It’s amazing how often the great affairs of state play out in miniature in the domestic sphere.
For instance, here is Congress cobbling together a gargantuan stimulus bill that is as packed with government pork as a casing is with meat.
Urging this grotesque sausage along the production line is a president who in October told Americans he would “go through the federal budget line by line, page by page, [and] programs that don’t work, we should cut.”
Sure we should. We should cut those programs! We should cut them right away!
But we won’t. Certainly President Obama won’t, because when the time comes to cut there is always too much accreted bureaucracy in any government program, and my goodness, the last thing he wants is put more people out of work. It’s much easier, especially for a Democrat, to cram in a bit more sausage.
The corollary in the home is not the breakfast table, as you might imagine, but the playroom, a place that would have been known in antiquity as an Augean Stable.
Like most governments, most playrooms are a barely-contained riot of accumulated stuff that had seemed a good idea to buy at the time, but which is now mostly junk that takes up more space than its worth and is fantastically difficult to cull.
Like any government program, each toy in a playroom once had its passionate lobby group. It might have been you, the benign parental dictator, who decreed that toddlers needed puzzles.
When you bought that sweet tray of barnyard animals, each fitting into a little rabbit- or hen-shaped space, you never dreamed that 10 years later the pieces would have migrated into every drawer and box in the room so that no one could actually use the thing.
Yet, you remember taking it out of its package, and the look of delight that passed across your small child’s face when she first fitted the tractor back into its slot, and so, well, you can’t cut that program, can you? It may not work, strictly speaking, but too much is invested in it to throw it away now.
Or how about that rattling old toy robot? A much younger interest group lobbied for its funding, way back when. “Pleeeeease can we get the robot?” the activists had begged, “We neeeeed this robot!”
Other causes have since drawn their attention, but you can bet that they’d campaign fiercely to retain possession of the dead machine should some reformer come along and propose to chuck it out.
Like government entitlement programs, most playroom toys get into the house via a process of heartfelt good intentions (though the transfer of wealth is from the old to the young, rather than the confiscatory generational drift of our current Congress).
At least half the stuffed animals in our household, for instance, came from loving grandparents actuated by the very best of intentions.
That’s how the small stuffed llama, pig, raccoon and parrot came to dwell inside the red plastic bucket that used to hold Legos.
As President Obama has discovered, or perhaps always knew, it is much easier to add than it is to subtract. Thus, this week, while he was lecturing us all about the need to digest more pork, I decided to cut some.
I waded like a hopeful housewife-Hercules into our own Augean mess. There I stood, metaphorically wearing hip boots, with a heart freshly hardened against any importuning children or reproachful stuffed animals.
“Toys that don’t work,” I announced to the room, “Should be cut!” I even brandished a garbage bag, so as to show my resolve.
Several hours later, with shoulders slumped like a fatigued senator leaving a conference room, I departed that dread place. You will not be surprised to hear that the bag was almost empty.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
