I graduated with honors in Government from St. Lawrence University in 1979. My head filled with theory, I entered government service that September, and met Practice.
Practice won. Theory was squashed dead.
Idealism died as a Contract Specialist at the United States Department of Energy.
With no training whatsoever, I was expected to okay contracts and send out federal funds to happy recipients. On day one, I was led to a small fire hazard of a room with thousands of different forms, not unlike the room below.
“These are contracts,” I was told. “When you need contracts, this is where contracts are located.”
That very first day, I sent $25,000 – a lot of money in 1979 – to a guy in Colorado who wanted federal funding to find better, smarter, and faster ways to turn chicken manure into some kind of gas. Remember that those were the days of Jimmy Carter and energy shortages. Feeding chicken shit into your Buick seemed like a swell idea to Jimmy Carter.
I had to call the guy – a chicken farmer, I presume, or an impending one – to give him the good news.
“You’re kidding,” he said.
“No sir.”
“Who are you really? Did Jake put you up to this?” he asked.
He got his money.
The next day, the supervisor called us all into his tiny office. It was about September 1st. He was tiny, too – this was 1979, before calories were invented – so he stood on his desk and exhorted us to speed up our contract dispersal.
“We have to get all our pending contracts approved and out the door before October 1st. It doesn’t matter what they’re for, just get them out! Otherwise we won’t get even more money from Congress for the next fiscal year!”
What a surreal pep rally.
All of my formal “education” about government, from stellar professors such as Bob Wells and Bernie Lammers, was discredited. The government is really all about spending indiscriminately so as to be able to beg for even more money to burn the next fiscal year.
I could have saved four years of fake education at SLU by just going down to Bob Merrill at Merrill Brothers Hardware.
Bob would have told me something like, “Government is a joke.” And he would have been right. At least in my first little adventure in it.
Education and idealism are utopian. Practice and reality are what hits you upside the head for real.
Meanwhile, can I interest you in some KFC thanks to some birds that failed to shit enough?
