Dictator For A Day 

Who wouldn’t like to be Dictator For A Day?   Let’s be honest.  What would  you dictate?

How about world peace?

Economic stability?

Real opportunities to achieve the American Dream?

Or to define the American Dream?

An unending supply of money to donate to programs to feed the hungry, house the ill-housed, give everybody a chance for however much education they might need to reach  their goals, help crime victims, cure diseases, etc.?

Then what would you do on the second day?

—Because you’ve only been a dictator for one day?

Wouldn’t it be smart on the first day to dictate that your authority extended for the rest of your life?   (I’ve always wondered by people who rub the lamp and find a genie in their midst granting them three wishes didn’t immediately wish for unlimited wishes.)

Our former president says he won’t be a dictator except on the first day when he’ll build the wall and drill, drill, drill. We hope he doesn’t get a cramp in his hand from signing all of his executive orders.

One day of a dictatorship is 24 hours too many.

A long-ago friend of mine once remarked after listening to a public office holder proclaim upon his inauguration that God intended him to be in that office, “Never trust a politician with a messianic complex.”

Let’s take a big leap beyond that.

Never, ever, trust a politician who says he wants to be a dictator for only one day, or denies obvious thoughts of being a dictator far longer. An old limerick warns us against placing trust in such a person:

There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.

Crock

Republicans in the U. S. House of Representatives have had the night to twist arms, make promises or threats, or do other things to cajole their own caucus to vote for a Speaker who has been in the House since 2006, has introduced only thirty bills in all that time, and has gotten none of them passed.  They’ll try again today.

Jim Jordan not only didn’t get the votes to become Speaker of the House on the first ballot yesterday, he got outvoted by Democrats.  All 212 Democrats voted for their leader, Hakeem Jeffries. Jordan had only 200 votes after twenty of his fellow Republicans voted against him.

The Republicans, who can’t get their own ducks in a row, are blaming Democrats for their failure to use their majority to pick a new Republican  Speaker to replace the ousted Kevin McCarthy.

Whose fault is this historic and ugly deadlock?

McCarthy maintains the House would not be stalemated if “every single Democrat didn’t vote with eight Republicans to shut this place down.”

That, my friends, is a crock. And it’s full to the brim.

The Democrats have no obligation to Republicans who have let four percent of their caucus run their conference.  Democrats are not in charge of putting the Republican House in order.

Democrats have scored some points by saying they’ll work with moderate Republicans to end the chaos.  But McCarthy and Jim Jordan and their supporters who have shown no interest in bipartisanship otherwise think Democrats should ride to their rescue.

Hypocrisy flows in buckets with their whining.

Perhaps the Republicans, especially those who have aligned themselves with the political evangelicals should have a discussion group about the meaning of Luke 4:23—“Physician, heal thyself.”

And to remember another old adage:  If you point a finger at someone remember that there are three fingers pointing back at you.

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Notes From a Quiet—

Road.

Your traveling correspondent has been on the road for a month, from Cincinnati and Indianapolis to Illinois to Colorado and Texas.

He has not been to Auxvasse.

Auxvasse is the home to 1,001 people.  At least it was in the most recent census.  It has a total area of three-quarters of a square mile.  It’s a few miles north of Kingdom City, the crossroads of Missouri.  You might catch a glimpse of its former small business district as you flash past it on Highway 54.  The town tavern has survived.

It originally was called Clinton City when it was platted in 1873 but changed its name to honor a nearby creek because the postal service was easily confused by the presence of another town in Missouri named Clinton, with no “city” on the end. It has had a post office since 1874. It is the largest populated area in Jackson Township of Callaway County.

Blogger Tom Dryden, who might be the most famous person to come from Auxvasse—because of his blog—notes that the town website refers to the community as “the third largest fourth class city” in the county.  He says I have been pronouncing its name incorrectly, Oh-vawz.  No, it’s “Of auze.”

Dryden wrote a loving tribute to his hometown in his October 23, 2016 entry. I suggest you check him out at TOMDRYDEN.COM.  He has written some other things about the town and its people, too.

Dryden admits the town is so insignificant he cannot convince his car’s GPS system that it exists, which led him to concede in his May 14, 2012 blog entry, “When you’re from Auxvasse, you can’t go home again.”

