I find that as I get older, I like to drive without any music. Just the sound of the road, whatever few sounds modern vehicles make, and the air when the window is cracked. I find it peaceful and relaxing. Mind you, I still listen to music, and sometimes NPR for a quick cardio workout, but a good bit of the time I just like the silence. Life is very loud. My new (well, new to me since it was built in 1910) is very quiet, and the appliances are new so they do not make much noise, but still there is t he sound of the pets and the neighbors and other stuff. But in the car it is just me and the sound of the road.
It gives me time to think and decompress. At any rate, I was thinking today, and I started to wonder if maybe I am the last generation who will remember good governance at the state and local level. Now obviously, there have always been problems and corruption and systemic racism, but at least when I was a kid they could do the basics- pave the fucking roads, pay the cops, do preventative maintenance. The coronavirus is a perfect example- we shouldn’t have to freak out and authorize a shitload of money, we should have the broad outlines of what to do in place and then just mobilize and fund as needed.
I don’t know what happened. I suspect it is because every election has been nationalized, and we have 34 year old idiots elected to the state legislature or city council and they think their job is advancing abortion policy or other bullshit, when actually their job is making sure the rivers and water isn’t polluted and the budget is balanced and the teacher’s get paid. The internet, the big money involved, and everyone wanting to be a star has also played a role, as well as talk radio.
Good governance is like maintaining an old house. You have to do things ahead of time to be ready for when shit goes downhill. You do the preventative maintenance, and when something breaks, you fix it instead of putting it off because you want to go on vacation or some other shit. You don’t wait until the roof caves in to make sure the shingles are ok. You can’t govern by just lurching from disaster to disaster like we have been doing for the last few decades. There has to be normalcy and routine. It’s one of the many reasons that I am supporting Warren, because she understands this.
What brought this to my mind today is I was out taking pictures of areas on the road near me that had had rock slides. I have two state Senators, one of whom is worthless and a right wing ALEC guy, the other is William Ihlenfeld, who was the United States Attorney from 2010-2016 before becoming a state Senator in 2018 (and one day Attorney General or Governor, I hope). While the other dipshit is out pushing fetal pain bills and other fucking nonsense, Bill Ihlenfeld answers his phone when I call to tell him there is a slip that is dangerous or the guard rail is broken on a treacherous part of the road where the college kids drive like maniacs. Every winter we have a bunch of rock slides, which is usual, due to the expansion and contraction due to freezes and thaws. I contacted him a couple weeks ago, State Road worked on them this week, and today I called to thank him and to tell him there is one area that still has what appears to be precarious overhangs, but that I can not provide informed comment because I am not an engineer or geologist or engineering geologist. Within an hour of leaving a message for him, he called and asked me to take some pictures. I was already in the big city, so I took some photos on the way home, and then marked up a map to show him locations:
And you know what? I can guarantee you that by tomorrow noon he will have called or emailed me back. Good governance. Competence. It really is a precious commodity these days.
I think we forget that. Hell, much was made of the first transgender woman being elected to the Assembly in Virginia, Danica Roem, and she wasn’t campaigning on hot button issues. She campaigned on fixing the fucking roads. And people elected her without hesitation, because PEOPLE NEED FUCKING ROADS.
Maybe we will luck out and once again have a boring President and government that just does its job and we don’t have to see them on fucking tv every god damned night of the week being a disgrace. Right now, though, we are shit out of luck, and our idiot in chief just appointed the non doctor who created an HIV epidemic in Indiana to head the coronavirus response. So get ready for prayer and holding an aspiring between your knees or whatever fuckery that idiot has lined up for us.
dm
Ezra Klein has been talking a lot lately (it may be part of his book), about how the best thing to do for your sanity and for our world is get involved in local politics — not too far away from what you’re doing with your calls to your state legislature.
Work on, and solve real problems. Bite off something you can actually chew.
HumboldtBlue
Food always helps.
Chilaquiles verdes: De Mi Rancho a Tu Cocina
Jharp
I haven’t had my car radio on in years.
