David Plays a Game

I really rarely read David Waters' Commercial Appeal column on "Faith Matters." He seems far more interested in politics than religion, on chastising than praising, on what he sees as the bad rather than what the rest of us see as the good. He's the guy at church who will gladly tell you everything you're doing wrong as a Christian because you're not living up to God's word like he is. Shame on you.

But this Sunday's column had numbers in it, which is what caught my eye. It seems the money we're spending on Iraq ($5 billion a month, as he breathlessly repeats, because, you know, pounding a fact home just makes it more true.) and then tediously works through all the other things we could spend that money on.

It's a tiresome game of lazy writers. Look! That $600 Army toilet would have bought groceries for a family of poor people. Look! We have enough missiles to blanket the world but we can't blanket a kid in Kansas. It's a game of priorities usually done by people with brains full of fuzzy warm feelings and considerably lacking in military or foreign policy thinking.

Let's take a random passage:

That's enough money to provide health care coverage for nearly 2 million people for a year.

Or Head Start places for half a million children for a year.

Or scholarships for a full year's tuition and fees for a million state university students.

Or a year's worth of salaries and benefits for 100,000 art and music teachers, or 100,000 police officers.

Yeah man! Art and music.

So let's play his game. You'll notice that nowhere does he mention not taking that money from taxpayers in the first place. Nope, it's the government's money now and a giant slush fund for well-meaning social engineers. It doesn't seem to occur to Waters that the money used to belong to all kinds of American families that could probably use the money for their own children. No, no. It's our... er, the government's money now. Let's do good with it!

Even better, let's just take all wages and send them directly to the government. That way, everyone only gets just what they need, decided by smart, efficient bureaucrats with the goodwill of the nation in mind. That way, we can have all the "excess" right there in Goodwill Central to give to those who need it.

How about this variation of the game: Why have we sent hundreds of millions to people in foreign lands when we have people starving and without health care and art right here at home? Kids right here in Tennessee are doing without good schools, warm homes, clean clothes and free healthy, nutritious snacks that are low in calories and don't cause tooth decay. What business is it of our government to take this birthright of all Americans to give to strangers around the world, some of whom are racist, sexist and homophobic.

Let's play another version of the game. David Waters get a pretty good salary from the Commercial Appeal. Enough so that, if remember correctly, he can take a vacation every year. A vacation! Why doesn't Waters take that money, spent on selfish, sybaritic luxury, and give it to the poor instead? While he's lounging about some lake, some poor family in Memphis wasn't eating. Heck, for that matter, I wonder just how nice a house he lives in. Couldn't he do with less? Do he and his family eat out? How dare they, when some children don't eat? Why aren't he and his family making do with the minimum to send the excess pay to the government -- county, state or wherever it will do the best good?

You see? It can go on forever.

Let's try this game: Assume that the CA prints 200,000 copies per day. A week's worth of print might come to what? Five pounds per customer per week maybe? That's a million pounds of newsprint a week. According to this source, only 30% of that is recycled newsprint. That's 700,000 pounds a week of dead trees. How many forests got stripped so that Mr. Waters could earn a paycheck? He participates in the production of an ephemeral product that daily chokes our landfills and threatens the world's ability to survive. If Mr. Waters' industry could only find another way of disseminating information instead of killing whole forests, then the world would benefit incredibly. But no, we need our daily fix of comics, recipes, relationship advice and meaningless reports on macho physical contests. And Mr. Waters profits quite well from it.

You see? We can play this game all day, in a hundred ways. It almost writes itself. But of course Mr. Waters' version allows him to engage in auto-stroking conscience massaging. It reminds me of this passage from C.S. Lewis, which was repeated the other day in another, though related, context at Signifying Nothing:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

No doubt, Mr. Waters feels quite good about himself for giving Memphis that stern talking to.