The.American.Word.

Considering the reputation and self-presentation of the IMF’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn, we work hard to resist the thought that he sure *looks* guilty enough. The former governor of California, Terminator, Kindergarten Cop, et cetera, et cetera, at least spares us the personal trial of deciding how guilty we presume him to be as we debate the significance to our public and private lives of what these men did, and what men, quite generally, do.

History was unkind to both in meaningful ways. An ordinary economy would have allowed the governor to impress friends and enemies alike with his honest and earnest firmness, and belief in a smaller and more sensible government (if not, alas, a smaller and more sensible governor). He’d have been a good counterweight to the unions and other organized interests in the state, had things been more or less as they’d been before. But there were no good options post 2008, and California was filled as much as any other state and more than many with the long-lingering effects of poor personal financial decisions, malicious banks, and sleepy regulators.

Strauss-Kahn, remarkably, was considered quite brilliant at his job even in the face of global financial disaster. Hard to know why on the merits, but his job was certainly one of the few at which one cannot – short of assaulting the maid – fail. He directed considerable lending of other people’s money generally without collateral, on the principle that economic ideas ought to drive the global economy. Hard to do that too terribly wrong, unless one tries too hard, and Strauss-Kahn has a reputation for many excesses but not for excess of effort at the central work of his day job, for which the world really ought to be grateful.

Are there lessons from the travails of these men? Not many that might regard the governing of states or global ubernational banks, but perhaps a lesson here or there about the folly of all men’s work, and, just at the level of a whisper, the false hope for perfection. None of us, it turns out, are that much better than others, and that ought to limit our hopes not only in the habits of men, but in the workings of institutions that might at times seek to save our souls, or our accounts.

A few of us – very few – knew who Osama bin Laden was before September 11, 2001. In those olden days, in fact, some policy and terror wonks knew him as “UBL,” back when we translated the first vowel of his name further back in our collective throats.

Either way, we take the word of our leaders that the man is dead. We do not shed a tear, but we do not pump our fists and bang our chests either.

We note that there is a superficial world of symbols, brands and public gestures that seems to approximate the real world, but not quite exactly. In this surface drama approximating life, the locus of evil has been slain. But on the true surface of the Earth, something smaller has happened: one man has been shot and his corpse fed to the sharks. His ideas, his images, his brand all remain. Some might argue that they are diminished by his death; some might argue that they are enhanced. But they remain and can only be adequately fought with a collective will for our nation to attend to its own shared needs for community, decency and genuine mutual regard.

We do not love our enemies, nor do we love to see them suffer and die. We must direct our public energies to much greater needs and more worthy ideas.

Public education is failing in Los Angeles. The stories are legion, the statistics are glum, and a lot of money is already spent on a system that should be doing a lot better for the students and families of this city.

Few large American cities – and in fact few medium-sized or small American cities – are doing much better. In New York City, one former schools Chancellor recalls getting a call from a famous billionaire who told him that he and a group of similar plutocrats had decided to put on the table whatever it would take to fix the schools. “This is historic. We’re willing to put a billion dollars into this. Nothing can resist the force of a billion dollars.”

Well, not really. The punchline of this story is that the New York City public school system was already spending over twenty billion dollars on just doing what it usually does, that very year. Five percent more would make little difference.

What we wonder about is where the big red “RE-SET” button is. Where do we sign up to start the whole system over?

That’s a big part of the magic of the charter school movement, a movement that is so clearly slowing down as it gets bigger and older. It’s losing its tremendous value as a small and fragmented – but real – form of resetting the system one school at a time.

There’s got to be a better way. Not to start where we are and make a change on the margins – even a billion-dollar change – but a way to take out a clean sheet of paper to start over. It’s clearly time.

We note the budget compromise in Washington today without pleasure and without much regard for the work and the workers behind it. It is far better than what might have happened, but that is a low standard for a nation that has done so much better, so many times.

Not spending what we do not have is wise. Making a transition to that footing carefully and with regard for the experience of the people who will be hurt by it is morally necessary, to say nothing of the need to keep an eye on the consent of the governed, as the Declaration of Independence demands.

And we ask for some reflection on that word, “governed.” The just powers of the American government derive, we have read, not from the consent of Congress, or even the consent of the voters, but from the consent of the governed. (Please look it up if you do not have the Declaration clearly in mind).

Who are the governed? The rich, the poor, and the rest of us. The long-descended Americans. The illegals. The children. The tax-payers. The homeless. The workers and the idlers. The thinkers and the thoughtless. All of us. All of them. What we and they all think and feel matters.

Rebecca Berger writes from Bhuj, India:

One of the projects I’ve been working on here is an initiative to teach representatives of local village governments to use online tools and social networking for improved governance and advocacy. Sound a little crazy? Well, it kind of is.

I suppose there’s an important context behind this that might help in painting a more detailed picture, and would help in understanding what the NGO I work for actually does. So, we’ll start from there.

The Indian government adopted a system that promotes the election and governance of Panchayati Raj Institutions. These are small, locally and democratically elected governments at the village level – each governing about 500 people – combining villages or hamlets when they are too small, in order to form a substantial reach of governance. These governments are called Gram Panchayats. There are Gram Panchayats at three levels – the village level, the block level, and the district level. (Above the district level is the state level, but the state level government is then a part of federal elections).

Here in Gujarat, however, the state-level government, run by Chief Minister Navendra Modi (see the NYT front page article on him HERE) and the conservative, Hindu-nationalist party the BJP, are committed to creating a state that is wide open to business – connecting the rest of the world to India via the state’s many ports and Special Economic Zones.

So, because Mr. Modi is determined to keep corporate interest in the state high there is great incentive to keep all governance centralized, under the control of the State government. In this way, they can ignore all those pesky villagers whose claims to traditional livelihood activities, connection to land, and demand for public services simply get in the way of turning the state into one giant, ugly polluting factory.

One of the ways we’ve begun to organize these Panchayat groups is by teaching them online skills.

First, we taught them all Facebook, which resulted in a very interesting list of characters requesting to be my friends on Facebook. We taught them Skype, to enable better and less expensive connectivity, and now we are teaching them blogging. In fact, I am blogging in the blogging training as I write.

This session has by far been the most interesting in terms of issues that have come up with the ‘enablers,’ and also the most exciting. In the spirit of all the has happened in Egypt, and a new generation of revolution that exists because of the internet – I can’t help but feel like sitting in this room, I am a part of something innovative, exciting, cutting-edge and in its own little-way, revolutionary. (Or, perhaps I just try to convince myself of this because it’s more appealing than admitting that in reality, I am sitting in a room with 20 people and we are all starring into our computers for the entire day).

But what is exciting – is seeing people, for the first time, learn to value their work and themselves. These “enablers” are really at the forefront of grassroots change. Every day they engage with people – educating them about their rights, connecting them with resources to make change in their communities. But they’ve never had the opportunity to connect outside of such localized development. Because they are so engrossed at the grassroots, they have difficulty seeing that they fit somewhere in a greater picture.

For them, it’s just what they do. They are getting by with a salary of approximately $100 / month, and this is just their every day reality.

But to create a blog, to post one’s background, one’s work, one’s motivations – is, in essence, to express oneself to the world. The story of our work and why we find it important – these are extremely powerful stories. And telling them is empowering. All of a sudden, these little committees that have other people write reports about them are themselves writing to the world about what they do. This is huge.