I rarely bother any more trying to despin the amazing twists TB puts on my words. I recognized long ago that it's the verbal equivalent of chaff, that I'm supposed to expend all my energies correcting the distortion and have no time left over to address the actual issue. On a larger scale, you see the same thing these days as the McBush campaign tries to bog down Obama in responding to a thousand little attacks and smears every day. It's a Republican thing.

I don't see the government as either hero or victim, but I do see it as a juicy prize for anybody who craves power. There's the rub: It's the mission of a democratic government, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, to act as a counterweight to concentrations of power and to maintain the dispersion of power that's the philosophical basis for America. The government isn't obligated to treat abstract corporations with the same regard as human citizens, nor give the wealthy special treatment; it should in fact take our side--the side of the "little guy"--in any dispute, in accordance with the principle of decentralization of power. The government's analogous to a union, aggregating the power of millions of individuals to stand up the concentrated power of wealthy businesses. The bottom line is that the government already belongs to the people, and attempts by Big Biz and the wealthy elites to coopt it--to make it "an extension and servant of capital"--amount to theft, plain and simple.

The fact that it's our government seems perpetually lost on RightWingers, who view the government as an external entity, a foreign power trying to invade their idyllic realm of free yeoman and gentleman farmers and impose an iron-fisted alien rule. It's utter nonsense, and at the end of the day what pisses off RightWingers about the government is really just that it responds to other points of view than theirs and that elections often lead to non-RightWingers holding positions of leadership. They hate to share the government with people who disagree with them, and fail to understand that compromise is a necessary obligation on all Americans.

Another, related, irony is the RightWing horror towards collectivism. In point of fact, America is a collectivist country, because collectivism simply means that members of a society are obligated to be loyal to that society and to care for and contribute to its welfare. Collectivist societies are distinguished by their "height": America, technically, has a flat formal hierarchy representing egalitarian values. Feudal kingdoms, the Catholic Church, and all modern corporations are collectives featuring a tall formal hierarchy.

Thus the modern corporation is an island of feudalism in a nominally egalitarian society. Of course Big Business is permanently in conflict with democratic government--they're matter and anti-matter when it comes to individual freedom, dignity, and self-determination. A great deal of the government "interference" that chafes Big Business and their RightWing shills amounts to the government trying to protect the serfs with laws regarding employment and working conditions and pay.

Thank god for big government! Imagine the kind of world we'd be living in if Big Business and the wealthy elites had their way. We'd all be dressing in company uniforms and singing the company songs and living in company housing buying food and energy from the company and always in hock to the company store. We've already been there in the past, so don't tell me I'm just paranoid. As Mark Twain said, history may not repeat itself, but it most certainly rhymes.