Private Work for Public Good (Part II)

On the heels of my recent discovery on the background of the word “liturgy”  as “private work for public good,” I made another observation while taking my son to school along 38^th Street, one of the busiest roads in Indianapolis, and one of the few that sees a significant flow of city buses. 

Last week, after the snowfall that had set the local record for the most snow in a season, I watched an older woman trudging east in the far right-hand lane of the six-lane street, staying close to the dirty white ridge that hid the curb.   

We have very nice sidewalks on 38^th Street, with landscaped right-of-ways between the sidewalks and the street.   But for a four-block stretch of that street – occupied largely by branch offices of banks – the walks have not been shoveled, apparently since the big storm in early January.

Monday, I decided to traverse that stretch on foot to go to the nearest drug store.   In the 29 degree temperatures, the single-file path blazed by previous pedestrians was turning into a trench filled with ankle-deep slush.   The trails ended in knee-high gray roadblocks at the crosswalks where the snowplows have cleared streets.

Over an eight-block walk (there on one side, and back on the other), only two property owners had attempted to clear the sidewalks – the landlord of an un-named apartment building at 38^th and Penn, and North United Methodist Church. 

Who is responsible for keeping sidewalks cleared?   On my street, everyone does a pretty good job of keeping their walks shoveled, if only so our neighbors can walk their dogs without getting snow over the tops of their boots.   What happened to businesses having that sense of responsibility? 

It was the sidewalks in front of the banks that irked me the most.  I suspect these banks know who their customers are and are not.   The sizable parking lots behind the banks are plowed, and the walkways around from the lot to the front door are clear.  Apparently few pedestrians patronize these banks; perhaps not even many of the people in the neighborhood who use public transportation (when they can avoid being run over by it).   Or maybe the pedestrians are just so used to trudging through knee-deep snow that it doesn’t occur to them to say anything.

I’ve also been reading about the U.S. Postal Service’s idea of becoming an outlet for financial services such as prepaid credit cards and even payday loans.  Apparently a growing number of Americans don’t have bank accounts – not only the unemployed and the disabled and those supposedly-ubiquitous welfare cheats, but also a lot of people who take public transportation to their minimum-wage jobs. 

I just watched my son perform in Les Miserables twice, so I’m still feeling like a revolutionary.  I couldn’t help seeing the little old lady trudging past the offices of the multinational corporation and thinking,

Look down, and see the beggars at your feet
Look down and show some mercy if you can
Look down and see the sweepings of the streets
Look down, look down, upon your fellow man!

Or, for that matter,

Look down, look down, you’ll always be a slave

Look down, look down, you’re standing in your grave...

Man the barricades!   Occupy!

Whew.  Okay, I got that out of my system.

Actually, I did consider doing something about it (instead of just writing about it).  I thought about going and shoveling it myself.   And notifying some friends in the media to come photograph and interview me doing it, to publicly shame and humiliate the property owners.   Luckily, it’s been thawing all week, and so I didn’t act on my passive-aggressive impulse.

But I did think, if I had noticed this was going on earlier in the winter, it could have been a great opportunity to approach those business owners about putting young people to work shoveling these  “public  thoroughfares” which cross “private property.” 

So I’m talking to a couple of people in the area about gearing up for that effort in the future.   It might be best in this day and age if the property owners were approached by an adult on behalf of an organization that was supervising the young people who could use the work, the direction, and the small amount of money.   We wouldn’t be asking residents and businesses to support one more charity.  We would be providing them the means to fulfill their erstwhile  obligation to do private work for public good.  It would be a liturgy.  

Private Work for Public Good (Part I)

Last week I got a little history lesson when Cate Waynick, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis, joined us for Sunday worship.  As part of her interactive homily, she told us that the word "liturgy," while often synonymous with "service," actually comes from a Greek word that referred to a form of "service" different from "ceremony."

Bishop Cate told us that the Greek word leitourgia is sometimes interpreted as "private work for public good."  The example she gave was of a merchant who built a bridge to get his goods to market ... and then left it for anyone else to use.

