As a matter of course, I ignore the anti-government donnybrooks that consume Fox News, such as the recent furor over the IRS’s eccentric “conferences.” To my own surprise, I’m not inspired to do this out of any animosity towards Fox; although I find maybe half or two thirds of the politics that it promotes noxious, I enjoy watching it from time to time, and I have come to find it less frequently revolting than CNN, whose pomposity and sleights of hand tend to drive me up a wall. Rather, my reasons for ignoring Fox’s causes du jour are, first, that I just don’t have time to follow its donnybrooks on top of all the more important things that I’m trying to cram into my life, and second, that I find Fox’s signal-to-noise ratio too erratic to take its pronouncements at face value. In practice, this means that I usually insist on hearing corroboration from a significantly less shrill source before believing that Fox isn’t blowing its reports completely out of proportion for partisan and business advantage. Ronald Reagan called this approach “trust, but verify,” but by any honest appraisal it’s a form of distrust.

My corroborating source confirming the seriousness of this IRS linedancing/Star Trek role play idiocy is my mom. By her own admission she’s a hardcore leftist. What she is not, however, is a worshiper of bureaucracy. She spent too much time working for the Veterans Administration, an agency whose dysfunction she can describe in much greater detail and much more cynically than I can, to assume that the IRS is not run by the objectively deranged. So when my mom mentioned to me in a recent phone conversation that the IRS had gotten egg on its face over these ridiculous training seminars, I figured that whatever Fox had to say about the scandal, no matter how shrill, had some merit.

Having now watched Greta van Susteren’s coverage of these training exercises, I agree with her and with my mom that they were absolutely ridiculous and should never have been undertaken. The IRS has clearly delegated responsibility for its employee training to a bunch of useless nutcases. Governments that spend their money on stuff like that are troubled.

Where I disagree with van Susteren is on her insistence that these junkets stand out as wastes of taxpayer money. As a matter of principle, it’s certainly improper to misallocate tens of millions of dollars on ridiculous staff training exercises at posh resorts, but the sums in question ($52 million or so) are chump change in the context of federal spending. Preventing these particular instances of featherbedding and cronyism would have done nothing to appreciably improve the federal treasury’s prudence and solvency. There’s just too much systemic fiscal laxity and corruption for the prevention or redress of these really juicy scandals to make a real difference. The real improvements have to come from concerted, systematic reform. The Inspectors General responsible for curbing this kind of waste are important internal watchdogs, but by its very nature their work has to be done incrementally, often at a pace that seems glacial because the rot is so pervasive. In any event, they’ll be cleaning out the Augean Stables until such a time as the underlying cultures at their agencies start undergoing genuine reform. In a very real way, we’re stuck dealing with the hearts of men, and doing so in a country where the systemic corruption extends far beyond the public sector. I honestly don’t see how systemic reform is viable as long as so many Americans so sincerely believe in hustling, and in being hustled, rather than in plain dealing.

At rock bottom, I believe, it’s a matter of what Vaclav Havel called living in truth. I’d love to see an American leader of Havel’s prominence spread that message with such clarity, but I don’t expect to come across one, especially given the chronic tendency of so many Americans to reject reasonable politicians of goodwill in favor of abject demagogues of the lowest character imaginable this side of the genocidal.

Clearly, one of the factors that drives this deference to openly sadistic leaders is servility. There’s a powerful cognitive dissonance between the rhetoric of American freedom and independence and the reality of a population hesitant to challenge even its most ridiculous and pointless degradation at the hands of its superiors. This is how we’ve ended up with our proliferation of idiotic, disingenuous corporate “teambuilding” exercises, motivational posters and videos, and rude, bumptious, grandiose, incompetent managers. We let them get away with it. Walmart employees in Germany responded to mandatory motivational rallies by fleeing to the restrooms and calling their union reps. They recognized petty tyranny and had too much self-respect to submit to it; American workers generally don’t.

That’s the buried lede in the IRS “conference” scandal. These “training” seminars and the videos made of them had nothing to do with the employees’ job duties, and they must have caused sentient employees who were unwillingly drawn into the fray great annoyance, if not also discomfort. Extraneous seminars of the sort, although rarely extreme enough to involve Star Trek costumes, are so ubiquitous in American corporate and bureaucratic life that they’re widely regarded as unremarkable.

Submitting to such degradation under duress is not a hallmark of a free people. There are certainly extenuating circumstances for doing so, in fact, usually powerful ones, given the abusive dynamics at workplaces where management inflicts this sort of thing on subordinates, but meek, servile submission to this sort of belittling idiocy is not honorable. The proper response is to tell the instructor, “You’re a moron, this is bullshit, and I’m getting a gin and tonic.”