"Governance and the Utopian Imagination."

That's the Public Administration Theory Network (PATnet) conference theme this year.

I proposed to the conference organizers that we make this a little more personal - what in public administration stirred our own utopian imaginations?  I reasoned: 

Most of us in PATnet have either pursued a doctoral degree and/or a career in the academic field of public administration.

So I thought it useful to ponder:

1. why we have committed so much of our time and abilities to this field
2. whether we have found what we were looking for or have been disappointed.  
3. what we hoped  to get in the field when we began,
4. what we got, and
5. what recommendations we have for people starting out today and for the field of public administration.

I got word that people on the organizing committee liked the idea but didn't know how to fit it into the schedule.  Staci Zavataro contacted me about a Tweet Up and as we talked we came up with the idea of an  ongoing side conversation before, during, and perhaps, after the conference.


Think of this as a movable session the flows throughout the conference and that people can participate in this session in different ways. 

• There's a conference hashtag on Twitter - #PATnet2013.  
• The PATnet Facebook page will host some of this. 
• You can leave comments here. 
• We're looking for help to set up a discussion forum at the PATnet website.
• We're inviting conference attendees to ask these questions of people the meet at the conference during breaks, over meals, in elevators, etc.  
• And we're going to set up an informal gathering for those who'd like to get together to follow this pursuit.  So far we've discussed a post session/pre-dinner gathering in the hotel lobby one night, but we're open to suggestions. 

Meanwhile, you can address the questions or the process in the comments section below this post.  (If you're having trouble getting past the spam blocking steps to comment, you can email me)


[NOTE to regular readers of this blog - I'm using my blog to do this because it's something I know how to do to move this along.   I hope you'll indulge me.]

[NOTE to PATnet members - we needed a place to point people to and I offered this spot on my personal blog until a more appropriate place can be set up.]

Great Civilizations Can Die - Including Ours

"Even in the stable and prosperous times of the Roman Empire, literacy rates, by our standards at least, were not high.  As the empire crumbled, as cities decayed, trade declined, and the increasingly anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the whole Roman system of elementary and higher education fell apart.  What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment.  Schools closed, libraries and academics shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work."

I'm just starting Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, described in the jacket:

"In the winter of 1417, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties plucked a very old manuscript off a dusty shelf in a remote monastery, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied.  He was Poggio Bracciolini, the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance.   His discovery, Lucretius' ancient poem On the Nature of Things,  had been almost entirely lost to history for more than a thousand years."

 Lucretius had written about a world with a relatively modern scientific mind set.  From Greenblatt:

"The stuff of the universe, Lucretius proposed, is an infinite number of atoms moving randomly through space, like dust motes in a sunbeam, colliding, hooking together, forming complex structures, breaking apart again, in a ceaseless process of creation and destruction.  There is no escape from this process  When you look up at the night sky and, feeling unaccountably moved, marvel at the numberless stars, you are not seeing the handiwork of the gods or a crystalline sphere detached from our transient world.  You are seeing  the same material world of which you are a part and from whose elements you are made.  There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design."  

I'm leery when someone writing about the past, slips in modern words - like 'downsizing' and 'intelligent design.'  I'm concerned that they are using such terms to make the connection to the modern day clearer.  As I said, I'm just at the beginning, but this Shakespeare scholar should know the world of 1417 better than most of us.  Columbus hadn't yet sailed and his Shakespeare was still almost 200 years off.

But we do know that the Roman empire fell.  That dark ages followed.  We are faced with fundamentalist religious zealots in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and other faiths.  In the US they currently play a significant role.  It's hard for Americans to imagine their country crashing.  But it happened in Rome and other dominant cultures over the centuries.  Current attacks on our schools and universities could easily lead to a loss of the collected wisdom of Western Science.  There are other centers in the world that could take up the slack, though the economic interdependence in the world increases the likelihood that if one center goes down, the others could follow.

