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How did so many people ever fall for the fiction that “self government” means being governed by the majority of one’s neighbors? Being governed by some powerful elite is bad, but being governed by the “non-powerful masses” is just another brand of poison. Self-governance means just that — governing yourself.

Of all the national myths in this country, perhaps none is as nonsensical as the notion that there is a collective “genius of the American people” insofar as governance goes. It’s a myth that’s discussed in almost religious tones — and it leaves otherwise intelligent people acting in foolish ways to try to bring about things that aren’t possible.

I started thinking about this Wednesday because of a Cato Institute policy forum I listened to called “Citizens v. the Ruling Elite.” (You can watch the video of the forum at the end of this article. Or click here to subscribe to Cato’s audio podcasts via iTunes. Many of them are excellent.) The theme of the discussion was finding ways to elect people to Congress who would “represent the people” instead of elites.

One of the speakers was a co-founder of one of the Tea Party groups. Another speaker was with an organization working to get more people to run in party primaries to challenge incumbents. (On the pragmatic side, the group working for more primary challenges is just plain wrong to believe that this is a good way to defeat incumbents, but that’s a different story entirely.) The overall theme for all the presentations is that the people in office now represent “the elites,” but that if the right candidates would just run, “the people” would suddenly be represented and everything would change.

Since these people believe this, I wonder what other fairy tales they believe.

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We’ve all seen something like this in an airport or somewhere else in public. An excited child sees a grandmother and impulsively runs over to hug her. It’s sweet and loving and it makes most of us happy.

For the thuggish bureaucrats of the TSA in Wichita, Kansas, though, it was enough to make a soon-to-be-crying 4-year-old girl into a “suspect,” according to a mother who told her daughter’s story in a poignant and scary Facebook post.

Michelle Brademeyer was traveling with her two children — ages 4 and 6 — from Montana to Kansas for a wedding. Brademeyer’s mother (the children’s grandmother) was on the trip. The kids don’t get to see their grandmother that often, because she lives in California. This was their first time to travel together.

As the family was waiting to leave Wichita on the way back home, they went through security. Brademeyer and the children went through the scanners without problem, but something on the older woman was triggering the scanner, so she was told to sit to the side to wait for a pat-down search.

As the grandmother sat alone, Brademeyer’s 4-year-old daughter saw her sitting and ran over to give her a hug. (That’s her in the blue dress above.) It wasn’t more than a few seconds, but a TSA agent started screaming at the child. Agents wouldn’t allow the girl’s mother to come get her, because they said she must go through a pat-down now, too. They implied that the grandmother might have passed a gun to the now-crying 4-year-old.

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Everybody’s read an obituary from time to time. They generally tell who died and what family the person left behind. Despite how unloving and fractious most families are, most death notices refer to “loving” spouses and children. They’re not the most honest accounts of life.

For one man in a suburb of Denver, that wasn’t good enough. When Michael Blanchard died, he wanted something a bit more truthful to leave behind, so he wrote his own death notice, saying, “Weary of reading obituaries noting someone’s courageous battle with death, Mike wanted it known that he died as a result of being stubborn, refusing to follow doctors’ orders and raising hell for more than six decades. He enjoyed booze, guns, cars and younger women until the day he died.”

The death notice — complete with a notation about which relative can “kiss his butt” — has become a viral sensation since it was published in the Denver Post nearly two weeks ago. (A Denver television station even did a story about the obit.) Here’s the complete text:

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