After the regular anchor pronoun gives you the news, the station brings out the perennially constipated-looking expert, who is seldom angry but who is using the word "chaos" a lot these days.

And, as his thin lips disappear in a private high school approximation of anger, he desperately indicates that "bipartisanship" is dead.

And it is. It's not just dead in Congress, either. It's dead in the auto body shop where you work, and it's dead at your church, and it's also dead in some of the bars I used to go to but don't anymore.

The urge is to bite, to lock your jaws around the big bone in the arm and bring down, who ...

The boss? Money? Drag queens? Guns? Fossil fuels? Electric cars? Pumpkin spice? Taylor Swift?

What do we want?

Having covered small-town government for decades, I know that the business of government is to take in taxes and pay bills. Both the taxes and the bills should be as moderate as possible.

Mostly, there's nothing else to the process, and it's a very unlucky governmental body that suddenly has to deal with Klan literature being distributed at the high school or a drag queen reading storybooks at the library.

And there are plenty of smaller governmental bodies still doing business that way, far from the big issues, wondering if the town can afford to buy a new fire engine.

HINT: Sometimes they can't afford to buy a new fire engine, and most generally nothing bad happens and they buy one in a couple of years.

The trouble emerges when some candidate of "the people" begins insisting that the town could afford five new fire engines if "corrupt officials" weren't "lining their pockets" and the town wasn't "spending millions" teaching gay lovemaking techniques to the grade school kids.

None of it's true, of course, and some of it doesn't have anything to do with a new fire engine, but it pleases and massages the American urge to bite, to rip and tear, an urge most recently expanded by libertarians and conservatives, two groups who are barely able to define their beliefs.

Libertarianism is most often just an excuse for intellectual laziness.

Low test scores in the schools? A libertarian says government shouldn't be in the education business.

High crime rate? A libertarian says the government shouldn't be in the police business.

To the libertarian, every governmental question can be answered with the word "privatize." But, if every question has the same answer, why ask questions? Why struggle for answers? Why think?

Conservatives have the same problem. To them, the only job worth doing is to push the culture back to 1972 or 1942 or 1964 or whenever you were personally too young to know there was injustice in the world, even if your family was experiencing injustice.

And no one on the right side of any aisle, anywhere, has any interest in the fire engine, in where it will be bought and for how much and is it really needed and would a secondhand one be good enough?

There is, however, great effort put into guaranteeing that, if you ever get the fire engine, it won't be driven by a drag queen or a woman who had an abortion in college or some guy who "disrespected" the flag during a high school demonstration against the football coach who wouldn't play a Black kid at quarterback.

You can't put out a fire with ideology, but you can start one. Just bite each other until the fire engine arrives.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion, and read features by Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Devil's Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

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