I can appreciate his love for his town because I grew up in a couple of small towns in Illinois—one of about 1,500 people (Mt. Pulaski) and the other of about 3,300 when we moved there (Sullivan), probably considered big cities when Tom was a kid.

Now I live in a REALLY big city. Jefferson City (43,228 people in the most recent census).  And Auxvasse has been irritating me for decades.

(By the way, we made an interesting discovery on our way back from Albuquerque last weekend.  We drove through Wichita, which has a listed population of 397,552 in the 2020 census.  St. Louis claims 301,578.  Wichita, Kansas is bigger than St. Louis!!.  Sedgewick County can’t hold a candle to St. Louis County, though, so St. Louis is still a bigger metro area)

Tom Dryden’s GPS doesn’t know where Auxvasse is. But he’s wrong. He CAN go home again. The Missouri Department of Transportation makes sure of that. Interstate 70 exit 148 has a big green sign—

Maybe it’s a conversation piece designed to keep drivers bored by hundreds of miles of billboard-ugly, mostly straight, highway alert by trying to figure out (a) how to pronounce that top word and (b) why it is important enough to be on the highway sign.

“Hey, Maude, get out yer Triple-A guidebook and look up Ox-Vassy and see what’s there.”

“It’s not listed, Claude.”

“They why do you suppose Missouri wants you to go there?”

Well, why does it?

Why doesn’t the sign say “Jefferson City?”  It’s only the state capital, you know.  It’s only the place where the department has its headquarters.

Heck, with Kingdom City’s development into almost-Effingham West, why isn’t Kingdom City on the sign?

We are left to ponder whether Auxvasse has the distinction of being the smallest town in Missouri, or in America, to be listed on an Interstate Highway exit ramp sign.

But it just irritates the sock off me that Jefferson City apparently is less important to the department than Auxvasse is.   I will confess, however, that there have been some times when I’m just one more tired and semi-dangerous driver on the road late at night, that seeing that sign has kicked up the mental processes just enough to make it the last 30 miles or so home safely.  That and the Coke I get at the Kingdom City McDonald’s drive-through window.

Congratulations to Auxvasse, though.  Every day, tens of thousands of people go past a sign that says it is more significant than the capital city of the state. If I lived in Auxvasse, I’d be proud of that.

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The journalist

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was last weekend.  They’re filled with jokes and jabs between those who cover and those who are covered.  And along the way, the people who are covered get to say some good things about journalists. Sometimes, the covered make some pointed comments about journalists.

We pause today to pay our tribute to the fellow ink-stained wretches who daily do their best to tell us about our city, our state, our nation, and our world. There are those who will dismiss this contribution as silly because they already know that reporters are biased against their viewpoint, whatever it might be.  Some of those who dismiss these remarks might, in fact, claim that they know the “media” is biased because their favorite radio or television talk show host or political leader says it is, missing the irony in that position. We hope they will excuse us as we plunge ahead, using words of another written a long time ago when the press was newspapers and reporters really could be called ink-stained wretches—a title many were proud to wear.  The phrase, incidentally, is of uncertain origin but has been used for decades.

In 1922, New York American writer Gene Fowler, one of the great journalists of the first third of the Twentieth Century, asked Arthur Brisbane to write about the one-thousand members of the Newspaper Club of New York. Brisbane was the editor of William Randolph Hearst’s tabloid New York Mirror. When he died in 1936, Brisbane was called “the greatest journalist in his day” by Hearst.  And Damon Runyon, certainly no slouch as a 1920s writer, said, “Journalism has lost its all-time No. 1 genius.” What he wrote then about newspaper reporters rings true today among those who toil not only in newspapers but in the changing world of electronic journalism, often without pay increases for years, to responsibly report about the factors that shape our lives. We found a reprint of Brisbane’s editorial on page nineteen in the October 14, 1922 edition of The Fourth Estate, which billed itself as “a newspaper for the makers of newspapers.”

A thousand newspaper men represent, among other things, disappointment in life. Newspaper work is hard, and it does not get better as you grow older, unless you are among the few very fortunate.

