KISS City, PR
by Milton Fillmore
There is a little known Republic 215 miles off the US West Coast called The Pragmatic Republic. This Republic was founded in 1999 by then President Angela Fisher and a group of like-minded engineers. The goal of the republic was to govern simply and without politics. Laws were introduced as solutions to problems and could be easily replaced if they no longer were effective. More importantly, if a problem no longer was a concern, the laws were easily archived. No longer would you have obsolete laws in existence in perpetuity.
President Fisher (also known more commonly as Pragmatic Angie) puts it this way: “Politicians are worthless. Engineers are professional problem solvers and we felt they were the ones best suited to running a country. It doesn’t mean we don’t have different viewpoints, but as a rule, we work together and compromise when necessary to produce the best solution. Then we monitor the effectiveness of that solution in the wild — adapting as necessary.”
We asked Miss Fisher how they went about choosing their leadership and what is required to gain citizenship into this country, she had some refreshing points.
“First, we invited leaders that were well respected and were the most effective problem solvers. This didn’t mean we plucked the high profile speakers who presented a thin veil of this requirement. We looked at results. We found some of the best under-the-radar problem solvers in the industry — who are mostly unknown. Doing as they say also was a very important requirement. We had one prominent technologist who reached out to us for an invitation. He was very publicly in favor of a “paint over graffiti” rule where you do not allow blemishes linger on something beautiful — that only invites more graffiti. That was great until we found his website where he publicly promoted graffiti and destruction as a means of expressing a political statement. He got a nice generic form letter of rejection.”
“In regards to citizenship, it is invitation only and can be rescinded if our standards are no longer met. I won’t go into our citizenship criteria, since you really do not need to know that.”
My assignment in this island nation will continue over the next several months. We did have one final question for Miss Fisher, regarding who to contact regarding tourism, and her reply was:
“Do not bother. This is not a tourism nation.”