MISSOURI WATCH: DETOURS ON THE ROAD TO OZ

Like Dorothy, traveling on a dusty road in Kansas headed for the Land of Oz, Americans today seem as bewildered as the young lady who found herself in strange company as she sought out the Wizard's wisdom. Poll after poll shows that, except in rare instances, Americans have lost their way toward achieving an effective, functioning democracy, something that our second president, John Adams, said was not only impossible but was doomed to failure.

Why today's sense of failure, this foreboding that the affairs of state are amiss and past the point of correction?

The partisans among us will insist that all fault can be laid at the feet of the opposition. High-minded Democrats will insist that a spirit of meanness rests in the hearts of Republicans, while the party of Lincoln quickly answers that their opponents never faced a problem they didn't believe could not be resolved by more freedom-dampening programs and more taxpayer-earned money.

Even if both parties are correct, such conditions could not create the malaise that fogs our national conscience and threatens to erode public confidence in the ability of our society to resolve its serious problems. A poll recently undertaken by the nonpartisan Center on Public Attitudes, reveals that nearly eight in ten Americans -- 79 percent -- believe that elected officials would make better decisions if they thought more deeply about what they were doing. This is an interesting view, for it focuses a revealing light on the competence of men and women we have elected to office. This same survey reveals that persons interviewed believe their elected officials make good decisions less than half the time, and further believe that these decisions are not the ones Americans as a whole would make. In other words, the overwhelming majority of Americans believes that most of the time governments make decisions that are not correct or are based on unrealistic expectations or are grounded in false assumptions.

Now for the survey's clincher: a vast majority of those polled believe that the decisions made by elected officials do not serve the public's best interests; rather the interests served are those representing partisan organizations, big business, big labor, the super-wealthy and ideological zealots. Eight in ten respondents said society would be better off "if our leaders followed the views of the public more closely," while just 10 percent said we would be worse off.

Illustrating the current trend of public cynicism, 58 percent agreed that public officials don't care much what ordinary citizens think, a statistic that has increased from only 36 percent in 1964.

If a vast majority of "ordinary citizens" feel that many of the decisions made by elected officials are wrong and furthermore, a majority believe these same officials really don't care what the public thinks, then perhaps we have identified the cause of today's critical judgment of representative democracy. Remember, it was the above-mentioned John Adams who said, "Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide."

Whether in Washington or Jefferson City, we have no shortage of bad-result, politically grounded decisions, programs and, as Nikita Khrushchev once observed, "bridges where there is no river."

At the federal level, we have engaged in diplomatic and military exercises that have no remote connection to the future of our republic, whether it was a war to stem communism that was far weaker than our leaders knew, to becoming a domestic police force inside sovereign nations. Under the guise of national security we are sending tax dollars to shore up foreign economies to protect the bottom line of domestic corporate profits, all in the name of protecting U.S. currency.

Within the walls of Washington's offices, we run our government with a recklessness that would not be tolerated in our homes; our national leaders promise untested measures for minorities in order to attract votes; our federal legislature approves budgets in amounts no one understands and in final forms that no one comprehends. As Sen. Robert Byrd said after Congress passed, well past the deadline, the most recent federal budget: "Nobody but God knows what it contains."

If we are engaging in foreign policies that are life-threatening, investment policies that are meant to maximize corporate profits; budget policies that no one comprehends and social policies that do not strengthen the national community, no wonder we have lost our once-held self-government faith.

At the state level, we are now witnessing the end of desegregation plans that have, by federal court whim, redistributed the educational wealth of every child in Missouri. Because of past official mistakes and miscalculations, we have distribute 44.6 percent of all available monies for public school education to only 9.1 percent of all students, leaving the remaining 90.9 percent in underfunded programs.

The state has just reneged on a program begun just seven years ago that promised, for an increase in user taxes, to bring needed highway improvements into every corner of Missouri, while diverting some fo these same taxes to transportation uses that can never become self-supporting.

While carrying out these and other self-defeating programs, the state continues to encourage the almost useless investment by middle- and low-income workers in games of chance and other gambling-for-profit enterprises that only enhance the frustration, anger and poverty of these same citizens.

As Will Rogers once said, "There is no credit in being a comedian, when you have the whole government working for you, all you have to do is report the facts.

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.