People Generally Preferred Watching Television to Seeking Reform
The Federal Bureau of Government Incompetency was created early in the 21st Century, at about the same time that a consortium of universities began publishing the Journal of Public Sector Graft and Outright Thievery.
Both efforts arose out of the conduct of the ill-fated war in Iraq launched by the Bush 43 administration and a spate of unusually blatant corruption scandals involving elected members of Congress and their aides and executive branch officials.
While both the FBGI and the “Thievery Journal,” as it came to be called, endured for nearly a decade, in the end most experts agreed that “tepid” or “comme ci, comme �a” best summed up their overall impact on American life.
“The core of the problem was that the American people at that time, and still even now, don’t give a flying you-know-what about either government bungling or public officials stealing money right before their eyes,” said Hollister Swagbotham, professor of government at Harvard University, assessing the impact of the FBGI and the Thievery Journal a decade after their creation.
With a staff of nearly 10,000 employees and an annual budget approaching $1 billion at its zenith, FBGI made its biggest impression with a five-year study of how the Bush 43 administration bungled the war in Iraq. It chronicled in painful detail a host of incompetency-plagued decisions, from the failure to impose order on Iraqi civil society immediately after Iraq’s government fell to the inability to deliver simple services to the populace, such as adequate, uninterrupted electricity.
FBIG also studied the government’s blatant lack of preparedness to deal with North American natural disasters, such as floods, wildfires, hurricanes and a Biblical plague of locusts that decimated crops and suburban lawns in the Midwest beginning in 2008.
FBIG’s eventual demise appeared to arise from its own prescient conclusion about the nature of American governance at that time: politicians were so focussed on getting elected and corporate interests were so equally dedicated to furthering their interests that the American people turned away from even caring about the effectiveness of their government.
Ultimately, the body politic concluded that the system was so badly broken that it could not be fixed and turned its attention to mass media entertainment.
The Thievery Journal’s signature contribution was its investigation of corruption among American contractors in Iraq and the blatant stealing that went on as one bungled rebuilding attempt after another failed. The Journal ultimately placed a price tag of $950 billion wasted over a four-year period in Iraq.
But that finding barely stirred a ripple of public interest, let alone outrage. The public had turned inward to their 120-inch HD flat panel television screens and the 1,000 channels of entertainment, including an off-shore recreation of Ancient Rome’s gladiatorial combat, in which participants actually fought to the death.
The program, named simply “Gore,” came to have the highest ratings in television history. It was estimated that eight of every ten Americans watched the bloody and deadly flights at least twice a week.