Out here in the hammocks, we’re a little loose. We don’t keep regular hours mostly, which doesn’t seem very much of a deal to Mother Mary and the Dude, but it’s a very big deal in places like Alexandria, Virginia, or Orlando. We do get out the silver at dinner. . . . Washington, D.C.’s greatest contributor to a better world is undoubtedly Miss Manners. Which would you really prefer? All those rules you just sort of work out for yourself, or rules the government enforces with a nightstick?

Wasn’t that easy?

I don’t have a whole bunch in common with some of the beach town folks; even less than with the wildfolks on the Keys. Those places in Orange County where they trim their lawns with cuticle scissors might as well be on Mars. And there’s not much reason why I have to worry about it. We can all do business: money is one blessedly neutral thing in the world (let’s hear it now! a big cheer for good old filthy lucre!).

Politically, though, things seem to be getting out of hand. Tampa, the Keys, Palm Beach: as communities, we share some interests (besides painful lawns) — waterways, roadways, infrastructure; and on such matters we can deal with each other with the state acting like some huge metaphorical bundling board. There’s almost no reason for the state to touch me personally, though; I’m not a bridge or a block grant. There’s even less reason why Washington, D.C. should touch you or me; it should be dealing almost exclusively with the states.

When I was a small, there were pools all over, shallow ones, with fountains sometimes, around hotels and restaurants. They were chock full of alligators. To a three-year-old, a big gator raised up is just about at eye level. There were gators all over, too; someone was always calling to have the state guys come lasso one and cart it away from civilization and back to where it and everyone else would be more comfortable. Until your teens, in the Florida where I grew up, you had a high potential for being lunch if you were slow or unwary. While I can talk about my perspective with someone from Seattle, we can’t share our perspectives on a visceral level, any more than I can comprehend what seems to me their eternal rainy darkness.

Even years away from the hammocks and bayous, the Wisdom Dude was known to have the occasional dark dream involving large saurians, snakes, sharks, or other of our equally cuddly Florida fauna. This is not conducive to becoming a blindly obedient adult who is content to let the state assume parental responsibility. The Wisdom Dude hastens here to point out to proponents of natural rights that a person has a perfect right to fritter away his or her freedoms (yes! really!), just as he or she has a perfect right to fritter away his or her money. In some places, they’ve pissed away both their money and their rights — the Orange Counties on both coasts, Berkeley, California, most of the Northeast. As long as it stays a local quirk, who really should care?

So even if perfume and cologne are illegal in every public place in Berkeley, your hibiscus color is prescribed in Orlando, razor-cut lawns are the law of the land in Scarsdale, and hundreds of handicapped johns, required by law, stand empty in New York City, out here in the hammocks, we smell real pretty and have yards, not lawns . . . and no public places to speak of.

Big Brother hasn’t quite taken over our lives yet — though not from any lack of such ambition in Tallahassee. For years and years, our hallowed state executives have lusted in their hearts, and everywhere else, for the kinds of power wielded by Eastern governors, who can make millions of lives miserable with one stroke of the pen. It makes the political pulse pound. Forcing people to do what they don’t want to do is a huge turn-on to some people. What kind of work would you seek if you had such inclinations? Prison guard, storm trooper, dominatrix, pimp, or U.S. Senator? (Hint: it would probably be the one that pays the most, involves the least amount of work, and has flunkies regularly stroking one’s self-esteem.)

What the minions of Capitol Hill’s would-be South American dictators do, bless their little hearts, is crunch a lot of numbers through a lot of computers that you bought for them and come up with some averages. Then they throw some borders around their work, name it “acceptable parameters” — and that becomes the blueprint for your personal life. It’s quite possible that no one person on the planet actually fits the blueprint, but who’s got the firepower to resist? (The Code of Federal Regulations, incidentally, has gotten so out of hand that every single day you, the reader, whoever you and and whatever you do, break the law — at least six times before breakfast. If the Powers That Be ever decide to go after you, for spitting on the sidewalk, say, you’re going to be toast.)

Now, if you do buy in, which isn’t too likely if you grew up in Florida, the promise they make you is the end of uncertainty. The future is fixed: even the laws of the universe will bend to legislative will and executive order, they promise.

If you really are ready to let those on the shores of the Potomac volunteer to be your daddy and mamma, rather than keeping these antisocial inclinations at a more manageable level, you should bear in mind that inside the Capital Beltway, you, the taxpaying American, are known as “Joe Sixpack” — when your public servants are feeling kindly disposed, that is. The constraints of respectable discourse prevent me from passing on some of the more interesting nicknames for you that the Wisdom Dude has encountered in what the Department of Justice likes to call “the Seat of Government.” (They’re mostly too giddy with the downright sanctity of the whole thing to draw the obvious extrapolation from that term — that they do their thinking with what they sit on.)

I’m writing this in 1995, nearing the end of the century where total government was actually tried, control from the top down — and everything up to and including Heaven itself was promised for those who let themselves be thus dominated. It failed. It failed. No matter who promised what, no matter how pretty, it failed. It failed in Nazi Germany, it failed in the USSR, and it is failing everywhere else it’s been tried — including on the shores of the Potomac. That’s the Wisdom Dude’s thought for the day: No matter what they promise, they want everything you have, are, ever will have, ever will be . . . and when they get it, their promised Eden will still fail.