Here's an email I got from a coworker, who obviously expected from me a sympathetic, "So true, so true."
I'll cut to the chase by saying the bufoon depicted here turns out to be a government bureaucrat intent on using his high tech toys to scam this cowboy out of a calf, although why this Gucci shoed bureaucrat would want a calf in the trunk of his BMW is never expalined.
A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out of the window and asked the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?" Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?"
There ensues a lengthy description of all the high tech satellite based technology this wimp is able to bring to bear on the problem of counting how many head of cattle Bob owns.
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says Bud.
He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then Bud says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?" The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"
"You're a bureaucrat with the U.S. Government", says Bud.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"
"No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you think you are; and you don't know a thing about how working people make a living - or about cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep... Now give me back my dog.
Thinking back on my decades in private practice in a suburb of Washington, DC, where many of my patients were "government bureaucrats," I was struck by the disparity between the reality of government workers, civil servants, the people vilified in this story and the reality of what these people are really like.
I had a patient, a fifty year old lady who arrived in my office with her maroon attache case and she was wearing a blue suit, but certainly not a designer outfit--she worked for the Department of Agriculture and they don't pay civil servants enough for designer labels. She worked on Mad Cow disease and her job was to go out and inspect herds and sometimes she had to tell farmers the bad news they had to kill off a lot of cattle. I asked her how she was received by these guys in overalls when she stepped out of her government K car--they don't drive BMW's when the government is paying.
She told me she grew up on a dairy farm. One night, when she was about nine, her brother was killed driving his truck back to the farm at night and at midnight they woke her up along with her sisters and younger brother and told them about their older brother. Then they all went back to bed and got awakened again at 4 AM to milk the cows.
I asked, "They didn't even let you sleep in that day? After your brother was killed?"
She said, "The cows didn't know that. They wouldn't have cared either. We did our chores, as always."
So when she arrived at a farm and started talking with the farmers, they very quickly learned who they were dealing with and that was pretty typical of the government workers I knew. They knew their stuff and they knew the impact they were having on the people they regulated and they knew how they were perceived.
That story with all it's focus on the foppish twit in his expensive car and clothes is someone's imaging of what the government is all about, not the reality. It's an image which evokes class resentment and the idea of the salt of the earth cowboy, who is actually more intelligent and competant than the privileged dingbat who has all the power and technology of the US government at his disposal. It's the Rush Limbaugh delusional state of what he'd like his enemies in the "Power elite" to be like.
But who are the government people you actually know?
When was the last time you saw the postman drive away from work in his BMW, wearing a Brioni suit?
Do the soldiers, even the officers, who are humping off to Afghanistan strike you as being overpaid?
Are the airport security people arrogant twits?
Do the air traffic controllers do such a terrible job they'd be likely to mistake a dog for a piper cub?
When was the last time you saw a government employee dressed in really expensive clothes--outside of the Congressmen and Senators?
Of all the government workers you might hate just because of the glossy finish, it's the very people we put there with our votes who are the most officious. Can you see John Boehner in that BMW? I know I can.
Even the Supreme Court Justices, who are a pretty sanctimonious lot, at least four of them are, do not make anything close to what the private lawyers who appear before them make.
SEC workers are daily faced with regulating people who make so much money, driving a BMW would look like slumming to them.
The federal prosecutor draws a salary; the defense attorney will demand everything the defendant in a capital case has--on the premise he's saving that man's life, if he gets an acquittal.
And the doctors at the National Institutes of Health, at the Veterans Administration Hospital are not in it for the money. Generally speaking, they are federal government employees because they got hooked on the job.
But that's not what Rush and Glen and Cowboy Bob want to hear. The real government worker is just not that much fun to skewer.
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