We don’t live in a metropolis. Our town lies in a rural area which only recently achieved public bus service for one of its outlying communities. Before that, some of the area’s students had to hitchhike to get home from high school. Near the center of our tiny town, there is a library maintained on a volunteer basis. Though I’m sure the volunteers do what they can, whenever I pass by, it isn’t open. Now the library in the nearest town to the south may suffer a similar fate.

We talk a lot about civil society but not so often about what goes into to making and maintaining one. Like public education, a library is essential. It’s a meeting place where ideas are important, a setting where where elders can tutor struggling students, where kids can research their term papers, and where the unemployed can use the Internet connection to apply for jobs. (And that last is especially important: At Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2010, local residents hoping for charity turkeys at the mission on the main highway had to stand in a long line to get one. It’s not likely they’ll have the spare fuel to drive long distances or excess funds to spend at online bookstores.)

I hope the library board considers the following: A short while back, we were all snickering about Texas, where extremist officials voted to take evolution out of the school textbooks. Those Texans must be eyeing us here in Santa Cruz County with astonished wonder, now. For without a library, right-wing ideologues won’t have to make the effort to ban an idea or censor a book to keep it out of circulation: Why bother to ban a book, when the library has already been closed down?

© Shelley Buck, 2011. Used with permission.

As with many other instances during the George W. Bush administration in which legitimate duties of government (such as statesmanship) became conflated with and ultimately displaced by punishment, pure and simple, we are all of us coming to realize that Bush-era techniques employed in efforts to extract information from unwilling and even uninformed “informants” went way too far. Not only international conventions but also our own laws and morals were savagely violated by actions taken with a veneer of government approval.

As ever more reeking information continues to seep from the closed drawers of the military and spy agencies, it is clear that the heritage of America’s own dirty war will not go away on its own.

The problem now seems to be what to do about it. Should we go on talk shows and claim that torture wasn’t really torture? Should we-Nuremberg-style-prosecute and punish those who carried out illegal policies endorsed by our then-government? Should we convene a truth and reconciliation commission, so that those who carried out the torture can ‘fess up and hug their surviving former victims? Should we talk the issue onto its deathbed, bury it in paper, smother the legal and moral outrages in subtleties, and move on to health care, global warming and other pressing matters? Or should we see-to paraphrase the late folksinger, Phil Ochs– the pictures of the pain?

What to do? In this case, although I consider myself a progressive, I really would like to see Washington run more like a small business. I ask: “What would Main Street do?”

If I identified an embezzler in my business, I would likely institute controls to identify financial misdeeds earlier and more readily. I might choose not to prosecute the culprit due to concern about publicity. But would I keep the embezzler around to do next season’s taxes?

If I were a small town editor who discovered one of my writers was plagiarizing, I would probably increase my future scrutiny of news stories prior to publishing them. But would I continue to accept articles from the freelancer who burned me?

If I were a carpenter who discovered that a vender sold me wood for a house that was so weakened by wormholes that the house I was building could not stand, I might devise new methods for stress testing my materials before beginning construction. But would I buy again from that vender?

If I, a hapless householder, hire a plumber who recklessly breaks a pipe and lets a stream of sewage spew into my front yard, will I call the guy up again when the garbage disposal stops grinding?

I am not a carpenter or accountant. I do my own cleaning. My business does not earn enough to have employees, let alone ones who embezzle, and my garbage disposal is not broken, but you get the idea.

If I were a new president who discovered his employees had engaged in torture, I would likely devise new methods and policies to keep torture out of government. But would I continue to keep people who authorized it or did it on the payroll?

C’mon. Really? Would you? Would anybody? –buckdata

For her part, buckdata is wondering why money isn’t getting to the people most hard hit by this depression, such as those on the verge of losing their homes, those who have already lost them, and those for whom a tarp is not a government program but a literal roofing strategy in tent cities around the country.

To aid the President—on this issue at least– the following modest solution is hereby submitted:

Let’s all be bankers! Maybe it’s time for the poor and dispossessed and the rest of us to found some banks. Buckdata has a few in mind: First Foreclosure Bank in Stockton, Credit Default Swappers Bank in the New Orleans Ninth Ward, Toxic Assets Bank in Flint, Bonus Plus Bank with a nice Manhattan address, the Bank of Kaput in New Shock, Pennsylvania, and, of course, the online Bank of Buckdata.

Consider the possibilities: Laid off attorneys can volunteer time to help with the charters and incorporations. Laid off Wall Street employees can help us set up the books. Laid off web designers can devote their graphics talents to creating suitable online presence and branding. Impoverished retirees can exhume their mothballed suits and ties to lend us all gravitas at the headquarters front office.

Once the banks are set up, perhaps the homeless, the foreclosed, the evicted, and the about-to-be dispossessed will be able to approach Washington politely, hats (if we still have them) in hand, in search of generous bailouts. After all, a democracy, too, involves a contractual obligation, doesn’t it?

The proposal has a further benefit: If the sheriff’s deputies should arrive to evict us before the bucks start rolling in, we can always live in the vault. –buckdata

Note to readers: This is a satire. The above banks do not now exist. There is no Bank of Kaput in New Shock, Pennsylvania. There is no New Shock, Pennsylvania. No intention to single out particular existing institutions should be inferred from this blog post. This caution is necessary because of an unusual initiative reported in the New York Times on April 8. The article by Graham Bowley and Michael J. de la Merced details a scenario in which ordinary citizens may  be cajoled to invest in private mutual funds which are to be set up with government support to purchase other private institutions’ soured assets. The writers suggest such citizen investments may be envisioned as similar to the patriotic purchases of “Liberty Bonds” during the World War I. In such an audacious climate, formal disclaimers truly become necessary. Without such disclaimers, even well-informed readers may find themselves unable to distinguish pastiche from reality.

Secondly, he thanked the firefighters, noting he had “this special sense that I was with them.” Then he went on to thank “all those who are helping making the effort work here—people are working long hours and the citizens of this part of the world really, thank you for it.”

The president then thanked the Boy Scouts for working on his “Healthy Forests” initiative. He added: “Finally, I’d like to let the people out here know that we’re paying attention in Washington, D.C., we care about you, and that we’ll respond as best as we possibly can.”

Coverage of the speech on the The White House website included comments given in Redding by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had appeared with Bush when the president made these comments. In the attribution of governor’s comments by the White House website, the governor’s name was misspelled.

As of July 18, 2008, meanwhile, the area burned in California reached 907,568 acres, according to figures provided by the CAL FIRE (the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) That’s 1418 square miles burned.