Intrigued, I did a little more research.   It seems that leitourgia -- literally, "work of the people" or "work for the people" -- originated with the ancient Greeks in the years 800-500 B.C., when the Romans were still clustered in central Italy and the Hebrews were in the Babylonian captivity.   The Greeks funded their civic enterprises -- temples, the military, and even gymnasia and theatrical productions -- by asking the wealthiest citizens to volunteer for the privilege of underwriting them.  There was great prestige in being named the "sponsor" of the costliest items.  Often this came with the benefit of serving as master of ceremonies at a related festival or feast.   Not unlike modern philanthropy, in a lot of respects.

Except this wasn't philanthropy in the modern sense.  It appears to have been much closer to their version of taxation.   A tax paid exclusively by the rich.   Has anyone told Mitt Romney about this?

It seems the ancient Greeks did have other forms of government revenue, that everyone paid, even if only indirectly -- primarily what we could call sales taxes and tariffs.  But at this point in history there was, apparently, no attempt to tax the income or "wealth" of the poor.  The Greeks didn't look beyond the wealthy. Like Willie Sutton's rationale for robbing banks, that's where the money is.

   

Rooting for Chaos

It’s time for my annual mid-November guide to watching the rest of the college football season.  As usual, I’m rooting for chaos – not because I hate the BCS (that’s a moot point, anyway), but because I like for as many games as possible to have a bearing on the debate that makes looking at “the big picture” so much fun.

The best thing that can happen would be for Auburn to keep winning, and then upset Alabama on Thanksgiving weekend.    That opens up all kinds of possibilities; including, unfortunately, the possibility of Alabama going to the national championship game anyway.  That would be absurd and chaotic.   So that’s another reason to root for it.

If the goal is to keep Alabama out of the championship, then we need for Missouri to win out as well.  That way, the winner of the SEC championship game – Missouri or Auburn (who would have predicted THAT in August?) will be 12-1.  No way an 11-1 Alabama team that didn’t make the league title game leapfrogs that winner.  On the other hand, if Missouri loses to Texas A&M, and South Carolina wins the SEC East and then beats Auburn in Atlanta, so that both those two teams end up 11-2 … which SEC team has the best shot at a national title invitation?  Sure enough, it would be “third place,”  11-1 ‘Bama.   Bet on it.  And wouldn’t that piss off fans of every other team in the top ten?

This year, I don’t think that a one-loss SEC  team will get to jump over an undefeated team from another “power conference” – and it’s frankly hard to see Florida State losing a game at this point.   Unless Ohio State turns the ball over four times and loses to Indiana 67-63, the Buckeyes aren’t going to be tested until the Big Ten title game against Michigan State.  But we’re rooting for chaos, so give that one to Sparty.

Baylor’s a great story, but they still have three of their toughest games ahead of them … and even if they win them all (against Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, and Texas), those teams all still play each other, too … so Baylor NEEDS to win out to make the championship game; because otherwise, they could be an 11-1 team with no wins against anyone who finished in the top 25.    But, undefeated Baylor vs. undefeated Florida State for the national championship?   Yeah, I’d watch.

But I’d rather root for chaos.  So, sorry, Baylor.  You’ll need to lose one.  How about to Oklahoma State, so you both end up 11-1?   Along with Oregon, Clemson, Central Florida,  Louisville, and Alabama?  Tucked right in behind 12-1 Stanford, Ohio State, Michigan State, and either Missouri or Auburn!   And, oh yeah, let’s let Fresno State and Northern Illinois finish undefeated, just to tie up some BCS game slots and make it more chaotic.

Oh, what the heck.  While we’re trying to make all this happen, let’s go ahead and imagine Florida State losing an ACC title game rematch against Miami.   Now we’ve got chaos!

Think next year’s four-team playoff system would take care of this mess?   Nope.  I think we’ll always have debates about national championships settled the old-fashioned way:  by drunks arguing in bars!

Why Settlers of Catan trumps Risk and Monopoly

Remember board games?  I have fond but distant memories from my younger days of Monopoly and Risk marathons with friends and cousins.   Fond because it was fun.  Distant because, who has eight hours to play a board game these days?

I spent much of a recent three-day weekend playing Settlers of Catan, a game that my household discovered at a Thanksgiving family reunion, and which quickly surged to number two (behind an iPod) on my 12-year-old’s Christmas wish list.  Now it’s my favorite as well.

Catan is often described as a cross between Risk and Monopoly, and those are understandable comparisons, although it has dawned on me that the contrasts with those two games are just what I like most about Catan.    Here’s what makes Catan superior to Risk and Monopoly:

Literally, no two games are the same -- the board is assembled in a different random order for every game.