How will the existence of cyber libraries make things different this time?  At least Bracciolini didn't need an ancient technology to read the manuscripts he hunted, and the technology of pen and ink and parchment was still alive so that he could copy the important texts he found.

We'll see where this book goes.  So far so good. 

----------------------
After writing this, I checked for a good link for people to read more about the book.  Jim Hinch wrote in the LA Review of Books, that:

"The Swerve, in fact, is two books, one deserving of an award, the other not. The first book is an engaging literary detective story about an intrepid Florentine bibliophile named Poggio Braccionlini, who, in 1417, stumbled upon a 500-year-old copy of De Rerum Natura in a German monastery and set the poem free from centuries of neglect to work its intellectual magic on the world. This Swerve, brimming with vivid evocations of Renaissance papal court machinations and a fascinating exploration of Lucretius’s influence on luminaries ranging from Leonardo Da Vinci, to Galileo, to Thomas Jefferson, is wonderful.

"The second Swerve is an anti-religious polemic. According to this book, the lucky fate of De Rerum Natura is a proxy for the much more consequential story of how modern western secular culture liberated itself from the deadening hand of centuries of medieval religious dogmatism.  .  .

"This is a powerful vision of the world entering a prolonged period of cultural darkness. If it were true, then Greenblatt’s second Swerve, the anti-religious polemic, also would deserve every award and plaudit it won. However, Greenblatt’s vision is not true, not even remotely.  .  .

"I’m at a loss to explain how two distinguished prize juries managed to overlook the fact that The Swerve’s animating thesis is at best “questionable,” and at worst “unwarranted,” as Renaissance historian John Monfasani put it this summer in the online journal Reviews in History. Still, to make clear the extent of The Swerve’s errors, I’ll go through Greenblatt’s portrait of the Middle Ages point by point. . . " 

And you can read the point by point at the LARB.

" if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently"

Writer David Foster Wallace's 2005 graduation speech at Kenyon College has now arrived on video with appropriate visualizations.

It's all about paying attention to what you know.  About becoming aware of your  'default setting, hard wired into our boards at birth'  - the 'deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence'.

And realizing that we have the choice to change the hard wiring, to see the world differently.  To see others differently.

I'm posting the video because the fundamental purpose of this blog is to explore how we know the world and this video does that thoughtfully and entertainingly.  And more explicitly than most posts here.





Actually, there seem to be multiple versions of Wallace's speech. There's the version on the video.  The Guardian has an adapted version here.

More Intelligent Life has a version with an Alaskan reference (see bottom of post.)

Here's the ending of the speech that is basic (bolded part) to a paper I'm working on at the moment.

"The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: 'This is water, this is water.'"

(The speech starts and ends with gold fish who don't realize they are surrounded by water.)

When you read 'wanting to shoot yourself in the head,'  it's probably instructive to know that three years after this speech, at age 46, Foster hanged himself. Pursuing great themes and seeing past what most people (want to?) see, is sometimes a curse as well as a gift. 





*Since this is an Alaskan blog, here's the Alaskan story and relevant interpretation that gets into the nature of reality from More Intelligent Life's version:

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

How Things Used To Be - Great Service At Speedy Glass

I've had a number of encounters with businesses large and small that were not particularly customer friendly.  (That's Steve-talk for bad service and overpriced.)  So I was in for a pleasant surprise Friday at Speedy Glass at Fireweed and Arctic.

The rear window brake light on the back window of my car had gotten knocked off a while ago when we put some furniture into the car.  It's been that way much too long now.  I tried to fix it myself.  Got some glue for glass, but it took too long to dry and I couldn't hold it against the glass long enough.  And even using duct tape, I couldn't hold it down tight enough.  It would very slowly slide down.

So, Friday I finally got over to a place that does auto glass things.  I'd looked in the phone book and picked Speedy Glass.  I walked in.  Told Eric what I needed.  He came out and looked at the car.  Said, be right back.  Came back with a spray to loosen the old adhesive I'd used. Scraped it off with a razor blade.  Then he had his own adhesive - fast dry he said - and sprayed it.  In less than ten minutes it was back up and sticking.  I asked him what I owed.  He just looked at me, waved his hand, and dismissed my question.  Nothing.