Men in other professions, as they work through the years, build up a firm name professionally or in business they build up a business name. And at the end of years they have created something that goes on earning for them when they are old.

Not so with the newspaper man.

He must do every day the work by which he lives, and do it all over again.

Each day he must create his reputation anew.

His greatest asset is enthusiasm, real interest in what he sees and what he tells.

And the years are the enemies of enthusiasm.

A thousand newspapermen, however, represent something more important than several hundred kinds of disappointment. They are to our civilization what the bulb in the electric lamp is to the big factory grinding out electricity down by the waterfront. The light in the bulb tells what the factory is doing. The reporter in the newspaper tells what civilization is doing, as it works, builds, tears down, cheats, lies, deceives and slowly goes ahead.

“The electric bulb burns out, so does the newspaperman. He at least has made it possible for humanity to see more clearly and to advance with knowledge. That means satisfaction.

Newspaper work brings disillusion. After a few years a man starting out full of enthusiasm knows too much about human beings. He must begin with a great supply of hope and optimism, and a good deal of knowledge of the past and of progress in the past to avoid pessimism and gloom.

Young reporters learn that the words of great men is often unreliable. One of the best known statesmen and heroes of this country always had two reporters sent to see him by the Associated Press, that one might corroborate the other and discourage denial of what the hero had actually said.

Reporters in the very beginning learn the pitiful craving for notoriety, eagerness for publicity that obsesses their fellow citizens and that diminishes their opinion of them.

Reporters learn quite young that politics and the government of this nation are managed to a great extent by the intellectual dregs of the population. They discover that the first step toward public approval is a step down, and that discourages them,

However, newspaper work is an education. It enlightens reporter as the reporter enlightens his fellow citizens. If he can stay out of the rut, which is extremely difficult and unusual, or if he can stay in long enough to get the information he wants, then get out and try something else, the reporter usually can thank his newspaper experience.

If he stays too long and is not exceptionally fortunate, time and the current of news running through him burn him out, as the electric current burns out the bulb, and like that bulb he goes into the scrap heap.

This is written after thirty-nine years of reporting and other newspaper work, and therefore with some slight authority.

Without the work of good reporters our government, our grafters, our hypocrites, big and little, our crooks in politics, and our politics in crime would be a thousand times worse than they are. Let that repay the 1,000 newspaper men.

We often have said that being a reporter is the most exciting thing to do because reporters do something that scientists say is impossible and they do it every day.  Each day reporters walk into their newsrooms not knowing what events will challenge their skills and their principles during the day.  At the end of that day—and passionate reporters know a “day” for them is not measured in a fixed number of hours—they have created something out of nothing, a product known as “news.”  It happens every day in newspaper, radio, and television newsrooms throughout America.  Critics blast television for the “if it bleeds, it leads” attitude, or bemoan the shrinking commitment to solid local news reporting on radio, and mourn the passing of competition in local newspaper markets.  But in hundreds of newsrooms of those organizations are those who consciously work to tell the story straight.  But even if you believe the “media” are biased, believe Brisbane’s last paragraph:

Without the work of good reporters our government, our grafters, our hypocrites, big and little, our crooks in politics, and our politics in crime would be a thousand times worse than they are

Brisbane also wrote something else—advice that is good for reporters and non-reporters alike—that we’ll pass along in another entry.

Increase our taxes

We are a retired family living on a more-or-less fixed income.  We hope our taxes go up next year.  In fact, we’re going to give our permission in a few days for them to go up regardless of what happens to our income.

Jefferson City needs voter permission to raise the money for a loooonnnnnng overdue second high school and the school district wants people like us and our neighbors to approve a higher tax levy.  This household is unanimously in favor of the idea.

We don’t have any kids attending the schools of Jefferson City.  We haven’t been to a school play or a school concert or to a school football or basketball game in years, probably decades.  Haven’t been to a PTA meeting for even longer, probably.  We do go into one of the public school system’s buildings three or four times a year for the city concert association events but that’s about it.

So we have no personal connection to a school system that wants to increase our property tax bill by a pretty good amount.   But we want the system to do it.