It doesn’t take eight hours to play a game.  The games I’ve played have lasted one to two hours.

You can still play it for eight straight hours if you want to.   But that consists of five or six separate consecutive games, after each of which every player enthusiastically says, “Want to play another round?” 

Because you win by assembling natural resources from a randomly-generated landscape that can make some products ridiculously abundant or scarce, Catan teaches great economic lessons about supply and demand.  Players can’t win without mastering the concept of trade – with the mainland "bank," or even with each other. 

You get points for the largest army, but also for building a market, a library, or a university.

Yes, there is a military aspect to the game.  But it’s more like a Viking raid (or maybe modern guerilla warfare; but Catan is set in the Bronze  Age) than a war of occupation.   Playing the “knight” card involves stealing a resource from an opponent and disrupting natural resource production in the affected region for a few turns – not destroying his army, removing his cities from the map, sowing salt into the earth, or even hearing the lamentation of his women. 

But there is no conquering of someone else’s territory.  What an amazing respect for property rights!  You win this game by expanding your territory more successfully than your opponent, not by driving her from her home.  How American!  Or maybe how un-American.  I’m getting confused.   I grew up playing Monopoly and Risk, driving people from their homes and into the sea …

That’s not to say Catan is not cut-throat competitive.  There’s nothing more brutal than spending eight turns building a road to the last ore deposit, for example, and then having your opponent beat you to it on the ninth turn. 

Ultimately, the best thing about Catan is that the end of a game tends to be a race to the (arbitrary, point-based) finish between growing “empires,” rather than a two-hour Sherman’s March through Georgia.   At the end of almost every game, the “losers” are one or two acquisitions away from winning themselves, rather than having spent the last two hours downsizing or burying their dead in a lost cause.  

The difference in the definition of success is not subtle at all … you can play a game based on competition, free markets, trade, property rights, territorial expansion, and even military intervention – and not have success defined as the extermination of your opponents.   How interesting that Monopoly was developed in America in the 1930s; Risk in France in the 1950s … and Catan in Germany in 1995. 

It’s not surprising that our society’s games are based on hundred- and thousand-year-old economic and military philosophies.  But our real-life  economic and foreign policies don’t have to reflect 50- and 80-year-old games.  I think all of us need to play a whole lot of Settlers of Catan with our kids, and soon.  Fortunately, it’s a much quicker game than its predecessors. 

Constitution Day

Monday is the 225th anniversary of the day our nation's founders signed their names to the final draft of the Constitution. On Friday I spoke to a gym full of elementary and middle-school students (and some parents) at my son's school's Constitution Day program. I didn't do a ton of research for it, but I did give considerable thought to how to address such a wide range of ages. The following is more-or-less what I came up with.

We celebrate the Constitution because it is the set of rules that the founders of the United States worked out and agreed on 225 years ago – when our country was brand new, and no one was sure yet that we wouldn’t fall apart.

They did an amazing job. They agreed to rules on how we would elect our leaders, how we would write and approve and carry out laws, how we would pay for it, and how the states would continue to interact with each other.

The founders wanted a central government strong enough to create an army and navy to defend us from foreign enemies, but not one so strong that it could be just as oppressive as the King of England had been.

Who can tell me how many branches of government the Constitution set up? And what are they? Good. And why is it important that we have THREE? Right. For balance. So no ONE gets too strong.

Which one do you think they were most afraid would get too strong?

I think you’re right. Most of the rest of the world at this time had an Executive Branch led by a king, or a czar, or a Sultan, who ultimately had all the final authority over whatever legislature and certainly whatever courts existed.

The power and independence given to our judicial branch to overturn legislation or to prevent the executive branch from enacting it – to declare it unconstitutional – is one of the things that really set the United States apart, certainly back then. And that is where the ACLU often comes in, by the way – sometimes Congress, or a state legislature, will pass a law that they THINK is solving some problem, but along the way that law is also depriving people of their rights, or treating some people differently than it treats other people. And when one of those people who have been hurt – even unintentionally – comes to the ACLU for help, the ACLU sends a lawyer to ask a judge to interpret the constitution and decide if that law is unconstitutional, at no charge to the person who was hurt. The ACLU helps make the system work the way it was designed.

