Public Service. Ah, what  a noble phrase! It conjures up images of a virtuous but humble toiler in the vineyards of goodness, bringing succor to the weak and friendless.

Yeah, right.

In actuality, the toilers exercise their best efforts to oppress the weak and friendless. (As a general principle, this is a pretty good idea. Try oppressing the strong and well-connected, and you will have your butt kicked.) And as this program unfolds, the public grits its collective teeth and bears it.

Given this bitter reality, you might think that “service” is an ill chosen word. But perhaps not. Remember, when a rancher retains the services of a prize bull to provide his cows with progeny, the bull’s activity is also termed “service.” So in reality, the word is used with precisely the same meaning in both contexts, except that in the public case it is applied to a bovine public, rather than a bovine bovine.

There is a famous science fiction short story written in 1950 by Damon Knight (later turned into a Twilight Zone episode) entitled “To Serve Man.” In it, an alien race arrives on Earth, is extremely friendly, offers to help humans solve all their problems, and offers to bring a few humans back to their home world. During their visit, the aliens leave a book lying around, which is written in an incomprehensible language. A philologist begins to attempt to translate the book, and gets as far as the title which is, of course, “To Serve Man.” How nice. However, just as the first shipload of humans lifts off Earth, the philologist arrives at the spaceport, too late, with the unwelcome news that the book is a cookbook.

Taking our guidance from agriculture and literature, we conclude that a public servant is designed  to both ravish us and consume our substance. Bulls eventually tire of dalliance, and retire to a life of munching grass before they are converted into ox-tail soup. Cannibals eventually become sated, and drop dead either of Kreuz-Jacob disease (like mad cow disease, only it comes from eating people) or of obesity. Public servants on the other hand, like the Marquis de Sade, are never satisfied.

But there is a big, big upside!

There is a limit to how much any indvidual can be ravished and financially drained. Hence, as the public servants shift into overdrive, their victims are finally reduced to impoverished slaves from whom no more can be wrung, but for whom provision must still be made.

That’s not so bad. An impoverished slave has precious few decisions to make; every crisis he or she faces is in the NMP category – Not My Problem. Impoverished slaves do not have to decide between different automobile models. Impoverished slaves do not need to make monthly mortgage payments. Impoverished slaves do not need to select vacation destinations. Impoverished slaves do not need to pay income taxes, sales taxes, real estate taxes, or tax taxes. On the other hand, they can still eat, sleep, and reproduce in vegetative comfort, like a french fry on the hoof.

As far as I can tell, potatoes are happy.

In 1958, a newly minted chanteuse named Connie Francis released her debut album, whose title song was “Who’s Sorry Now?” In this particular case, the singer is expressing refreshing schadenfreude, gleefully telling her former boyfriend, who has just been dumped by his latest light o’ love, that she rejoices in his misery. One feels that she would rather be singing her ditty to the pile of hamburger resulting from his being fed through the wood chipper.

The song title has retained a remarkable currency, and we have advanced to the point where we can give a definitive answer:

EVERYBODY!

We are doggie paddling through a cesspool of apologies. Does a golfer say that he is thinking about moving out of California because the taxes are too high? He must produce an apology. Does a politician boink his favorite racehorse? He must produce an apology. And worse, we are supposed to accept the apology, and say “Go and sin no more,” except in the not-so-rare case that what he or she is apologizing for is a third degree felony.

Why should we apologize for anything! Gibbs, the character on NCIS who utlilizes his Marine training to blow away hordes of malefactors, tells his worshipful staff “Never apologize — it shows weakness.” He’s right.

Public discourse continues to coarsen, the “f-bomb” being dropped on TV with depressing regularity. Wardrobe malfunctions (first popularized by Janet Jackson during the half time show at Super Bowl XXXVIII) have been rendered increasingly unnecessary by the ubiquity of attire not unlike that worn by the yummies who populate the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. You would think this indicates that it is becoming well nigh impossible to offend. You would be wrong.

Look, anything you say in our collapsing civilization is guaranteed to offend somebody. Our skins have become thinner than gold leaf.  [Nerd Note: that’s 1/25,000 of an inch.] You can’t even use the word “niggardly” without causing an uproar. By the way, it has NOTHING to do with the N-word; it comes from the Old Norse word “nig” which means stingy. But use it in any context whatsoever, and the PC police will be breaking down your door, and the media will demand that you issue an apology.

It will only get worse.

Outside the realm of reproduction and its associated fun activities, the realm of acceptable anything is shrinking at an accelerating rate. Soon it will go beyond the realm of politics.

