Remembering Mr. Miller

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

It’s a weird confession to make, but I love politics and, by extension, am often fond of politicians. It’s fashionable to ignore both at best and proudly despise them at worst, but regardless of those feelings — and until the glorious day when humanity figures out how to function in an enlightened anarchy — if politics and politicians aren’t your subjects of study, then you’re their subject, literally.

But politics are not a game, nor are politicians players in it. The lazy analogies to “teams,” “finish lines” and “plays” are as shopworn as they are dangerous. If our political life is noxiously tribal, it’s because we’ve let generations of jumped-up jocks masquerade as informed political observers. 

Rather than athletics, politics should better be analogized with an elemental force, like continental drift, and politicians are the people who presume to possess the levers adequate to shift the drift. How much we credit them with that ability is the measure of elections.

This is all to say that politics are so complex and fundamental that few politicians are capable of understanding, much less manipulating, the forces they propose to command. Bad politicians are game-players; good ones are appropriately awed by the forces with which they contend and often put at their disposal.

I’ve benefited from a number of keen political teachers who helped me understand these ideas, and one of the first and most critical (on several levels) was longtime local educator Ray Miller, who left us April 24 at the age of 81. 

Mr. Miller influenced thousands of Sandpoint kids over his decades as a teacher of economics, history and more, as well as a football, wrestling, and track and field coach. I didn’t have him as a coach — and he would have growled at me if he heard my poke above about jocks — but I was a nerd who often chose to eat lunch in his classroom and bother him with questions rather than hang out with my friends.

Looking back 30 or so years to those lunchtimes, I’m shocked that he was willing to sacrifice what I now know were probably the only minutes he had to eat, prep or otherwise not be bothered by teenagers only to have me barraging him on topics ranging from his recollections of the Vietnam War to the finer points of late-20th century Middle East diplomacy.

Ray approached politics, and the history underpinning them, with scholastic sobriety. To say I was and remain “to the left” of his ideological position is an understatement (he one time told me in a half-joking way that it broke his heart that his finest student had turned out a “pinko,” and half-flatteringly referred to me as “Jane Fonda’s brother”). But he and I always found common ground the nearer we approached libertarian territory, and all the while he was helping hone my “crap detector.”

That was true when I was his student, as well as later when I was a reporter covering him during his time as Sandpoint mayor. It was a singular feeling to call my old teacher, and friend, to interview him on matters of city politics during his tenure, which lasted from 2002-’08 (he also served on the City Council from 1982-’02), and he was just as quick to correct my errors as he was to grumble a little praise when I got it right.

Ray and I joked and jabbed at each other for many, many years but always with the highest affection, and to say I’m going to miss him is as big an understatement as saying I respected him has a teacher, mentor, political animal, family man and (above all) member of a community that he had such a steady hand in influencing — and for the better.