Introducing: The Daily Constitutional

After I left the army and resumed my studies in graduate school, I almost bankrupted my family writing a master’s thesis that was rightfully rejected by my advisors the first time I submitted it. But instead of patching it here and there as my advisors suggested so that I could graduate a few months later in the summer, I dropped off the face of the earth, worked part-time, minimum wage jobs, and relied heavily on my (first) wife’s income as a teacher to support us and our young children. I resurfaced several years later with a manuscript that eventually became published as The Road to Mass Democracy: Original Intent and the Seventeenth Amendment.

I won’t belabor the details which readers can find in the work itself, but I simply could not accept the suggestions of my advisors, based as they were on the glaring logical contradictions unquestioningly promulgated by the textbook industry. So I spent hours that turned into months of digging through primary sources and following a trail of political writings that led all the way back to the Greeks and Romans. Again, I won’t re-argue my case here, but suffice to say, the professors of the Progressive Era who sat on my thesis committee were perplexed by my having to reach so far back to explain an amendment that was ratified in 1913.

At the time that I had completed my draft for re-submission, I chanced to be invited by a friend to accompany him on a warm October day to a gathering of Southern gentleman for mint-juleps and a discussion of affairs, with M.E. Bradford featured as the main speaker.

Full disclosure, although I was born in Atlanta, it was to parents who were both wanderers in their own right, who wandered to different destinies after their divorce, and raised me as a wanderer back and forth between them. Naturally, I continued to wander when I came of age. So even though I was technically born there, any affinity I have for the South is more by adoption, an outsider’s admiration, like that held by a transplanted New Yorker or Pennsylvanian or one of those other places where they serve unsweetened iced tea. I have always wished for Bradford’s certainty about the sanctity of place and birthright, but living the life I have, anything I say on that topic is akin to reciting the Creeds as an agnostic who hopes them to be true.

Not being a lawyer, and having just read Robert Bork’s The Tempting of America, I naively asked Dr. Bradford if the Dred Scott decision was a case of judicial activism, inflicting slavery from the bench on States that didn’t want it. I don’t remember the entire tongue lashing that I received while a tent full of legally-trained Virginia good old boys glared at me for having such insolence. But I do remember the conclusion: that every time he came back East, M.E. Bradford made it a point to lay flowers on Justice Taney’s grave. Argumentum ipse dixit!

So imagine my surprise, when discussing my thesis with perhaps the only two people at the gathering still willing to speak to me, the acquisitions editor of a university press appeared, gave me his card and asked me to send the manuscript. Long story short, when I let it circulate that my thesis was being considered for publication, my advisors stopped trying to get me to cut Rousseau out of my history of the Seventeenth Amendment and I finally graduated.

It took many years and was far more difficult to get the work published than I had presumed, perhaps an instructive story to be chronicled at another time, but given the difficulty of getting my master’s degree in history, I made a half-hearted effort to apply for a PhD before deciding to spend the rest of my veteran’s educational benefits on a master’s degree in Library Science. I think it would be more accurate to refer to it as Library Practice, or Library Traditions, than “Science,” but they don’t give out master’s degrees for Practices and Traditions.

My thinking was that I could still hang around universities and do research without having to sing for my supper as an academic beholden to the political fads that inevitably underlie the main streams of university funding, which they did even thirty years ago, but far more so now. And while I always fancied myself corrupting the youth on the steps of the Agora, I am sure I dodged a bullet in not pursuing a career in the classroom. I retired yesterday as a librarian. As a professor I would have certainly blurted out something excommunicable long before I was eligible for my pension.

Despite being dragged kicking and screaming to the word processor (using floppy disks) during graduate school, and initially starting my library career as a manuscripts cataloger, it turns out I had a knack for automation and data management and an abhorrence of bottlenecks in organizational workflows. Just knowing anyone, anywhere was manually typing in information that had already been typed in somewhere else in the world would drive me to the whiteboard to diagram a better way, and if it took me two months to automate ten minutes of data entry, I considered it time well spent. It was therefore a natural transition from manuscripts cataloger to systems librarian, which tended to pay better.

I am sure to write eventually in greater detail about leaving the United States and a job as systems librarian in a prestigious university to take the position of head librarian at a small university that few people outside the maritime world have ever heard of. For now, let’s put it down to mid-life ennui: grown kids, divorce, a new marriage, and a congenital inability to torture the meaning of words and mouth the pieties required of managers at the senior level. Having automated or delegated virtually every task in my job at the time, if I wasn’t going up in the organization, the choice was stagnate or quit.

Undoubtedly, I will also have a thing or two to say about working the last seventeen years for a university in the orbit of the United Nations. I have frequently imagined some goat herder peacefully tending his flock as a truck pulls up. A squad of soldiers emerge, turn him upside down, and shake out his loose change, which by processes outlined in various treaties and memoranda of understanding ends up in my monthly paycheck. I always wince at the thought, but it has inspired me at least to build the best collections at the lowest costs with minimal staffing, and to train our students, mostly from “developing nations” (as opposed to “declining nations”) in how to use the awesome tools of research at their disposal — courtesy of the anonymous goat herder.

So much of my work in library automation was inspired by an urge to reform the slow, tedious processes available when I was researching The Road to Mass Democracy, that, as I sit at the keyboard a day after retiring, I wonder if my library career was just one giant era of procrastination before getting on with my writing. I had obtained the domain name, dailyconstitutional.com, in the late nineties or early aughts, with the intention of writing much more prolifically. Since then I have only managed a second edition of the book and a few articles, all of which were published elsewhere, and a couple poems — published by whom? I can’t remember.

Now that I find myself with an extra forty hours a week on my hands, I hope to make up a little of the lost time. Writing a book or a long scholarly article — which, besides bureaucratic memos and “strategic planning” documents, is my only writing experience and was accomplished for the most part decades ago — is slow and tedious trench work that doesn’t allow an author to come up for air that frequently. I have a few of those projects on my itinerary, God willing. But I suspect I also have a knack for the editorial, the satirical, the polemical, and the shorter forms of essay that just might be suitable for a web site called The Daily Constitutional.

It will take practice and will power to keep it short (This introduction is already too long, but it still hasn’t taken more than a day to write, so it counts).

As the title suggests, it will be a daily rumination or mental walk about whatever is chapping my hide or tickling my funny bone. A few days back on the walk to work I passed a man down on one knee, trying to comfort his toddler daughter. She was crying inconsolably over what I realized, as I came closer, was a split open carton of milk that had splattered all over the sidewalk. I didn’t come close enough to hear if the father was passing on the ancient wisdom, the same in Swedish as it is in English, "Man ska inte gråta över spilld mjölk."

Instead, I walked on and laughed at seeing the literal enactment of a proverb.

Well, let’s see where this goes.