Dan Calabrese

Your government hard at work.

Sort of shatters the image, if you embraced it to begin with, of earnest, dutiful feds conducting themselves with the utmost sense of high-minded purpose. Hey! When we’re driving nuclear weapons around . . . people will get out of the way!

Anything valuable in the car? Well, uh . . .

This seems to be a symptom of the bureaucratism that afflicts everyone in large organizations after awhile, but especially public-sector ones. And while I’m sure some of you will point out that these were private contractors, the real point is that the culture of any organization – public or private – is what lends itself to this sort of thing.

Letting the work out to contractors allows the middle-management department paper-pusher to claim plausible denial. And being an outside contractor means you know that no one is really watching you all that carefully.

By the way, if all of American culture had not so completely intertwined alcohol with “unwinding” and relaxation, would this still have happened?

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