Steven Hayward, now one of the regular posters at PowerLine and a contributor to several other publications, has a piece up on Forbes in which he writes about the growing bureaucracy within every branch of government around the nation, particularly in his home county of San Luis Obispo, California, which has but one town of any size, also named San Luis Obispo.

I can understand why Hayward chose the area for his home.  I spent a couple of days there while doing an audit back in the late nineties, and it is a lovely place.

Anyhoo, Hayward notes the recent ascendance of a local committed liberal named Adam Hill to the Chairmanship of the county’s Air Pollution Control District (APCD, an agency common in California counties), and to the letter he recently wrote to the editor of the local weekly newspaper.  Mr. Hill was apparently responding to local critics who allege mismanagement at the San Luis Obispo County APCD.  The following is an excerpt from Hill’s letter, titled “Who Is Susceptible To Conspiracy-Theory Thinking?”:

Not only the superficially educated and narrow-minded, not only bumpkins with bad breath and worse teeth, not only the gullible and aggrieved, not only those who are nostalgic for a past that never was, not only those who are afraid of losing control—the fire-breathers, the weapons-collectors, wearers of bespoke body armor, anonymous online trollers, lovers of Ayn Rand novels for whom the gift of literacy is truly wasted, not only the teacher’s pets from cardio-prayer class, and the self-appointed scolds of free speech and the memorizers of parables about power …

Not only them, and not only the emotionally obese whose dreams are scarily self-tunneling and find themselves most alive when watching themselves rerun on the government channel late at night while wearing a human mask …

Not only the sufferers of psychosomatic persecutions who use their cats as food tasters, not only the scavengers of propaganda, not only the depressed and bed-crazy, not only those who hear voices in other people’s heads, not only the owners of 66 books on terror, not only those who crowd their homes with canned goods and medical salts, not only the connoisseurs of cartoon porn, not only those with ominous hair and gnawing vendettas against the IRS, not only proudly unregistered voters or voters registered to parties with serpents in their logo …

Not only them, and not only the over-medicated who’ve barricaded themselves behind an alternative reality as a way to hide from their own damaged lives and turn to AM radio for the comforts of hate and heart-worming pet tales …

And not only the adrift and the paranoid and the resentful, not only the rural white, not only the panicky liars, not only racists and anti-Semites, not only those who speak in spittled spurts about the Constitution, not only the no-longer-employable-work-from-homers, not only the smelling-impaired, not only those who would never donate their organs to strangers, not only defunct politicians, not only the fanatics, not only those who fear world music …

My short visit to San Luis Obispo did not entail any contact with the APCD, and I do not know if it even existed then.  But I gotta admit, despite his obvious predilection for run-on sentences, their new chairman is a damn good writer.