So 225 years ago this week, on September 17, 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention finished their work and signed it, and sent it back to the state legislatures of the 13 states – because the states all had to accept, or ratify it – or else what good would it do? And that took another year and a half.

Was it perfect? What do you think was the biggest problem that it left in place?

Yes, I think most people agree that the answer to that question is Slavery. In 1787 some states allowed slavery and some didn’t, and the Constitution compromised by allowing it to remain in place. It took 90 years and a civil war to fix that.

What did the Constitution say about who could vote? Ah, IT DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING! At the time, it was customary and assumed that only men who owned property had the right to vote. Not until after the Civil War did we amend the Constitution to specify that the black men – but only the men – who had been freed from slavery could vote. And when were women allowed to vote? Anyone? Right, not for another fifty years after that, in 1920.

So, the Constitution is a living document, that still works because we’ve amended it when necessary – but not really all that often – for 225 years.

In fact, the first ten amendments were done immediately, and all at once … and who can tell me what those ten amendments are called?

Yes, the Bill of Rights.

Whereas the original Articles of the Constitution deal with the powers and limits of powers of the branches of government, and the relationship between the states and the federal government, they don’t talk much about the rights of the People.

So that’s mostly what the first ten amendment did – list freedoms that the government could not take away from the people. And we just heard a great presentation from the second graders on what those rights were.

So, the Constitution in general, and the Bill of Rights in particular --
Defend the people from the government;
Defend the weak from the strong; and
Defend minorities from the majority.

Take note. What are the first three words of the Constitution? Yes, “We the People.” And the Bill of Rights consistently refers to The People. All the people. Not just white male landowners, not “citizens.” The People. True, in 1787, women (and men who didn't own homes) couldn’t vote, but they still had free speech, freedom of religion, the right to trial by jury. The government couldn't search them without a warrant or force them to let soldiers live in their homes.

The Bill of Rights also introduces the concept of due process, which courts later extended from just matters of trial by jury, to all dealings with government – the idea of equality under the law.

It’s an election year, and candidates are falling all over themselves to convince us that they believe America is the greatest country on earth, and that they are the MOST PROUD to be an American.

America is indeed a great country, and I feel proud AND blessed to live here. One of the things that makes America great is that we are a huge country, rich in natural resources, and relatively safe across two oceans from most of the troubles of the rest of the world. I feel blessed by that, but not particularly proud – any more than I’m “proud” that I’m six feet tall. Being six feet tall is an advantage, but it’s not something I worked to achieve.

I think what really makes America great is the 225 years of upholding this Constitution and its principles, and working to extend freedom and equality -- liberty and justice -- to ALL PEOPLE. That’s something to be proud of.

So go be proud Americans. And be Americans we can all be proud of.

Notes from the Pacific Northwest

Observations on the Pacific Northwest from the plane on the way back from our trip to Seattle:

(If you're reading this blog, you probably know that our son Grant is in France with a school exchange program that we've been preparing for for years. Partly to distract us from fretting about our 12-year-old being on another continent, Sally cashed in a few thousand frequent flyer miles, and we took our first kidless vacation in years -- staying, for the most part, with Sally's cousin Bruce and his wife Julie and their daughter Taylor. With the expenses of travel and lodging covered, we were able to indulge ourselves with great food [and the related hidden costs of parking and ferry crossings] without worrying about the budget.)

We spent the first week in June there without ever unpacking my walking shorts or short-sleeved shirts. The weather alternated between sun-splashed and drizzling, but it rarely got above 60 degrees. And since we didn't really have a spring in the Midwest this year (its been in the 80s more often than not ever since early February), the cool climate was perfect, from my perspective.

When I travel, I tend to plan my days around cultural and historical sites -- whether that means castles and cathedrals and seaports and cityscapes, or simply pubs and bistros and the food and drink and music and conversation within, I'm pretty much a "man-made" kind of guy.

On this trip, we encountered a heap of male seal lions basking in the sun;
a peregrine falcon perched above its cliffside nest; a herd of elk lying down on a roadway in a valley below us; and best of all, for a few magical seconds, a bald eagle skimming across the surface of the Columbia River just a couple of hundred feet from us. These unplanned events rarely lent themselves to photography or any other souvenir-taking. The memories will have to do.

