#363 – Dick Bernard: The Tyranny of "Circles"

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Back in the 1990s I participated in a workshop in which one of the activities was to identify the “circles” of which I was a part.
It was surprising to learn how many circles, and thus associations, I really had. These circles would include groups like “family”, “church”, “work”, “political party” and on and on and on.
As part of the exercise we identified individuals we knew in each of these circles. Potentially there were a lot of people.
I drew a rough graphic of the circle exercise:

In more recent times I’ve had occasion to revisit this business of “circles”, and it is distressing what I seem to see.
Even in the relatively short time period since the 1990s I have noted an occurrence which is, ultimately, very dangerous to our very survival as a society.
As our world has become more complex, and our country more politically polarized, I am finding that people of all persuasions are retreating into ever smaller and more limited and thus mal- or mis-informed “circles”. I’d call the phenomenon the “I can’t deal with it” response, “it” being some other point of view. People retreat into their belief or absolute interpretations of what they consider ‘truth’, often with little or no evidence to support their position.
They figuratively fight to the death to make sure that their point of view ‘wins’, whether it makes sense or not.
A society such as I describe has relatively little chance of enduring short or long term.
Examples abound.
As I write I think back to the terrifying times of Y2K in the later months of 1999.
There was almost hysteria, then, about the probability that computer clocks would end at midnight on December 31, 1999, and our world would descend into chaos. Even then, computers were omnipresent, though nowhere near what we experience in today’s world.
Of course chaos didn’t ensue when midnight first struck late at night somewhere in the Pacific January 1, 2000. By then lots of people made lots of money fixing those computer clocks; I doubt that anybody really knows whether there would have been chaos without the fix, but that is how hysteria works….
I remember particularly two vignettes from that time period – vignettes that I think are instructive in the present day.
A short distance to the east of where I write, in a Wisconsin border town, a story was published about a survivalist couple who lived in a regular house in the town and were preparing for dooms day: generators, bottled water, you name it. They were ready for the literal millenium they were certain was coming.
I thought to myself, then, what if their worst case scenario actually happened? How safe would their stash be, regardless of how ‘armed and dangerous’ they made themselves. They were simply a tiny little island in a mass of humanity. A hugely vulnerable ‘circle’ unto themselves. They would have been overrun by the local rabble.
On December 31, 1999, I recall a friend of mine telling about her flight (literal, in an airplane) from here to California to beat Y2K. It didn’t dawn on her till somewhere over the western U.S. that midnight happens at different times in different places around the globe. To what time zone was her planes computer clock set…?
She landed safely.
There are those, now, who think that they have control and can manipulate the future because of their particular means of domination.
They should not rest easy.
Neither should we, particularly if we can survive by ourselves, or with our hand-picked tiny ‘circle’.
We live together, or we collapse.

#362 – Dick Bernard: The Challenge of Change, and "Spin"

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Back in the 1970s, when overhead projectors were the way of conveying information, and handouts were the takeaway record from attending a meeting, I once attended a meeting where the below handout left, and stuck, with me. (Click on it to enlarge.)

