Nearly everything from the school millage issue in Little Rock to the Trump-Russia madness in Washington comes down either to ego and turf or partisan distrust.
Oh, no, you're wrong, say well-intended Little Rockians who cast on Tuesday their first vote ever against a school millage.
They did so, they insist, only from studied concern about fiscal prudence based on an exhaustive and authoritative public essay from Baker Kurrus, the ousted superintendent.
Kurrus' memo was a barrage of numbers of financial assertions hardly anyone understood or had the ready independent wherewithal to confirm. What mattered was that voters trusted him.
If Kurrus had still been superintendent and proposed a very similar school millage, and if state education director Johnny Key had written a very similar critical essay, then those Little Rock voters would have scoffed at the criticism. They would have hurried out to vote confidently for what they soundly drubbed last week.
They wouldn't have trusted Key. And why not? It's because Little Rock pro-public education voters tend to be Democrats and Key is a Republican. It's because Little Rock's Democratic pro-public education voters believe the GOP theory of "school choice" threatens traditional public schools. It's because they don't trust that Key, by favoring new charters, isn't trying to ruin public education.
Am I dismissing as partisan the analytical work of the otherwise heroic Kurrus? Not exactly.
I believe Kurrus constructed an equation comprising facts and figures, but with a multiplier of his own distrust. He was ably outlining a worst-case scenario.
Most any major debt could be made to look imprudent.
Let's say a young newspaper reporter sets about to buy a home. Let's say that, at closing, he gets a look at the staggering amount of money he is obligating himself to pay in principle and interest over the 30 years of the loan. And then let's say somebody hands him a memo saying the newspaper business may well be in severe constriction owing to an information-delivery revolution before those 30 years are up.
Is it prudent to mortgage oneself to hundreds of thousands of dollars for much of the rest of one's life when one considers the uncertainty in one's source of debt-service income over the course of the debt-repayment schedule?
Some might argue that an equity position in a home is entirely different from an equity position from a capital investment in public schools. But is it? Housing markets can collapse, as we have learned. Public schools can fail, as we have learned. But a home can be a great asset, just as a vibrant, well-equipped and well-maintained public school can be an asset.
The proposal got trounced and needed capital improvements will go undone because of partisan distrust ... and, oh, yes, lest I forget, because of turf, owing to local resentment that the state had taken over the district because of the academic failings of six schools.
Here is a paragraph of facts not influenced by ego or partisan distrust: The state Constitution makes the state ultimately responsible for public education. The Arkansas Supreme Court has affirmed that constitutional language into case law. A state law provides a mechanism for the state to exercise the authority to meet the responsibility by taking over local districts with failing schools. By regulatory definition, Little Rock had six such schools. By the usual procedure of the state Board of Education, local authority is returned when the failing schools lift themselves out of distress by test scores. Three of the six schools in Little Rock aren't yet so lifted.
Simply huffing, puffing and bellowing "local control" amount to nothing.
Now, regarding the Trump-Russia madness in Washington, my best guess is that Donald Trump himself engaged in no activity with Russians that passed from the realm of the naïve to the criminally colluding. It is that Trump objects to an investigation not because he fears going to jail but because the idea that Russia helped get him elected offends what currently is America's most monstrous menace.
I refer, of course, to Trump's ego.
As for partisan distrust, I would remind you of what the White House counsel said to acting attorney general Sally Yates when she related that national security adviser Mike Flynn was lying to Vice President Mike Pence and that the Russians knew it and conceivably could blackmail him.
The White House counsel asked Yates why she cared whether one guy in the White House lied to another.
What he meant was that Yates was an Obama appointee and that he didn't trust that she had altruistic purposes.
That's rather serious dysfunction.
We need to invest in our traditional public schools in Little Rock. We need a national government that can credibly probe how the Russians meddled in our recent presidential election.
We need a political system that serves those needs rather than worsens them.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/14/2017