We took a pile of income tax information, over which Nancy had agonized for countless hours, to our accountant a few days ago.  We’ll learn the damage before long.  Naturally, we wish we could keep that money but when we come down to it, we don’t mind paying taxes—because we understand what they buy.  We just hope the people we elect to distribute those funds do so in a responsible manner that benefits the general public. We confess there are times when we think those people could do a better job by putting more emphasis on the word “general”  but we haven’t met anyone yet who has come up with a better system than the present one for making sure all of us share the Biblical and the democratic responsibilities to each other.

Somebody has to pay for the things we expect government to do for us and we’re okay with putting our financial drop into the big bucket that finances more things for us that we can count. And education is one of the biggest benefits.

We’ve lived in Jefferson City nigh on to half a century—a statement that amazes us every time we recall the things we ‘ve seen and done—and we can’t recall a time when somebody wasn’t saying, “Jefferson City needs a second high school.”   Actually, Jefferson City already has a half-dozen or so public and parochial high schools including the high school program at the Algoa prison, a high school for about fifteen severely disabled students, and a Christian academy with about five students in grades ten through twelve.

In our household we think it’s important that children have opportunities to learn.  Not just classroom subjects, but the things they can learn through band, and science clubs, and school newspapers, and sports, and debate clubs, and other things that add to the creation of a thinking, active, inquisitive life that is to come.   We think a better future can be incubated when all of the eggs are not jammed into one basket.

And it’s the future we’re talking about here, a more learned society in a world that increasingly demands educated people who understanding that learning and life have to go together if hopes for a free humankind are to progress.   A second high school in our town will increase opportunities for our grandchildren’s generation to have a better chance to make that idealized future a materialized future.

We know that we write from the standpoint of ones who can afford to pay these higher taxes, knowing that there are many who feel they cannot.  We wish we had an answer for them for some of them are our friends.  We, and they, are left with leaving others who are in policy positions who have the knowledge to ease those concerns to recognize them and act on them.

Regardless of our economic standings, the thing we CANNOT afford is ignorance.  Ignorance is one of the greatest enemies of a democracy.  It is one of the first tools of the despot.  The control of learning and the limitations placed on it and on the circulation of public learning are trademarks of the societies we identify geographically and often culturally as threats to our way of life.  A visit to a nation governed by those who know ignorance equates to power and control is a sobering experience.

We’ve been there.  We’ve seen it.  We know that the American system of public education is one of our greatest protections.  We’ll be glad to pay more taxes to make that system better in our town.

We in this household are products of public education from our first days in a classroom to our last days in graduate schools.  We benefitted because our parents and grandparents paid the taxes that helped shape us as, we hope, good and responsible citizens.  We’ll be glad to pay some higher taxes so other generations will have a better chance to defeat ignorance and all of the perils it presents.

It’s okay if our taxes go up next year, even if they go up by a pretty good amount. In our household we think that the Preamble to the United States Constitution is not only a statement of the virtues we want in government, but is also a commitment by We the People to work through that government to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,”

Promotion of the general welfare cannot be done in a climate that impedes an escape from ignorance.  We will pay higher taxes because we wish to help create a climate that better serves the future general welfare of our city, our state, and our country.

Big government comes to Missouri

The State Planning Board in 1937 did a study of office space requirements for state departments in Jefferson City.  Your specialist in the archaeology of forgotten information uncovered it at the State Archives during research on the next Capitol book and thought it offers context for the discussions about what government should be these eight decades later.

In this era when “big government” has become a charged phrase, this report does at least three things:

  1. It gives us a history of big government’s early development.
  2. It explains why the phrase became a necessity.
  3. It explains why shrinking “big government” is easier to say than it will be to do.

We offer this to you as a prelude to later discussions of Donald F. Kettl’s Escaping Jurassic Government: How to Recover America’s Lost Commitment to Competence, a book that says big government is here to stay but today’s political approaches to it might be only  aggravating its shortcomings at a time when enlightened, practical steps should be taken to bring a 19th century system that worked for decades into a workable system in the 21st century. It can be interesting for those of us who are served by government programs but it might be even more useful for those who determine the directions those programs take.