It's about nine hours later and it's still up and fine. 

Businesses used to do things like that regularly.  If it didn't take long and wasn't a big deal, they just smiled and said, glad I could help.  It was exactly what I needed today.

You know where I'm going if I need anything to do with glass in the future.

Just looked them up to make sure I got the name right.  It seems my experience wasn't unusual.  Here are two google reviews I found:

"Best Speedy location ever! Eric is a very helpful manager, the work is finished quickly. Can't beat the prices. The customer service is the best! #1 recommended location for glass needs."

"If I could put another star I would. Especially considering what a asswipe at the 5th avenue location treated me, (no back in jan 2012) Eric &club Brian took the issue, resolved it with no questions asked, and did a phenomenal job. From Carmen in the front, always so inviting and was very quick to get me a appointment the next day after coming in. I can speak alllllll day about these guys. Everyone was so chill. And they even called me back to make sure they vacuumed out the back. Thanks a million team."

Red Necked Grebe and Muskrat Potter Marsh 10:30-11pm

First time out with the new camera.  Dinner with friends in south Anchorage, so after we went to Potter Marsh.



 Indulge me.   This all was between 10:30pm and 11pm, so it was getting dark and when I saw that some of these were as slow as 1/15 of a second, I wasn't so disappointed with the results.  Not as sharp as they should be, but a promising start.  Think of what the camera will do when the

sun's out.

From Cornell Lab of Ornithology:

The Red-necked Grebe breeds on small inland lakes in Canada and Alaska, and winters along both coasts of North America. Boldly marked, vocal, and aggressive during the breeding season, it is quiet and subtly attired in winter.

There was a pair that ran atop the water, but they were too far away.




And the muskrat.  

 From National Trappers:

"Muskrats are somewhat sociable with others of the same species, but will often fight to the death as populations become dense. Preferred foods include a variety of vegetation, including roots, stems, and buds. Muskrats often seek out undercut banks for protection while feeding. Food is usually carried by this furbearer by mouth, and eating takes place above the water level. Muskrats are often active during the day, as well as night, with peak activities near dawn and dusk. Muskrats commonly stay underwater for five minutes while searching for food and they are capable of holding their breath underwater for 10-12 minutes."

The muskrat is hard to see (it's the brown lump in the water in the middle), but I thought reflection and ripples made it worth posting.  

Peek At Summer, Yesterday

Sky was blue. 



We came close to 60˚F. 


And I took advantage and did my run in shorts and a t-shirt.  It felt good.


The Chester Creek bike trail was mostly clear of snow but there were some patches, like here where a temporary unnamed creek flowed across the trail. 




But the trail was clear again up ahead.

A great day everyone's been waiting for.  Still in the 50s today, but mostly grey. 

"We believe this childish mantra . . . which says that we can have anything we want, that reality is not an impediment to what we desire."

[This is one of my meandering posts as one thing leads to another.  It started with the video, but as I tried to get more on the speaker, I found something more profound from the most insightful thinker I've encountered lately - Chris Hedges.  Which, probably not coincidentally, led right back to yesterday's cryptoquote which I left unfinished and I'm guessing most of you didn't take the time to complete.]


So, here's where this all began:  Bill McKibben gives a great overview of the condition of the earth and the battle over climate change at New York's Riverside Church.  [Something I found out about, for the record, because I'm now on Twitter, though I can't reconstruct how.]






His website bio begins:

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. Time Magazine called him 'the planet's best green journalist' and the Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was 'probably the country's most important environmentalist.'

Most of the criticism I found on him tended to be friendly fire - disagreements on details or approach by other environmentalists who claimed they basically were on the same side.

I also found a Mount Royal University interview with Chris Hedges and Derrick Jensen that includes a critique of an earlier McKibben work on the grounds that he didn't address the underlying issue - the corporate totalitarianism that has taken over the world.

