{"id":433,"date":"2005-12-30T14:38:07","date_gmt":"2005-12-30T14:38:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=433"},"modified":"2005-12-30T14:38:07","modified_gmt":"2005-12-30T14:38:07","slug":"the_bureaucratic_mentality_vs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2005\/12\/30\/the_bureaucratic_mentality_vs\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bureaucratic Mentality Vs. My Mother’s Trumpet Vine"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the conclusion of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home<\/i>, Dr. McCoy remarks that the bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe. It’s taken me years to completely figure out what he meant, but I think I finally get it. What old Bones is saying is that the world is filled with small-minded, mid-level-management types whose only purpose in life is to squash the unorthodox and ensure that everyone does everything “by the book.” These gray-skinned, unimaginative little beings live and die by their rules, their time clocks, and their almighty god, Procedure. Their thought processes are inflexible and binary in nature; they think in terms of black and white, on or off, one way or the other. They abhor the idea of a third possibility or an exception to the rules because it overloads their limited minds and interferes with their hardwired purpose, which is to use what little power they’ve been granted by the greater beings above them to enforce their mindless and impersonal regulations.<\/p>\n

So, you’re wondering, what’s got ol’ Bennion riled up today? Nothing, except being awakened by the raspy buzz of a chainsaw, which was busily mutilating this wonder of nature:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

That’s my mother’s trumpet vine, which she took as a start from my late grandmother’s yard and planted alongside the utility pole in front of my house when I was a little boy. It has lived and thrived on that pole for over thirty years. It’s been something of a local landmark, a unique object that out-of-towners could easily spot and which could be easily described when giving directions. Total strangers used to stop when my mother was doing yard work in the front, compliment her on the vine, and ask for their own starts. That vine has been as familiar and comforting a part of my personal landscape as the house itself, and my old school, and the tree where my dad once built me a treehouse.<\/p>\n

This morning, in the space of about two hours, it was ripped down and fed into the heartless jaws of a mulching machine, and then its roots were poisoned, just to be sure.<\/p>\n

My parents — who are my landlords these days — have been fighting the destruction of the vine for several years now, ever since Utah Power and Light was acquired by a Scottish multinational<\/a>. You see, kids, there was a time when things like public utitities were locally owned. Back then, when hobbits still made their homes in holes in the ground and elves abided in groves of Russian-olive trees alongside the Jordan River, the power company was staffed by local people who gave a damn about the concerns of other local people. When something like this vine issue came up, you could call someone and discuss it with some confidence that they’d actually listen to you and that you might even win the battle. The service was at least somewhat<\/i> personalized, and it was<\/i> possible to reason with the power company.<\/p>\n

But no more. Now some golf-shirt-wearing office-monkey sitting in a cubicle somewhere, most likely not in this state and possibly not even in this country, issues a fatwah that proclaims, “There shalt not be any vine-like vegetation on the utility poles because the vine will grow into the pole and damage it” (actual reason given for the vine’s death sentence), and the tree-trimming guys show up unannounced on your doorstep, saying, “So it was written, so shall it be done.”<\/p>\n

I suspect the desk-drone’s memo was most likely composed with ivy or kudzu in mind; those vines are<\/i> destructive monsters that infiltrate whatever object they grow on and weaken it by forcing their way into — and widening — small crevices. But trumpet vines don’t work that way. They grow on the outside of whatever supports them. If anything, my trumpet vine has probably reinforced that damn pole and kept it from coming down during the summer windstorms we sometimes get around here. (To be fair, the vine has needed to be trimmed periodically to keep it from tangling into the power lines, but UP&L was historically willing to work with us on that, and, in some three decades, there has never been any interruption in service because of the vine.)<\/p>\n

Beginning three or four years ago, the treetrimmers have come around to take down the vine about every six months, and each time my dad has managed to convince them that the vine has not, in fact, damaged the pole in any way and that an exception should be made for it. But, like comic-book villains who refuse to stay dead, they’ve just kept coming back, and this time there was no arguing with them. They had their orders. And now the vine is dead and gone.<\/p>\n

I know everything in this world is impermanent, but it never fails to amaze me how quickly something that has witnessed the rise and fall of generations can be utterly swept away. It makes me sick to think that the objects we use to define our personal spaces are ultimately nothing more than fodder for the landfill. And it absolutely infuriates me that there’s not a damn thing you can do to fight the faceless, anonymous powers that control our lives. That vine wasn’t hurting a bloody thing, but it didn’t matter to the paper-pushers who’d never even seen it.<\/p>\n

Resistance is futile in these matters. And I hate that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the conclusion of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Dr. McCoy remarks that the bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe. It’s taken me years to completely figure out what he meant, but I think I finally get it. What old Bones is saying is that the world is filled with small-minded, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gripes-and-grumbles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}