Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • February 16, 2011 In the waning days of feudalism, the medieval European kingdoms also began to appoint local administrators who were not noblemen and had no armies of retainers. These people couldn’t simply go back to their castle and try to withstand a siege if they couldn’t get along with the king or emperor. They didn’t have any castles. They did what they were told, and those who were ambitious skimmed the taxes they were sent to collect into a sort of retirement fund. Today’s mandarins usually let the supportive government – local (generally through the unions), state (ditto) or federal (same-ol’, same-ol’) skim it for them. People who are exposed to zero risk of premature dismissal unless they get caught stealing thus have an insurance and pension policy that most private sector workers can only envy. How do you get to be a mandarin? You get to be a mandarin by taking tests! In China, the test consisted of the ability to comment on classical Chinese poetry. To pass these tests, you had to have a tutor who was effective and knew somebody. Tutors got rich from the fees paid by mandarin fathers who wanted their sons to learn to be mandarins, and who skimmed the merchants and peasants to come up with the money. Everybody wanted to be a mandarin. Nobody wanted to be a warrior. The Chinese were ruled for a large part of their history by Mongol or Manchu feudal nomads who cultivated the war-like virtues or horseback archery and swordplay instead of commenting on the Chinese classics, scandalized the circumspect Chinese with their near-fatal alcoholic binges and adventuresome young women, and eventually collapsed due to a voracious fondness for opium. This was sort of like the bikers from downtown taking over the Ivy League campus, but the Mongol and Manchu rulers kept the mandarins in place for that most basic of reasons. The Mongols and Manchus were bad businessmen, the Chinese were great businessmen, and somebody had to pay for all that liquor and opium. The reformers who drove out the Manchu oligarchs were mostly Christian converts, tragically followed by communists whose European-based system was an unconscious and blasphemous parody of Christianity. Confucianism was a mandarin system from start to finish and opposed all reform. Mandarins knew they were bad but couldn’t help it. The Koreans had a similar system. Korean mandarins were called yangban. The Korean common people were constantly organizing secret armies to overthrown the yangban and replace them with groups like the tong hak who were fair to men and women alike. Other Koreans became Christian or admirers of Japan. When the Japanese annexed Korea, the yangban were trifurcated: a dozen committed suicide, a score slipped off into retirement, and the others tripped over themselves and one another applying to the Japanese for hereditary titles that could be handed down to their sons without the dreaded tests in the Chinese classics. But hey, this is America, so we have to get real and understand that the mandarins aren’t the bad guys; they’re our friends and neighbors. The trouble is that they have found a system that works only for them and not for the rest of us, and we can’t afford them anymore. Stock market slumps, the fall in bank interest, and the harrowing fact that so many people are unemployed mean that the $250,000 superintendent of schools, the $100,000 kindergarten teacher, and the $120,000 police patrolman have begun to drive up property taxes to such an extent that people with multiple college degrees who commute to what’s left of the New York business scene for far smaller salaries have begun to ask ugly questions. How come I went to a better college, work at a more demanding job in a nastier area, and get paid half as much as somebody who can never be fired? The secretaries who are paid far more than their peers in the private sector have become insupportable to those single moms, in particular, who are struggling to stay solvent. Let’s be kind. The problem may not be as simple as too many mandarins. The problem is that once the thieves, the lechers, and the incompetents are eliminated, most of the survivors are decent, honorable people who know their jobs and perform useful functions. The real answer is not the Lethal Lunch, where the boss takes the employee out for a good time and tells him he’s fired, but the Offer You Can’t Refuse over coffee: Here’s what we can afford to pay you, take it or leave it. A few six-figure cuts at the very top and a lot of fivefigure cuts in the middle, with shared insurance payments, could do it. The newcomers and the laborers are probably paid about what they should be. The trouble is that the bureaucrats and educators go up much too fast. If those mandarins who are honest and capable were willing to work for what they would make in the private sector, while continuing their public sector protection, we could probably save most of their jobs and most of the houses with substantially paid-down mortgages. Political leaders in New Jersey and New York are telling us we can’t go on doing what we’re doing. Better to act now while civility and kindness are still options. The Super Bowl may be over, but there is a far more profound confrontation in progress that should hold the attention of all Americans: the battle between the brigands and the mandarins. This one has everything. As one of my college professors was fond of intoning, “Life is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.” Choosing teams is based on whether you are a private sector employee with salary or wages being paid on a voluntary basis, or whether you are a bureaucrat, teacher, or other public employee with pay coming from the taxpayers. If you work for yourself, in the sense that you have to depend on a higher level of skill or affability than the competitor, you’re with the brigands. If you’re part of a unionized group that obtained work through test-taking and paper qualifications, you’re with the mandarins. Private sector institutions that have grown too big and flabby often verge into Mandarin Country. I once worked at a place where the major event of the day shift was the two-hour argument over where to have lunch. Promotions and raises were determined by that most daunting of questions: Where did you go to school? I was not happy there, though I was sometimes amused. The ex-communist editor who spiffed up the preppie peoples’ writing and was constantly hearing about Groton and Choate, once asked me if I had ever done any time in prison. Conversely, I once worked at a hard-core private-sector place where the boss, a rubicund exemplar of capitalism, decided he could save a bundle by firing everybody who was black, Jewish, or over 50, and replace them with yespersons of his own ethnicity. You can’t do that in Mandarin Country, but in Brigand Country it happens a lot. Here it backfired. The people he fired were the only ones who knew the business and had a solid work ethic. A business that had lasted 50 years flopped in six months. All around the world, brigands and mandarins got their starts with the decline of feudalism. The original social structure of people who advance from being rather harmless savages to potentially intimidating barbarians is a hunting band that develops into a war party. The war party leader is usually succeeded by the strongest of his sons or nephews, though when the whole war leader family fails to impress, a usurper may seize power without compunction. This pattern persists as long as the culture in question has no substantial commerce profile – sometimes longer. The war leader and his lead players are proto-brigands because they make their own rules and rise and fall by their own achievements. As the war parties expand, they turn into dukedoms or kingdoms, and gradually become a sort of empire. The continued existence of so many war parties is a threat to the central government, and the central government imposes the mandarin system. Professional administrators then rule without any real military prowess of their own, but are backed by the central government and its regimented, sometimes mercenary army. Mandarins exist in almost all developed cultures. I use the term associated with China to avoid antagonizing Americans who are mandarins but don’t know it. The brigands and the mandarins Club donates dictionaries More than 450 third-grade students in 22 classes received personalized encyclopedic dictionaries courtesy of the Ridgewood A.M. Rotary Club. The presentations represent an annual undertaking by the Rotary Club to address literacy locally and beyond. The dictionaries are a gift to each student from the club to use at school and at home for years to come. The A.M. Rotary also presented dictionaries to the students in Glen Rock and Ho-Ho-Kus. Pictured: Rotarians Scott Lief, Anne Bosch, and Robert Elfers here at Orchard School being assisted by Principal Margaret Loonam (second from left).