I much prefer the quiet.
hells littlest angel
I fear anybody under ten years old is not going to remember good anything — governance, health, economy, climate, etc.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Jharp: I use my car audio system to play tunes from my phone, I pass by windmills so you can’t be too careful. I hear the sound they make causes cancer, so said a stable genius.
The Dangerman
“I’m from the Government; I’m here to help.”
Too many people bought that shit hook, line, and sink hole (that we’re all getting sucked into like a black hole)
ETA: I’m not old enough to remember quality Republican Governance at the Executive level; Eisenhower was too long ago. OK, maybe Daddy Bush, but that’s stretching the definition bigtime, not to mention he should have told his dry drunk son to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and just enjoy baseball.
FlyingToaster
This is definitely a thing. Constituent services should be the bedrock of politics. I know my town councillor, and our state rep and senator actually respond to messages about the local annoying shit (like WTF is wrong with the MBTA and thanks Senator Brownsberger for beating them up over the 70 Bus mess). We still have our colorful lunatics, but most of our reps are conscientous.
Mind you, Massachusetts also elected Senator Centerfold and Governor RMoney, so we fuck up like everyone else.
Ruckus
John, there are numerous reasons things are different now. First of all there are more of us. The roads get used more, they fall apart faster. You could go down to the local butcher shop for meat, now it’s prepackaged at the supermarket. You wanted something not sold in your city, you had the Sears catalog, That’s been for the most part destroyed by some clown who decided there was a lot of money to be made fucking the customer. Wally World.
IOW the world has changed. Our clothes are made elsewhere because labor is cheaper. Our overall income is distorted because others like that clown who screwed Sears screwed other concepts for a profit.
But what you are talking about, politicians, that came about for all the reasons you left the republican party. They get elected every 8 yrs and practice fucking everything. The next guy (so far….) comes along and spends 3/4 of his time fixing the bullshit left over from republicans and rinse – repeat, rinse – repeat. And now the clown who couldn’t find his own ass with or without a map and instructions, and it’s always at his finger tips, because he’s all ass. How is anyone going to get anything done with big shit in the WH and almost bigger shit in the senate? It’s like treading water while a 2000 lb shark has your leg in his mouth. Thank your stars that you have a decent congressman who doesn’t have over 700,000 constituents.
cokane
There’s very little press coverage of local, anything really. People can’t name their local government officials, and often can’t even name their representatives in the national Congress.
Part of this is a larger problem than just local politics. There’s very little coverage of government period. But endless coverage of politics.
The business models that delivered press coverage and thus oversight of government (all government not just state and local) aren’t succeeding today. There’s a much smaller news appetite for stories that focus on the workings of government, as opposed to stories that cover the politics of elected officials. So much of this is on news consumers, ultimately.
Mandarama
@The Dangerman: This year will mark 10 years since my city experienced rapid and historic flooding. Dozens of our red-state counties applied for federal disaster zone status and FEMA/TEMA showed up and got to work. I didn’t notice any of the anti-gubmint folks refusing a dime or a hand then. Shocker, I know.
VOR
“The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis is a love letter to good government. He profiles a bunch of unsung heroes working in government. Like the guys who improved tornado response times. Unfortunately, the book also takes about how Trump is dismantling important pieces.
Cursorial
I think about this aspect often every Presidential election season. The contest – primaries, debates, rallies – is all about charisma and grand dreams. The job is the mind-numbingly tedious and sometimes terrifying task of running the largest bureaucracy on earth.
We more or less have decided to hold a beauty pageant to select our anesthesiologist for major surgery.
Soprano2
We had a city council member who tried that shit – putting “In God We Trust” on the wall of city council chambers, tearing down the whole city government, crap like that. She and her whole slate of candidates went down to defeat by over 60% of the vote in my heavily Republican city. Even the Republicans didn’t want her crap in city government.
The Dangerman
@Mandarama:
So, that would be under Obama, who acted as if he was President of all 50 States, even those that didn’t vote for him.
As a Californian, Trump has way too much time looking for ways to fuck over Californians … all while his hand is out to take our tax revenue to give disproportionately to Red States.