The premise of the handout is very simple and timeless: change is not only inevitable for everyone, but is desirable, and often essential. It doesn’t take much thought to identify someone – maybe ourself – whose ‘bad habit’ may have all but killed them.
BUT, even if one knows that a certain change can be demonstrated to have long term positive benefits, there is a huge challenge to actually changing the behavior (see the chart). Adjusting to the change, whatever it might happen to be, is extremely hard work until the new behavior has become a new habit.
While change is terribly difficult for individuals; it is far more difficult for organizations of any kind. Change can be imposed by law, threat or whatever, but lack of buy-in is a real problem. A surly undercurrent of attitudes held by people who weren’t sold on the great idea can sabotage change.
It’s even worse when competing ideologies demand change, as is true in our country today. Change is what the other side must do, since we know what is right.
So, politically these days we have constant talk about the need for deep change in how our American society does business. It comes from left, right, center about most everything…. But precious few are talking with each other. More prevalent is talking AT each other. The objective is to win the war of ideas. The win is always temporary. The war is continual.
Almost always this conversation is premised on the need for the OTHER person or group to change. The initiator gives him (or her, or their) self a pass: “if you accept my superior idea or wisdom, and change by conforming to my views, all will be good. But I don’t need to change my own attitudes or beliefs.”
It just doesn’t work out quite that simply. Societal change is a team sport.
An immense contemporary impediment to positive change is “Spin”.
“Spin”, the increasingly black art of buttressing one’s argument, while simultaneously dismissing an opposing point of view, essentially sabotages change initiatives. These can be perceived as positive or negative changes (depending on one’s point of view).
Spin has always been a part of the political conversation, but until fairly recent history, a receiver of information would have at least some assurance that “facts”, while skewed, did indeed exist, and could even be found, to support or refute an argument.
Today, almost anyone on any side of any issue can successfully avoid personal accountability by choice of information, image, expert…. It takes very hard work to find some semblance of “truth” in any political positioning statement. Even ‘truth’ becomes suspect. Most recently, The President’s release of his full birth certificate does not quiet the birthers. For assorted reasons, they deny reality to keep the issues alive.
I don’t think it is possible to find a well known pundit or personality who is ‘objective’. Their bias is embedded somewhere in their writing or script. If we share their bias, we like their thinking; if we don’t, we reject it.
We pick and choose who we wish to believe. “They’re all liars”, I’ve heard a good friend say, then she selects the liar she wants to believe – the one which confirms her bias.
If you’ve read this so far, you’re already thinking of the people you don’t like who are the real culprits in this deadly game.
Best we think of ourselves, and how we’re complicit as well.

#361 – Dick Bernard: Atlas Shrugged Part I

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I went to Atlas Shrugged on Monday afternoon at a local theatre.
My only certain prediction: Part III of this apparent three part made-for-the-theater movie will be released just in time to attempt to influence the 2012 election.
This is a hard-edged propaganda film.
It is pretty hard to make ruthless Capitalist Captains of Industry into heroic looking figures, but the film takes a shot at this (unsuccessfully, I felt).
I’d recommend people go see the film for themselves, so I don’t plan to give away much of the ‘story’, except to say that when one woman walked out about an hour in, I was tempted to follow her out the door. But I elected to stay it through. I’m glad I did.
There was no applause at the end from the dozen or so of us remaining.
Other than a waitress, I don’t recall seeing any workers in the film, except that it is clear that workers are slugs, except for a few superstars who are held in check by totally worthless unions whose henchmen (people like I was for an entire career, always men) are anti-progress disheveled gangster types imposing stupid work and safety rules.
Of course, Government itself is obstructive and evil and represented by nefarious types wanting to take us back to the good old days of collective farms. (If they thought it would work, the film producers would probably have used Communist terms like Commissar and the like. Even they must have thought that was a bit much. But they have some pretty good synonyms in both words and images.)
There is a certain audience – I think very limited in size – who will gobble up every word and nuance of this made-for-a-movie novel. They would be people like I sometimes see at my coffee shop, like the two guys after a Bible Study last week who are working stiffs but were complaining about how they dislike unions because they, the complainers, are superior to the shiftless rank and file and particularly union stewards.
While I know there is a tiny element of truth in their complaint, I can’t imagine even these guys taking much of a shine to the Capitalist King-Pins who are the obvious ‘stars’ of this movie.
(A favorite scene of mine is when one of the Tycoons is approached by his “tree-hugger” relative and asked for a handout for some cause or other. It is a Mr. Hard and Mr. Soft scene. In an instant the Capitalist offers $100,000 – one gathers it is a mere pittance for him – tax deductible of course. Tree-hugger demurs, saying that the ‘progressives’ – the word is intentional – he’s working with in Washington wouldn’t want the money to be identified with this specific Capitalist. Couldn’t it be sent another way? The story line is not completed in the film.)
To a certain kind of audience this will play well.
As for Ayn Rand (Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum), whose book “Atlas Shrugged” (1957) brings this to the silver screen, it’s worth learning a little bit about her, too. She had the misfortune of being 12 years old in St. Petersburg (later Petrograd, later Leningrad, now St. Petersburg again) when the Bolshevik Revolution upset her families applecart in 1917. The Revolution began in her home town. She came to the U.S. in 1925.
I’ve been to St. Petersburg (2003, two weeks after President George W. Bush made a visit), and I wondered to myself how things might have turned out differently had young Alisa really gotten to know why the Revolution got its legs in 1917. Revolutions aren’t child’s play, after all. They’re very risky business.
It doesn’t take long at the obscenely rich Peterhof or Catherine Palace outside St. Petersburg to get a sense of the kind of life the peasant class was forced to live in Czarist Russia. We spent several hours in both Palaces.
The run-up to revolution doesn’t seem to register, much, in Rand’s personal narrative. Her bourgeois family was a petty beneficiary of the Czars….
My thoughts went back to leaving Peterhof Palace in June, 2003. We were boarding the bus after several hours in the opulence of the Palace. Across the parking lot came two old hags – elderly women in rags, begging.
I couldn’t bear to take a photograph of them, but the image is burned in my mind…. Talk about compare and contrast.
See Atlas Shrugged Part I. See for yourself.

