Marty, Bob and Michael

I've been away in a place where news doesn't dominate the day and mind.  It's always a relief.  What strikes me upon my return each year is how little has changed which makes one wonder why we need all this 24-7 noise.  Being away from it all, really away, also gives you some perspective.  Looking ahead as we move into the pre-election summer, we find ourselves in a kind of suspended animation.  Those of us who have been troubled about where the country has been heading in these last years wonder if other Americans, those who seem to be asleep on the sidelines, are going to finally awake from their slumber and, more importantly what action they will take?  None of us really knows, but I have some anecdotal evidence that the tide may be turning.

Marty (that's not his real name) is behind the cold meat and prepared food counter at one of my favorite Upper West Side specialty shops.  He has been a fixture there for years and has long been dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country.  Four years ago the name Bill Bradley appeared on his paper service hat.  Marty favored the former New Jersey Senator and wanted everyone to know it.  He was relentless and long after Al Gore won the nomination, Marty still stood his ground.  Bill Bradley was the man and his name remained on his hat.  It's still there, but significantly now below the name John Kerry.  Marty's hoping Bradley will get a shot at the Vice Presidency.  Regardless, he wants Bush out, and in that regard knows he must get behind Kerry regardless of his beloved Bill's fortunes.  But here is the punch line.  I discovered the other day that all this time Marty has been a talking, not a doing, activist when he declared, "I am going to vote for the first time in thirty years."  Marty has been a closet sideliner, but that will end with this November.  One vote, but somehow I suspect he's not alone.

Bob (also not his real name) is a sharp guy with a distinguished high level business career including sometime abroad.  Like many of his peers, he's been voting Republican pretty consistently over the years and the two of us, good friends, have long accepted each other's different politics.  Bob has voted Republican, but not this year.  I think his disillusionment began with the economy, but it probably crystallized with the way in which George W. Bush and company have been systematically dismantling generations of international cooperation, have mucked up the war on terrorism and have ill advisedly opened a hornets nest in Iraq.  Bob is not someone who takes these things lightly.  He's also a reader and this year he has been reading a multitude of devastating books by insiders who know what's really going on down there in and about 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Bob is pissed (I can use that word now since the Vice President has lifted the bleep rule).  Unlike Marty, he always votes and this year, like him, it will be for John Kerry.  Perhaps he won't be attending any rallies and won't switch his affiliation, but the GOP has lost him this time around.  I suspect he's not alone either.

And then there is Michael.  The lines to see Fahrenheit 911 even in places you'd least expect it have been astounding.  I'm going today as a kind of Independence Day celebration.  Sure much of the audience is made up of the already committed, but I think film may constitute more than preaching to the convinced.  Like Marty, a lot those people who profess unhappiness with the status quo never moved themselves to the polls.  People do go to movies and do watch television, both of which have big influences on their thinking, and their doing.  Just consider the powerful role of advertising on purchases. Michael Moore may just stimulate enough of the heretofore talkers rather than doers like Marty, to pull some levers this fall.  He may even convince some more Bobs.

Marty, Bob and Michael.  Perhaps I'm dreaming, but think of the possibilities.  Happy 4th and best wishes for what's our America too.

What About Me?

The election in India, the world's largest democracy, may turn out to be among the most significant events in recent years.  Most assuredly it will be analyzed by many including people who, unlike myself, really know something about the sub-continent.  I see it as sign of possible things to come.  On the simplest level, much ink and many words have been devoted recently to the miracle of the Indian economy, to its brilliant well educated middle class and its aggressive move into technology.  Indians answer the phones when we call tech support representing a major endpoint of all the outsourcing that has become an issue in our Presidential campaign.  But the real story of India is that, despite years of democracy and of economic growth, the vast majority of its citizens remain mired in abject poverty.  This election appears to have been about them, those many left behind, truly left behind.  In bringing back the Congress and other Leftist parties, these people were asking, what about me?

It's an important question and if you put it in a global context, one that can be posed by the majority in most places.  As an American, it's hard these days not to be obsessed with our conflicts, external and internal.  Aside from aggressively flexing our muscle and promoting global trade, we have little time for the world at large.  Even when we venture out; we do so awkwardly without any real conviction about engagement in any substantive way or necessarily assessing the near or long-term consequences of our actions.  Today there are people in Washington and on Wall Street who are ringing their hands about the Indian election results and the potential impact they might have on us.  Interestingly these are the same people who insist that the Almighty wants everyone to live under democracy.  Right, so long as they don't think about exercising it.  Remember the kind words spoken about the Spanish electorate after they translated their opinion into votes?  While I don't think God is its advocate or sponsor, I do believe that democracy is a great thing and truly wish it were more widespread all over the world.

What if that were the case and all the disenfranchised could, and more importantly would, vote?  Contemplate that and you'll see why the election in India was so important, perhaps prescient.  We all talk about the growing disparity between rich and poor, or even middleclass and poor.  We bemoan it, but we don't do all that much about it.  We rightly criticize the Bush Administration for its lack of after-planning in Iraq, which has turned out to be so costly on every level.  The fact is that nobody in any party here or elsewhere around the globe seems to have a strategic plan in place to transform this planet into something that at least puts everyone on the playing field.  In fairness, I don't know that such a plan is even feasible, but don't you think we should be taking a stab at it? 

Go into the neighborhoods of poverty in the United States and in many other places.  Visit the homes and what will you see?  A television set.  Walk the streets and you'll probably see some cell phones which are morphing into post-computer powerhouses of capability and connectivity.  Images and ideas are multiplying faster than the families of fundamentalists.  Perhaps they haven't pulled themselves together yet, but they will and they will most assuredly be asking, what about me?  That shouldn't come as a surprise to us who ask the very same question almost every day.  In fact, what about me is our favorite question, the icon of our times, at the very moment when we should be asking more vigorously, what about you?

Moral Authority

While taking his anguished apologies at face value, what seemed to bother Donald Rumsfeld most was the fact that the gruesome photos got out.  It reminded me of how we all feel after some accidental event, kicking ourselves that we could let such a stupid thing happen; if we only had...  Rumsfeld contended that photographing and the release to CBS, The New Yorker and other media were illegal renegade acts, and you can be sure that, if he can find a way below the radar screen, they won't go unpunished.  Punishing the chain of command is another thing altogether which is exactly what troubles Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican known for his prosecution of Bill Clinton during the increasingly beside-the-point days of Monicagate.  Perhaps I misjudged him because he certainly is less partisan than might have been expected.

I've noticed in talking to people about this that, after mouthing the appropriate horror, strong supporters of our invasion of Iraq are eager to place it in the proper context: terrible things happen in war.  True, which is precisely why many of us are so reluctant to engage in it.  But even if you accept war, which sometimes is unavoidable, what happened in this prison can't be construed as one of those spontaneous combustible acts in the heat of battle.  Getting people to undress and into suggestive embarrassing positions, leading them by dog leashes, is something that doesn't just happen.  It takes planned intentionality.

We simply can't let ourselves off the hook with the things happen in war argument, the kind of reasoning that in a profound way is at the heart of what makes our times so troubling.  Perhaps it is overstating it to say that we've proven ourselves no better than our adversary, but to deny it entirely misses the moral point.  Morality is one of those pesky things that demand absolutes.  The country I love claimed the moral high ground in sending its daughters and sons into battle to fight for democracy and decency against the evil one.  We tell the world that we don't do those terrible things done by others because that's not what we're all about.  Having found no WMD's the President justified our action by pointing to torture chambers like Abu Ghraib in what now appears to have been a compare and contrast shell game.  I don't suggest that Bush knew the specifics, but rather that it is all part of a claim of moral certainty – I'm right and everyone else is wrong – that is emblematic of the neo-con rhetoric to which he so closely adheres. 

The Conservatives that hold sway in America, so certain that theirs is the right way, are clearly not terrorists, but like them claim to act on  on behalf of The Almighty.  It is the same proprietary pipeline conceit used by those who bomb the innocent around the world on instructions from Allah or of Orthodox West Bank settlers who claim Divine Right in withholding lands from Palestinians who lived there for centuries.  Everyone with a gun it would seem claims to be carrying out a mission of a "Higher Authority."  If all the terrible things going on these days are the result of what God really wants, I want no part of Her.  The fact that I view all these claims as self serving and bogus is the only thing that permits me to hold on any modicum of belief.  My father was born 102 years ago today and based upon his lifelong work and thinking most assuredly would have shared this sentiment.  Had he voiced it in one of his sermons, he might have concluded with this prayer: May God protect us from the many divergent forces that claim to hold the absolute Divine truth

