Last week county government offered us an unusual little window into the practice of local democracy and government in the 21st century. In partial response to a Public Records Act request filed by Eureka kazillionaire Rob Arkley’s Security National company, the county released four days’ worth of Supervisor Mark Lovelace’s e-mail correspondence.

On the surface, these e-mails were far from the most enlightening government documents ever rescued from the archives. About 85 percent of Lovelace’s correspondence is as dull as our own. Here is the supervisor arranging a time and place for a meeting; here he is passing on a constituent’s complaint to the Sheriff’s Office; here he is lamenting that he has to take his car to the shop.

But our eyes open wide when we come to the remaining 15 percent, which is interesting in the way that an automobile accident or a bare-knuckle fistfight is interesting. We are thrilled to witness the abuse of our fellows, and so our pulses rise when we witness the torrent of excrement that pours down upon Lovelace’s head:

“Wake up Mark … your old tricks are no longer working,” writes Kay Backer, the Sacramento lobbyist who heads the Humboldt Economic Land Plan group. “People are figuring you out.”

“Your problem is that you continue to be caught in lie after lie,” writes Arkley himself.

These are a couple tastes of salvos that are now part of the public record, and for the reasons given above many people will no doubt stand up and applaud. It barely matters what the derision refers to, and in this case it refers to almost nothing; it occurs, in each case, in a policy-free context, or only after the policy discussion that preceded it has been exhausted. It is pure gorilla id, and all the more appealing for that.

Security National’s reasons for putting these e-mails into the public sphere are a bit obscure. It may have been hoping to identify the author of the anonymous Humboldt Herald blog; if so, it failed. However, it did do us the useful service of reminding us that the ideal version of American democracy contained within our middle school civics textbooks is in constant tension with ancient, tried-and-true human methods of resolving conflict, such as total obliteration of the enemy.

What percentage of our elected representatives’ workload must be devoted to the animal passion of the citizenry – combating it, engaging in it, studiously ignoring it? No small part, if the conversation-stoppers contained within the Lovelace e-mails are representative. In fact, the thrust of Arkley’s and Backer’s attacks are of a piece with a larger effort to delegitimize Lovelace and his work on things like the general plan update. Like the larger effort, it declines to engage on the level of policy. As with President Obama and the “question” of his American birth, the only point is to goad the target into spending time and effort in an attempt to prove that he is not, in fact, a monster.

It’s not like conservatives are the only ones capable of performing such political dirty work. The larger part of American politics is selling dumb stories like these to a populace ever hungry for them. So it is that a mild-mannered policy geek like Lovelace finds himself uncomfortably transformed into a power-crazed demon, a duplicitous huckster out to destroy freedom; so it was that an all-American character like Rex Bohn, upon running for city council, found himself depicted as a stooge of Big Oil simply because he worked for Renner Petroleum like any other wage slave. It’s so much easier than inviting people to think through policy and make informed choices.

It’s more effective, too. We are a simple species. We strongly prefer fairy tales to nuanced literature, and will stretch all evidence to populate the worlds of our imagination with noble knights, disfigured ogres and helpless maidens on the verge of being defiled. We want this same story again and again and again, because it shrinks things to a size that our poor brains can comprehend.

That’s where we’re at. You can point out this state of affairs and encourage others to at least recognize it when they see it. Perhaps you can go a little out of your way to thank and support those who decline to reduce government to a simple morality tale for children. Don’t expect either to accomplish very much.