#360 – Dick Bernard: Returning to the Eighth Grade

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April 15 we were invited to an event at Friendly Hills Middle School in Mendota Heights MN. “Telling the Story of WWII and the Holocaust” was the event: “An Interdisciplinary Project between Language Arts & Social Studies” involving eighth graders in five classes at the school, each of whom had worked on a particular project for the preceding three weeks, culminating in their own museum display.
It was a fascinating program: great learning and great public relations. I congratulate the students, teachers and school.
I remembered back to the 1960s when I taught 8th graders for nine years. Yes, the ‘genus and species’ remains the same: kids are kids. I remembered further back, to 1953-54, when I was in eighth grade. The same….
We went from display to display. They were as one would expect, many very nicely done. In 1953-54 and my last year of teaching, 1971-72, they would have been assembled in roughly the same way: paper glued on pieces of recycled cardboard, etc. But such a gathering would be very unusual.
The difference, and it is a huge one, is technology and accessibility to research data. In 1953-54 we perhaps had one old encyclopedia on which to rely, and no copy machines, or newspapers to clip from. No television and (to my recollection) no movies. Such projects would be very difficult and thus very unusual. Only in recent years would you see, as we saw on Friday, kids with laptops and movies pulled off of the internet. Pretty incredible.
We didn’t have time to visit every display. There were a great number of displays and a great number of visiting family members. At each one I visited, I asked the student what was the most interesting thing that he or she had learned. Every one of them was able to answer the question confidently.
World War II was a long time ago. One student said her great-grandfather was in the War. Even though that made sense to me, it still took me aback. My oldest Uncle in the war – my Dad’s brother Frank – died at age 26 on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. I was 5 years old when the war ended in Europe in 1945; and when I was in eighth grade in 1953-54, my uncle Art, the youngest family member to join the military in June, 1945, was only 26, and not yet married. Time flies.
At Friendly Hills, students picked from a potpourri of potential topics. The brochure said:
“We have discussed
Why do people look for strong leaders when times get tough?
How can “good”people get caught up in “bad” things like the Nazi movement?
How are the ideas of community, identity, discipline, and power connected?
How can the ideas above also lead to conflict among people and nations?
What is our responsibility when we see things happen that are against our values?
How can each of us take ACTION to stand up for the things we believe in?”
These are all good questions for all of us.
A number of students did their research on the dropping of the Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945.
One of them was taking a poll, where respondents could pick one of three choices:
“1. Yes, I think it was a good decision[to drop the bombs], and it helped end WWII.
2. I don’t really like what we did, but I don’t have a better solution for it.
3. I think it was a terrible idea to kill so many people to destroy two major cities.”
I picked #3, and joined three others in so voting. #1 had 5 votes, and #2 had 20. Our 29 hach marks added to the conversation.
I felt and feel that killing someone else is never a solution…it only creates a new problem. But that’s not a very popular concept.
War, then and now has its moral dilemmas. The morning after the display the paper had a front page article about the Libyan leaders disgraceful use of cluster bombs against its own citizens. Nestled in the same article was reference to our own countries recent use of cluster bombs in places like Afghanistan. There was nothing about who developed and later perfected and profited from the cluster bomb concept.
Late today came a photo montage of the reality of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Let us never forget.

