This book is about my experience on Knox County Commission with an occasional detour or two into other events that occurred while I was on commission. In four years I passed through a surprise campaign victory, a series of telling vignettes about human behavior when it intersects small amounts of power, a politically motivated shooting at my church, and dozens of colleagues coming and going as our county endured a succession of crises related to attempts to evade both term limits and open government laws.
Our commission’s dysfunction was so profound that the New York Times sent a reporter to cover a meeting. That reporter caught the moment when a fellow commission (nicknamed Lumpy) called me a university twit. My wife made T-shirts with the phrase “Proud to be a University Twit.” If one does a Google search for the phrase, the first hit is a photo of my in that shirt.
My time on commission could be seen as a microcosm of dysfunction, or morality play, or a voyage of discovery chock full of life lessons. Those experiences are presented as a series of vignettes or subjects, rather than an overlapping and confusing chronology. The intended audience for this book is those who read and care about politics, but will appeal as well to those who lived through this revealing breakdown of local power. That audience will discover how our community rebuilt its local governance after our calcified collection of local fiefdoms collapsed.