The 1937 study concluded, “A new building is necessary for economy and efficiency in the operation of the State government.”   Here’s the history lesson from that report:

When the Capitol building was still under construction, the state government functions were increasing and the demand for office space likewise increased.  During the last fifty years or more, great changes have taken place in our social and economic structure.  Extensive alterations have occurred in transportation, communication, means of production, trade and commerce, and manners and customs.  New standards of civic and social responsibility have arisen and state government in Missouri, as elsewhere, has been affected and has had to keep pace with the influences of the changing world.  Today, the state occupies a different place in society than it did fifty or even twenty years ago.

Gradually, the emergency of railroads, the industrial system with its thriving cities, the automobile, corporate financing, public utilities and other products of the period confronted the state with problems of regulation and control which it had never before known.  An increase in the material wealth of the population produced a rising standard of living which, in turn, demanded a greater number and better quality of governmental services in the field of education, health, sanitation, and hospitalization of the insane and tubercular.  The awakening of a new social responsibility established institutions for the blind, the deaf, and the delinquent minors.  The automobile placed the state in the road-building business.  Problems arising from industry and urban life demanded that the state inspect mines and manufacturing plants and establish health and sanitary standards.  Decade by decade, as our society has grown in size and complexity, new services and functions have been demanded of our state.  In short, then, the state has developed into an agency for promotion of the well-being of its citizens.

The report noted the number of permanent administrative government employees in Jefferson City (excluding the legislature and the Supreme Court) had grown from fewer than 100 in 1900 to about 1,400 in 1936 because of that half-century of change in American, and Missouri, society and economy.

The first state agency to reflect that trend in an obvious way was the Highway Department. In 1907, the office of Highway Engineer was created within the State Board of Agriculture (not a department yet).  The position became that of State Highway Commissioner in 1913 and just four years after an entirely new department, the State Highway Department, was created—all in response to the rapid growth of the use of automobiles and the need for the roads for them.  In 1920, Missourians approved a $60 million dollar bond issue that started the Missouri Centennial Road Program, the state’s first major effort to create a coherent highway system.  The report reminds readers that in the space of less than fifteen years, the agency for developing the state road system had grown from one person in the office of another state agency into a “huge department” that finally had to move out of the Capitol and into its own building in 1928.

When the 1937 survey was done, twenty-two departments or parts of departments (not including highways) were housed in the capitol.  During legislative sessions they had to find temporary quarters in other buildings in Jefferson City.  Two agencies—the Public Service Commission and the now-Department of Agriculture’s laboratory, had moved full-time into the old post office/federal building that was across High Street from the present main post office.

By 1937, government had so outgrown the capitol that office space on the building’s first floor occupied 48% more space than the building’s designed capacity, the study commenting, “This has been accomplished by using as office space the cafeteria, vestibules, vault space, etc.  The second floor is seriously overcrowded.  In some rooms typists are working in such close quarter that they cannot freely operate their machines.  In one case, the fixtures in a toilet were removed and the space converted to offices.  The need for office space is so acute that it is planned to make use of other toilets for offices in the near future.

“While the legislature is not in session, certain departments expand their activities into legislative committee rooms and the Senators’ private offices.  Each time the legislature convenes, it is the same story. Departments occupying legislative quarters have to move, and each time the legislature adjourns the persons occupying rooms are besieged with requests to let this or that or other departments use the space.”  In those days, the legislature met every other year, not annually.

The Federal Works Progress Administration occupied “extensive space” on the legislative floors, including the Senate balcony.

About 2,600 square feet of space in the basement was improvised into offices that had no ventilation and no natural light.  Between sessions, ten departments or parts of departments rented space elsewhere in town.  During sessions, fifteen departments had to rent space.   More than 200 employees worked in a basement that became so polluted by exhaust gases of delivery trucks that many workers developed “sick headaches” that force them to take time away from work.

Missouri was not alone in dealing with the development of big government.  The Oklahoma State Planning Board had reported late in 1936 that Missouri was just one of 28 states considering new office buildings.

Big government had arrived—out of necessity.  It remains and it is a fact of life.  The result of that 1937 study was the Broadway Office Building.

In later entries we’ll review Kettl’s call for realistic thinking about the focus  of discussion about the direction of government.  In short, he argues without saying it: The goal is less about making government smaller than it is about making American government competent again.

Stay tuned.