....Obama,
....Breaking the Hillary Lock
....Breaking the Guiliani Lock
....The Walmart Way
* * *
During this week's Democratic Presidential Candidate debates, Barach Obama declared his willingness to meet face to face with the Iranian leadership to find a resolution to our issues. No doubt some people will call this approach naive. Some people will call this approach weak. Some people will call it pointless because the Iranians are too stubborn and close-minded to negotiate anything with anything but a bomb. They're not like our President! I have a slightly different take.
It takes less personal courage for a President to face an enemy across a polished mahogany negotiating table in elegant surroundings, and face the risk of flying home empty-handed on Air Force 1 than it takes for a freshly minted private to face the empty streets of Falujah, with the possibility of flying back in a C130 on a stretcher or in a box. A president who lacks the courage to face our adversaries across a negotiating table has no business sending our citizen-soldiers to die for him, or her, in the same conflict.
Yet few other candidates seem willing to risk their prestige to possibly spare American and other lives. Few other candidates, Democrat or Republican, understand that diplomacy is war by other means, just as war is diplomacy by other means. Few other candidates understand that a military spent is a threat to no one, and no security for us.
Few other
candidates seem to feel that they are the equal of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad;
that they can face off against him on the battlefield of world opinion
and trump him at his own PR game. Few other candidates on either side of the divide understand that the home of Hollywood and the master of marketing anything to anyone can win the hearts-and-minds-war if it is peddling real goods and not mythology and hypocrisy. Obama seems to understand, as few others do, that diplomacy creates options and possibilities that our military resources have not, cannot, and will not. And our military resources need all the options they can get.
* * *
Polls in Iowa show that Obama is running neck and neck with Clinton, who to date has only shown herself equally capable of stonewalling and equivocating in the manner of the incumbent she seeks to replace. Hillary is not Bill, as Dubya is not HW (who at least understood the world, if not the check-out counter of his local food mart, and was capable of acting on his knowledge). But Hillary could well be Dubya, with perhaps more adept public speaking skills, and that should give us all pause for thought.
This is what I think. My fantasy is that two of the seven dwarfs will wake up to the reality that alone their risks are formidable, but combining their complementary skills could blow Hillary out. If, let us say, Biden and Obama decided to tag-team her by announcing their joint candidacy as Pres/VP (with no preconceived order on my part), what would Hillary do to counter? Would she dare to declare her VP, and who would be willing to play third fiddle in her White House? Now might be a great time to find out. And if the tag team went yet further to assemble a 'cabinet in waiting' to give the American people a sense of their priorities, their intentions for organizational competence, and their capacity to move expeditiously after election to repair the damage of our Cowboy in Chief, then they might have a prayer.
* * *
Giving equal time (more or less) to the Republicans, I find myself ironically, mildly intrigued by Huckaby. While I do not identify with his positions on abortion and gay rights, I do not sense that he will blindly pander to the Religious Right constituency of which he is an acknowledged member. He seems aware that he must lead a larger and more diverse country and not a theocracy (like Iran?). All other candidates appear to pander too much to the Republican fringe, which has done nothing positive for the Country and, for that matter, nothing positive for the Party. The Republican Party suffers from the same syndrome as the Democrats: they pay too much attention to the strident fringe and ignore the moderates, both within their party and the nation as a whole.
Meanwhile, if the writer's union goes on strike, one might wonder if Fred Thompson's Law and Order performance will be finished....No, not the t.v. series; the campaign. The script is bland in content and weak in delivery.
As for Giuliani, it's surprising that a lot more attention hasn't been invested by the media in his extensive career as Mayor. It would seem a useful analog to his presidency. And, by the way, did Rudy learn as much from 9/11 to secure our future security as he apparently did from the first World Trade Center blast of 1993/02/26? In business, the notion of the "serial entrepreneur" (one who repeatedly launches successful new ventures) is more often dreamt than achieved. Giuliani's mold breaking performance on 9/11 was notable in absolute terms against the stark backdrop of the event, but was also notable in relative terms against the prior history of his administration which gave little suggestion of his ability to lead in a more adroit manner. Was 9/11 his epiphany or his aberration?
* * *
While everyone is focusing on casting our votes in 2008, few of us realize that we cast votes every day of our lives. Every time we purchase something, we vote with our dollars. We even vote with our clicks on our computers.
That's why I use Ask instead of Google for search whenever possible. The skeptic within me retracts from a company whose motto is 'DO NO EVIL!', while it becomes the Death Star of the information universe by stretching its tentacles into every nook and cranny of our virtual lives with megalomaniacal zeal. (Remember the good ol' days when we suspected the intentions of Microsoft and IBM? Today they loom small in impact by comparison.)
That's why I vote for Lowe's, because the best way someone can help me is to start with a clean and organized store, where their own staff can find what I need.
That's why I vote for Breakwater Books instead of Amazon whenever I want to order a book. Yes, it's a small, dying breed of community book store - no chain. But when I order something, management doesn't come back at me with five suggestions of what I might also like to buy, based on its comparison of my electronic profile with others who have similarly been laid out on a cyber-dissection table for the benefit of enhanced marketing. Breakwater Books lets me retain for the moment the illusion that I am an individual with some small degree of anonymity, and not merely a financial node to be electronically milked. And I return the favor by hopefully helping them to live for yet a little longer.
And then, there's Walmart. I try to avoid its everyday low prices because I understand that those everyday low prices come at indirect but no less real costs, to me and to others. One of those costs includes values not measured in dollars. Let me give you an example.
I recently made one of my rare visits into The Dreaded Store in pursuit of some CPS (Cheap Plastic Stuff) that I could not locate elsewhere (and believe me--I tried). As I made my way through the maze that draws you past everything possible to motivate impulse purchases, I scanned the faces of the 'associates' for those perky, happy faces I see in the in the commercials. None located.
Finally, I made my way to the checkout counter where I encountered a clerk whose wan complexion masked a contradiction of fatigue and nervous twitching. Her eyes bore a vague, distant, almost lifeless gaze as if she was looking past the people in front of her and the life before her to some remote deliverance. As the person in front of me left the register, the clerk suddenly brightened, as if she had 'returned to the game'. She greeted me with the genuine warmth of an airline stewardess struggling to maintain personal interest in each passenger while herding the cattle onto the plane. And then she immediately slumped back into her quasi-zombie state of mechanical, subliminal service. After she had processed my purchase and I swiped my plastic purchasing passport, the terminal screen asked me to answer a question before it would allow me to proceed to complete my transaction: "Did our associate greet you? ___Yes ___No".
Suddenly, I understood her. Now we were both in Walmart's carefully designed Skinner's Box. She was performing for pay. I was drafted as a stooge, reporting on her behavior. Both of us were dehumanized by the process.
This statement may seem ironic, if not hypocritical, coming from me. After all, management control is the discipline by which I earn my daily bread. Management control is essential to a well functioning society. But management control which becomes all pervasive, intrusive and dehumanizing fails not only the organization but society as a whole. The line that separates proper management control from totalitarian manipulation is not always easy to draw, and is often subjective. It's kind of like beauty and pornography. It's often in the eyes of the beholder. It's often difficult to define. But you know it when you see it.
Recent Comments