The ancients had an advantage over the American people of today: the uncluttered mind of a man named Aesop.

Aesop could define their bewilderments and their problems with stories we now call fables. Aesop usually did it by using animals as the actors to portray the follies of people and their rulers. Unhappily, there is nobody around today to paint a simple picture of where this country is going and the spreading lunacy of its politics.

So I dug around to learn if Aesop had something to say about why the world’s richest country, boasting the world’s most prodigal resources and with billions of dollars in surplus to spread around just a few years ago, is now starving its schools and swindling its citizens.

Aesop didn’t know much about electoral colleges and nuclear options. He did know something about the capacity of power-driven human beings to acquire delusions of wisdom and the masks of reason. Aesop remembered a lion going into a frenzy of rage and some fawns standing anxiously in the woods nearby. One of the fawns was more perceptive than the others. “This lion,” the fawn said, “looks like he won’t stop at anything now—and he was more than we could take even before he went out of his mind.”

Aesop’s lion lives today. Transposed into the 21st Century, it is just as crazy. Aesop’s lion is an idea, unchecked, self-absorbed governmental power gone amuck. The 21st version of the idea is that you can re-invent society and change the laws of economics. You can keep the people fed, comfortable, educated, solvent and healthy and convince them they don’t have to pay for it. You can also convince them that the richest among them deserve to be exempt from paying and if you object they are going to throw a tantrum, call you unpatriotic and expose you on Fox TV.

Do you think this is a crazy idea? Well, yes. It’s Aesop’s lion trained to land on aircraft carriers. In America today, the lion is now on a rampage and crazier than he was a year ago. The madness has a name and it is called hard-gut ideology. It says “we’re going to ram these things through. We’re going to make this thing a jungle war. The toughest and the meanest are going to win. If we can sell a war as America’s finest hour, we can strangle the Democrats in congress and call it a victory for democracy. We can sell the destruction of Social Security and call it a rescue.”

The difference between Aesop’s lion and the others is that this one believes he is acting in the interests of God. He also has imitators all around America, because it doesn’t seem all that hard to dumb down the country.

Do you want to see crazy when it’s really operating on all cylinders? Come to Minnesota.

Years ago, scholars and social scientists, Nobel prize winners and the nation’s leading authorities on government came to Minnesota. They came to study what they called America’s flagship state in providing public services, stimulating corporate growth and offering high quality of life for its citizens.

On the average, the public’s bills for creating this kind of society were a little higher than the average bills around the states. It didn’t matter whether the political movers were Democrats or Republicans. The citizens paid the bills the old fashioned way until the millennium rang in and the wave of the future took over in Washington. The new wave needed only a little more than a year to get into the red. The people running the government privately cheered. That was the idea. Give the surplus to the millionaires in tax cuts and let the schools and the poor rubes go crying to the states, who were getting frozen out of money from the federal government. The plan was working. The public service scam would be shut down. A little later a war was invented. The government cut taxes for the millionaires again. The shelves were now bare and and the states were scrimping..

In Minnesota a new governor came in like a lion. Never, he said, would he ever tell the people of Minnesota they had to pay more taxes on his watch. It just isn’t the way to get elected nowadays. It didn’t matter if the nattering nellies came to say the people are in trouble and the schools are desperate and health care is suffering.

I have a plan, he said. It will make Minnesota once more a shining star of civic and fiscal responsibility

We will gamble our way out of the deficit.

You think this is crazy? Never mind. We’re not gophers. We’re crazy lions.

This is what’s happening in Minnesota today: The owners of the biggest store in the country, the Mall of America, want to build a rooftop casino to attract an international clientele. The state could rake in. So the state of Minnesota promptly began running its own game, negotiating with Indian tribes who operate their own casinos in northern Minnesota. The idea is a partnership, the state and the Indian casinos. But the operators of the big Indian casino in suburban Minneapolis yelled foul, its big city gambling monopoly in jeopardy. So now we have an expanding war between the Indian tribes while the state of Minnesota brokers a deal with the gambling industry and the tribes. That’s the beginning.

The operators of the race track outside of Minneapolis, Canterbury Downs, want their own casino to sweeten the poker operation they run. Whereupon the bar owners of Minnesota came charging into the action for a bill that would put slot machines into thousands of liquor joints from border to border. In the meantime, the metropolitan Minneapolis and St. Paul and suburbs, home to more than 2 ½ million people, is choking in traffic gridlock. Light rail has been brought in to provide some relief. But there’s not enough money to expand public transit. So the right wing governing body of the metropolitan district wants to cut service and increase fares to force low income people back into their automobiles, thereby expanding the gridlock.

It’s the way crazy lions run the country today.

---Jim Klobuchar

© 2005 Jim Klobuchar