Back in the spring of 1990, I was a young-ish professor, sitting in the convocation ceremony of a wannabe-ivy league college in West Virginia. It was a beautiful place, founded in the 1840s, with classic architecture set in the riotous Appalachian forest. But it struggled to compete for students. Like many small colleges, it admitted a large percentage of “learning disabled” kids from wealthy families – “full pays” of an exorbitant tuition – in order to subsidize smart middle-class kids. That was a win-win all around, because officially “learning disabled” students didn’t count against a college’s standardized testing scores (GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.).  The one-third or one-quarter of the students who were smart-and-subsidized pushed up the college’s scores, while the dumb-but-wealthy got to purchase a “prestigious” degree. 

    Colleges are expensive to run, especially given the expectations of wealthy families, so the pursuit of prestige is never-ending. One device in that pursuit is awarding doctoral degrees honoris causa to any random celebrity who can be convinced to attend a convocation and wow the parents. So there I was, sitting in a self-congratulatory convocation ceremony, watching an honorary degree being awarded to “population expert” Paul Ehrlich. It was surreal.

Continue reading “THE EIGHTH FIT: Mathematical Witch Doctors” →

The mandate came down from Citizenship NHQ in Ottawa:  At every opportunity, at any citizenship ceremony, a native elder should be enlisted to deliver a “Native Spirituality prayer” before the hundred-odd newly sworn citizens.

            So I sent a query back to Ottawa:  “Since 40 percent of natives identify themselves as Catholics, and another 25 percent as Protestants, does the Lord’s Prayer qualify as Native Spirituality?” To which came back the reply: “LOL.” Hmmm. Since this involves public funding of a religious minister, Native Spirituality is now the Established Religion of the Canadian State.

Continue reading “THE SEVENTH FIT: Spirituality Apartheid” →

True story: the departmental facilities manager comes to my door, smiling and asking, “D’ya have a minute? Can I close your door?” Can he close my door? What did I do now?
Six years ago, when I first started working for the government as a citizenship judge, our department didn’t have a facilities manager. If the building management company had a problem to report (east entrance closed for construction or whatever) they had email addresses for everyone in all the departments, and they just emailed us. Meanwhile, if you needed to sign out the department car, you grabbed a binder in the mailroom with the mileage record and car key. If you needed a taxi, the chits sat in a drawer in the mailroom – and be sure to return the copy for month-end. If an office lightbulb burned out, you phoned this number.

Continue reading “Sixth FIT- Getting Ahead with No Bottom Line” →

I’ve constantly been gob-smacked by all the nutty conspiracy theories. Ten years ago, I was teaching part-time in a private high school, when all the well-dressed, BMW-driving students informed me that the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan’s World Trade Centre was really a conspiracy by the United States government; and their gruesome conviction suggested that their parents may have transmitted the theory. Years earlier, in the midst of the sub-prime market melt-down, a well-educated entrepreneur told me that nothing bad was going to happen to the global economy, because the Bilderbergers were in control of everything. And just last year, in a nostalgic moment, a mathematician insisted that the 1969 moon landing was mathematically impossible and must have been faked. Staged in an aircraft hangar. In northern Florida. With invisible wires and counterweights to simulate low gravity. Government did it all.

Continue reading “Fifth FIT- The Bureaucracy Is Everywhere” →

Fortunately I was home that Friday afternoon, when we got the phone call from the extended-care hospital. We were told gently and efficiently: If we wanted to say a final goodbye to Valerie, we should visit her right away, because she was going to die that night.
My wife, of course, was immediately suspicious: “How do they know she’s dying tonight?” Good question.
Valerie had been in the hospital for five years with a strange neurological disease, a collection of symptoms called Somebody’s Syndrome (as if they knew what was happening). The usual course of Somebody’s Syndrome should have carried her off in the first year, but she motored on cheerfully for four more years, before slowly losing her reason and speech. Her decline was obvious but undramatic. How did they know she was dying that Friday night? Continue reading “Fourth FIT- Playing to Their Weakness” →

Working in the newsroom of a daily paper, I never found out how the random anonymous calls from the “public” were divvied out to the reporters. I imagine the switchboard simply routed them to the first open line. Here’s why: when folks are caught up in an injustice, their stories loom large for them. But for jaded reporters it’s all just the “same old same-old.” The “tips” (as the public likes to think them) are almost always unusable, because they either involve the Public Service and “no comment,” or they involve some libelous accusation that no sluggish reporter can bother to verify. So, with a random call, the reporter’s primary task is simply delivering a polite “get lost,” without annoying a potential subscriber.

So, I’m sitting at my desk one day, when one of those calls comes in. I happen to have a little time to spare, so I show some sympathy for a helpless situation: Female, young, offended and maybe desperate, because “the social workers want to take my kids away.”
Okay… Two kids, both under school age. Why do they want to seize them? “Just because my house is dirty.” Pause. That house must be dangerously dirty, for overworked case workers to grind out all the paperwork needed to put the kids in foster-care. What’s your name and phone number? No; she’s too scare to give me her contact information. She’ll call me back, after I’ve had a chance to “investigate.” She may be on welfare and worried about her cheque.

Continue reading “Third FIT- The Equality of Regulation” →

Have you ever noticed a dirt path, cutting a beeline through the grass in a park, going someplace other than where the Administration wanted a sidewalk? For example: We have a lovely park rolling through the middle of our neighborhood, leading to our local rapid transit station. It’s a beautiful walk in the morning. As you approach the ramp to the station, however, the wide, luxurious sidewalk suddenly veers off to the right, climbs a small hill for twenty yards, then turns sharply left, going back downhill another twenty yards toward the station ramp. Meanwhile, at the bottom of that little hill, just before the sidewalk veers to the right, a dirt path angles left, away from the sidewalk, cutting twenty yards through the grass, directly toward the station ramp.
Continue reading “Second FIT- Stubborn Paths” →

Some years ago, I was sitting at a picnic table, outside the staff lunchroom at our dying local newspaper, watching the kids from the on-site staff daycare. It was a lovely spring day, on a bluff overlooking the freeway. Two daycare workers were taking the kids for a walk. Each worker held one end of a thick yellow rope, to which clung a dozen tiny fists. The Yellow Daycare Rope. Two dozen tiny heads swiveled anxiously, surveying the world. My first thought was: “My kids would never stick to that rope – too confident – they’d run off in a flash.”
Then suddenly I remembered a simple scene from the old television series, Little House on the Prairie, set in the 1870s American Midwest. The little daughter of the pioneer Ingalls family, all dressed up in petticoats, was running cheerfully, fearlessly out into the open prairie, with nothing but the long grass between her and the far horizon. Versus the Yellow Daycare Rope. And I knew that we’re no longer in the Homesteaders’ World. But where are we? Continue reading “First FIT- If This Is Not Kansas, Where Are We?” →