Hey, Payback is a bitch, as the Democrats could nominate some random invertebrate and that invertebrate would carry the State in 2020. I have no idea why Trump was in the State last week other than to gloat about stealing water from the Cities to give to the small (and getting smaller) Red areas in the state.
Mnemosyne
@Mandarama:
I just found out that big chunks of Kentucky are currently underwater, but no one seems to give a shit, especially the federal government.
joel hanes
@HumboldtBlue:
I _love_ her cooking videos, especially the earlier ones.
Kattails
Wow, nice facies change you got there. Limestone? Let’s see if I can link to the pretty map:
I was reminded over the holidays that it was perfectly OK to go sit in on our selectpersons’ meetings and back up one who’s views were more in line with mine, give her some support against the other two more Trumpian guys. I need to put this on my calendar. My congresswoman, Annie Kuster, is great for sending out missives keeping us informed, always sends a reply to a call, and her staff are very polite and engaged. I know my local state rep, haven’t had the occasion to call; but you are right for reminding us of this, and thank you.
joel hanes
California still has good government, mostly. I think that Oregon and Washington do OK.
Iowa has the remnants of a strong good-government culture: the roads, for the most part, are very good. The schools were once truly amazing for a small rural state, but the Republicans have been degrading them for several decades, and the schools are not what they once were.
Watching Virginia take big steps this year toward good government has given me hope. Some things do get better.
hitchhiker
Solid post, thanks.
You reminded me of a time I heard Barack Obama’s voice saying, in response to some fuckery the Republicans had been playing, “We have to govern.” He sounded flummoxed that they were prepared to just let the shingles rot and the side of the mountain fall down into the road, to use your analogy, just to get a political win against him.
Correct, Obama. That’s the job. Governing is balancing needs within constraints in a logical, fair, good faith way. It requires a lot of drudgery to gather accurate, timely data followed by clear thinking and communication.
That’s it. That’s the job. I grew up in one of those houses where nobody did routine maintenance, and when things broke, they were only sort of fixed. Imagine my shock when at 34 I married into a family of engineers!
These were guys who calmly went about their work, and it was almost always preventative. It’s how I came to think of adulthood — the time of your life when it’s your job to calmly prepare and then respond rationally to whatever comes up.
We don’t have any adults in whole sections of our government right now. We have, instead, guys like my dad, who never really got off the couch but who had plenty of worthless opinions.
The Dangerman
@HumboldtBlue:
Teaches me for taking German as my second language (not that I remember any of it); it was much easier than Spanish as languages, apparently, just aren’t my thing.
She reminds me of someone I kinda knew up there that cooks for Sammy’s BBQ (Eureka; two thumbs up). Which is all making my mouth water as I’ve been fasting today. Not for much longer.
joel hanes
@The Dangerman:
I have no idea why Trump was in the State last week
Many of the rich are Republican. Trump was taking their money.
jl
Dang kids these days with their music in the cars! Though I listen to traffic and weather reports.
Thanks for pretty landslidepix.
The underlying problem is that everything is too winding (as in wine-dee) in WV. Gotta fix that. Problem solved, Cole is welcome.
Mandarama
@The Dangerman:
As a Southerner, I’ve always been so aggravated by the fact that we are a complete drain on the federal government our culture claims to deplore. My husband is from New England, so his home state basically has to prop my banana republic home state up.
cain
@Mnemosyne:
And I guess neither does McConnell, huh? You have the head of the senate and the feds can’t do anything? The attack ads write themselves.
Poe Larity
I don’t know what happened
Reagan Won, and you are still living in it.
cain
I”m a little older than John, and I like riding around with my music on – all kinds of stuff. I guess I just don’t have that older gravitas that some men acquire with age. On the other hand, I’m thinking that knitting might be kind of cool – but feel like I don’t have time to learn it.
Mandarama
@Mnemosyne: And that’s McConnell territory. That’s the kicker—Republicans don’t give a shit about these states, despite all their “heartland” bullshit. They just like the fact that so many of even our middle-class folks can be juked with the right mix of racism and pandering to a fake nostalgia.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@The Dangerman: He was picking up checks from developers here in LA.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: I worry about you jl, you’d better keep the tunes on so you don’t hear those windmills. Can’t be too safe.
