The Ideas Festival is over, and I presume that most of the participants have left. So, now that there\u2019s nobody here but us, I wanted to take note of the 3,352-word \u201cconversation,\u201d \u201cedited for clarity and length\u201d between Dan Porterfield \u2014 President and CEO of the Aspen Institute \u2014 and the Aspen Daily News. This in a newspaper which suggests that 250 words is about all they want to hear from their own readers in the letters section.<\/p>\n
Regarding the 3,352 words, that\u2019s a lot of free advertising, and if the Institute were a political organization an article of that size would probably need to be reported as an in-kind contribution. Oh wait, they are a political organization, they just don\u2019t run ads during election season.<\/p>\n
According to Porterfield: \u201cThis year we have placed more emphasis on what is the next chapter of the Aspen Institute\u2019s relationship with Aspen, Colorado. \u2026 I think the institute can also take a role, as long as it is a nonpartisan role, to try to gauge the direction of progress and try to nudge, encourage, support and evaluate efforts to make progress happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Progress?<\/p>\n
Most people think that partisan, or \u201cnonpartisan,\u201d is a reference to party politics, as in Democrats and Republicans and all that stuff. To me, the true partisan divide is between totalitarians and libertarians \u2014 people who want to run everything and people who mostly just want to be left alone. The first group inevitably drifts toward one-party rule and centralized control (the definition of totalitarian, by the way), while the second group tries to lay low and live their life. We need both, but the former is more prone to excess \u2014 without considerable resistance from the latter.<\/p>\n
The Institute is all about really, really big institutions and organizations. Their concern with the individual (a word which never appears among the 3,352) is mostly to groom those who might someday run the really, really big institutions. That\u2019s fine, I guess, but could they perhaps stop pretending that indoctrinating people into totalitarian groupthink is nonpartisan?<\/p>\n
Oh rats, I\u2019m 102 words over my limit.<\/p>\n
Jeffrey Evans<\/p>\n
Basalt<\/p>\n