Nature had the starring role in two other attractions that weren't on my pre-trip agenda. On Monday Bruce and Julie took us up into the mountains to Sosquamish Falls (remember the opening scenes of "Twin Peaks"?) --
a waterfall that is narrower but taller than Cumberland Falls in Kentucky, but that somehow manages to send a tower of mist higher and farther, it seems, than Niagra.

And, on the return leg of an overnight trip to Portland, we took a detour to visit Mount St. Helens. We had been advised to allow at least two hours for the trip and ended up taking five. It's an amazing experience that just keeps getting more compelling the farther up the 52-mile road you drive -- especially if you stop at the four different visitors centers along the way, watch the videos, and talk to the interpreters and forest rangers (this property is part of the U.S. Forest Service, not the National Parks ... more on why that matters later).

I remember when this volcano erupted in May 1980. I was in the middle of my last finals week as an undergraduate at Ball State; and the huge news story of the day wasn't the volcano, it was the Iran hostage crisis -- "I'm Ted Koppel and this is America Held Hostage, Day 143". We've all seen the pictures and the video of the column of ash, but -- probably because of the relatively small loss of life (incredibly small, once you've been there) -- the enormity of this event didn't register on me before.

You start this trek on Interstate 5 a couple hundred feet above sea level,
and end up 4000 feet higher (and 20 degrees cooler) on an observation deck outside a bunker-like interpretive center atop Johnston Ridge, staring across two miles of a lunar landscape at the bottom rim of a huge, angled crater, the top edge of which , at 8000 feet, is 1000 feet lower than the peak of the mountain used to be. Everything in between -- and as far as the eye can see to your left and your right -- is an almost-barren field of boulders and dried ash and pumice, a new valley floor hundreds of feet above a former wooded valley floor that was filled, for 30 miles downstream, with the raw material of a mountain that blew itself apart.

And in the middle of that crater, silent and snow-covered, is a new lava dome that has risen over 800 feet in just the past thirty years.

The mountainside was sparsely populated to begin with, and "only" 57 people died because authorities had evacuated the area in advance. "Only" 300 homes -- spread across a 40-mile long valley -- were destroyed, and most of them were empty. That's why the numbers don't prepare you for driving miles and miles and miles across empty countryside -- most of it now replanted with fir trees. On the way back down the mountain, you pass the point at which the trees were splintered by the power of the eruption; to the point at which the trees were yanked out by the roots and hurled down the valley along with the avalanche of melted snow and mud; to the point at which the trees were left standing but naked and blackened by the heat from the blast. That point is 14 miles downhill from Johnston Ridge.

No one lives less than 25 miles from Johnston Ridge today. Except maybe Bigfoot. It was an amazing experience, but coming down the mountain -- even with three hours of daylight left -- I felt very small and alone and eager to get back to civilization. It felt good to get back to Seattle and settle into a neighborhood grill for a martini and duck quesadillas and rabbit tacos.

So, yeah, we had great meals -- charcuterie from Charlesbourg, a French bistro in the newly revitalized, funky little Greenwood neighborhood; wood-fired pizza at a Ballard art fair; great meals of salmon and pork tenderloin that we took turns cooking for each other; marionberry crepes at a ferry landing in Kingston; dungeness crab in eggs benedict at the Edgewater and crabrolls and salads at Lowell's in Pike Place Market and in stew in an oyster bar in Old Town in Portland. I also had a reindeer sausage from a food truck in Portland. So we not only saw wildlife on this trip; we ate a fair amount of it too.

The daytrip to Portland was the only real disappointment. Not only did plans to meet a friend fall through; that was the day that Sally hit a wall, physically, and she ended up using our lovely suite in the restored Mutnomah Hotel for napping. And for a few hours of another perfect cool spring day, I was fairly content to wander the riverfront and the used bookstores and head shops and open-air bars for an afternoon.


This was my second time in Portland, and I lobbied for this hotel because I stayed there for a museum conference in 2003. At that time, I found the surrounding edgy neighborhood and its population of young people in dreadlocks and tattoos to be exotic and charming. I don't know whether things have gotten seedier, or I'm just nine years older. After a few hours, I found it depressing this time.