Duane
@Soprano2: Kristy Fulnecky.(SP?) She’s a nut. She tucked her sorry tail and ran off to Nixa.
LongHairedWeirdo
If we ever have a functioning federal government again, it won’t be by luck. The GOP has already started its civil war; foes of the GOP get harassed and persecuted, if not prosecuted; GOPpies in good standing get their crimes swept under the rug, and those who discovered and investigated their crimes slimed.
I mean, seriously: the defense they used for Trump was “well, *Trump* thought he was fighting corruption!” which:
a) bullshit!
b) If you’re dumb enough to believe the bullshit, keep in mind, I call this “the President doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, but still should continue to be President” defense.
(Because, seriously? Asking for a baseless investigation, that your own DOJ[1] has said would be illegal to start, means you literally can’t tell fact from fiction. Anyone *that* stupid would give a news conference, insisting a disease outbreak was contained, and just afterward, we’d find out that it wasn’t… oh, right, that already happened.)
Facts actually matter, but alas, only one political party believes that.
[1] Let’s be honest with ourselves: Trump didn’t want *UKRAINE* to investigate the Bidens; he wanted the *FBI* to do it, and Barr realized that would expose *his* tender ass, so he refused. No, Barr won’t admit it, and neither will Trump (unless he’s indicted, in which case he’ll flip like a circus acrobat, forgetting his distaste for people who do that), but do you *really* believe he started thinking “let’s see if I can get an investigation involving some *foreign country* against a political opponent? ‘course not. He knows the GOP is all-in on weaponizing law enforcement, and he wanted to benefit from that, a second time.
CaseyL
I keep talking about that, too. Ours is the last generation to remember what it was like when government, from local to federal, was in the business of governing.
You know who really kicked the shit out of municipal funding? Good old Ronnie Reagan. He ended the federal Aid to Cities program, which used to fund stuff like infrastructure (roads, bridges) … and schools. States have never been able to make up what they lost; have spent the intervening decades scrambling to find money, letting roads and bridges and schools fall apart because they lost a big part of their funding at the same time the feds also de-funded or outright ended a lot of social programs, putting the burden on the already-struggling states. Not just a double whammy, but a triple or quadruple whammy.
And people have forgotten that program ever existed. I mention it to people and they’re astonished there was ever such a thing.
I try not to think about it too much, because it makes me so angry. We threw away our society, and forgot what it took to create it. Now we’re like “Oh, we can’t do that,” forgetting that we once could, and did.
Redshift
Part of the conservative project is to break government to “prove” their ideology that government doesn’t work. If they can make it hard enough for those of us who do know government is a force for good to get stuff done, people’s experience is that neither party can do anything for them, and they tune out from politics.
It’s harder to do that for long at the local level. So yeah, pay attention to local government to help maintain your faith in government.
Redshift
@CaseyL:
Yeah, it’s infuriating that the people who wax nostalgic about the days when our country did great things are the same people who think all taxes are theft.
Hey, anti-government wackos! Most of those great things? “We” didn’t do them, our government did them. We could be doing the same right now. Everything you whine that we “can’t afford” while other countries do it, we’re arguably the richest country that has ever existed. It’s not that our country can’t afford it, it’s that our government can’t afford it, because you thought it was better to “starve the beast” and let billionaires accumulate even more.
patrick II
I think the thing that bugs me about Republicans the most is the sheer selfishness. Many people with money know that global climate change exists, but their plan isn’t to contribute to help slow it down, their plan is to keep all the money and power, to own the water and livable land. They’ll be alright and screw the rest of us. It is a self-fulfilling nightmare, since their reluctance to pitch in a penny to help while they pretend they don’t know what is coming makes their dystopian nightmares become more inevitable.
The CDC cuts over the last few years is the same story. No tax money to aid in a crisis which they can’t imagine affects them — they’ll just get on their yachts and live off-shore until it blows over.
