To hear our presidential candidates tell it, anytime something bad happens, it’s a failure of public policy.

Prices should never go up. If they do, it’s someone’s fault—probably those conniving capitalists, those greedy corporations. Congress must impose a windfall profits tax.

If the unemployment rate exceeds zero, the government must spring into action. It is unnatural for unemployment ever to increase.

War is a total failure of diplomacy. Perfect diplomacy equals perpetual peace. If war does break out anywhere, it’s the other political party’s fault. Or an insidious plot by Halliburton.

Bad weather and climate change are the results of defective public policy. But if the right people were in office, with enough power to carry out the right policies, the weather would always be nice and the climate would remain optimal forever.

No one should ever get sick. If you do get sick, it’s because the United States government has not done everything it could do to prevent it. But if the government only controlled enough money, disease would be eradicated.

Our leaders are just one step away from promising us eternal life. If they can promise us an ideal global climate, why not throw in an offer of eternal life?

So if you’re between jobs, or feeling the pinch at the pump, or not enjoying the weather, or laid up with the flu, or if the fish just aren’t biting for you—well, you can be certain someone did it to you: either on purpose (see Jeremiah Wright on the deliberate creation of AIDS, and other plots against black people) or because you, the stupid voter, failed to put a liberal in office.

All of this stuff used to be known, in high-flown philosophical terminology, as life—as in “That’s life,” or “It has its ups and downs.” But we know better now.

If the government does its job, there will be no fluctuation, no downs, no speed bumps on the road of progress. The natural state of man, we know now, is to be happy all the time. We’ll even be healthy all the time, once the government cracks down on tobacco, fast foods, and alcohol, and makes us all do calisthenics. Meanwhile, if you are not happy all the time, the government has failed you. You’d better elect new leaders and give them greater powers.

One of the things that makes a satirist’s job hard, these days, to the point of despair, is that every politician spouts this stuff and millions of citizens buy into it. How do you poke fun at such people? Our political discourse satirizes itself.

What’s going to happen if politicians start believing that they really can do all those things? But that question presupposes they haven’t already severed their connection with reality.

For the time being, the only way known to ensure that life will have no ups and downs, no shortfalls, no disappointments, is to be dead.

Our leaders can’t deliver eternal life; but they can probably find ways to kill off a lot of us.

Copyright by Lee Duigon

Lee Duigon is a Christian free-lance writer whose work can be seen regularly at www.chalcedon.edu .