Success courtesy of hard work, luck - and Uncle Sam

The triple is one of baseball's rarest, most exciting plays: the ball sizzling deep into the outfield; the runner churning around the diamond; the deft choreography of the fielder's relays; the convergence of zipping ball and diving player at the bag.

Less rare, alas, is this figure in American public life: the guy (it's usually a guy) who was born on third base and imagines he hit a triple.

Such fellows are having their moment right now in D.C., with their Ayn Rand on the nightstand, their sneer when they spit out the word entitlements, their glib rhetoric about a world divided between "makers" and "takers."

A pillar of their worldview is the claim that government and its deeds played no role in their successes. In this riff, government only strews obstacles - those damned taxes and damnable regulations, which hamstring heroic figures such as themselves.

This "I hit a triple" delusion would be amusing, if it didn't do such harm to the common weal.

Odd thing is, my own life feels, from the inside, pretty much like a triple - a passably successful career with some opportunities to contribute to lasting good, combined with the deep joy of great family and friends.

But I never would delude myself that I reaped these satisfactions solely on merit; I've been richly blessed with opportunity and support. And much of that was thanks to government and its works.

My roots are working class. My dad was a newspaper printer, trained in the craft of hot type. My mom was his war bride. She grew up poor in England, the child of an alcoholic ne'er-do-well who moved his brood from council flat to council flat (i.e. public housing), a step ahead of the bill collector.

Yet, I found myself growing up in a four-bedroom brick house with Tudor trim in a tree-blessed suburb of Cleveland, going to school with the children of doctors, teachers, and architects.

How did my Sicilian father, printer's ink coursing through his veins, afford that?

Simple. It was thanks largely to a government program - the G.I. Bill. Pops drove a truck for the quartermaster corps in the European theater. His service entitled him to major help from Uncle Sam on that mortgage, not to mention free tuition for the college degree he earned by doggedly attending night class for years.

The income my hard-working dad earned to pay for that Tudor house was boosted by another government entity, the National Labor Relations Board, which enabled his union to bargain with the bosses for a fair wage.

The public (or as the right-wing snarl has it, "government") schools I attended were superb. They started teaching us French in third grade, which set me up for the fellowship I earned after college to spend a year in Lyon, teaching.

Why were they so good? Because the residents of my town, professionals and union workers alike, always voted for the school tax levy. Imagine that - people eagerly supporting a government activity because it upheld a public good, not just for their children, but everyone's children.

Well, not really everyone's, I'm duty-bound to admit. Government did not do anywhere enough to eliminate bank redlining and restrictive real estate covenants in suburbs like mine. Thanks to those sins, not a whole lot of black children who were born into the same blighted East Side neighborhood as I could follow my escape path out to that springboard suburb.

After my dad died of cancer on my 20th birthday, my Social Security survivor benefits allowed me to complete my time at a college that launched me into the world with a gold-plated degree and a priceless alumni network. Again, government to my rescue.

Oh, almost forgot - how did I help pay for my tuition? A summertime job with the Ohio highway department, cutting grass and patching potholes on I-271. Yes, the interstate highway system - the work of Uncle Sam again, his hand steering me clear of trapdoors.

Sure, I've put effort into what modest success I've had; just ask my wife how many nights she ate dinner alone.

But hard work by itself is never enough. You need luck, and you need help. And sometimes, your luck at being born as I was - white, male, suburban, with loving (and book-loving) parents - sets you up to have your hard work pay off in ways denied to other hard-working, talented kids who happened to born black, brown, female, into the wrong ZIP code or a broken home.

The suits who now cry "Repeal" and "Tax Cut" in Washington these days seem clueless about all the help their government offered them as they got to where they are today.

They're too bought into the divisive rhetoric they've used to win elections. They rail about the mote in the poor person's eye (say, food stamps) but ignore the beam in their own (mortgage interest deduction anyone?).

Wealth is not worth. Material success doesn't equal virtue. Life's lottery has as much to do with where you end up as your own strivings. For millions of Americans, our society offers more trapdoors than ladders. (The stress of poverty, research has shown, can induce bad choices.)

Anyone who brushes aside these truths and races to worship wealth will be a poor steward of our democracy.

Chris Satullo is a former Inquirer editor. centersquarephl@gmail.com