Museum of Public Service

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise put up a parking lot
They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum.

     Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi, 1971 

 

This blog mostly examines political performance, not governance and policy. But the reason for all the performance, branding, messaging, and coalition building is not to feed an entertainment industry. It is to shape policy and carry out the serious act of self-government in a republic.

It says something about the current state of politics in America that someone is proposing a museum for public service.

Politics--the mechanism of resolving and accommodating as best as possible the multiple interests within a polity--are widely characterized as dis-functional in America. In the U.S. Senate the filibuster and Senatorial "holds" on appointments mean that offices remain unfilled and policies that have undoubted majority support cannot be implemented. 

Pete Buttigieg acknowledged that he handled the performance part of his job incorrectly in the Ohio train wreck. He should have gone sooner, he said, to make a statement by his physical presence.

I could get technical readouts, information about the response. But I think it was important to hear and see how the community was responding. . . .Sometimes people need policy work, and sometimes people need performative work. And to get to this level, you’ve got to be ready to serve up both.

Senator Josh Hawley and spokespeople from the RNC criticized Buttigieg for wearing leather boots when he toured East Palestine. Buttigieg found it "maddening." 

“Who cares what shoes I was wearing, when I was there to draw attention to an agenda that will save lives on our railroads? 

Editors of Murdoch's New York Post cared. It was a way to mock and trivialize Buttigieg's performance of being in East Palestine. Theater critics comment on costumes. After all, it was a performance.

A Museum of Public Service. 

There are efforts underway to push against this tide of trivialization. College classmate Sandford Borins is Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto. After a 45-year career researching and teaching public management he maintains an active political blog, www.sandfordborins.com.  He described a worthy endeavor, a project of one of his academic colleagues, Marc Holzer. It is a Museum of Public Service. Borins writes

The Museum is being launched in the US, an extremely challenging context for its mission. The Republican Party has repeatedly denigrated and defunded public services. Public trust in government institutions, as measured by the Pew Research Center’s ongoing surveys, has been declining for half a century and is now standing at historic lows. 

Public Trust in government to do "what is right."

A virtual Museum of Public Service is an attempt to restore public appreciation for government. Borins quotes from the Museum prospectus, saying it will offer

engaging, in-depth, multimedia exhibits that highlight the positive roles public servants, institutions, and their partners, have played in delivering government’s promises to the public. These public servants and institutions have immeasurably improved the quality of life for all stakeholders across the realms of health, education, the arts, criminal justice, defense, security and dozens of other services that build social capital.

GoFundMe

The fledgling project has a GoFundMe campaign underway. It's name is a "tell." It is a fund "in defense of public service." In a healthy democracy, government itself would display public service, and it would be acknowledged as a good thing. It wouldn't need a defense. Nor would we need a museum to preserve something disappearing.

But, alternatively, maybe we need it more than ever. The thing worse than needing a museum of public service is to need one and not have one. It is past time for a rebirth of patriotism. "Ask what you can do for your country." It sounds so old fashioned and quaint--which is the problem.

I will conclude with my own contribution to respect for public service. Below is a photograph of the painting by John Trumbull depicting of one of the foundational acts in U.S. history. George Washington, General of the Continental Army, with the power to assume unquestioned leadership of the new nation, turns his back on the throne-like chair open to him and voluntarily hands back his commission to civilian authority. It wasn't his government to lead. It was the people's.

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