Part craven, part stupid, but that’s who they are.
Feathers
My dad worked for the Federal Highway Administration. On family vacations, we’d go and check out roads that people were complaining about that weren’t too far off our route. I remember one small metal barrier set off the road to prevent a car from rolling down a steep drop off at a curve. My dad rolled his eyes. He said it was well sited and showed me why. “Five years from now, no one but the guy who wrote that letter will ever remember that it wasn’t there. And in that time it will probably have prevented at least one fatal accident.” I really remember what he said after that – that people complain about government being all about the numbers, but that numbers are why that barrier got approved and put up. Numbers mean that problems get fixed when an elderly couple with no family gets killed, not just when it’s a carload of popular kids on their way to the prom. That has stuck with me as what good government is all about.
Quaker in a Basement
I’m so ready for boring.
John, you put your finger right on my hesitation with Bernie. Ideologically, I’m with him. But ideology doesn’t get much done. We need someone who is willing and capable to get the routine administrative bullshit work done. That’s why either of the women in the race would be tops on my list of candidates. Warren or Klobuchar have the experience and connections to Get. Stuff. Done.
Mj_Oregon
I spent 20+ years in varying capacities in government for our little town here in Oregon, starting with planning and budget committees and ending with eight years as mayor after a few terms on city council. I worked with three city administrators through those years trying to bring a woefully behind the times little town into the 21st century. I was very lucky to have a number of likeminded people who threw themselves into a long list of projects over two decades.
The underlying theme every year was how do we get the most value out of every tax dollar we received. Key to many of our successful projects was citizen interest and involvement. Unfortunately, that civic spirit is waning somewhat, a victim of suspicion of any size govenment. Good governance in a small town requires understanding that keeping the infrastructure up and running while planning for improvements is more important than anything else. There’s no place for petty politics. Happy to say I had more successes than failures along the way and the town is looking forward to more improvements in the coming years, including the complete renovation of the main highway through town, which came our way because we let our state senator know it needed to be done.
Doug
An aspiring what, my knees and I want to know.
prostratedragon
@Doug: One answer if the discussion concerns reverting to old means of controlling venereal diseases, another if it concerns old methods of becoming wealthy.
JPL
Remember when…
Soprano2
@Duane: Yes, mercifully I had forgotten her name. I was so happy when her whole slate lost so badly she quit too! I was kind of surprised that happened. I guess the locals actually want us to do stuff rather than engage in ideological crap. I especially care because I work for the sewer department, so her crap could have affected me directly. (I refuse to call it Clean Water Services to citizens because then they think I work for the water department. I’d make more money if I did!)
debbie
I still remember Roy Goodman, my state senator back in the 1980s. He was a Republican, but he worked on behalf of all of his constituents. At the time, in NYC, apartment buildings were being turned into co-ops, and there were all kinds of fears about what that meant to the current tenants. Goodman spent many evenings explaining the laws and the process, holding sessions building by building. He had my vote for as long as I lived there.
rattlemullet
The only thing the federal government prepares for and very poorly at that is continual war and the distribution of tax dollars to private enterprise which reduces money to state and local governments.
artem1s
It’s still there. There is nothing more invisible (or thankless) than a well run bureaucracy. It’s just that Gohmert has been trying to drown the Federal parts and farming everything out for the states to deal with. Some states have the infrastructure to deal with a failing infrastructure, some don’t. Some care about rebuilding aging cities, some are still white-flighting it out to rural areas and tearing up farmland as fast as they can pour a thousand yards of concrete. Some barely made it out of the Great Depression (looking at you Pennsyltuckyginia) and hardly have any resources to recover from W’s Greater Depression. Ohio is a mix of GOPer, near militia-state counties, well off bedroom communities, rural poverty, and rust belt inner cities. Almost every level of competent or not exists in the state, or even within a single city or ward. I’ve been fascinated with Cleveland’s rebuilding since I moved here 30 years ago. The first decade it was crawl. The second there were pockets of sunshine and the third it’s like a whole new city is suddenly emerging from the ashes of the steel mills. Some of the city services are amazing like the MetroParks and libraries. Some are competent but just being hammered by demand (health care) and are barely keeping up. View point is so important here. Old timers only see decline. People who didn’t grow up here see possibilities on every corner. It really helps if there is an infrastructure to build on, even if it is currently crumbling.
