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Democratic government isn’t really designed to highlight the individual achievement of unelected officials.

Even the people who win an award will receive it and hustle back to their jobs before anyone has a chance to get to know them
— and before elected officials ask for their spotlight back.

Even their nominations feel modest.

Never I did this, but we did this.

Never look at me, but look at this work!

Never a word about who these people are or where they come from or why it ever occurred to them to bother.

Nothing to change the picture in your head when you hear the word “bureaucrat.”

Nothing to arouse curiosity about them, or lead you to ask what they do, or why they do it.

Our elected officials
— the kids who bludgeon the teachers for attention and wind up cast as the play’s lead
— use them for their own narrow purposes.

They take credit for the good they do.

They blame them when things go wrong.

The rest of us encourage this dubious behavior.

We never ask: Why am I spending another minute of my life reading about and yapping about Donald Trump or Kamala Harris when I know nothing about the 2 million or so federal employees and their possibly lifesaving work that whoever is president will be expected to nurture, or at least not screw up?

Even the Partnership seems to sense the futility in trying to present civil servants as characters with voices needing to be heard.

But this year, someone inside the Partnership messed up.

Spotting the error, I thought: Some intern must have written this one.

It felt like a rookie mistake
— to allow a reader of this dutiful list a glimpse of an actual human being.

Four little words, at the end of one of the paragraphs.

"Christopher Mark: Led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States."

A former coal miner.

Those words raised questions.

Not about the work but about the man.

They caused a picture to pop into my head.

Of a person.

Who must have grown up in a coal mining family.

In West Virginia, I assumed, because, really, where else?

Christopher Mark, I decided, just had to have some deeply personal stake in the problem he solved.

His father, or maybe his brother, had been killed by a falling coal mine roof.

Grief had spurred him to action, to spare others the same grief.

A voice was crying to be heard.

The movie wrote itself.

But then I found Christopher Mark’s number and called him.

Even after I’d explained how I’d plucked his name off a list of 525 nominees, he was genuinely bewildered by my interest.

He’d never heard of the Sammies award.

But he was polite.

And he answered my first question.

“I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey,” he said.

“My dad was a professor at the university.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/michael-lewis-chris-marks-the-canary-who-is-government/

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