Havre de Grace. -- In the financial morass of Washington D.C., where the current year's budget deficit is three-quarters of a billion dollars and growing, a seven-member majority of the city council is defying the mayor and proposing to -- cut taxes?
Who are these heretics? Haven't they been reading their daily newspaper editorials? As public officials, as Democrats, and especially as Washingtonians, they're supposed to know that cutting taxes in order to revive a stricken economy is 1) bad economics, 2) bad politics and 3) immoral.
And amazingly, the tax-cutting council members don't seem to be right-wing Christians, Idaho survivalists or nutcakes who suspect that extraterrestrials are taking over the country. They're not even Republicans. They're ordinary people who have just realized that you don't help an out-of-control government by giving in to its endless pleas for more money.
These are the sort of folks who dominated the national elections last fall, and the fact that they're standing up to be counted on the Washington City Council, of all places, shows just how far-reaching the November Revolution was.
The District of Columbia tax cutters' open defiance of Mayor Marion Barry and all the principles of Democratic orthodoxy so astonished the Washington Post that it put the rebels on the front page last Sunday. Upon inspection of the new council majority, the Post discovered that its members are, on average, 16 years younger than their pro-tax colleagues.
Well, big surprise. Revolutions aren't usually led by the elderly, not even by those who considered themselves revolutionary in their youth. Thus the forces of Newt Gingrich are younger, as well as stronger and more passionate in their beliefs, than were those of Tom Foley.
"All successful revolutions," wrote none other than John Kenneth Galbraith in 1977, "are the kicking in of a rotten door." It's a vivid description of what's going on all over America today. And as the tax-cutting commandos seize power on the D.C. city council, the termites are scurrying for cover.
In Maryland, the door hasn't been kicked in yet, but the boards are spongy and it's beginning to splinter. Just be patient, Governor Glendening pleads through the keyhole to the gathering guerrillas of the Sauerbreista movement, and I'll let you in soon. Just have a seat out there in the hallway, senores, and wait another two or three years.
The gubernatorial/establishment message to the tax-cut guerrillas in the General Assembly is that they're playing with fire. Cutting state taxes now, wrote my esteemed associate Barry Rascovar on this very page last week, would be "insanity." For after all, if you were in debt you wouldn't "rush out and increase your children's allowances."
But this metaphor, which equates a tax cut with an expenditure and implicitly assumes that all money is rightfully the government's to begin with, has it backward. The Annapolis guerrillas and the new majority on the D.C. council, as well as a majority of the voters in 21 Maryland counties, understand that.
These people would say that if your government, or your children, can't be trusted to behave sensibly with the money you give them, you should try giving them less. They'd point out that the government is supposed to work for the taxpayers, not vice versa. And they'd suggest that if politicians think a tax cut would be playing with fire, maybe they should propose a tax increase and see which generates more heat.
Maryland's not in quite the mess the District of Columbia or the federal government are; maybe the governor will be able to pacify the revolutionaries for a while. He's already made some studious efforts to learn their language, and when he can't stall them any longer he's clearly practical enough to open the door for them before they kick it down. It may happen sooner than he hopes.
Economics aside, one reason the revolutionaries shouldn't stop now -- in Washington, Annapolis, and any other place where there's nothing between them and the frightened defenders of yesterday's discredited policies but a rotten door -- is because they'll never again have such fun.
They should remember -- it was Germaine Greer who said it -- that revolution is the festival of the oppressed. They've been on the losing side for years, have been ridiculed, scorned, mocked and ignored. But now they're winning. World-wide, even on the Washington city council, the ideological tide is flowing their way.
If they lose their momentum now, they'll be might-have-beens to the end of their lives. But even if they succeed -- and they surely will -- the festival won't last. They'll have to govern, and face a portly middle age as the new establishment, while the generation now entering high school busily plots their overthrow around 2015.
Peter A. Jay is a writer and farmer.