Chief Oshkosh
Nothing much to add except sometime during the Shrub Maladministration I remember having these conversations with the youngsters at work. Even back then, it was clear that they had no direct experience with good governance at local, state, or federal levels. And the decline really did pretty much start with St. Ronnie in terms of timing (he was just the hollow vessel – and vassal – to the real power mongers).
Betty
@Cursorial:
This is why I keep harping on choosing the person best suited to do the job. We are the employer. But that seems to get lost in questions of who do I like. Sad.
Betty
The last good Republican I can remember was John Heinz. Lost him too soon.
Exregis
I don’t know if this will make Cole happy or sad.
My city plans way ahead. For example, they have a storm drain and sewer line replacement policy to install new lines way before the drop-dead dates. They proactively expand schools and add new facilities based on future projections. There was a major intersection subject to flooding that they raised by one foot, an inch at a time in different lanes (of which there were fifteen) and never once interrupted traffic. They send me an email every day elaborating on two or three city items of interest. They stream council meetings on the internet. Etc. There are problems, to be sure, but it seems rational people keep on getting elected to various offices.
J R in WV
John:
I don’t usually sweat the small stuff — a missing comma or apostrophe. But on your otherwise excellent post about Good Governance lasts night, you made a typo that changes the entire meaning of the post as in:
I feel certain you mean to say “You CAN’T govern by just lurching from disaster to disaster”… and as you see, the missing “n’t” is as big a deal here as a leak in an obscure corner of your roof.
Otherwise, of course, a great piece, and quite accurate.
WaterGirl
@J R in WV: I didn’t know if John would come back to this thread, so I fixed it for you. Let’s hope he doesn’t sue me for unauthorized fixing of his typo.
J R in WV
@WaterGirl:
Thanks. Thought if he saw that a week from now it would piss him off no end. Spell check doesn’t help with some errors!
I need to report that the back arrow is still erratic to no end. IF I click on the time/date stamp so as to get back to that spot, from then on the back arrow will take me to that comment, regardless of where else I have clicked around to in the thread. Otherwise it just seems that the address of “back” is either unset or randomly set somehow.
WaterGirl
@J R in WV: Yeah, I know. back arrow is on the list. thanks.
Jonas
I think there is short-term cost-saving that costs long-term problems due to the system we have set up. If you can spend $100 million dollars to pave roads that can go 12 years before needing to be resurfaced and $80 million for roads that last 6 years, the pols will brag about choosing the $80 million plan because they can save you, the tax-payer, money, and they will be gone before the repercussions come due.
Uncle Cosmo
P.J. O’Rourke, no flaming (or even smouldering) liberal, once wrote, Republicans say government doesn’t work, & then they get elected & prove it! I read this as sarcasm & think that in the context of the times (>30 years ago) it was.
Let me urge one & all to retain some skepticism of “goo-goos.” Just because there may be no overt &/or large scale corruption afoot doesn’t mean there aren’t some rather nasty hidden agendas that will eventually come to the fore. The incumbent Sultan of Turkey, one Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, made his name as a “goo-goo” Mayor of Istanbul. There was this Eye-talian guy from the 20s and 30s who was known for “making the trains run on time” (in fact he only had the schedules changed to reflect reality) and draining swamps (an actual good deed, since depriving the mosquitoes of habitat essentially eradicated malaria as a public health scourge in The Boot).
And there were two other guys who put a lot of unemployed people to work on public projects to start the crawl out of the Great Depression. One was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The other’s last name was Hitler.
Words to the wise guys – or words to the wise, guys.
Tehanu
John, you write so well when you take the time. Often your posts act just as quick nods to show you’re still here — which is fine, I’m not criticizing — but when you want to be, you are one of the more eloquent voices on these here intertoobz. This was a really fine piece of writing. Thanks for it.