#359 – Dick Bernard: Teachers and Teaching – searching for "truth"

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April 11, 2011, found me in a hotel near Bernalillo NM. The hotel offered complimentary newspapers, and as I usually do I picked up the local paper, in this case the Albuquerque Journal.
Front page, front and center, was a “Beyond the Classroom” story about teacher Kathleen Cox, and her 12 year old student, Elizabeth, whose Mom is struggling with cancer. [To read the article, and the editorial which follows, you need to sign on for a temporary access pass, which is a very simple process.]
The column was a wonderful story about a teacher going above and beyond. It had absolutely nothing to do with test scores, or classes. It had everything to do with relationships. And most likely Elizabeth was not able to perform academically as she normally might have because of difficulties at home. Kathleen was doing what she could.
I migrated, as usual, to the editorial page or the paper, and the lead editorial was titled “Most Important School Unit is Accountability“. It was an interesting counterpoint to the lead article on the front page. It was about bean counting, and holding people accountable for the number of beans.
Therein seems to lie the struggle in contemporary public education. Relationships versus quantifiable data (“accountability”).
Of course, there has been massive effort over the last few years to figure out some way to get rid of “bad” or “ineffective” teachers. It is some kind of generic label, and I have yet to hear someone say publicly the name of the “bad” or “ineffective” teacher(s) they have in mind. They just must be out there somewhere. Apparently Ms Cox is not one of those marked for extinction, but we really don’t know.
I was in New Mexico to talk with retired teachers of the the National Education Association. Enroute from the airport to the conference center a retired teacher from Nebraska was remembering some teacher who’d made a big difference in her life. It just came up in conversation.
One of my handouts was a list of positive school employee qualities generated by teachers at a 1999 leadership conference I had led. I had asked the participants to think of a school employee who had had a particularly significant impact on them. Having thought of this person (it could be any school employee), I asked them to come up with a one word descriptor of that person: what was it about the employee who made a difference in their lives? In all there were about 60 participants. Only one of the 60 could not think of a single education personnel who he had positive feelings about. I have no idea why this was. The purpose of the exercise was not to probe or value judge but just to establish criteria used by teachers themselves.
In all the teachers identified 47 different characteristics of educational personnel who made a difference in their lives. Here are the characteristics, as identified by the participants: OUTSTANDING-BEHAVIORS-OF-EDUCATION-PERSONNEL
If you look at the qualities that made a difference in school personnel, one is hard pressed to find a single quality that emphasizes directly or indirectly test scores or such as that.
The employees who were remembered were the ones who were very positive in their relationship with their young person.
Is there a need for accountability? Absolutely.
Are there school employees who shouldn’t be school employees? Of course. In a cohort of millions of school employees serving 50 million students, there is without any question at all less than desirable “apples”.
But until the labelers attach names of actual people to these supposed “bad” or “ineffective” anonymous teachers, I am going to challenge them every time to show me the evidence.
They don’t show the evidence, because they can’t…or are afraid that they might be wrong in their judgment.

#358 – Dick Bernard: Averting a shutdown. A tiny bit of optimism.

