Definition of a Bureaucrat

MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia: Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder: "Some of the common signs of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder include:

* Perfectionism
* Inflexibility
* Preoccupation with details, rules, and lists
* Reluctance to allow others to do things
* Excessive devotion to work
* Restricted expression of affection
* Lack of generosity
* Inability to throw things away, even if there is no value in the object"

Girls Get Guts from Globalization III

My third instance of a similar theme is from a post by Major Bateman on Alter's blog on MSNBC.com, Baghdad Holidays III - Altercation - MSNBC.com. The major is in Iraq:

"As you know, we have been supplying a boy’s and a girl’s Elementary School, as well as a Boy’s High School. After the delivery last week we found the High School for the girls. I faced a decision at that point: Expand the program and initiate supply delivery to the girls’ High School… or face rebellion and possible execution at the hands of the female officers and NCOs from this command.

These women are armed, and appeared quite serious. Discretion, as they say, is oft the better part of valor."

The interesting bit is the interplay between the major's female soldiers and the females at the girls' school. It's two cultures meeting. (It's also, to someone who was in the Army 65-7, amazing.)

Girls Get Guts from Globalization II

The second example, Muslim Women in Europe Claim Rights and Keep Faith , isn't as neat, but the NY Times finds:

"a quiet revolution spreading among young European Muslim women, a generation that claims the same rights as its Western counterparts, without renouncing Islamic values.

For many, the key difference is education, an option often denied their poor, immigrant mothers and grandmothers. These young women are studying law, medicine and anthropology, and now form a majority in many Islamic studies courses, traditionally the world of men. They are getting jobs in social work, business and media, and are more prone to use their new independence to divorce."

There's a description of efforts by such women to reinterpret Muslim teachings to be more friendly to women and the modern world

Girls Get Guts from Globalization I

Ran across three items with similar themes: women being freed by contact with the bigger world. The first is in a Wash Post article--Facing Servitude, Ethiopian Girls Run for a Better Life:

"Professional running in Ethiopia was long dominated by men, and the country has produced some of the world's best male distance runners. The legendary Haile Gebrselassie, 33, has broken 17 world records and won two Olympic gold medals. But in the last decade, determined female runners like Meseret Defar, 22, have also begun winning Olympic medals, world championship races and marathons. Today, according to an Ethiopian sports magazine, seven of the 10 top-earning athletes in Ethiopia are women.

Inspired by these new national heroines, Tesdale and thousands of other girls have left their villages and come to the capital, living with relatives in hardscrabble neighborhoods, training on their own and dreaming of being able to compete."

Ethiopia is a male chauvinist society, with the women doing the heavy lifting of water and wood. Even the women who don't find money from running get a measure of hope.

Anarchy and Rules

The NY Times has an article, When Scholarship and Politics Collided at Yale ,on an anarchist professor at Yale, who's involved in a controversy over tenure. One sentence struck a nerve:

"He was by many accounts a prolific writer and popular teacher. Although he sometimes came late, his classes were crowded."

Lateness for meetings drives me nuts. It's disrespectful to others; particularly for the leader of a meeting it's saying that your time is more important than those to whom you're talking. If your audience feels that way, it gets you off on the wrong foot. All in all, it's no way to make railroads run on time. Perhaps in this case the professor justified his lateness to himself by saying he was asserting the power of the individual over that of the institution (that's the way it might have been said in the 60's). And so it would be a symbol of his anarchism, the belief that people can come together without having coordinating authority.

The other thing that drove me nuts was setting a meeting for 8 and having people trickle in late or holding conversations in the back (in the case of large meetings). So I set a "Harshaw rule"--the meeting would start on time and I would start talking at 8. The rule worked. First it put me on record so I made sure to start on time. Second, it made the attendees settle in more promptly.

The lesson for anarchists is that some rules are necessary. Historically, standard timekeeping rode into town on the cowcatcher of the locomotives of the railroads--you can't run a railroad without having a standard time. You can't run a large university without scheduled classes--the professor can't start late and run over without making students late for other classes. Even if you believe in "mobbing", you can't coordinate a demonstration without giving a location and and a time.

The recurring mystery is how you reconcile the need for rules and the need for freedom.

