deathmtn

I hoped to give a public comment at Tuesday’s meeting of the Cambridge School Committee about the need for electronic tracking on special education buses. I had raised the issue at a meeting in March, the same month I filed a federal discrimination complaint. The agenda for the meeting indicated that the committee would vote on a new contract for NRT Bus, the vendor in question. Naturally, I wanted to read the proposed contract before the meeting to find out if it contained the provision I sought.

But the executive secretary of the committee informed me that it didn’t possess a copy of the proposed contract, worth as much as $40 million. She suggested that I file a public records request. The city, however, denied my request on the grounds that the contract was a matter of “ongoing policy deliberations.” Of course, that was why I wanted to read it in the first place.

The members bickered for a little while longer like this and then voted 4-2 to endorse the NRT contract. Harding and Hudson voted no. The others seemed happy to kick the can down the road and to get on with other, less confusing business.

How you assess this folly probably depends on what you expect of our public officials. If you listen to them, as I do, constantly proclaiming their agony over the “crisis of democracy” in the bad, red states, you have to wonder why they have neither the talent nor the inclination to practice democracy in their own meetings. Democracy is hard. But even a minimally functioning technocracy requires competence.

An electrical engineer by trade, Yokoi joined Nintendo straight out of university in 1965. The way he saw it, it’d been something of a mercy hire. A middling student at best, he’d watched his classmates land plum jobs at all of the same big electronics firms whose interviews he’d washed out of. Nintendo wasn’t Yokoi’s first or even third or fourth choice. He’d applied out of sheer desperation—it wasn’t even an electrical engineering position. His only duty was keeping creaky the old hanafuda presses oiled and running. Yokoi didn’t care. “The main thing was I didn’t want to leave Kyoto,” he confessed. “My thinking was if I could work in peace until retirement, anything was fine.”