Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 68. Sunrise is 7:06 and sunset is 6:15, for 11 hours 9 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 52.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Plan & Architectural Review Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1903, the Boston Red Sox win the first modern World Series, defeating the Pittsburgh Pirates in the eighth game (it was a best-of-nine series).
In this small city, as in places elsewhere, one encounters now and again common techniques of entrenched special interests. Two come to mind this morning.
False claims about lack of transparency. Maintaining open government principles is a challenge everywhere, but some governments do better than others. In Whitewater today the municipal government is more open than at any time in memory. Not perfect (as no institution is) but better by far than its predecessors.
And yet, and yet, when Modern and Open arrive, Old-Fashioned and Closed start complaining that they’re being cheated, deceived, hoodwinked, damn it.
Listen closely, and a special-interest faction of small-town cronyism will do what it can to level charges that it was not told something, did not know something, was denied information about something. These are the same men who for years concealed information on the old Community Development Authority, e.g., unfavorable audits, a cease and desist order, lost paperwork, firings, the terms of wasteful deals, the reasons for wasteful deals, etc. Now, however, they’ve found God, so to speak. (Having seemingly found a certain open-government faith, they’d do well to keep in mind the tenet of an older faith against bearing false witness.)
There’s often a simple solution for these types: read the agenda packet thoroughly and carefully before a meeting. This should not be too hard for men who position themselves as knowledgeable and professional. Agenda packets in Whitewater are written in English; it’s a common language on this continent.
Emphasis on specific, but minor, details. Special-interest men who for years showed no grasp of broad economic trends in Whitewater will, when criticizing those who do understand those trends, focus instead on minor, picayune, insignificant details. They likely do this for two reasons. First, because the minor, picayune, and insignificant are their familiar ground. Second, because they believe a focus on minor details makes them seem clever. (It doesn’t.)
So, for example, if someone were to present a design for a new passenger plane, they might ask a question about whether the seats were covered in stain-resistant fabric, whether the flight attendants received overtime pay for delayed flights, or whether anyone knew if the aerospace engineer’s spouse’s cousin’s next-door-neighbor once went to Whitewater High.
The proposed plane could take off, fly, and land perfectly well at a reasonable cost to meet a transportation need, yet they’d still keep complaining that no one should proceed with production until their questions were answered.
During Halloween and throughout the year, these techniques are little more than hocus pocus, all tricks and no treat.
NASA research equipment crash-lands on Texas farm: