Holding the Dustpan

My mother’s cat carted in a baby mole today. Usually his rodent friends are already dead when the indoor portion of the play date starts, but this blind fur ball was still squirming and squeaking when he crossed the threshold, and as soon as he was released from feline jaws, he booked it into a dark, furniture-crowded corner where we humans couldn’t hope to achieve the first step of catch and release. My mom and I armed ourselves with cups and dustpans and chased this sucker around gaps in our baseboards for three hours, unable to attain the unwanted houseguest. Admittedly, I jumped and let out an embarrassingly girlish scream when I felt it scurry across my bare foot, and it was ultimately my mom who had to trap it because I was found to be worthless as a mole hunter. Finally, though, we set it loose in the grass outside, and I now feel confident that we could remedy similar problems in the future much more quickly than we did today. We’ll call it a ridiculous learning experience.

While I shared this anecdote primarily for entertainment’s sake, I can’t help but make a connection to the political revelation I had this morning. I’d been chasing around an uninvited bother for some time, unable to really get my hands on the core problem. Although people were throwing around accusations of hypocrisy and communism and lies, all of which I do accept, I couldn’t pinpoint, on a personal level, why I was so perturbed about the GM buyout situation.

Then, in a startling, clarifying moment, much like the shock of direct foot-skin-to-mole-fur contact, I saw an auto commercial that acted as the water glass cage around my evasive irritation.

It was a GM/Chrysler ad about some great deals they were cutting on brand new cars. They were encouraging me to come in and buy a vehicle on the grounds that they were rebuilding and were going to be a better company, one to which I could confidently give my business. And as added incentive, they would take $3,000 off of any purchase. But $3,000, I thought, was not nearly enough. In fact, I immediately felt as though I had already purchased a car. GM already owed it to me. They were in my debt.

Herein lies my problem with the intertwining of government and business. Now, because my tax dollars have gone to fund GM’s Chapter 11 catastrophe, I feel I own the company. I should be a stockholder, because they have taken and used my hard-earned money. I shouldn’t have to buy a car from them because, in essence, I already have. We all have. They should be handing over keys to a motorcade of Yukons and Envoys because they’d be high and dry were it not for the taxation of US citizens. If the government owns them, we own them. Or so it would seem.

But I’m not getting a shiny new Sierra 1500; I’m just getting the bill.

Obama says he has no intention of running GM, and yet he fires a CEO who shows resistance to his business plan. He claims that the billions we’re giving to save the corporation from failure will be greatly effective, and yet he says that we can expect many more factory and dealership closures resulting in massive lay-offs. He is the President of the United States, and yet he’s running the place as though he’s governing communists instead of capitalists.

Although it would seem fitting that the people indirectly own whatever the government owns, the terrifying reverse is true: when the government owns business, the government owns the business’s people. The government is buying out its citizens. Barack Obama, as much as he says he’s going to stay out of it, is the new boss to everyone at GM. And for every company that accepts his “rescue,” there is a new staff of Americans being sold to Washington. It has started with the automotive industry, but in this cloud of liberal-perpetuated economic fear, other sectors are bound to follow. “Buy American” is quickly becoming “Buy America.”

So perhaps I can’t catch rodents, but I can trace and cage a devastating political move when it’s on the run. But in this case, there is no yard for release. I’m stuck with a mole in a dustpan, and although I’ve caught it and identified the problem, there is nothing I can do. I am as helpless in this as I was in the actual vermin hunt.

So where’s the government equivalent of my mom?