One of the giant “Green” movements of our time involved the terror of burying plastics that would last thousands of years. No such panic was raised about putting rock in the ground, which is there for millions of years.

A fund-raising against rock would be seen as silly. The Plastic Panic was Idealistic and Intellectual.

More important, the Plastic Panic made money.

It has begun to occur to the most amazing people that there is nothing Idealistic about old white women having to be strip-searched and all of us taking off our shoes and belts at an airport. What DID occur to the public was that pilots should have guns up front.

They don’t.

Those who get paid for panicking fought it, and pilots don’t want something else to worry about. The Pistol Panickers have essentially won that battle. The only person with a gun on a plane will be a terrorist.

When you’re still young and fresh to the political game, this insane business can bother you. You see the Public Interest and you decry those who waste our resources on nonsense and worse.

But when you start asking, “Where does this information come from?” you calm down. Fundraising is based on the latest news, the latest moan of misery.

The slogan of money-raising and new legislation and all the rest is “something must be done.” So our “solution” is very much that of boys is when they cannot attain the Playboy models.

They do SOMETHING. In any headline crisis, hundreds of thousands of people are paid to do SOMETHING.

The somethings are very similar, except that the one the boys engage in is harmless and costless.

Any crisis brings forth hundreds of millions of billions of dollars. Never yet have experts, the people who let the crisis occur in the first place, ever le a crisis go to waste, any more than any heterosexual boy has ever thrown away an old Playboy.

This would normally be seen as a joke, comparing boy’s masturbation to the deadly serious business of Crisis Management.

The reason you see it as a joke is because you do not speak the language of politics fluently.

It IS funny, but only if you recognize who is the butt of the joke. The gang in the Medieval Clown’s getup is the public, which always listens raptly to the opinion of anyone who has let a crisis develop in the very field he has been paid a fortune to be an expert in.

Doing Something is for little boys who find a hidden Playboy Magazine.

Doing Something is not for adults.