{"id":7988,"date":"2012-12-12T16:23:03","date_gmt":"2012-12-12T21:23:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=7988"},"modified":"2017-02-27T14:45:07","modified_gmt":"2017-02-27T19:45:07","slug":"meditation-pt-11-at-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=7988","title":{"rendered":"A meditation Pt 11 (at last)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Keith Dixon only lied to me face to face on one occasion. He was so convincing I thought he must be telling the truth even though I was trying to trap him into a lie. I was so persuaded by the story he told me that it took me almost a year to confirm my first suspicions and blow apart his story. <\/p>\n<p>One lie, however, does not prove anything let alone that the teller is a \u201cpathological liar\u201d which I\u2019ve come to believe about Keith Dixon. When a lie is little more than a white lie like the one that we keep telling our Virginia\u2019s about Santa Clause the word pathological is ridiculous. I don\u2019t think that this lie which I\u2019ll describe later was anything close to white. And Dr. Dixon\u2019s\u2019 larger lie was hardly white. It was in fact Red. The lie was Dr. Dixon\u2019s assurance that Duluth was doing the right by its children and that we would be grateful for the building of the Red Plan. This claim was built on a lies, some of commission, some of omission. It also bred lies in other Red Plan supporters, allies of Dr. Dixon and vendors with a lot to gain by the Red Plan and others by people under Dr. Dixon\u2019s thumb. They continue to this day, long after Dixon\u2019s departure, by those dedicated to maintaining his many Red Plan fictions.<\/p>\n<p>The first lie I know of was the one Dixon told the Faribault School Board when they were looking for a new Superintendent who could sell a school bond project to Faribault voters. Dr. Dixon told them he planned to move his family from Colorado to Minnesota after they hired him to be their superintendent. He was an adjunct teacher at Mankato, Minnesota, at the state university when they hired him. Why he had such a tenuous job is anyone\u2019s guess.<\/p>\n<p>Keith Dixon had been an assistant superintendent for a much larger school district than Faribault. He had  apparently been in charge of building a new high school as the District\u2019s liaison with the building\u2019s contractors.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s hard to believe than an assistant superintendent had moved a thousand miles away from a good job to Minnesota without his family to be a part time college teacher if all was well at home.  I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if Dixon\u2019s loose attachment to the truth had something to do with this solo move and abandonment of his family. Certainly it took very little time for the new Faribault Superintendent to  begin actively dating again. He soon married a young school secretary who left her husband and children and ended up getting a high-profile job in retired General Colin Powell\u2019s civilian mission <a href=\"http:\/\/www.americaspromise.org\/\">America\u2019s Promise<\/a> to help troubled kids with an office in the Faribault\u2019s Superintendent\u2019s suite.<\/p>\n<p>Early on the School Board was very pleased with Dr. Dixon. He managed to do exactly what they hired him to do &#8211; win passage of a referendum to build new schools. He was charming, caring and eloquent although he may have made a few too many promises that couldn\u2019t be kept to pass the referendum. Some people complained that no referendum money had been set aside to equip the schools with desks and such stuff. Others claimed they didn\u2019t realize that the new buildings assured the abandonment of their beloved neighborhood schools. But the complaints didn\u2019t really amount to much until the consequences of paying to furnish the schools led to the defeat of two subsequent referendums to raise operation (classroom) levies. Perhaps Dr. Dixon had not been as straight with the voters as he could have been.  In time the city\u2019s business community would come to believe that Dr. Dixon\u2019s departure would be required in order to pass a referendum which turned out to be the case. <\/p>\n<p>That day would lie several years in the future. In the meantime, Dr. Dixon was saddled with his first critic on the Board. A Taiwanese native with an accounting background Wai Lee got elected to the Faribault School Board and immediately began asking lots of questions about the District\u2019s finances.  Unwelcome questions.<\/p>\n<p>Much like Gary Glass, the one-time lone voice on Duluth\u2019s School Board, her repeated questions received little satisfaction but did generate headlines. When ignoring Mrs. Lee\u2019s became unendurable Dr. Dixon called her into his office explaining that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.snowbizz.com\/Diogenes\/RedChronicles\/Part5.htm\">they had a \u201cproblem.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Keith Dixon only lied to me face to face on one occasion. He was so convincing I thought he must be telling the truth&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,80],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7988"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7988"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20118,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7988\/revisions\/20118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}