stimulant

A strange juxtaposition from the Death and Taxes site for the budget graph, visualizing the relative proportions of the national budget by department and project:

It reminds me of the the first chapter of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, wherein Carnegie recounts the capture of infamous gunman, “Two Gun” Crowley. During the final shootout, Crowley penned a letter:

But how did “Two Gun” Crowley regard himself? We know, because while the police were firing into his apartment, he wrote a letter addressed “To whom it may concern.” And, as he wrote, the blood flowing from his wounds left a crimson trail on the paper. In his letter Crowley said: “Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one — one that would do nobody any harm.” A short time before this, Crowley had been having a necking party with his girl friend on a country road out on Long Island. Suddenly a policeman walked up to the car and said: “Let me see your license.” Without saying a word, Crowley drew his gun and cut the policeman down with a shower of lead. As the dying officer fell, Crowley leaped out of the car, grabbed the officer’s revolver, and fired another bullet into the prostrate body. And that was the killer who said: “Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one — one that would do nobody any harm.” Crowley was sentenced to the electric chair. When he arrived at the death house in Sing Sing, did he say, “This is what I get for killing people”? No, he said: “This is what I get for defending myself.”

Carnegie goes on to cite Al Capone, who said:

“I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.” That’s Al Capone speaking. Yes, America’s most notorious Public Enemy — the most sinister gang leader who ever shot up Chicago. Capone didn’t condemn himself. He actually regarded himself as a public benefactor — an unappreciated and misunderstood public benefactor.

The point being, of course, that most everyone tries to do what they see as right, most of the time (or at the very least, the end up believing that they do right). Including Kevin Marlowe. Note that I am not comparing Kevin’s job to Capone or Crowley’s deeds. I’m simply comparing the disparity between Vanessa and Kevin’s assessment of his work and our assessment of Capone and Crowley’s lives, versus their own. However, I would be remiss if I did not point out a fundamental weakness in Kevin’s claim: taking the budget as a literal quantification of voter trust is specious. In fact, this is much of what is wrong with politics: the power (even as roughly encoded by budgets) is not well-coupled to the people’s will. Thus, for instance, a genuinely unpopular war is possible.