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"    JACKSONVILLE \u2014 We first noticed them on Friday night, as a string of relatively slow-moving, revolving yellow lights coursing down the darkened highway. We saw three more of them on Saturday in the daylight, entire convoys of wood-chippers, power wagons, and bucket trucks. Usually, there was a pick-up truck at the front of each line of vehicles, and another one at the end of it, and, when everybody wanted to duck off to a Love plaza up on a hill, one of the pick-ups would park itself at the base of the exit ramp and make sure the other trucks were herded up in the right direction. There were electrical workers from Pennsylvania, and from North Carolina, and from Indiana and New York. There were tree workers from Indiana and Illinois and Michigan. They were from the parts of this country where there is electrical work and tree work to be done at all times of the year. There is that work to be done in the winter, after the blizzards, and in the early spring, after the sucker-punch ice storms, and in the later spring, after the ice melts and the floods come. There is that work to be done in the heat of the summer, when the tornadoes form over the flat, drought-sickened landscape, and the sirens sound and then, when the terrible roaring is faded and gone, they come out to clear the trees and free the wires, and dig battered normality out of the rubble once again. And they keep doing it long after the cameras and the microphones and the network anchors have moved on to the next pile of wreckage. These are the people who work with angry weather, and with a climate driven mad, in places where there is weather all throughout the year. This week, though, they piled into their trucks and headed south, to this place, where there is weather and work for them to do only in a small sliver of time at the end of every summer, when the storms come. They came rattling down Dwight Eisenhower&amp;#039;s great national highway system because the National Weather Service, which is itself part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, relying on satellite technology and the National Hurricane Center, told them that a storm named Isaac was going to slam into this country somewhere along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. They were prepared to move in any direction along Ike&amp;#039;s great idea because the storm might hit New Orleans or Mobile, or up along the Florida Panhandle. Some of them were ready to go all the way down to the Keys, because it looked as though that was the only place the storm was guaranteed likely to make American landfall. They even thought they might have to follow the information that the National Hurricane Center fed to the National Weather Service and drive hellbent down the west coast of Florida to Tampa, where the Republicans already had called off one entire day of their quadrennial informercial that, this year more than any others, is dedicated to the proposition that the national government is a useless parasite that does no good for anyone. Better for &amp;quot;the states&amp;quot; \u2014 or, even more gloriously, your county sheriff \u2014 to be in charge of warning the rest of the country that you&amp;#039;ll be needing your powerlines to be disentangled from the oak tree that just fell on your Escalade. There will be some who believe to this to be unfair. I don&amp;#039;t care anymore. The reckless right has translated its reckless rhetoric into reckless action once too often for me. In 2009, the Republicans in the House of Representatives, led by the zombie-eyed granny-starver who is their presumptive vice-presidential nominee, took a meat-ax to all of those programs, cutting over $450 million from NOAA&amp;#039;s budget alone. Some of the leading conservative intellectuals \u2014 which is to say, some of the most lucratively subsidized corporate tools \u2014 have long advocated privatizing the National Weather Service, essentially arguing that the NWS was scaring people with its warnings. (&amp;quot;Intellectuals,&amp;quot; you may have noticed here, is a relative term in this context, in the same way that, say, &amp;quot;andiron&amp;quot; is a relative term in the context of food.) Rick Santorum, the place horse in this year&amp;#039;s Republican primaries, climbed on that bandwagon as well. One thing we&amp;#039;ve learned since Todd Akin unlimbered himself concerning the secret secretions of the ladyparts, and since Willard Romney told his &amp;quot;birther&amp;quot; joke and gave the crowd around him a chance to howl with delight, is that anything the Republicans refer to as a &amp;quot;fringe&amp;quot; idea is merely one the common wisdom of the party that you&amp;#039;re not supposed to say out loud. That is where we are with them \u2014 a cult of the Kabbalah of Stupid. The influential conservatives in this country are now dedicated to nothing less than the ultimate delegitimization of the concept of a national self-government. Some of them are in it for the bucks; state governments are more easily bought and controlled. Some of them are in it out of pure ideology, and out of tired ideas that already have caused far too much historical mischief. Some of them are in it because, frankly, they don&amp;#039;t know any better. But the overriding goal of the modern conservative movement, which its adherents will make obvious no matter how truncated their convention is this week, has been to make something alien out of something that is essentially ours and, historically, the best vehicle through which to exercise our better selves, as a people and a country. I watched these long lines of trucks and thought, again, of Dos Passos&amp;#039;s great, deep sigh at the end of the portion of USA that deals with the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. &amp;quot;All right,&amp;quot; he writes, &amp;quot;we are two countries.&amp;quot; That may still be so. But we are one people still. A lot of the people in these trucks probably could have been on vacation. Certainly some of them had work to do back in Harrisburg, or Columbus, or Elkhart. But they were on the road south because a place that usually doesn&amp;#039;t have a lot of weather was about to get a lot of it from a demented climate. Certainly, the companies they work for sent them off, and, certainly, those companies will turn a tidy profit, not enough of which may filter down to the people driving the trucks. Hurrah for free enterprise. But they were driving on our highways, on information from our scientists, to try and help our fellow citizens. Competent, intelligent self-government is the finest product of a free people. It provides the context within which our highflown ideas become real. It illustrates the manuscripts of our founding documents. It lays out the detailed maps for the pursuit of happiness. We are all invested in it because we all are, or damned well ought to be, invested in the work of creating it. It cannot go rogue. If our self-government fails us, it is because we have listened to the fundamental heresy that our national government is something alien to us. The people in those trucks, pulling off the highway to grab a burger or a nap, were not moving through the American night as Indianans or Pennsylvanians or New Yorkers. They were Americans, come south to help other Americans. I was proud to share our highway with them. MORE FROM THE POLITICS BLOG ROAD TRIP: Finding Ourselves in Gettysburg and Discovering Danger in Between --STAY TUNED FOR MORE DISPATCHES FROM THE ROAD TO TAMPA ALL WEEKEND LONG, THEN FOLLOW COMPLETE RNC COVERAGE HERE AND WITH @ESQPOLITICS ON TWITTER &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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