There is an organization in Montgomery you have almost certainly never thought about, and this — this precise, cultivated, architecturally deliberate not-thinking-about-it — is the single greatest achievement in Alabama public life, which is saying something, because Alabama public life also produced George Wallace, Jim Folsom drinking bourbon on television, and a Senate race the entire nation watched with the horrified fascination of people observing a controlled burn that has become, technically, uncontrolled.

The Business Council of Alabama does not want you thinking about it.

They want you thinking about football. About your neighbor’s fence. About gas prices and the new pastor at First Baptist who isn’t quite right somehow, can’t put your finger on it, something about his handshake. The BCA has mastered the ancient art of being the largest puppet master in a state full of people arguing passionately about whether the puppet is blinking correctly, while the strings — thick as ship’s rope, taut as a banker’s smile — disappear upward into a drop ceiling off Dexter Avenue where men in seersucker eat catered lunches and make decisions that ripple through your life like a stone dropped in the Warrior River, long after the stone has settled and been covered over and nobody remembers who threw it or why.

Now let us discuss the money. Let us discuss it the way you discuss a relative who drinks — openly, without illusion, because pretending hasn’t helped anyone.

Your state senator receives a discretionary fund of two hundred thousand dollars. Of your money. Which he gets to give away. To whoever he wants. Your representative gets a hundred thousand. Same deal.

And then comes the novelty check — the one with the comically oversized numbers that exists for no purpose except to be photographed — and your man, the one you sent to Montgomery on the reasonable assumption that he would do things for you, performs generosity with your own money like a magician whose only trick is reaching into your pocket and then taking a bow.

The chest inflates. The shoulders go back. The chin lifts. The eyes acquire the glaze of a man receiving, in his own internal broadcast, a standing ovation from a crowd that doesn’t exist for a sacrifice that wasn’t made. He gave away money he was given to give away and now he believes he is Pericles, and the plaque is the least they can do, and the parking space too, obviously.

And then there is the Governor, who is — and this must be said carefully, the way you describe a weather system that doesn’t fit standard terminology — an enigma in the specific way a locked cabinet is an enigma. You know there’s something inside. You can hear it shifting. But the key belongs to people who are not you, and the cabinet has been there so long that people have put decorative items on top of it and stopped asking.

She appears. She cuts ribbons. She says things shaped like positions but which are actually the outlines of where positions used to stand before they got up and left.

She is for Alabama. Who could argue.

Here is the joint decision they have all arrived at — the BCA, the senators with their novelty checks, the governor with her ribbon scissors — arrived at not through meeting or memo but through the deeper telepathy of shared interest:

That your life is a backdrop.

That the Business Council’s interests are the state’s interests, and the state’s interests are the Business Council’s interests, and this tautology is load-bearing, structural, the hidden beam in the wall, and they spend considerable money making sure you never notice the wall.

So excuse yourselves. From our kitchens and our doctors’ offices and our schoolrooms and our futures, which were not included in the arrangement made without us, in the room we weren’t invited to, over the lunch that has been going on since before we were born.

The plaque is yours. Keep it.

But the drainage ditch that floods every spring in Perry County and ruins the crops and nobody comes —

that one’s on you.

Brass and all.

The Business Council issued a statement reaffirming their commitment to a prosperous Alabama for all Alabamians. It contained the phrase “job creation” four times. Eunice’s tomatoes drowned in the flood. The committee is looking into it.