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April 7 I was at committee meeting unrelated to politics or political parties, and my colleague sitting next to me showed me a book he was reading, which he felt was a must-read for anyone interested in politics. The book: “Winner Take All Politics” by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. I have yet to pick up the volume, but I will.
A day later, late the evening of April 8, a government shutdown was averted by an agreement between House, Senate and White House. It is much too early to know what it means, and most of us will never know as the aftermath will be buried in the same rhetorical fog that accompanied the negotiations of the agreement. I kept thinking of assorted cliff-hanger negotiations I was involved with from time to time in my career. If people we were negotiating for only knew…. Sooner or later you’re stuck with making a deal.
Like the old story about the optimistic kid who comes into a barn full of manure and starts digging because “there must be a pony in here somewhere”, I have a little bit of optimism that maybe a tiny bit of sanity is beginning to prevail in this country. There needs to be a whole lot more, but at least there’s a start.
Even the sudden turnaround in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election due to quite certainly administrator incompetence rather than fraud is a hopeful sign for me. What had appeared to be an easy race for the apparent winner, turned into a near loss for him. What normally would have been a low profile boring election with a certain outcome turned into a cliff-hanger in the national spotlight. People are paying attention.
Winner take all politics is killing our country, and maybe, finally, some of us are paying attention. Maybe there is that pony down there. But if so, it’s a long ways down, and there’s a whole lot of digging to be done to find it.
Between the meeting and the drama in Washington, I attended a hugely informative two hour session entitled “Reality Meets Rhetoric: The Hidden Costs of State Budget Cuts“.
There were about 50 of us in attendance at the gathering. The session was expertly conducted. (click on photo to enlarge it)

Citizens generating questions after one of the presentations April 7.


Four outstanding panelists gave an overview of and some context for our state’s deficit situation*. None of the presentors were politicians; all of them were in high level positions of advising, administrating agencies or lobbying. They know the lay of the land – what is inside that fog bank of political rhetoric. I could name their names and their credentials, but it wouldn’t matter. They were talking straight about a pretty harsh future if our lawmakers don’t grow up (my state is like most these days: politically divided and polarized. Not a whole lot unlike Washington DC or even Wisconsin.)
I was tired when I got home from the meeting, but nonetheless I felt better informed.
I wrote a thank you e-mail to one of the people who seemed to have an important role in helping set up the meeting, and she wondered: “It will be interesting to see what percentage of the participants are the same people who are super involved in the political process already and what percentage are just getting their feet wet. My goal was to start reaching the latter. How do we do that?”
“How do we do that?” is a legitimate question with an easy answer:
One person at a time.
I will always believe in the long term benefit of what I call “each one reach two”. It seems so simple. If the 50 of us who were in that room reached two others, that would be 100 more. If those 100 each reached two, that would be 300….
But you need to actually start doing this, first; and become as good at listening as talking. Results generally don’t come by just wishing for them, or blaming somebody else.
* – “Scribbles”: of course, in such presentations, the macro is emphasized. So, for instance, we’re dealing in Minnesota with a $5 billion dollar deficit which seems awful. But if one does the calculations, that is roughly $1,500 per Minnesotan, which MOST Minnesotans could absorb quite easily, and which SOME (the wealthy) could very easily handle, and MANY (the poor) could not. It would take very little creativity and little sharing of the wealth to deal with the entire deficit. Of course, the $5 billion was a deliberately created mess due to a refusal to “tax” to fund the programs Minnesotans demand.
Similarly, one of the presentors talked about the most expensive students to educate in Minnesota Public Schools. I recall the number was $12,000 per student per year (the average was, if I remember right, about $8,000 per pupil). This covers every cent of every expenditure by schools for educating our youth. For the most expensive student, it amounts to about $70 a school day, less if you factor in that the buildings must be maintained during the rest of the year etc. Is $70 a day for a child’s education too much? Where would you cut? I recalled being at a fundraiser for a private school for special needs kids – kids whose needs are beyond the capacity of public schools to serve. That school, two years ago, said the cost per student was $25,000 per year, double the most expensive public school student this year.
In short, talking MACRO can be scary; talking MICRO is more real….
Related Posts are here, here, and here.

