the other guy’s name is and we don’t really want to ask?

Me, I’ve got a weird memory, so while it may take me a few passes to put a name to a face, I can almost always put a face with an occasion, or dredge up a half-remembered conversation from years ago. I remember the chubby man with the old glasses, or the shy brunette who wears kind of drab clothes, but who keeps her nails and rings perfect, but “Bob” or “Jennifer” feel like such poor mnemonic representations of the most vivid particulars of those people that it takes me a few passes to find a place to hang a moniker.

Details, yes, but names, not so much. Nothing personal; it’s just how stuff hooks into my memory.

It is mostly a small thing – what we call other people – but at just the right angle, caught in just the right light, it can be what an old writing teacher of mine used to call “the telling moment” or the “telling detail.” It’s why Elmore Leonard’s writing kicks so much ass, and Raymond Carver even more so. Both have (or, in the case of Carver, had) the gift of revealing everything you need to know about the hamster in the wheel at the heart of the man in dialogue so very carefully constructed that you can’t even see the hand of the author.

And to be clear, this is most definitely not the the case only in fiction. Not by a long-shot.

So for example, when a Republican opens up his trap and talks about “those people” you damned good and well what he’s talking about without having to draw a whole rhetorical map.

And the “they” and “them” of Barbara Bush’s chortling, self-satisfied, “We Are Most Amused” speech about the plight of the mostly black and mostly poor people stranded by Katrina could not have been more revealing of the inner person had her face-plate popped off like Yul Brenner's in “Westworld” and shown her inner cranium alive with little, cross-burning maggots.

So the subject of this post is a small thing (he repeated for the third time), but it was enough to make me make an actual note of it on the way home, and Google it when I finally arrived back at Castle Driftglass because of how oddly it rang in my ear.

A particular word used by George Bush in a particular way – and not a dirty or derisive word -- just at that moment seemed to make the truth of the Bush persona open up a little further, like an origami flower made out of a Jim Beam label.

Here’s the article; see if you can spot the word.

Bush: Ready to tap reserve
President says his administration willing to loan oil to mitigate the shortfalls caused by storms.
September 26, 2005: 12:13 PM EDT
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - President Bush said Monday his administration is willing to release supplies from the nation's strategic oil reserve to deal with oil shortfalls caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

"It's important for our people to know that we understand the situation and that we're willing to use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to mitigate any shortfalls in crude oil that could affect our consumers," Bush said in a statement made at the Energy Department in Washington.

The reserve, which is overseen by the Energy Department, is the government's emergency stockpile of crude oil that was created in the aftermath of the 1973-74 oil embargo. After Hurricane Katrina struck in August, the U.S. government agreed to loan 30 million barrels from the reserve.

Bush said Rita missed a lot of refining capacity along the Texas coast but that the effect of two storms in succession would naturally affect supply. Refineries in the Houston area process about a quarter of U.S. fuel stocks.
...

He said the government has suspended certain EPA rules to make it easier to import gasoline and get it to the market, but encouraged Americans conserve energy and cut non-essential travel.
...

Bush is – God help us – temporary steward of a great nation. Leader of the Free World. Commander-in-Chief of the last superpower and heir to the office of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt (both of ‘em) and Truman, so here’s my little bit of free advice from me to him.

You are the head of the most powerful nations on Earth, Mr. President, and nations don’t have “our consumers.”

Corporations have consumers.

Nations have citizens. And taxpayers. And founders. And sons. And daughters. And heroes.

The government of the United State is not a for-profit enterprise, and you are not head of Arbusto, CEO of Halliburton or Chairman of the Board of Silverado.

We don’t work for you, Mr. President: You work for us. And I know you will find this fact abhorrent, but the truth is, governments are necessarily set up to do exactly the opposite of what corporations do. Governments, Mr. President, of necessity take more money from those for whom they provide fewer services, and provide greater service to those less able to pay, because even though Oprah pays 5,000 times what I pay in taxes, she doesn’t get to drive 5,000 times faster than me.

Well, maybe in Chicago she does.

Government is not and can never be a place where what you pay in as a “consumer” is directly proportional to the service and attention you receive, so that a cut in what you are charged affects only you. What you pay in as a “citizen”, on the other hand, goes to help those who can least afford to help themselves. Goes for parks for everyone. Schools for everyone. Justice for everyone. Security for everyone.

A consumer makes a purchase – a private exchange of money for a specific thing of value.

A citizen pays a tax – a public sacrifice to support a public system from which they may or may not derive a direct benefit, but which is absolutely necessary because it is that system that promotes our shared values as a people and a culture.

“Fuck Everyone But Me” is a sentiment for the corporate Universe, but it has no place whatsoever in the public square, and is lethally antithetical to the very idea of a common, national good and purpose.

Good government is found in the balancing act of taxation. Take too much, and the wealth-creation that powers to engine dries up and blows away, which is why Communism is and always will be a failure. But tax too little, and you end up letting people die or live in misery who didn’t have to, and to cover up that fundamental crime against humanity, you end up having to invent some variant of an “Us and Them” ideology. That “those people” somehow deserve their fate and it’s somehow a much greater sin to be forced to help them because they are wicked or lazy or genetically inferior.

The Modern Liberal/Progressive movement has by-and-large learned the lesson of former, which is why Commies are a novelty these days – a sideshow act like the Dog-Faced Boy – instead of a threat. Which is why the Progressive Movement is damaged but salvageable.

OTOH, the Modern GOP positively mainlines the grotesque, divisive, “Fuck Everyone But Me” ideology -- dosing themselves with their narcotic dogma harder and harder and with larger-bore needles every year -- which is why the Conservative Movement as it is currently constituted is just fucking evil and beyond redemption.

The Real World requires the paired and complimentary interplay between the Government and the Marketplace, and Consumers are exclusively creatures of the latter.

The marketplace – properly tended and pruned – is a fine thing. It’s very efficient at delivering goods and services to places when a profit can be had, and completely useless at delivering the basics to the indigent, to infirm, the disabled, the abandoned, the elderly, the young and anywhere else the margins are too thin or non-existent.

And in that context, how we think of each other may be a small thing, but it means everything.

Because if in your unguarded heart you think of your fellow Americans as “consumers” and of some of them as “those people”, you will inevitably reach a harsh and brutal set of conclusions about how they should be treated and what your national priorities should be.

But if you believe that your fellow American is a “citizen” just like you, and your fellow man is your brother or your sister to whom you owe a duty, you’ll inevitably reach a set of radically different and drastically more humane conclusions which, if pursued pragmatically and realistically, can form a core of shared values among all of the various breeds of Liberals I know of.

And in the end, as we saw in New Orleans, whether your government thinks of you as its boss or its supplicant -- as a citizen to be abide by and attended to, or a consumer to be waited on only if you can flash enough cash –- can mean the different between life and death.