In Praise of Civil Service
At a time when public service is being so gleefully denigrated by President Trump and his once faithful companion Elon Musk, Peter Quinn’s brilliant and gratifying review of Michael Lewis’s book (“Bureaucrats vs. Plutocrats,” June) gives a much needed boost to those of us who have devoted our lives to government service.
As a forty-year veteran of city government, I witnessed the hard work and dedication of many civil servants with a wide range of ages and ethnic and educational backgrounds. So many were proud of their contribution.
As the head of a large insurance program run out of the mayor’s office, I interfaced with multiple levels of people in private-sector positions, and can attest to the devotion, competency, and commitment of people in the public sector, most of whom earned considerably less than their counterparts in the private sector, and without the numerous perks afforded to the latter. There was a time when the call to public service was a noble endeavor, as cited by Quinn’s examples, and we will suffer from the loss of knowledge, expertise, and experience as an arbitrary hammer is imposed.
Jim Harper
Hartsdale, N.Y.
Little but Unforgettable
In Kenneth L. Woodward’s online remembrance (“More than a Theologian”), he writes: “[David] Tracy’s vast erudition awed his students, but it was his humility and little acts of kindness that many of them remembered.”
Having slogged in raw ignorance through a seminar taught by a long-suffering OSCO priest in which we read David Tracy’s Blessed Rage for Order, I later found myself at Notre Dame taking a course from him. Wisely, I thought, I enrolled for audit, not credit, supposing I would never meet his expectations. Yes, I was awed by his presentations, style, and erudition. I decided to submit the final paper required for credit-earning students, hoping for a crumb of reply, but I marked it “audit only” so as to temper his critique. Not only did Fr. Tracy give me feedback on the essay, he wrote “change to credit and pursue the MA”! I did. It was such a small thing, “a little act of kindness,” but I shall not forget it. Rest in peace, Fr. Tracy.
Rita Hessley
Cincinnati, Ohio
A Dire Transformation
Near the close of Alexander Stern’s recent piece on the state of the Democratic Party and its efforts to mount a cohesive response to Trump 2.0 (“Bernie Hits the Road,” May) appears a sentence that deserves added emphasis. If it’s accurate, which seems likely, it amounts to a seismic wake up for all who revere democracy, however imperfect, and the Constitution that established it.
Commenting on prominent opponents to the Trump administration and their ideas—people like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their book Abundance and writer Matt Yglesias—Stern laments: “[T]hey fail to give any account of the dire transformation the country now seems to be completing, from liberal democracy to authoritarian plutocracy.” Surely this is intolerable, and a trend we dare not simply observe. Too much is at stake for the living, particularly the non-affluent, not to mention future generations, and the planet. Way too much.
R. Jay Allain
Orleans, Mass.
