Corpses and Little League Fields

During the French and Indian War, starting around 1708, bounties were offered for the scalps of Native Americans. Each side paid for the scalps of different qroups -- the French for Iroquois scalps, the English for Abenaki scalps. Scalps for money lasted, intermittently, until the late 1870s, in different parts of the country. The practice was finally abandoned for lack of demand, not lack of supply.

The big problem with scalps for money was that the whites could not tell whether the scalp was from a member of a friendly tribe or an enemy tribe. Woo-hoo!! Open season on members of any tribe who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lo, the poor Indian.

Now, forward almost 200 years. Iraq, and the contractors. There are many, many issues with contractors in Iraq. Questions:

How does it make sense to pay contractors so much more than soldiers?

What is the system to make contractors accountable (and we are so in love with accountability) if they are murderous beyond their duties?

What sort of military control do we have over these people?

What on earth do we want these people to do?

There are more, I suppose, but let's start with those.

Contractors are overwhelmingly used for protection of diplomats and visitors. Contractors and their agencies are paid by the hour. A lot. The longer the war goes, the more they make. Not exactly a recipe for quick success.

The rationale is that we just have too few soldiers to be used for what, after all, is usually a mundane task. At first glance, this makes some sense. Soldiers fight the enemy, not watch doors.

Let's think about it another way, like the 18th century folks did. They had sensational success; their enemies were completely wiped out. We should be so successful!!!

Let's reverse roles. Soldiers, formerly in the field shooting people, moved to guard duty, taking care of the people and buildings we most value. Contractors moved to field operations. And the payment system changed. Contractors paid per corpse. How do we tell if the corpse was an enemy? Easy. The same way we do now!!! Success guaranteed!!! Lo, the poor Al-Qaeda!!!

I am not opposed to privatizing. Not at all. I just want privatizing to be successful, and I want privatizing to lessen the role of the state in many areas now ignored. Contractors in Iraq may have been a bad idea, but no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Look around. What is the least noticed, but most necessary, function of local government? Easy again. Parks and fields. Particularly Little League fields, also used for adult softball.

I propose we offer towns good money to sell all their fields to us, along with an agreement that they will build no more. The towns already have a monopoly on fields, and get paid for their use. Easy stuff, particularly these days, with towns starving for cash.

Then we can jack up the user fee astronomically. Yessss!! A monopoly!!! The dream of every business. Hey, let somebody try to compete. With the price of land, no way!!! We do away with the town rec person, who has such enormous power and is widely despised. Instead, we get a scheduling web site. The software is easily available. Problems? Call customer service, in India. Nothing is more important to adult Americans than softball.

In the deal, we get catering rights for the fields -- something not even thought of before private industry took over. And we subcontract the serving of decent, healthy food for the little folks and the big folks during and after games. No more sugary treats. Beef Wellington? No, not so upscale. Deli platters, maybe.

In my town, there is a statue, a magnet for tourists. They stand in front of it and have their pictures taken, often by passers-by. Well, the mall does the same thing, with Santa. And charges the big bucks. And so will we. Our statue is there year round. Plus food stands!! Plus souvenir stands!! Plus a dunk-the-Brit booth!! The possibilities are endless, and so are the profits. Or course, not all towns have an attraction like the statue. We can be creative with parks, though.

Fire department? Already privatized. Street repair? Already privatized. Stick to parks. User fees for dog...performance? Alert Reader groans at inevitable appearance of poop in the chapter. Well, too hard to enforce anyway.

Schools are a sticking point. The charter school movement has left the mouth-breathing right salivating and producing other body fluids; finally, a chance to crush the teacher unions, which they seem to despise with a virulent hatred. There seems to be no such disdain of police and firefighter unions, for some reason. Perhaps the collision of beliefs.

But.....schools are tough. Seems easy, but you end up dealing with amphetamine-addled howler monkey parents, who won't be put off with a help line to India. They have a murderous rage, inflamed by the least issue. I wouldn't put it past them to hold corporate officers personally responsible for pain inflicted on their children. We can't have that. Stay away from schools.

Ah, the point. The commons are, well, common, usually for a good reason. Local institutions we hold dear, such as Little League, are not so easy to privatize, and are held in common for the community, much as sheep-grazing commons were in the early days of settlement.

There are also beloved national institutions immune from privatization. Soldiers are not in it for the money; we are taught to despise mercenaries, starting with the Hessian troops who were on the British side in the Revolutionary war. Soldiers are part of the commons. I don't know how the Iraq contractors have been able to escape the mercenary label. I always thought that folks fighting just for pay were mercenaries.

Teachers are treasured until they reveal themselves as "in it for the money" like the rest of us, and are no longer part of the commons. Same with stern but kindly librarians; they are the first to go, since they are old and cost too much on the health insurance. Same with the addled brother-in-law of the town manager, whose duties focus around field lines in the summer, and shoveling out town hall in the winter.

Where will it end? I will not allow the blog to be sold off to the highest bidder. Well......