How about your taste in food. You say that you like chocolate? Apologize immediately. You don’t like eggplant? Apologize immediately.

Transportation is next. You like big cars? Apologize immediately. You like small cars? Apologize immediately. You don’t like any cars? Apologize immediately.

But this will all work out for the best! Ultimately, you will not be able to say anything at all without apologizing, so that everybody will be forced to SHUT UP! We will no longer be inundated by drivel! YAY!

I hope I haven’t upset you by describing this prospect  But if I have…

I apologize.

Jack Kennedy spent his term so stoned on painkillers to treat his ruptured disk that he approved the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Ronald Reagan spent both of his terms nodding off in jelly-bean-induced comas. Barack Obama spends more time on vacation than he does in the White House.

So who actually runs the country? The cabinet.

These worthies represent the most skilled sycophants the Maximum Leader can identify. While a few actually know something useful, a surprising number lead their elephantine bureacracies into the future with panache and total ignorance of the subjects their Departments are supposed to oversee. Would you like to be Secretary of Commerce? Then just contribute ten million dollars to the super-PAC that gets your man elected, and you will have your appointment in two shakes of a deposit slip.

Of course, that’s not enough if you belong to the wrong interest group. Increasingly, cabinet appointments provide the opportunity for Dear Leader to demonstrate how inclusive he is. There are now female positions, black positions, hispanic positions, union positions.

That’s why confirmation hearings are so much fun!

Not only do these folks stumble through substantive questions by reciting focus-group-tested sound bites, but they excel in denying that they ever said the inconvenient things that raise their ugly heads, even if there is a video of the politically incorrect comment being  projected on the hearing room wall. They follow the Groucho Marx dictum: “What are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes.” More often than not, the eyes do NOT have it.

Fortunately, most cabinet officials are too busy traveling around and collecting hundred grand speaking fees to wreak all the havoc their non-existent skill sets could facilitate.

So who actually runs the country? The chief bureaucrats.

Yes, that’s right, the devotees of CYA, counting the seconds until they can retire and collect their excessive pensions and enjoy their gold-plated medical benefits. There they sit, writing ever more convoluted rules to govern our every action. But they have very little experience in the industries they oppress, so they have to look outside for advice.

So who actually runs the country? The lobbyists.

With the exception of Jack Abramoff and a few other throwbacks, lobbyists are not bagmen. The are hypnotists. They ooze their way through the corridors of power, forked tongues tasting the air, searching for the weak-minded and persuadable. However, it’s getting to be a tougher and tougher job, what with silly little items like the Freedom of Information Act, which uncovers so many things that ought to be decently hidden. So the lobbyists are losing power.

So who actually runs the country?

Nobody.

We are in free fall, jerking spasmodically like a recently decapitated chicken. Our supposed leaders writhe excruciatingly across the canvas of the televison screen, assuring us that they know what they are doing. They don’t.

On the other hand, this is really good!

What would things be like if these turkeys could actually run things? We would all be marching down the street in lockstep, singing songs of solidarity, behaving properly, sort of like the Stepford Wives.

Incompetence has its virtues.

A few (well, many) years ago, Francois Truffaut, the great artsy French director,  made a film based on Ray Bradbury’s science fiction novel “Fahrenheit 451.” The premise of the novel was that a future society would ban the reading of books, and would enforce this dictat by burning them. The title came from the fact that the flashpoint of book paper is (surprise, surprise) 451 degrees Fahrenheit (or 233 degrees Celsius if your are European, or 506 degrees absolute if you are a science weenie). But that’s not the point here.

The point is that in the film, everywhere that you looked there was a big screen television set.

Like today.

Practically every watering hole has become a sports bar, so that it is impossible to drink yourself into pleasant oblivion without a soundtrack provided by nattering sports commentators. Half of them are retired professional athletes, whose vocabularly is retricted to phrases like “he’s giving 110%.” This is, of course, mathematically impossible, and reflects the fact that the sports figure majored in kinesthesia while in college. [N.B. “College” is a synonym for “farm club.”] Kinesthesia is a subject that, in a more truthful age, was called “gym.” But you do not need a command of fifth grade arithmetic to make twenty million dollars a year by throwing or catching a ball of some kind, or merely beating your opponent to a bloody pulp.

