About a month ago, Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue called a prayer meeting on the steps of the state capitol in Atlanta to ask for divine intervention in a drought now in its twenty-first month. The next day, a quarter of an inch of rain fell in the northern part of the state. Then, three weeks later, it finally rained in Georgia. Not just a few drippy drops or a sissie little drizzle, but a fine, soaking rain, two inches in some places, maybe three inches in Atlanta, which the media called the “epicenter” of the drought. Believers in the power of prayer had a hissy-fit, proclaiming Governor Sonny a better rainmaker than Burt Lancaster. Disbelievers holed up in taverns and bars, taking their water on the side.

The ecstasy and the agony didn’t last long — it hasn’t rained a drop since and while some counties and cities are beginning to crack down on businesses and homeowners alike, the governor and the Georgia legislature have yet to make a serious move towards regulating the use of water. With about 90 days worth of drinking water left, Georgia still doesn’t have meaningful statewide water regulations, much less a comprehensive water plan.

My friend the curmudgeonly columnist Bill Shipp, recently wrote tongue-in-check in Online Athens http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/111407/opinion_20071114056.shtml that he thinks Governor Perdue should convene a bigger and more ecumenical prayer meeting, one also asking for divine help for the water-greedy governors of Florida and Alabama, for President Bush, who “needs it more than anybody,” and for the Georgia education system and a transportation network that are “in such despair that only heaven can help them.”

Says Bill, “Of course, we all know that Sonny’s favorite Republican suits, who give wads to fighting abortions and the spread of child health care, have a special line upward. Even so, it might be good for a few blue-collar types and those ungodly, anti-war liberals to hear what an honest-to-goodness Southern prayer meeting sounds like.”

My recollection is that such meetings usually sound like most of the sanctified practitioners either got their tongues stuck in a light socket and their brains stuck in reverse. My suggestion to the conservative goofers in control of my home state is that they walk-the-walk instead of talking-the-talk by heeding the oft repeated words of my mother that “the Lord helps those who helps themselves” (an admonition later stolen from her by Benjamin Franklin).

A little back-traveling music, please. Georgia is where Ayn Randians and the Republican Party have achieved their dream for all America. Over the past 30 years, voters in the former Peach State (the orchards are burning up) bought in wholesale to the whacko dogma that less government is always better, privatization of vital services is always preferable, all regulations are necessarily obnoxious, and free markets are always fair. State government and the congressional delegation flipped from lockstep Democratic to brain-locked Republican, while business, residential and highway development ran wild and unregulated. Today, the governor, all of the statewide officers, both U.S. senators and three-quarters of the state’s U.S. representatives are of the GOP born. When Governor Perdue rubbed out the last Democratic governor two years ago, there was a long-delayed comprehensive water plan before the legislature, one developed with the expertise of the state agency in charge of such things and backed by consumer, conservation and even some business interests. It never moved an inch, even though the state had been suffering drought conditions for a decade.

On October 30 of this year, erstwhile Democratic State Representative E. Wycliff Onn wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (“Georgia Leaders Need to Start Leading”): “For years, despite predictions of drought’s dire consequences on the lifestyles, jobs and economy of Georgians, our officials placated business, industry, developers and citizens at large by ignoring those threats. Apathy was politically profitable.”

Now business, industry, developers and “citizens at large” have joined the state’s farmers in paying a dear price for the refusal of their soul-mated elected officials to regulate water usage. Hundreds of businesses affected by city and county crackdowns are going under and tens of thousands of their employees are out of work. Recreation-oriented businesses are drying up in and around reservoirs like Lake Lanier and Lake Altoona. Governor Perdue? When he’s not ostentatiously praying, he’s ranting against governors of adjoining states and the Army Corps of Engineers, begging President Bush for big-government intervention with federal aid.

There are plenty of ways for Perdue and his followers to “help themselves” and the citizens of Georgia. For instance, there’s a bill before the state legislature to mandate the use of toilets that cut water-per-flush from two gallons to one and one-quarter gallons, a regulation that could cut commercial and residential consumption significantly. It will be interesting to see if legislative leaders can curb their conservative craziness long enough to keep the state itself from going down the drain.

Grover Norquist, the out-Randish Republican guru who holds his prayer meetings every Wednesday morning in Washington, once said his goal was to cut the size of government” down to where we can drown it in a bathtub.”

My question to Norquist’s myopic acolytes in Georgia (and in other drought-ridden states like Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas) is, “ How do you do that without water?”

Postscript: Norquist is also the dude who once said of America’s Greatest Generation: “Each year, two million people who fought in the Second World War and lived through the Great Depression die. This generation has been an exception in American history, because it has defended anti-American policies. They voted for the welfare state and obligatory military service.”