I've had my eye on Chris Hedges for about a year now.  There's an unfinished blog post that I've felt wasn't good enough post yet.  Everything I've heard from Hedges, to me,  is a spot on critique of what's wrong with society today.  He has a great macro understanding plus his years as a top tier foreign correspondent give him knowledge of the details to back up his narrative. 

Here's Truthdig's description of the audio:

What is it going to take for concerned and engaged citizens to finally feel as though some crucial threshold has been crossed—that our nation’s political system and the global corporate culture it both serves and feeds into will never represent them or serve their needs? Continuing along that line, what’s to be done once that realization has hit home, as it has for authors Chris Hedges and Derrick Jensen? Both Hedges and Jensen offer their ideas in this July 5 [2010] interview with Mount Royal University professor Michael Truscello.

This audio is really worth listening to. 

Hedges and Jensen were asked why, despite the development of skillful alternative media, there didn’t seem to be much of an effect on the consolidation of corporate media and the consolidation of the messages.

 Here’s the beginning of Chris Hedges’ response (17:09 into the audio):

“We’re arguably the most illusioned culture or society on the planet.  We believe this childish mantra which is fed to us across the political and cultural spectrum, which says that we can have anything we want, that reality is not an impediment to what we desire.  All we have to do is find our inner strength or focus on happiness or dig deep enough within ourselves or grasp that we are truly exceptional or believe that Jesus really can carry out miracles. . . This . . . keeps the mass of the population in a perpetual infantilism where they never grow up.  What’s happening now is that the illusion of who we are, the illusion of where we are going, and the reality - that gap is widening to such an extent so that as collapse begins to appear, and it is beginning to appear as 2.8 million Americans lost their homes last year to bank repossessions and foreclosures.  That’s 8,000 people a day.  Over 2.4 million will this year [2010].  Half of all bankruptcies are caused by inability to pay for medical bills.

As this gap opens up and we confront personal disintegration as well as ecological and economic disintegration, we’re not prepared emotionally, psychologically, or intellectually for what’s happening.  And so we react as children. Which is to reach out for a demagogue or a savior.  Somebody who promises new glory, moral renewal, and vengeance.  And then I think . . . we could swiftly revert to a much more classical form of totalitarianism, although this would not in any way disrupt the engines of globalism and corporate power.”  [to hear the full interview]

It's this sort of thing that the cryptoquote from yesterday seems to encapsulate for me:

"Reality is that which, when you stop 

believing in it, doesn't go away"

Exactly what Hedges is saying - enough people in our country believe in illusions that are disconnected from reality, but the consequences of not believing in reality won't go away.  So, despite people's beliefs in American exceptionalism, their own right to the American dream, that Jesus will make things good, the consequences of economic (losing their homes and savings) and environmental reality (increasing severe weather disasters) don't stop. 

Reality Is That Which . . .

This post combines a profound quote by one of the most prolific science fiction authors and the challenge of the daily cryptoquote.  These puzzles, which simply substitute one letter in the alphabet for another, mimic the mystery of the world just waiting to be discovered.  I look at these each morning - thanks to Dot Case who had a cryptoquote blog, but it seems to have gone, but her current blog format makes me realize I need to play around more with new things available on Blogspot - and look at mystery.  But slowly, or sometimes quickly, I can think through the mystery and discover the code.  And the hidden quote. 

So often, everything you need to know is in front of you in plain sight, you just need to pay attention to the clues to figure it out.  Things that look totally indecipherable make perfect sense to those who know the code or know logic and deduction.  And every day when I do the cryptoquote I relearn that truism.

So here's today's cryptoquote from the Anchorage Daily News:

[I've filled out the first line, so if you want to work it out all yourself, cover up my answers without looking at them.)

I've left the instructions in to help those of you who have never tried one of these. I found this one a little harder than most, but with it started you should be able to figure it out.
You may want to just copy it down so you can write out the answer more easily.