Of course, 24 hours in Old Town can't be a fair evaluation of Portland. And indeed, part of what was special about this trip was the time we spent in Seattle, not so much as "tourists," but rather as co-residents. Bruce is a free-lance videographer who had client meetings during the days; Julie is a Lutheran minister. They had school events with Taylor on a couple of evenings, and we joined them for a pitch-in dinner at church one night and for worship on Sunday morning; otherwise, they went about their business (including, happily, their usual "Sunday-afternoon-through-Monday-evening 'weekend'" with us) and we spent much more time behaving, it felt, like Seattlites than visitors -- watching sunsets over Puget Sound from city parks (or from catwalks over freight train tracks);



going to a farmer's market; or, as Sally and Julie did on Sunday evening, attending a compline service at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral (an austere and stunning space which they insisted I go see the next day, and about which I want to do a separate blog. Later.).

Or just grilling out and making mojitos and sharing stories with very good friends.


There are places I love to visit but I wouldn't want to live there: New York, New Orleans, Clearwater Florida, among others. And there are places where we can't help picking up real estate guides, and making the leap from fantasizing to strategizing about relocating. I've felt that way about our last few summer trips to Lake Webster in northern Indiana. We really feel that way about the Pacific Northwest.

Surely, the physical beauty of the mountains, the bays and islands, and the ocean can only go so far. You've still got to make a living. And the long months of cloud cover from October through April might be a problem for someone with a touch of seasonal affective disorder -- although I'm told that the mild temperatures and the thousand shades of evergreen (along with the thousand shades of gray) bring a texture to the Seattle winter that offsets the lack of direct sunlight.

But mostly, I feel at home with the cultural/social/political values of the region. The environmental awareness, the embrace of diversity, the value placed on education. This is the home of Boeing and Microsoft (and Starbucks), of course, so there's no objection to capitalism, which seems to thrive with an educated populace. Prices are high and so are taxes, but I didn't talk to a single person who could imagine living anywhere else.

Which brings me back to Mount St. Helens. The scale of the devastation makes the effort to build a road and several bridges and a sizable, if spartan, monitoring station/visitors center between 1982 and 1997 seem like an epic story in itself -- a "they said it couldn't be done" story in the mold of Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge or the Apollo project. A federal project, moreover. After 1980. And for what purpose? To educate people about an historical event -- to provide them with an opportunity to comprehend the scale and power of nature?

From a utilitarian viewpoint, some of what the federal government did around Mount St. Helens must make sense even to those who say that government is only good for fighting wars and paying for prisons. Surely, building a dam to trap the annual rush of sediment and seeding thousands of acres of mountainside with new trees and grasses to prevent erosion is a prudent use of precious taxpayer dollars. Weyerhauser, the private company that owned (and lost) hundreds of thousands of acres of mature lumber, aided that effort by investing in replanting forests that are still years away from harvest ... perhaps it was a fair trade that the government would build a road for them. But the last 14 miles of that road, and the visitor's center at the apex, seem to serve no purpose beyond allowing the public to share in an experience.

Kind of like a national park, except it's not a national park. National parks can only be created by acts of Congress. Mount St. Helens is a National Monument, administered by the Forest Service, and created not by Congress, but by executive order in 1982. By Ronald Reagan.

Once upon a time there we lived in a world where some issues, some endeavors, were not partisan, and not immediately opposed by 49.9% of the electorate. Vacation over, tomorrow I go back to work, in hopes that we can get back to such a world. And if I'm wrong ... there's always Washington state.

Hudnut and Laffer

Last week I went to two separate events where economist Arthur Laffer and former mayor Bill Hudnut were the speakers – two great and divergent stars of 1970s and ‘80s Republicanism. The contrast could not have been greater.

I had never heard Laffer speak, and I wasn’t prepared for him to be so entertaining. Or to be so youthful-looking. With his exuberant personality and head full of dark hair, he appeared to be younger than me. How old was he in 1979 when he was giving Ronald Reagan the ideological underpinnings of his fiscal policy (aka voodoo economics, according to George HW Bush) – 19? (Possibly … when I was that age I was really good at telling professors and bosses exactly what they wanted to hear, whether I could support it or not.)

Actually, Laffer is 71! And he’s completely unrepentant. He doesn’t QUITE say that “the lower the tax rate, the greater the revenue” is an absolute. If that was the case, cutting the tax rate to 1% would generate so much economic activity that overall tax receipts would actually increase … and so cutting tax rates by another point to ZERO would produce even MORE revenue! No, he’s not that silly … but he seems happy to provide the rhetorical ammunition for tax-cutting warriors who would fail to grasp the absurdity of my hyperbolic example.