#357 – Dick Bernard: Lurching towards catastrophe

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My opinion: some kind of agreement will be cobbled together to avoid a partial government shutdown tomorrow. That won’t solve the problem, only delay what seems inevitable: the gradual but inexorable slide of the U.S. to at minimum mediocrity. As a society we are “doing stupid”, as a Forrest Gump might say. You don’t translate coffee klatch conversations among people of like minds into good policy for a complex country. But that seems to be what we’re about.
Actually the game plan of the radicals who pretend to be Republicans is very, very simple. It plays out over and over and over again.
1. Refuse to compromise, and when you do compromise, deny that you compromised at all.
2. Substitute belief for reason, and wrap your belief in the label “truth”. Scoff at Science. (My favorite in this regard comes from my own Catholic Church which has devised something that they call “objective truth” which is truth so purified that there can be no legitimate alternative realities. “We have said it; thus it is so”. Of course, it is only the Church’s opinion about the “truth”, but nonetheless it is portrayed as the genuine, real truth.)
3. If something goes right, take credit for it, even if you had nothing to do with it; if it goes wrong, blame the opposition.
4. Demonize the opposition; canonize your heroes….
5. Never, never, never get off message.
And on and on and on. When it comes to propaganda, one only needs your own core principles and the gall to attempt to impose them ruthlessly. I have such a tip sheet, used against myself and my organization almost 40 years ago. It is a single typewritten sheet, one side, double space. You don’t need 300 pages of explanation to lie. You just need the gall.
Just today came two items, separately, which seem to fit this conversation. An e-mail came from a retired friend who lives in Madison WI and has been involved in the protests there. I knew she lived there, but not that she’d been involved in the demonstrations.
An hour or two earlier, in today’s U.S. mail, came five pages from William L. Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” captioned “THE SERFDOM OF LABOR”. (See it here: Shirer 3rd Reich001 ) The person who sent this to me is a retired teacher who grew up in Nazi Germany (born 1926), lived through the war in Germany, and came to the U.S. in 1947. She says this section of Shirer’s book perfectly describes what happened in the pre-War Nazi Germany she lived in, and she sees the same happening here with the assorted moves to kill union influence through assorted means.
Of course, the “rule”, now, is to never ever compare what is happening here to what happened in Nazi Germany. Take it from our German friend. Take what is happening here very, very seriously. It can indeed happen here. It is only a slight modification of the modus operandi that kept the Nazis in power till their country was destroyed.
There is a famous descriptor of we rubes which goes: “There is a sucker born every minute“. Too often, in this media age, this is true. We are so easily manipulated in working against our own interests.
We are in control of our own destiny only if we do the requisite hard workl.
And where we start is to begin to question the politicians who we freely elect, particularly those who represent us in Congress and State Legislatures – they are the ones closest to us.

#356 – Dick Bernard: Bottineau Jig, Untold Tales of Early Minnesota

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Two sold-out performances of Bottineau Jig, Untold Tales of Early Minnesota, attested to the interest in Dance Revels Moving History’s interpretation of the life and times of legendary Pierre Bottineau.
The program was performed at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, Friday and Saturday evening, April 1 and 2. The production was a creation of Jane Peck of Dance Revels. Jane is a long-time student of historical dance forms. The program proudly noted that the activity was “funded, in part, by the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008” (This is the Clean Water and Legacy amendment approved by Minnesota voters November 4, 2008.)
Pierre Bottineau (played by Dr. Virgil Benoit) was a legendary early founder of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and he was renowned guide in the white settlement of the upper midwest. Bottineau, Metis (Michif) born in the area of present day Grand Forks ND, was gifted in languages and a larger than life presence. He was one of eight pioneers who built the original log cabin St. Paul Catholic Church (the first Cathedral of St. Paul MN); he owned land and built the second frame house in what was then St. Anthony, later to become Minneapolis; he founded Osseo and later Red Lake Falls MN.
Jane Peck’s program was an extraordinarily rich demonstration of period fiddling, music and dance.
The program interspersed spoken word, ethnic music and dance, covering the period from Bottineau’s birth in 1817 through 1870. At the conclusion of the program the cast of 14 invited the audience to join them in a Red River Jig, and then engaged in discussion with the audience. (Click on the photo to see an enlarged version.)