Everyone has Sherlock Holmes' ability to deduce from the evidence. But not too many train that part of the brain very hard. Imagine all the time spent learning to play basketball or golf or video games spent on learning to solve mysteries! But anything you learn to do well is also teaching you to see things you didn't see before. An avid football fan sees all sorts of things in each play that a novice misses totally. The trick is to transfer that understanding of the complexity of one field to another. That is, to recognize the complexity in a field you know well, also exists in a field you know nothing about. Unfortunately, a lot of people completely dismiss things in fields they know nothing about, assuming their smarts in one arena carry over to another. Of course, none of you know any of those people.

Once you get the quote figured out, think about how profound it is. Think about all the ways it applies in our world. Think about, say, that quote about how women who are raped don't get pregnant. Think about climate change. Think about Obamacare. Have fun.

Keeping Repaired

Spending time lately on repairs.   



Our furnace had a new problem and was leaking.   From the blue tank.  One guy came out Saturday to help dry up the floor and another guy came Monday to put the new release tank on.









My watch band broke and I bought a new band.  But I couldn't manage, even with a small screw driver, to release the spring bars that hole the band to the watch.  So I looked online to see how much the right tool would cost.  It wasn't much - under $5.  Shipping bumped it up over $10. 

Digital watches can be pretty inexpensive, but it just seems silly to have to buy a new one because the band breaks.  It was so easy to fix with this baby.  







My van's battery was dead when we got home after sitting at our neighbors for almost
three months.  When the ice that held the rear driver's side tire tightly to the ground melted, we jumped it, I drove it, and parked it.  And a few days later it was dead again.  So, with summer coming up I scheduled a service for the whole van and today we jumped it again and took it in to be serviced.  I'm hoping to get some pre-bus Denali time in. 

And the cold I'd fought down in LA, had lingered and flared up again.  (Didn't want to be too graphic, so took this picture which I kind of like, but not sure how many people can figure it out.)

Dr. Schwartz, my incredible doctor for probably 30 years, maybe a few more even, retired last summer.  I've been thinking I should meet the new doc before I really needed him.  Wanted him to know who I was.  And let him know how much Dr. S spoiled me.  He'd already heard that from every other patient he'd inherited.  Well, he thought I could heal without taking anything - my preference anyway - and so I have to start working harder to get rid of this thing.  I asked to take a picture so I could remember what he looked like - that part of my brain that remembers faces is also in need of repair - and I promised not to post it, so I've photoshopped it. 






And, finally, if I were still in my 20's maybe these jeans would be ok like this.  But I think that's pushing things for a geezer.  But they were really comfortable. 

It turns out there are lots and lots of videos online that show ways to patch holes like this. 
The one I first found used a spray adhesive and an iron.  J took over this project and ended up with a liquid adhesive.  These jeans have years left in them now. 


There's more stuff that needs repairing or uncluttering or just doing which is making blogging harder - unless I blog about things like this. 

UAA Hockey Coach Search Gets Saturation Coverage, Chancellor Search Was Ignored

When the University of Alaska Anchorage sought a Chancellor several of years ago, the Anchorage Daily News, as I recall, ignored the story completely.  The head of the whole campus, the dominant institution of higher education, a major economic and cultural driver of the city, the region, and state even, was searching for a CEO, and no one paid attention except a blogger and the school newspaper.

But when it comes time to hire a hockey coach and the Daily News is all over the story:

UAA names 4 finalists for hockey coach position

Corbett states his case to take over at UAA

Prospective UAA hockey coach cites work with legends   

Prospective UAA hockey coach cites work with legends

Ex-UAA assistant ready to take over Seawolves

Utica's Heenan wants to rebuild UAA

UAA puts search for hockey coach on hold to revamp committee

UAA suspends search for head hockey coach
Heenan, Brown still interested in UAA hockey job



Even the Denver Post and, gasp, the Wall Street Journal covered this search.

Say, maybe they would have paid more attention to the Chancellor search if they had realized that the Chancellor is responsible for hiring a hockey coach.