‘America Gone Wild,’ Week Two

All right, then, let us now review Week Two of "America Gone Wild." First there was Dick Armey, a former Republican congressman from Texas who goes around these days stirring up Fox News viewers, which sounds like easy money. He said on "Meet the Press" last Sunday that it amounts to "tyranny" to force Americans to participate in a government program.

So, he was saying that Medicare, by which you probably get premium-free health coverage in your fragile old age, is tyranny. Social Security, too.

Surely he also means taxes. Pay them if you want, opt out if you wish, then, if you opt out, studiously avoid accepting any government service provided directly or indirectly by the taxes you eschew. Fine. Go for it. You'll have to walk everywhere, because you can't drive on the roads. And you'll need to stay off the sidewalks. And you probably ought to stay off private property, which, as a right-winger, you surely treasure above public cooperation and convenience.

Maybe you ought to stay hunkered down in your house, never coming out.

What a splendid idea, now that I think about it.

So, then I got this e-mail from a person calling me a Marxist and saying it's still socialism -- just like single-payer, supposedly -- for the government to set up nonprofit, member-owned cooperatives to enter the health insurance marketplace.

I hope my correspondent doesn't live in a rural area served by rural electric cooperatives, in which case he'll need to live by kerosene lantern at night after walking off-road and off-sidewalk by day.

Let me tell you about electricity in free-market America.

In the 1930s most people in the cities had lights and most people out in the rural hinterlands didn't. Most private utilities, serving investors rather than people, said it would not be cost-effective to run wires through the backwoods for so few customers.

In some cases private electric utilities also suggested that farmers were too poor to afford electricity and too unsophisticated to run electric systems.

The government happened to be blessed at the time with political leadership that was more expansive, compassionate, generous, forward-thinking and progressively inclined.

So President Franklin Roosevelt, to whom I refer, helped push through a government program to make government loans to member-owned rural electric cooperatives to construct the rural electrification infrastructure, then repay the loans from what the members anted up to pay for their electricity.

My goodness. Imagine such a thing. Government helping disadvantaged people get a leg up with a life-transforming modern service. Then people joining together to help each other and to repay the government for offering the leg up.

Why, the commie SOBs.

Right-wingers, who'll usually get on the wrong side of human advancement, argued at the time that this amounted to government unfairly competing socialistically with the private sector.

Ask the people in the suits in the front offices of today's electric cooperatives if they consider themselves Marxists. Ask the same thing of the old country boy using co-op power to keep his chicken house running to try to make a living and keep the world fed.

This is akin to how things would be designed to work with nonprofit health insurance cooperatives, should President Obama and the Democrats retreat to that.

Then U.S. Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts conducted a town meeting at which a woman compared Obama to Hitler and called proposed health care reform a Nazi plan.

Barney, it turns out, is the rare left-winger whose tendencies are as pugnacious as those of the right-wing extremists. He paused and told the woman that it's a great country, indeed, that would allow free speech for such "vile, contemptible nonsense." Then he told her he would decline to engage her on the issue because arguing with her would be akin to arguing with the dinner table.

At last, a modest rally for sanity.

To begin with Armey and end with Frank -- that's actually not a bad week. There might be hope for America yet.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.