Government: It's the Magnitude, Stupid!

BROOKLYN -- It seems as though everyone in America, right-wing and
left-wing, Democrats and Republicans, the Tea Party and the DLC, have
all come kumbaya-together on one overarching vision of the coming
American utopia: small government. By all accounts, America is proudly
morphing into the penny-pinching Darwinist model for pusillanimous
pussyfooters the world over.

OK, fine. I just have one question.

How small?

The only answer I've ever heard was from the god of small government,
Grover Norquist, who famously said, "Small enough to drown in the
bathtub."

OK, fine. But that's a metaphor, Grover. As Country Joe and the Fish
said, "You can't live on metaphors."

Still, Grover's vivid image of a fat white man kneeling by the toilet
and euthanizing a puppy set me to thinking -- as it should anyone -- and
prompted another question:

What's wrong with this picture?

I mean, "small?" "SMALL?" Grover, look around!

Grover, as you might surmise, is a hero of the Tea Party, whose loins
ache for small government. They've rallied repeatedly in Washington to
make clear their passion. Many of them, I assume, flew east for these
rallies.

Flew. On airplanes. Did they look out the window of their federally
subsidized Boeing 737? Did they notice how big this country is? Did
they notice from Tucson to Washington, flying at 500 miles an hour, it
takes four hours? That's very large.

America is one of the biggest countries on earth. Economically, we're
bigger than anyone. We have the largest military force in history, six
times bigger than the next biggest in existence. We have 311 million
people -- which is not as many as, say, India or China -- but we consume
25 percent of the world's energy. That's huge. We spew more solid
waste than any country ever thought of hauling to the dump. We are the
biggest consumer, spender, lender and borrower, the biggest eater and
drinker, the biggest waster and the biggest goddamn mouth that ever
existed anywhere.

We do stuff big.

And if we look back, and think about it, it's the big stuff America does best.

How, for example, did we get started? We picked a war, without first
actually putting together either a government or an army, against the
largest, richest empire in human history. Other countries -- who had
kings, queens, armies, navies, treasuries -- had tried beating the
British Empire. Spain and France tried. They got their asses kicked.

But we beat the redcoats. We booted George III. Was that big? It was huge, man!

We've been doing big stuff, really well, ever since -- even our Civil
War, when we killed 700,000 of our own. That's incredible. It's
colossal. We wiped out a generation.

In fact, as wars, go Americans don't really hit our stride unless the
war is enormous. After all, the last time we really, truly won was
World War II. Every semi-war we've tried since then, Korea, Vietnam,
Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc., has been either a
defeat, a stalemate, a case of bellicosus interruptus, or Vince
Lombardi standing on the sidelines yelling "What the hell is going on
out there?"

Speaking of Vince -- who won the first two of them -- we don't call it
the Modesty Bowl. We call it the damn Super Bowl. When Vince was asked
to coach in something called the "Runner-Up Bowl," he told the NFL to
shove it. He was an American; he wasn't about to play a "rinky-dink
game in a rinky-dink town." The NFL heeded Vince and killed the
Runner-Up Bowl, forever. So much for small ball.

It's hard to believe that any reminder is necessary, but the list of
big -- really big -- things we've done as a nation is, well, huge. Have
you been, for example, to Hoover Dam? Looked at a map of the Tennessee
Valley Authority? Driven across America on I-40, or I-80, or I-90 --
all the way across, on roads and bridges and overpasses ordered up by
General Eisenhower a decade after he launched the D-Day landings,
which was the biggest amphibious assault that was ever attempted, or
ever will be attempted?

I mean, for Pete's sake, Grover, we do stuff humongous. Have you tried
to fit (just as a small sample) the Griffith Observatory, Lake Mead,
the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Apollo moon missions and 76
land-grant universities into a bathtub? Do you have a Power Point
presentation on how to drown rural electrification and throw America's
heartland back into the dark, spoiling roughly 300 million gallons of
milk a day.

OK, that would be big! That would be waste on the American scale. Go, Grover!

If you apply the Bigness Standard to the Obama administration, you'll
see where Barack went wrong. Was his economic recovery program big?
Yes. Big enough? No! As a result, the small-government nags are all
over him. He's had the same problem with financial reform and health
care. They were both medium.

But what if he had started out BIG -- determined to extend Medicare to
everybody -- not just old people, veterans and Congressmen, but
everybody? If he had, and if he'd won, right now, the small-ballers'
budget would be threatening the end of Medicare not just for people
under 55, but for every last human being in America. And the backlash?

Huge!

The one really big thing Obama did full-bore and no-holds-barred was
bailing out Detroit and saving the U.S. auto industry. It was the
biggest industrial bailout anybody ever saw. And it worked because it
did not stop at medium.

Today, America faces the biggest deficit in the history of the whole
world. The only solution being offered by the small-government crowd
is to nickel and dime this problem into possibly -- if we're lucky --
the biggest recession since, well, George W. Bush.

This crisis, if we get it, might finally force President Obama to do
something big. Really big. I've got no idea what that would be. But
it's gotta be big -- FDR big!

I mean, huge!