From Bad to Catastrophe

Our intelligence wasn't good enough to avoid 9/11 or to find Osama in the hills of Afghanistan, but apparently right on target in understanding what it takes to humiliate Moslem men.  It is one thing to see rage based upon presumptions and misconceptions, it's another see it based upon clear evidence.  I ask myself how I would feel as a Jew seeing analogous humiliation of my religious and cultural beliefs?  But that's silly isn't it, here I am a child of, but not born in, Nazi Germany and I still can't look at Germans with complete trust sixty years after the fact.  The day Saddam was captured Howard Dean was asked if we were safer now.  He said no and was vilified for it.  Not only was he right, but we are less safe with every passing day.

You have to ask yourself not only why representatives of this country tortured prisoners, but also what in the world was the nature or purpose of the interrogation.  We still don't have a shred of evidence that Iraq was connected with terrorism, and what might we have wanted to learn about a fallen regime?  Was this simply a case of profiling, of late day sadistic McCarthyism?  And what about all of those civilian interrogators?  Did you know that we were hiring people to do that?  Obviously, they are getting higher pay than the military, but do they also work for a company whose owners are sitting comfortably and risk-free in the US collecting millions of tax payer dollars?  Is that off the books or on?  Is this an Enron in the making?

When George Bush couldn't answer a reporter's question about mistakes – something he joked about at a recent press dinner (but still didn't answer), it was revealing.  The man couldn't bring himself to say a simple "I'm sorry" during his two interviews yesterday with Arab TV.  He is clearly viscerally unable to do so.  Ah to be so perfect.  Remember how outraged this gang was at Richard Clarke's apology to the 9/11 families, something Condi Rice refused to do?  And Donald Rumsfeld, the arrogant and obviously incompetent Secretary of Defense, couldn't bring himself to say so either.  His response was very similar to that of the day when looting was going on in Iraq, the day we essentially blew it and from which we have not recovered.  Shit happens, he said then and shit happens he says now. 

When will the American people wake up and realize that we need regime change, not to mention drastic thinking change, before this Republic implodes?  Will it take a Holocaust-like catastrophe to make people sense that something is going drastically wrong, that we are being led down a  road that ends with a cliff?  Where is our sense of outrage, not at the low level soldiers (men and women), but against the chain of command that made this ill conceived war and disgrace possible and that leads straight to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? 

Image Makers

The power of images has long been understood by advertising people, and image making is a widely used tool of politicians.  Stage setting and image making is a bi-partisan activity, but no one has become more adept at it than the Republicans, particularly since Michael Deaver came to town with Ronald Reagan.  So it's not surprising that a great deal of attention has been paid on this day to President Bush's fly-in and staged end-of-hostilities address before that huge Mission Accomplished banner on the deck of a large carrier last May 1.  I can't add to it other than to note something Bob Woodward recently said about owning things you create. 

What I can't get out of my head are two vivid images that appeared on our front pages in the past days.  The first, and clearly the most disturbing, was of American soldiers humiliating war prisoners, and the second was of an of American officer shaking hands with a former Iraqi general to whom he was turning over authority in Falluja.  While being a vociferous opponent of the war in Iraq, I don't for a minute think that those few soldiers represent the brave youngsters who are risking their lives every day, nor do I doubt George Bush's sincerity in expressing disgust.  I also understand the desperate need to quiet down Falluja -- thus General Saleh.  But think about the images.

The prison in which those soldiers disgraced themselves and their country is the same prison in which Saddam tortured Iraqis throughout his brutal regime.  The general with his Saddam-like mustache and Saddam-era uniform has been asked to take command of the place, claims about outside agitators notwithstanding, that is widely regarded as the main stronghold of Baathist resistance.  If images are the name of the game in influencing minds and carrying the message, what must the average Iraqi be thinking?  What are we, who have sent our sons and daughters to war and spent billions to rid the world of Iraq's old way, to think?  Isn't it fair for both of us to wonder why our two countries are going through all of this? 

Ugly things happen in the heat of war, on all sides.  Frustrated  and tired soldiers commit atrocities.  The only people in Iraq with any track record of getting things like security done are the bad guys.  Our problem is that we have entered a world whose language, customs, culture and way of doing things we neither knew nor understood.  We speak platitudes about being on the Almighty's mission to bring the light to the democracy-starved.  We are confidently self-assured but are absolutely clueless.  Now everything is out of control, including the images.  In the end, it is the Iraqi people who, based upon our promises had harbored some hope, will pay the price.  They should have known the day we marched in Ahmed Chalibi as their democratic savior.  Speak of images.