And what comes squirting off the screen, in addition to high resolution pictures of overpaid gorillas prancing about? Food ads! And not just one at a time, oh no. They come in continuous volleys, three, four, five, one after another, adjuring you to stuff your fat face with yet another cholesterol and carbohydrate goodie. No wonder we are all fatties! Our bodies evolved their hard-wired programming during the Ice Age, when you had better eat everything you encountered on the exceedingly rare occasions when you actually encountered something (or someone, perhaps) edible. We are all Pavlov’s dogs, drooling uncontrollably at the sight of food. More, more, we cry!

And if we are not watching so-called sporting events, what are we subjected to? Cooking shows. (Peculiarly enough, most people who watch cooking shows have never cooked a meal in their life. They go out to a restaurant for 92% of their meals, and for the other 8%, they order takeout.) And much of the time the shows are not just animated recipe books. They are insane productions dressed up with the trappings of professional football, or perhaps mediaeval tournaments.

And we don’t only suffer this onslaught in bars. Our homes are filled with a multiplicity of televison screens. Restaurants are covered with television screens. Airports are covered with televison screens. Airplanes have television screens at your seat. There are urinals in mens’ rooms surmounted by television screens.

There is no escape.

Aren’t we lucky?

We no longer need to wait for an otherwise unemployed stumblebum to parade past us on the sidewalk, carrying a signboard proclaiming “Eat at Joe’s.”

If we choose our location carefully, so that we are part of the ultratypical market used to test products, we can receive endless previews of the latest innovation, such as chocolate and artichoke soup. (It sounds revolting to me, but de gustibus non disputandum est. Or chacon a son gout. Or whatever floats your boat.) Or watch the newest advertising campaign, which features half naked cuties wiggling about and licking long, thin food products.

I hate to break this off, but I have to head out to the kitchen. I have just been seized by an uncontrollable hankering for pickled herring.

As you walk through one major airport in the Northeast, you will encounter a sign in the form of a yellow rhombus, on which is painted a bomb. Not a modern bomb; rather, it is an old fashioned kind of bomb: round, with a protruding sputtering fuse. A hundred years ago, anarchists, dressed in top hats and capes, sporting scruffy beards and shouting “Death to the Oppressors,” used to heave them at fashionable ladies. Sort of like today, except for the changes in headgear and slogans. Of course, the bomb is surrounded by a circle which is crossed by a slash,  like a “No Smoking” or “No Eating” or “No Spitting on the Grass” (just kidding, but I’d love to see the ideograph for THAT one) indicating, I suppose, that you should leave your bomb at home. It is typical of the ossified bureacracy of a collapsing civilization to think that this sign will provide us poor flyers with an added level of safety.

But there are some signs that are useful. For example, when you walk into a bar in Boston, you will be greeted with a yellow rectangular sign, printed in black block letters, that begins “WARNING.” This is a word that never gives me a good feeling. In the same typeface, the sign continues with a citation to the Massachusetts code that provides for your hanging, drawing, and quartering if you are apprehended drinking an adult beverage and are not yet of the legal age to become a disgustingly sloppy drunk. Well, the punishment is not quite that severe, but you get my drift.

The reason that this sign is so much fun is that, when you enter a bar in Austin, Texas, you will encounter a superficially similar sign. Once again, it is rectangular, yellow, printed in block letters, and starts with that same ominous “WARNING.” However, as you read the following text, you are disabused of the notion that Austin is like Boston, looking out for the morals of its youth. No no no! The text of the Austin sign informs you of the dire penalty if you bring your GUN into the bar. I never read far enough to get to the description of the penalty, but I suspect it involves your being shot. And if you disregard the sign, get into a dispute, and plug somebody, I also suspect that you will be acquitted when you say “Judge, he needed killin’.”

When you enter a restaurant in California, you are greeted by a sign, white this time, which informs you that everything served in this restaurant has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals. Bon appetit! The sign does not mention, of course, that the laboratory animal was a rat forced to eat a daily dose of twelve pounds of whatever chemical is the worry of the month before developing cancer, which occurred about ten milliseconds before its stomach exploded from the volume of stuff squirted into it.

It keeps getting better. McDonald’s, of “Super Size Me” fame, is now putting calorie counts on its placemats, and other purveyors of similar health foods are following suit.

In the not too distant future, we can expect the introduction of signs which are even more fun.

At the entrance to a hat shop: “The last guy to try on that hat probably had head lice.”

At the entrance to a power tool shop: “You don’t really need those fingers, do you?”

At the entrance to the doctor’s office: “Medical Malpractice Lawyer One Floor Up.”

and my personal favorite:

At the entrance to a by-the-hour motel: “If you sleep with her, it will fall off.”

Full disclosure is a beautiful thing.