I don't remember the congressional issue I broached, but it matters not.  The person to whom I made the comment observed, "They are (as in elected representatives) supposed to be working for us."  I would have taken it as a light-humor platitude if he hadn't said it in earnest.  I thought, we are so far beyond that; I wouldn't know where to start.  So where does one start? 

Politicians are almost never working for us.  Don't confuse a bill to reduce America's tax burden to revive a faltering economy with the elected officials themselves.  Politicians work for themselves, period.  If something worthwhile happens, it's like fruit beverage production; you can make beauty products out of the leftovers.  How often do you hear politicians proffer "getting back to doing the work of the American people"?  Both sides of the aisle use the phrase.  What actually are they "getting back" from?

The thing is that working for the American people simply does not pay well enough.  It's Marxism for the public servant class.  Beginning with Bill and Hillary, public servants began to see themselves as the schlub proletariat doing all the work while the elites reaped enormous profits from the policy deck–stacking for which the wealthy donated.  Thousands of dollars–a-plate fundraisers soon seemed like ancient small potatoes as the tech giants measured their own jaw-dropping GDPs as bigger than Italy, Brazil, Canada, and Russia.  The political class wants Washington, D.C. to be Palo Alto on the Potomac, having what the elite benefactors have.  In other words, the elected want to be the elect having almost nothing to do with us Americans in outer darkness.

What used to be cozy financial arrangements for the capital's political denizens have morphed into mega-wealth strategies.  The staged Capitol insurrection, the private security firm Capitol Police, and the barbed wall around the nation's capital are the neo-medieval fortress.  I am convinced of the elites' abhorrence of all things not them.  Hatred is the tool the political elite use to divide and subjugate.  For the rarefied gentry, this strategy means to sweep us, the peasants, out of their kingdom so they control and limit contact with us. 

There is not a trace of humility to be fracked from the cross-section of elite shale.  Their in-your-face lack of humility purposefully coarsens, then secularizes the culture, thus relieving them of the Golden Rule, which would require them to actually care about the peasants.  After that, the elites define all the peasants' boundaries for them and provide them minimum maintenance without even any defunded police protection.

Nineteen eighty-four conjures George Orwell, and it also recalls the year the Sigourney Weaver film Half Moon Street came out.  Ms. Weaver plays a Harvard Ph.D. fellow, Dr. Lauren Slaughter, at a Middle East affairs institute.  In a notable scene, Weaver's character chats with a Dutch banker, Hugo Van Arkady, at a dinner party.  What follows is my DVD transcribing of part of their dinner table conversation.

Van Arkady: There are five thousand people in the world.  That's it.  Five thousand.

Dr. Slaughter: Five thousand?  That's all that count?  What about the starving millions?  Don't they count?

Other guest: A million isn't a number in any real sense. 

Van Arkady: There's murder in nature.  Millions are dying right now, starving, bombed, in camps.  Nobody gives a damn.  You may deplore it, but it's a fact.

Dr. Slaughter: And naturally, Mr. Van Arkady, you're one of the five thousand. 

Thirty-five-plus years later, the scene still rings with immediacy.  Palo Alto on the Potomac is the coalescing of the American elites' membership in Club 5K.

Spruce Fontaine is an artist and retired college art instructor.

Image via Max Pixel.

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