Audience and Cast participate in Red River Jig April 2, 2011


The program specifically intended to showcase an assortment of characters, not all well known in Minnesota History. So, Sarah Steele Sibley was emphasized over her more well known husband, Henry Hastings Sibley, and Franklin Steele, builder of the first house in to-be Minneapolis. Jacob Fahlstrom, early Swedish settler via England and years with the natives in Canada, and his wife, Marguerite Bonga, whose ancestry was a freed Haitian slave well known in what is now the Duluth area, spoke powerfully to the dilemmas of cross-cultural relationships in the newly emerging Swedish community northeast of St. Paul.
Among other purposes of the Bottineau Jig Project are, according to producer Jane Peck: “1) Offering the contributions and points of view of the mixed bloods and Metis in Minnesota history. They have been ignored as much or more than the French; 2) tracing the modern-day communities of some of the cultures represented in the play, including the Metis as the only modern mixed blood community.”
An expert cast was augmented by three fiddlers, all well known interpreters of Metis and French-Canadian music: Legendary Metis Fiddler from Turtle Mountain ND, Eddie King Johnson, gave his usual great performance, as did Twin Citians Linda Breitag and Gary Schulte. Larry Yazzie and Ricky Thomas provided outstanding dance, native and Metis. Other performers, all very engaging, were M. Cochise Anderson, Josette Antomarchi, Jamie Berg, Paulino Brener, Kenna Cottman, Craig Johnson, Scott Marsalis and Jane Peck.
Jane Peck has begun and will continue a blogging project on the Bottineau Jig at her website. See her site for more stories about Bottineau Jig.
Also visit the website of IFMidwest for upcoming activities in Virgil Benoit’s French-Canadians in the Midwest organization. The annual conference of IF Midwest is planned in Fargo ND October 7-8, 2011. Details will be at the website.

#355 – Dick Bernard: The Public "Lambs to the Slaughter"

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Today’s Wall Street Journal had a very clear front page headline (click on photos to enlarge them).

Wall Street Journal page 1 April 4, 2011


The essentials are easily read: “Medicare”; “under the age of 55”; “cut government spending”….
The aim, of course, is not at all to “cut spending”. Rather, it is to cut government control of that spending, so as to facilitate making even more money at the hands of the helpless.
Here’s a simple example:
As it happened, today I was paying a bill to an Emergency Care facility. The essence of the bill is below.
It is a reasonable bill: the “You Now Owe” column showed $49.42.

(I had a bad sore throat, and I went to the neighborhood facility rather than wait till the next week and drive 20 miles to my primary care doctor. I had a simple throat culture to check for Strep and went home….)
The Bill is pretty self-explanatory. The apparent hourly rate for the procedure I had is $675.00 an hour (I was billed for 20 minutes). I’m on Medicare, and Medicare paid $19.61. More important, Medicare disallowed $155.97 of the bill, leaving me owing $49.42. In all, I’d estimate less than 10 minutes time with a nurse and then with a doctor during this visit. As anyone who’s visited a doctor’s office knows, waiting alone is most of the time spent.
I have no idea, of course, on what the $675 per hour figure is based. It could simply be a conjured up number. The fact of the matter is, however, that it is a number declared by the provider.
Another fact of the matter is that the entirety of that Government money at all levels is ultimately spent on all of the things government budgets are spent on: wages, materials, etc., etc. The vast majority of that spending ultimately goes to purchase something from the economy.
The issue is not the money; it is the control of the money. Apparently, in my case, the provider of the care would have preferred to ring up a tab of $225, but Medicare thought that was about $175 too much.
Without Medicare, the bill I had to pay would have been much, much higher.
Of course, the same business community that chafes at any controls on its ability to make money, has no qualms whatever in attempting to interfere with workers rights to organize and bargain. That’s just how business is…competition is good, so long as the winner is known.
So is how it goes with economics dominated by greed.
A few hours earlier, CBS’ 60 Minutes had an excellent segment on the war between banks and huge numbers of people whose homes are being repossessed. The segment is well worth watching. Succinctly, banks hired out the task of reconstructing missing documents to a firm that subcontracted out to another firm who had employees fraudulently sign paperwork for submission to Court. One person interviewed said his quota was 350 signatures an hour, for $10 an hour wages. The responsible banks refused requests for interviews, and blamed the subcontractor for their misdeeds. And these are people we trust?
Sooner than later – hopefully before it’s too late – common people, of which I am one, will realize in large enough numbers that they are being played for fools by big money and big business, and all that stands between them and disaster is a reasonably strong government which can effectively regulate the bandits among us who make a huge amount of money.

