Having retired from Congress, and therefore now being able to speak his mind freely, which, as we know, always has been his problem, Barney Frank is taking a little heat forsomething he saidin the aftermath of the murders in Boston on Monday.

"Let's be very grateful that we had a well-funded, functioning government...It is very fashionable in America and has been for some time to criticize government, belittle public employees, talk about their pensions, talk about what people think is their excessive health care, here we saw government in two ways perform very well...You know, I never was as a member of Congress, one of the cheerleaders for less government, lower taxes," he explained. "No tax cut would have helped us deal with this — or will help us recover. This is very expensive."

"We're not asking people, 'Do you have have private health insurance or not? Can you afford this or not?' Maybe the government is going to have to pay for it. And this is an example of why we need — if we want to be a civilized people — to put some of our resources into a common pool so we are able to deal with this. And to deal with it, you can't simply be responsive once it happens...this is a terrible day for our society, but a day when I hope people will understand the centrality of having a government in place with the resources...At a time like this, no one thinks about saving pennies. But going forward, I hope people aren't going to think, you spent these tens and tens of millions of dollars — that would probably be a low estimate — let's just take that out of everything we have going forward. This is an example of why we need to provide the resources for our common good."

There is not a single remarkable thing in there. There is not the shadow of an untruth. There is not a whisper of a misstatement or the hint of a lie. There is a wildness in our politics these days, and that wildness is centered primarily, and to varying degrees, around the notion that government is an alien thing. It is a wildness that has become a faith held by zealots, who feel alienated by faceless forces beyond their control, and exploited in our politics by the people who control many of those same forces, and by the politicians in their formal and informal employ. There is an entire media culture — across all platforms, to use that most odious of New Media concepts — dedicated to creating a world in which it can turn an unholy buck by letting that wildness run free. And, I am sorry to say, the wildness is most manifest on the political right. If this makes respectable conservatives — or those that fashion themselves to be respectable conservatives — uncomfortable, then they should do a better job at recognizing the effective limits of their problems so they don't always have to become our problems.

Consider, for example, Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, who would like to bump himself up into the Senate, except that he has to get past two true whackadoos among his fellow Republican congresscritters, Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey, to do it. (In any sane political party, both Broun and Gingrey have said enough nutty shit in public to end half a dozen careers.) Kingston's a smiling, affable sort, and he doesn't run around in camo, diving behind bushes to "stand post" against the mailman. But this is what he said a while back on the topic of government waste.

"Surely in this budget time when the governor of Arkansas calls for some - the National Guard to come to his inauguration, I just think we've got to take a pass," Kingston said. "The Boston Marathon, we got to take a pass. Out of all those deployments, we got to take a pass."

How do you think he feels this morning?

"Any time you're spending military resources, you want to ask the question of, what is the reason you're putting the resources there? And if the Massachusetts governor determines he needs to do that, then that makes sense," Kingston said in an interview.

They're still mopping up the blood on Boylston Street, so Jack Kingston of Georgia is OK now with us using his money to secure the crime scene. Thanks, Jack. Really. That means a lot. It came back to bite him in the ass today? Good. Let him go out and run in his primary now on the platform that his two main opponents are crazy-bananas, that they are examples of the prion disease that's rotting the brain of his party, and that they have no place in any serious discussion of any serious issue. Let him do that. Let hundreds of them do that. Let them atone for creating and sustaining a political culture that has damaged the country. That's their job. Not ours.

I will make you the Toby Ziegler bet — all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets— that, back in 2012, when he made his original comments, Kingston fastened on the Boston Marathon because, in the political culture within which he was raised, that same political culture that is the source of almost all the wildness in our politics, and that same political culture within which the basic principle of the wildness (Government is an alien thing.) is carefully tended and nurtured in a hundred ways, he got to say "Boston," which is a conjuring word summoning up "liberal," and "Dukakis" and "welfare" and all the other spells that so bewitch the people who live in that same culture. (Remember, Kingston said it in March of 2012, and I don't think the Boston Marathon just happened to pop into his head because it was a month away.) I can speak for a great number of people up here when I tell you that we're just a little tired of being used as a heavy-bag workout for every third-rate radio gasbag, every shoeless Bible-banging preacher, and every pecker-wood politician from hell to breakfast just because we have good public schools, decent public parks, and places we all can walk for free in the woods or by the sea, and a semblance of a decent health-care system. (Thanks again, Mitt!) We are tired of apologizing for having public servants and first-responders who make a decent wage and who work for us, and not for Fire Departments, Inc. in Tennessee. Not only that, but Michael Dukakis is a good and decent man and the country would be better off if it listened to him about high-speed rail.

We will not be embarrassed that we share these things in common just because, elsewhere, governors let children starve, and the sick get sicker, and preach of self-reliance while cashing checks from faceless millionnaires. We will not be shamed by the yahoo creationism of the Louisiana public schools, or the cruel neglect of health-care in Texas, or the corporate chop-shop that is being created out of the state of Wisconsin these days. We will not feel slighted that there are more sweatshops elsewhere than there may be here. We will not join your race to the bottom. It has to stop somewhere. It might as well be here.

We realize there is corruption in our systems. (The last several previous Speakers of the Massacusetts House in a row have all been convicted of one felony or another. Top that, Louisiana!) We realize there is waste. We howl and rail against it as loudly as anyone does. We mock its beneficiaries, and mock ourselves for being foolish enough not to see it happening. Our uncles get us jobs on the country road crews. We still have a Governor's Council, a vestigial Rivendell for political elves that last was truly relevant to anything shortly before they threw the tea into the harbor. But the essential point is that even the corruption and waste in our government belongs to us because the government belongs to us. We won't give it away, or sell it off wholesale, or exchange it for a bag of magic beans proffered by the political hucksters fronting for oligarchical money power. There is corruption and waste in Scott Walker's Wisconsin, and in "Bobby" Jindal's Louisiana. But you can't see it. It's the product of backroom deals and corporate brigandage beyond the reach of democratic accountability. That has been the great triumph of the conservative political revolution — it has managed to privatize political corruption.

We mourn now, because what happened Monday is still too close in time. We grieve, because it was only yesterday that we learned the names of the dead. We grieve and we mourn and we do all these things because that is what citizens of a political commonwealth do at times like this. But there are limits to grief and there are limits to mourning. We will go back to being what we were before. We will return to our good public schools and our decent public parks. We will walk again for free in the woods and along the sea. We will place ourselves in the care of our decent health-care system. (Thanks again, Mitt!) We will pay again for our public servants and our first-responders, and some of them will game our systems, and we'll raise a great howl, and mock the suckers who got caught, but we will not be conned by the grifters who are trying to make a Mississippi of us all.

We are not what they think we are. We are not the myths they've made of us. We are what we are, the Commonwealth Of Massachusetts, God save it, goddammit.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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