Imagine that you are in the front row at a marionette show when the puppet starts swinging out to kick you. Well, it’s just a little thing. It doesn’t hurt too much. But still, that’s not right. So you get a little upset.
“Don’t blame me! The puppeteer is pulling my strings!” Says the puppet, “But if you give me a knife, I can cut them and be free!”
Well, you can’t fault that logic. You put a little knife into the wooden hand and it swipes out and cuts your arm.
“Oh no! That evil puppeteer!” Says the puppet. “Quick, give me a bigger knife to fight that one off for you!”
You put a bigger knife in the other hand and that one slashes out at you too.
“I can’t believe how evil the puppeteer is!” Says the puppet, “I think the only way to defeat him is to give me a gun!”
How many weapons do you give to the marionette before you realize that every strike and every plea for power comes from the puppet master (who neither you nor the puppet has the power to fight)?
One time I was talking to my lefty cousin and I said, “The left fights big business by giving government more power to fight them. The right fights big business by giving government less power to sell them.” I came up with the marionette metaphor to illustrate my point.
But my lefty cousin responded, “The right doesn’t fight big business.”
And that’s when I realized I needed to rework my metaphor a bit.
So see what you think of this:
There is a marionette show. The marionette is controlled by the evil puppeteer. If the puppeteer comes down to fight the audience, we have the numbers. He doesn’t stand a chance. But if we go backstage to fight the puppeteer, he knows the landscape better and will escape easily. If either of those happens, the puppet show collapses into violence and chaos.
The left is so focused on the evil puppeteer that they keep letting the puppet convince them it’s on their side. But no matter how much power you give to Pinocchio, it won’t make him a real boy.
“But the right defends the puppeteer,” they say.
No, the right has simply never heard a convincing argument for how to hold a puppet show without a puppeteer.
The right wing solution has always been to keep the puppet show small and boring. And it wasn’t until I talked to my cousin that I realized that that doesn’t work either.
The problem with a small, boring puppet show is that the audience will walk out. And if the audience walks out, the puppet show collapses into violence and chaos.
So here I find myself at yet another unsatisfying fence-sitter of a conclusion: we need the left and the right if we’re going to muddle our way forward and do the best we can. When we give the government any powers, rich business interests always and immediately find ways to abuse those powers. But the government is sometimes the best and only tool to do important jobs, and it cannot do them without certain powers.
So let’s see what we can do to make a better puppet show. But please, I beg you, stop handing the puppet weapons.
