The sun is showing today in very small patches and strips, but the ground is still muddy and my laundry, which has been hanging on the line for two days already, is still damp. It's early February, and after weeks of bitter cold, the coldest of which seemed to take place during our trip to Krakow, it has warmed up into what must be the low 50s.

Whenever I become fed up with the state of things in America, the first impulse is always to wipe away and start from scratch, to expunge and bleach the temporary condition and head back to the start, when the system and the government and the people were fresh, before too much arbitrary sediment had accumulated (see Hawthorne's The Custom House). I doubt that is ever an impulse in Europe, except for those countries that are just reemerging after being subsumed under totalitarian states, and even then the urge is not to scratch everything and start from nothing. The urge is instead to return to how things would have been, how they had been before WWII, or WWI, or however far you have to go back in order to find the golden age. For the Czech Republic, it's between the wars, because that was their only time of independence, a little golden age between the Hapsburgs and the Germans, later to be handed over to the Soviets. For the Balkan states, you have to go further back, and even then you might not find the golden age, because for them it was the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs arguing and alternately conquering and reconquering them for centuries, and probably, if I knew my history a little better, I could say that it was the Romans before them.

Self-determination. Something that Americans rarely think about, because for almost the whole history of our nation, we have been self-determined. In fact, it is the act of declaring self-determination that we mark as our independence day, not anything to do with the actual fighting or winning of the war. We are, so we think, impervious to external attack and external influence, and we aim to keep it that way. Am I just hung up on the people vs. government issue? I keep coming back to that, have been for years. I keep getting angry at how those in control, whatever their party affiliation, embrace the noble lie, making sure the people have just enough to eat and just enough to hope for to keep them happy in their regular lives of eating and working and screwing and making babies and trying to retire. When things are too bleak there is revolution, or if not revolution, then unrest and political shakeups and uncertainty. This is not what we want. It is in the best interest of the politicians to make sure that times are calm and uneventful, that there are no crises. People react and vote you out of office when crises arise. From what I can tell, the political parties differ only in how much they want to make the people happy. For the Republicans (ignoring the rhetoric and looking just at their actions), business and war-making are the top priorities. For the Democrats, at least health care and job security make it somewhere on the list of priorities.

Maybe this is the wrong way to approach it. For the people who make the rules, it's not an issue of people vs. government. I'm looking at symptoms and trying to deduce the policies that produce them, which is only possible when every policy is single-minded and 100% effective. And, at least to some extent, I do understand the need for various noble lies. The truth is that we do need to spend a decent amount of money on the military and on national defense. The truth is that the world is somewhat Hobbesian, that in some ways it is a zero-sum game when it comes to international relations. The truth is that most of the citizens of this country cannot or do not want to spend their free time debating the merits of multilateralism versus unilateralism. So they watch reality TV and politicians appoint and reappoint each other to and from various boards of directors and take care of the messy details with which we do not want to concern ourselves. You get the government you deserve, I have heard said.