Shed a Tear for Limbo

The NY Times reports the Vatican may be doing away with the concept of "limbo":

"Unlike purgatory, a sort of waiting room to heaven for those with some venial faults, the theory of limbo consigned children outside of heaven on account of original sin alone. As a concept, limbo has long been out of favor anyway, as theologically questionable and unnecessarily harsh. It is hard to imagine depriving innocents of heaven. "

Apparently the theologians are reverting to the idea of God's mystery--a just God can't condemn children, aborted fetuses, and those who died before Christ to hell, so how you reconcile justice with the idea of Christ as the necessary savior of corrupt mankind becomes just another mystery. You may gather I'm a nonbeliever, but I did appreciate the concept, just as I appreciate the facility with which a painter creates the illusion of perspective on canvas.

Fraud and Speed

The Post today has articles on fraud at the Red Cross:

Fraud Alleged at Red Cross Call Centers: "Nearly 50 people have been indicted in connection with a scheme that bilked hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Red Cross program to put cash into the hands of Hurricane Katrina victims, according to federal authorities."

and the GAO's investigation of credit card fraud. The latter one buries this finding "The lists of purchases provided by five government agencies show nothing outrageous -- bottles of water, hundreds of maps of New Orleans and Texas, pizza dinners, and lots of insect repellent." But apparently GAO is looking at whether money could have been saved by better purchasing practices. The answer, of course, is "yes". As a Microsoft software engineer has written in connection with software, you can do software that's good, do it cheaply, and do it fast, but you can't do all three at the same time. At NASA they found that the"faster, better, cheaper" mantra had its limits. Or, as Robert Heinlein wrote, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

I suspect the best thing the government could do is set up two sets of rules: one set would apply when saving money is primary; the other set when speed is primary. A Presidential declaration of disaster could trigger the second set for the disaster area and for a designated period. Trying to design one set of rules for both scenarios is like designing a swimming camel.

Winslow Homer and "Red Tape"

Just back from the crowded National Gallery of Art and its exhibition of Winslow Homer art. We've seen almost all of it before, since these are works NGA owns, although not always displays. I was pleased by one print that was a conglomeration of Homer's sketches--covering the years 1860-70, with an associated poem. Various images, mostly of war, but Lincoln was at the center holding a paper labeled "Emancipation Proclamation." A streamer or ribbon trailed down to the left. It was labeled "red tape". I'm not sure of the implication--that Lincoln's executive action had cut through the procedural red tape involved in freeing the slaves (i.e., through constitutional amendment)?

The Marginal

The LATimes had an article on Georgia's requirement that voters have government ID. The theme of the article was that the van that was driving the state to offer ID's wasn't getting much business. Dems had claimed the law would deprive lots of people of the right to vote, Reps not. I found this portion interesting:

"'How does a person get along these days without a picture ID of some sort to cash checks, turn on utilities, drive a car or enroll their children in school?' Larry Watson of LeGrange, Ga., wrote in a letter to the editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In constructing their case, ACLU lawyers gathered a group of plaintiffs that included elderly people who did not have birth certificates, had never learned to drive, were too frail to stand in line at a licensing center, had allowed their licenses to lapse because they no longer used them, or had encountered bureaucratic obstacles.

But finding those people was not easy, said Neil Bradley, the Voting Rights Project's associate director. One dropped out of the case when he was asked to give a deposition.

'How do you find them? They don't have telephones,' Bradley said. 'These are people who live at that edge of society, where they pay their rent in cash or they pay 20% to get their check cashed.' "

Some points. The marginal, whether as in Chicago's Heat Wave of years ago or in Georgia now, fall out from society. They suffer. They pay more (check cashing), are more vulnerable to crime (keeping their money in cash, rather than the bank), eat poorer (no car to get to markets with good fruits and vegetables), and have less opportunity (aren't comfortable dealing with bureaucracy).

Golden Rule in Reverse

In my youth, I was taught the Golden Rule is the end-all and be-all of ethical rules. Indeed, the Social Gospel movement tried to apply it to society. But after lifelong observation of Christians, I don't believe my teaching. At bottom the rule is very individualistic--it governs one's actions as they affect others, so you are the actor. It says, don't torture your prisoners if you don't want your military children tortured. What's lacking is a rule for the reverse.

A Christian might object here that they do have such a rule: turn the other cheek. But that rule applies only to the receipt of bad. How about the receipt of good?

My proposal: allow others to do unto you what you would do unto others. Such a rule would stop a
"Lady Bountiful", who lives her life doing for others, but would resist any efforts by others to do for her. For example, in the wake of Katrina many foreign countries tried to offer aid to the U.S. The impression I get from news accounts is that many of the offers failed, because the government was not used to the idea of receiving help from foreigners. If we're to make this a better world, help must be mutual, not one-sided.