And Now For This Public Service Announcement....

If I ever run for office, I would want to be a mayor.

Last spring, Bogota's mayor established a Friday night curfew for men to combat the city's crime rate. Men weren't allowed out unless they had a special pass but most stayed home with the kids while their wives partied. Violence was down 40% that night.

Antanas Mockus, the mayor of Bogota Colombia, is a mathematician and semiotician who three months before he was elected got kicked out of his university because he mooned some unruly students. Besides Women's Night Out, he has gone on TV in his boxers to show people how to save water when they shower; he dressed up as a carrot and passed out stuffed versions to promote his 1am closing ("Carrot Hour") for bars and restaurants (a carrot is a geek in Colombian slang). People who participated in his gun-exchange program got flowers and a certificate of thanks.

This quirky form of governance seems a bit out of place in a country most known for the war on drugs and where terrorism is a part of daily life. But Mockus' "theatre politics" have worked. Since he became mayor, Bogota's murder rate has been halved, an accomplishment which Mary Roldan,who's working on a book about Colombian violence, says is largely attributable to Mockus. Being a pedestrian in Bogota used to be a risky affair but now there are well-maintained sidewalks and bike lanes. Even the taxi drivers stay clear of street crossings (for which they are awarded stickers that say "gentlemen of the zebra," slang for crosswalk).

In a fascinating article from the Atlantic Monthly, Mockus explained how his background in semiotics influenced his approach to governance. He drew three boxes labeled, "legal power," "moral power" and "cultural power." The latter two he defined as "power derived from one's own standards and power derived from the shared values of the citizenry":

        At first," Mockus told [the reporter], "I had the illusion that if I
        wrote new laws, those words would become reality. But it soon
        became clear that if you want to change society's habits, law is
        only one of the means. Most people prefer internal mechanisms
        for determining for themselves what is right and what is wrong,
        but perceive other people as needing to be regulated by laws.
        The question I asked was how to reduce the difference
        between the laws and cultural and moral means of self-
        regulation." A governing style that could fairly be summed up as
        theater-as-politics was the result.

Perhaps I should have gone to grad school for semiotics instead of law school.