On Value and Values

Ever so often a book comes along that transcends ordinary narrative to provide a profound insight into what's going on and how things work in our ever changing world.  James Gleick's Faster and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point were such books along with a handful of others.  Now my good friend Douglas K. Smith gives us On Value and Values, Thinking Differently About We…in the Age of Me.  It's a must read for anyone who really wants to understand how our world has fundamentally changed in more than the obvious ways.  I don't use the word our lightly here because, as with any other change, we in the so-called developed societies are early adopters.  What's so powerful about this book beyond explaining how things really are, is that between the lines you'll find still another insight into why there is such a huge disconnect between cultures, one of the underlying causes of the terrorism that hangs over our heads.

Doug's underlying thesis is that our world has moved from one of place to one of purpose.  While in former times everything we did revolved around our village, town, city etc., we are now driven by markets, networks, organizations, friends and family.  Simply put, what pervades our lives are the multiple relationships forged within each of those groups developing small teams of thick we's with whom we get things done.  Our connection with these discrete points of shared interest are far stronger than with people who just happen to live down the street.  Our world is not a village any more.  Along with our new purpose-focused existence comes a shift from the values-driven life of place to value-driven life of purpose, often for its own sake.  This may provide us with short term returns, but Doug argues that it is a recipe for long-term failure.  Value without values is no value at all.  His purpose in this writing is to point the way toward achieving those values.

Doug Smith is a deep thinking consultant who has assisted more than forty high profile companies and institutions navigate through complicated management issues or position themselves for the future.  He has one of the best minds of anyone I've encountered in my professional life.  Doug has five previous books, but this one really sums up his global thinking with a conviction that is hard to miss.  It is that which is what makes the read so compelling.  There are lots of great books around this year, many of them important but timely.  Doug Smith's book is timeless, one that I plan to revisit often as I try to make better sense out of what's really happening to us in this new century.  Log on to www.amazon.com or www.bn.com both of which carry On Value and Values.  You won't regret it, if only to get away from the ugly stuff that is taking up such a large share-of-mind these days.  It's also a wonderful read.

Talk On

Testimonies don't simply happen they are prepared.  I've been through that process when getting ready to offer expert opinion in legal disputes.  In such instances, and probably in most others, lawyers have two simple instructions: listen carefully to the question and answer only what is asked in the fewest possible words.  A potentially hostile hearing in which questioners are on the clock seems to require something else altogether, the advice Dr. Rice was obviously given.  Talk and then talk on.  Bury them with words and run out their clocks.  That's exactly what we witnessed this morning at the 9/11 Commission hearings.  She was a master at it.

The networks went quickly into headline mode identifying the critical sound byte, "no silver bullet".  Preparing for the worst, the spinsters are out there telling us that this is a politicized process.  Watch how that tone changes if the Commission exonerates W's administration which, of course, would make for a non-partisan verdict.  Without diminishing either the importance of the inquiry by what appear to be ten pretty serious people, nor the need to find a better way of integrating intelligence, the hearings are somewhat of a sideshow given what's going on in our world.

Even Tom Friedman, who long supported the war with or without WMD's, and in all fairness has consistently worried about the after, is getting increasingly frustrated and concerned.  It doesn't matter that many of us opposed Iraq, considered it a distraction from the war on terrorism and perhaps even an inflaming factor, we are here now.  Like it or not, George Bush and company has succeeded in merging the two wars.  How we proceed against divergent but clearly mutually supportive uprisings in the North and South will undoubtedly impact what happens next — there, in the world and to us.  Friedman can argue whether we're fighting the Viet Cong or the Kamer Rouge (NY Times 4/8), but I know a quagmire when I see it.

So Condi Rice talks on much as she has on every conceivable news program that will have her.  She talks on in the hope that we might be distracted, which we dare not let happen.  Personally, I prefer shorter answers to more questions.  Considering how deep a hole we've dug for ourselves since 9/11 they better be good.  Knowing they won't, let's hope we'll survive long enough to have a new, policy.  I don't know about you, but I've had quite enough of robust.