And he cloaks his dogma with non-partisanship, from his opening lines about how Barack Obama is a great and wonderful American success story (“he’s just wrong”), to his claim that Bill Clinton was a great President (“a despicable human being, but a great President”) to listing Nixon and Ford as two of the four worst Presidents ever.

Some of Laffer’s points are backed by indisputable facts; others are supported by anecdotes and fables. There’s no doubt that his main point – that taxes can get so high that they smother economic growth – is true. We get it. But I would have liked to have thought that Arthur Laffer – particularly at age 71 – might have developed some perspective on how his advice to Ronald Reagan 33 years ago was used by the Republican Party to disconnect spending from revenue and replace revenue with credit, and thus create most of our $14 trillion national debt.

On Friday, former Indianapolis mayor Bill Hudnut spoke at IUPUI’s Lake Institute on Faith and Giving. I had almost forgotten that before Hudnut was a Republican Congressman and mayor, he was a Presbyterian minister. One of his first observations was about how the ministry prepared him to govern: whereas a politician only needs 51% of the electorate to win or keep office, a minister had better have 90% of the congregation behind him. With that perspective, Hudnut said, once he was mayor, he felt he represented all of Indianapolis, not just the 55% or so who voted for him.

Hudnut may have said something like that 35 years ago, but I probably wouldn’t have understood it then. But clearly, today, he was referencing the tendency of elected officials of both parties to use their offices to railroad through the desires and fetishes of the 51+% that elected them, even if that means ignoring or crushing the 49-% of the residents of their district who want or even need something else.

Hudnut was a popular and successful mayor from 1976 to 1992, and early in his career was seen as a rising star in Republican politics. Without him, Indianapolis may never have built a domed stadium, attracted an NFL franchise, created the vibrant downtown anchored by first Union Station and then Circle Center Mall, hosted a Super Bowl, or maybe even kept Eli Lilly, Simon, and OneAmerica in town. By the end of his 4th term, he had developed a reputation as a facile cheerleader, and he lost a statewide election for Secretary of State. By then, he was also out of step with a Republican party that had no place for consensus-building moderates.

At age 80, Bill Hudnut looks (and deserves to be) healthy and content … but his prepared remarks and his responses to questions reveal an undeniable wistfulness. He repeatedly made statements that it was “foolish” for the Republican party to talk only about cutting taxes, and to not even consider “enhancing revenues” as an option. He suggested several times that he believed the antagonism toward the President is racially motivated. His response to a question about public education sounded despairingly like “that problem may be intractable,” but I have to believe that was mostly a function of the fact that education policy was outside his purview when he was in office.

At one point, his contemporary, former North United Methodist pastor Dick Hamilton, rose to ask him a question about the role that clergy could have and should yet play in support of a mayor. Hudnut flatly admitted to having felt “isolated” when he pushed through an affirmative action program to actively recruit and promote women and minorities in the city police and fire departments (hardly a “right wing” initiative), and “no one” in the clergy defended him against the criticism he received. He urged clergy today to play a role in depoliticizing the “intensely personal and complicated” issue of “pro-life and pro-choice,” believing that there should be room in both parties for people who have convictions on both sides of that contentious issue. He urged clergy to address the issue of hatred – hatred – in public dialogue.

Hudnut also made the point that in his faith tradition, "giving back" encompassed
not only making charitable contributions and volunteering one's time, but also "public service," in the sense of taking one's turn in an elected office, even if that meant taking four or eight years away from one's career. The idea seems quaint. When I was in high school, I believed it -- and I assumed that such "public service" was in my future. Sometime over the past 30 years, that kind of public life became something that I refused to contemplate ... and it was because the public arena became dominated by ideologues who wanted to beat the other side, instead of collaborators who wanted to move the whole community.

Before the event began, I found myself shaking hands with a woman that I realized, as she introduced herself, I had met before. It was Beverly Guidara Hudnut, who had interviewed me in 1985 for a position on Hudnut’s staff for which I had been recommended. I was serving as acting assistant director of the Indiana State Museum then, and frankly, withdrew my application primarily because as a young professional just getting ready to start a family, I couldn't afford the pay cut. I never again considered a position in what might be called “public service,” or “politics,” and I have grown more apolitical ever since. And it’s probably just as well. If today’s Republican Party has no place for a man like Bill Hudnut, I can’t imagine it would have kept a place for me.