The Carolina Bonsai Expo - Part 4, Politics

When something goes bad or doesn't work right, blaming it on politics is always a safe bet. People think politics are inherently bad. Politicians are generally reviled and dismissed as being among the lowest of untrustworthy creatures, so much so that calling someone a "politician" is a slur. 

I'm a politician.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you are too. You, me, everyone you know, all the people with whom you make contact —  politicians, every one. What else can we be when every day we spend most of our time practicing politics? Politics is human interaction. Whenever one human being interacts with another, politics automatically enters the picture. The more people involved in the interaction, the more complicated the politics become. There are world politics and national politics, politics in the state, in the community, in the workplace and in school. There are politics in your home. There are politics between you and all your kin, and between you and your partner. Humans are social animals. Politics are how we manage our social affairs.

Politics, in and of itself, is not bad or good. Politics can be used to effect the most positive of outcomes, such as fire departments, National Parks and cures for diseases. Or, politics can be used for the most hurtful of purposes, like intentionally injuring an opponent or suppressing the liberty of others. Politics is a tool and how the tool gets used, and for what purpose it gets used, is determined by the person wielding it.

The Carolina Bonsai Expo was a thoroughly political event. When I wrote the memorandum proposing the first Expo in 1996 it was a political maneuver employed in support of a political objective. The objective was to raise the status of bonsai within The North Carolina Arboretum, which itself was linked to the political objective of raising my own personal status within the institution. (I think all politics include some element of self interest; count me among those who doubt the existence of pure altruism.) Bonsai had come to me as an opportunity and I seized it because I was looking for a way to move forward — personally, professionally, politically. I was low on the Arboretum ladder, not far from the bottom, and I didn't want to stay there. My acceptance of bonsai as a vehicle for both professional advancement and creative self expression, doubtful as I was about that initially, came fairly easily compared to the other half of the equation. Arboretum administration had to be convinced that a bonsai collection was something our new public garden needed to have.

Navigating the internal politics of an organization is challenging when you find yourself in a position of low status, wanting to move up. One significant advantage I had in the early 1990s was that the Arboretum was new and still in the process of defining itself, which opened up lanes of possibility that wouldn't have existed in an organization already rigid with long existing political structure. There was room to rise if a person made the right moves.

In addition to dealing with the politics of the Arboretum, making the Expo happen took engagement in regional bonsai politics as they existed at the time. In places like New York, Washington DC, Florida and California, bonsai politics were already well entrenched. Bonsai clubs in these densely populated areas were more numerous and they banded together to form larger political organizations like the Potomac Bonsai Association and the Golden State Bonsai Federation. In North Carolina and the surrounding region no such greater political organization existed. Each individual bonsai club in the region mostly functioned as its own political island. That left the door open for some politician to put himself in the middle and create an organizing entity, such as the Carolina Bonsai Expo, with which all the clubs might engage. It took some doing, though — a lot of leg work, a lot of politicking with the individual clubs and key individuals within the clubs, to win their trust and support.

The politics that made the show happen the first time gave way to the politics of making it happen again, and then to the politics of keeping it going year after year. The internal politics consisted of first winning support from Arboretum administration to allow the show to take place and then managing to maintain my own authority over it. Circumstances allowed the first formulation of the Expo to fly under the radar, which allowed me to shape the show the way I wanted it to be. When the first Expo proved successful and then successive iterations of it proved even more successful, there was no more flying under the radar. As the show grew more prestigious it attracted more attention from within. It took some serious politicking, not all of it pretty, for me to hold on to the reins and keep the Expo the way I wanted it to be.

External politics, after the success of the first show, involved maintaining good relations with the various participating clubs and vendors so they would want to continue being our partners. In an effort to facilitate good relations, I offered to each club that I would travel to their town and do educational programming once every year without fee, as a way of "paying back" their ongoing support of the Expo. With some of the original clubs this resulted in me visiting them for twenty five consecutive years. With some of the clubs that came aboard later, it resulted in ten or fifteen years of visits. Additionally, I adhered tenaciously to having the Expo be a not-for-profit venture. There were always multiple free programs and any program requiring payment was kept as affordable as possible without losing money. Clubs also enjoyed the exclusive Friday night socials and the critiques without any cost, and club members didn't have to pay the Arboretum parking fee. I tried to do everything I could to make participating in the Expo a positive benefit to any club that threw in with us.

There was a catch, however, because this was all political. Management of the Expo was not done democratically. I was the boss, deciding when the show would be, who would be invited — clubs, vendors and guest artists, how the show would look, where various parts of it would be staged, what would be on the menu in the cafe, who would provide the entertainment, what the Expo logo would look like and what color tee-shirts it got printed on. The Expo was Arthur's show, and everyone knew it. The term benevolent dictator comes to mind, but I don't like that description. Benevolent politician sounds better and is closer to the truth.

I made a statement earlier about there always being some element of self interest in politics and I want to return to that idea. Perhaps some sense of guilt over being self-interested makes people shy away from admitting their own political machinations, and maybe the same judgemental sense is also at the root of the general distrust of politicians. But what's wrong with self interest? Shouldn't you take care of yourself? To be interested in your own well being doesn't automatically put you in opposition to anyone else's. This is the logic of non-zero thinking. Pure altruism may not exist but reciprocal altruism does — I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine.

The Carolina Bonsai Expo was one big back scratching extravaganza. The Arboretum benefited from all the far-flung positive publicity, goodwill and various types of public support generated by the event over the course of its twenty four year run, while never spending an unrecovered cent in the process. The clubs benefited from having a place to show their trees in front of a big audience, an opportunity to learn from some excellent artists and professionals, and a context in which they might coalesce into a more tightly knit community with like minded people from different parts of the region. I benefited from the vitalization of my program, allowing me the ability to keep making my living doing bonsai as an artistic expression. That adds up to win-win-win on your scorecard.

So why did the Expo come to an end?

Ostensibly, the event ended when the Covid-19 pandemic caused cancellation of the twenty-fifth Expo two years in a row. But I was looking for a way out years before that. The show had become so big that keeping up with it became a nightmare and I dreaded its approach. We eventually had fifteen participating clubs from a seven state region and the show filled both the Education Center and the Baker Exhibit Center, with a busy bonsai garden in between. Attendance had grown to the extent that we had parking issues every year. The Expo ran like a machine, but it was exhausting having to continually apply the political lubrication necessary to keep the machine humming smoothly. I had been thinking about how it might work if I handed over some aspects of Expo management to other people once the twenty fifth show was in the bag, maybe easing into an arrangement where I could eventually get out from under the load altogether. Then the pandemic came. Doing the Expo every year for twenty four years in a row made me tough, kept me in shape for doing all the work required to keep the show going. I went soft in the pandemic time off. It reached a point where I could not imagine going through the Expo ordeal even one more time.

Any thought of trying to pass off management of the Expo to someone else, or a group of some sort, had left my head. With the step back brought about by the pandemic, I gained a different perspective on the event. I saw the Expo as an almost miraculous thing, made possible by the fortunate circumstance of the right personalities coming together in the right place at the right time. We had twenty four years of uninterrupted growth and improvement, with hardly a misstep and never a disaster, and everyone had a good time. It was wonderful, but I knew the magic couldn’t last. Operation of the Expo as it always had been was not sustainable, and I came to think that it wouldn’t be the Expo if it was done any other way.

The Carolina Bonsai Expo was never going to run forever. Sooner or later, no matter what, it would have had to decline and eventually fail because all things do. Why wait around for that part? Why not say thank you and goodnight! while the show was still good? 

That was the choice I made. It seemed most politic, because I had other work to do.