On Tuesday of last week, one of the senators for South Carolina, Lindsay Graham (Rep.), perfectly demonstrated the infantilism of the oust-Obama-whatever-the-cost party, which includes many registered Republicans, all libertarians, and of course the inbred adherents of the I’m-against-anyone-I’m-not related-to Tea Party.

“It’s really American to avoid paying taxes, legally,” said the stentorian gentleman in defence of ‘Mutt’ Romney’s practice of salting away millions in the Caymans and other repositories for citizens’ erstwhile sacrosanct democratic dues (and if that comma is any indication of the actual phrasing, it speaks volumes).

It’s pretty much a commonplace that humans are far and away the stupidest and most helpless of all the species inhabiting Planet Earth. We require considerable help birthing our young; we are unable to source sustenance independently and many of us can’t actually feed ourselves without the assistance of a spotty, uniformed youth behind a cash register. We are well behind lions and tigers and bears, and scorpions and spiders, and amoeba, viruses and bacteria for that matter – when it comes to preparing our young for survival. We are untroubled by the exigencies of instinct, content to rely instead on a battery of frequently fallible technology to wake us in the morning, estimate the time of day or discover that it’s time for lunch, to actually prepare our food and of course to engage in intra-specie communication.

And still many of us can’t balance a chequebook or program a DVR. Americans indisputably lead the way in helplessness. Nonetheless a considerable number of them, despite the benefit of free and extensive education, are firmly convinced that they can maintain a national system of highways, defend themselves against their enemies, deter crime, educate their children and uphold the rule of law in one of the most lawless of lands, all on their sad and isolated little lonesomes. Government? We don’ need no steenking government. And beyond the knotty problems of logistics, management and execution of such complex tasks they would somehow, in this childlike worldview make it all happen without the benefit of funding, taxes being un-American and all.

As a priori dumb as a cart load of shit as such a set of beliefs may appear, for many they are less beliefs than inchoate screams of anger and frustration that those once twin peaks of aspiration – success in business or politics – have become a license to pillage the rest of the community.

Of course, what the seditious senator and the soapy slick presidential nominee really mean is that taxes are for poor people to pay in order to fund all that dull infra-structure and stuff, leaving them free to buy yachts on which they can sail to the Caymans as the mood takes them and check in on their lovely lolly.