#354 – Dick Bernard: In support of a Lobbyist (and scarcely anyone else)

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In the previous days post, I related the apparently close professional relationship between a lobbyist and a legislator.
The post brought a couple of angry responses via personal e-mail. In not terribly delicate terms, one demanded to know the name of the lobbyist; the other described the behavior of the two parties to the conversation related at the meeting (I decline to name the lobbyist or his organization, and, of course, I don’t know the name of the lawmaker.)
I didn’t meet the lobbyist at the meeting in question, and I’d never heard of him before, and I know little about his organization except that, I found, it is very dependent on state and federal funding, both of which are drying up “as we speak” by the slash and burn mentality of the current crop of lawmakers.
I actually feel considerable empathy for the Lobbyist. His job is to get funding, and he has to walk an endless tightrope dependent on who happens to be in political power at the time.
Reprehensible as they can seem to be Lobbyists serve a useful role in government policy making. At minimum, they can make sense out of arcane issues, and thus help their cause move along.
There are abundant lobbying abuses, to be sure, but without lobbyists, citizen and otherwise, what appears to be bad policy making would be much, much worse.
I don’t have the empathy for the slash and burn lawmakers currently in control in both houses in Minnesota, and in the U.S. Congress.
By and large they ran against “Government” itself, and they were wildly successful in 2010. Of course, they have their own definition of “good” government (give goodies to Business, and spend lots on “Defense”), and “bad” (people related priorities), which opens them up to problems of their own making.
In a sense, when they chose to close ranks with the bunch that allies with the Tea Party philosophy, they much resembled someone who has fuel and matches and sends angry people out to burn down a building. Let’s call that building “Government”.
Naturally, some of the rabble take that invitation to heart, and set the blaze. Some are even democratically elected as “leaders”.
But then comes a problem: as with a literal fire, the flames do not discriminate among “good” and “bad” government. As the house catches on fire, none of the rooms are protected from damage. The risk is that the entire structure goes up in smoke, or at minimum is severely damaged. As an act of an arsonist has consequences, so does “throw the bums out” philosophy.
In my simple analogy, the people and party who exploited the angry voters now have a problem on their hands: to allow the blaze to rage on creates the risk of destroying even what they consider desirable.
To put on the adult hat and urge adult behavior of the mob, turns the angry mob against them, resulting in future election problems.
I believe there are more than a few legislators in this dilemma, currently. They know that they have unleashed insanity, and they’re terrified of the political consequences if they engage in some kind of alternative rhetoric. So they go home and lie to their constituents, hoping to dodge a later electoral backlash.
We are in for a rough slide.
(Of course, someone might say, sometimes fires are useful…after all, you can rebuild. But what if you, at the very same time you’re starting the fire, drop your insurance? And that’s what we’re doing, and have been doing, for some years.)
That leaves “we the people”.

Someone asked, “what do we do?”
The answer is, in my opinion, “do something other than gripe and complain and blame someone else for the problems”.
Sitting on our hands will only make the problem worse.
That’s how I see it.
A friend recently sent me a very simple and profound quote from a column in the Lincoln (NE) Journal Star, (Pickles by Brian Crane, 3/27/11). It speaks to our role:
“If it is to be, it is up to me.”