(Response to a pastor who got some gobbledegook from his denominational HQ):

My friend, your theological education probably did not include radical social psychology, nor have you witnessed sufficient Yes Ministers, nor read Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (remember the character there who "made a fortune selling hogwash on an international scale.")

For my sins I did a masters' thingo at UniSyd in all this.

What you're asking of bureaucrats is that they forswear the stiff, colourless repetitious language of what is sometimes called 'committeespeak', and that they write plain ordinary English such as anti/non bureacrats do (eg Phillip Adams).

For your enlightenment:

"A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of a little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures."

Cicero 50 B.C.

"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."

Marry McCarthy

"Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies."

-Honore De Balzac

"People who claw their way to the top are not likely to find very much wrong with the system that enabled them to rise."

-Arthur Schlesinger,Jr.

"Now, the world's decisions were made by smaller men; by gray, faceless bureaucrats without vision or wit; committeemen who spoke committeespeak and thought committeethought, men who know more of dogma than destiny, men who understood production but were ignorant of pleasure, men more comfortable with a file full of papers than a fistful of gems; unsmiling men, unmannered men, undreaming men, men who believed they could guide humanity when they could not seduce a countess nor ride a horse."

Tom Robbins Still Life With Woodpecker

"Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy."

-Brooks Atkinson

"The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness, and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought."

-George Santayana

And for your sins here's a sermon I preached on some of this last Sunday - http://www.laughingbird.net/SermonTexts/vis008.html

Shalom! Rowland Croucher