Tiger Woods apologizing for not being a virtuous golfer is totally implausible. but let me explain. Try this on for implausible.
Imagine if Mother Teresa was little known to be a fair golfer. Imagine that she lost the Sisters of Charity PGA with such bad temper, throwing her clubs in the lake, that she was forced to step aside from all her charity work while the scandal played out. Imagine that as she went on retreat, word slowly leaked out that she had lost other major charity tournaments too, punched officials, and regularly ran her caddy off the course. Imagine her Order hushing it all up, and then the public shock, that the saintly lady was simply not the nice golfer we just presumed her to be. Saints play nice, we thought.
Now that is what I mean by implausible.
It is as mad to expect Mother Teresa to be a saintly golfer as it is to expect Tiger Woods to be a golfing saint. I know, the cry is “role model, role model” and even Tiger added that to his litany of supposed sins, that he had let the young kids down. But who told him that? Not any kids I know.
Kids will take up golf at 5 years old because they have seen the cute video of Tiger at that age. But where did his pretensions of such singular virtue come from? Someone in rehab must be feeding his delusions of being the Mother Teresa of Augusta, all to deepen his shame. Twelve Step doesn’t work, they say, unless you hit the deepest rough called Rock Bottom. You wrecked your marriage, you cad!!!! How bad do you feel? But get this-You wrecked millions of kids lives too! Now how bad do you feel?
We all want our sports stars to be nice human beings, for sure, but that is not what attracts our homage. It is the home runs they hit, the passes they throw or catch, the 30 foot impossible putts they sink. If we confuse virtuosity on the field with virtue in the play of life, then that is surely our fault, not theirs.
But of course, along come sponsors with check books in hand. They want to buy a piece of the legend. They burnish the player’s image to esteem their own products. They know that Tiger’s demographic is universal, and even grandmothers adore him playing. He has to be “every mother’s son.” But it is all a pure marketing exercise.
Tiger probably couldn’t care a dime for these products before they offered to pay him 40 million to care. Who wouldn’t sell their smile for that? The Faustian bargain is, “We make you look good. You make us look good. Just keep on winning majors.”
Then the wheels fall off and the poor wife and family have to deal with lies and human appetites gone awry, and a marriage wrecked, or so it would seem. And that is truly a tragedy within the personal circle of his family and friends. But what has it to do with me or my kids, or anyone else for that matter? Role model for golf-yes. Soul model for Life? You’re kdding me!
It can only come down to the sponsors feeding the media. They have paid top dollar. They need to recoup their money. They desperately need Tiger’s soul washed clean, spun dry and recycled to get back him back on the course, trailing tales of glory about scoring again, but on the greens this time.
That for mine is the sorry and sordid truth of the apology. It was as sincere as the sponsors could make it, and as profound as those smarmy journalists who sounded off like modern day inquisitors because, boo hoo, they were not invited. Who knew sports journalists were moral philosophers and marriage counsellors.
So Tiger, I want to apologize to you on behalf of your adoring public. Sincerely. I know this has been a hard time for all of us but I do ask you to leave our families out of this, and not to hound them but blame us alone. This is totally our fault. Alright. It is not an excuse, but we have been under all sorts of pressure. The media have been provoking us, saying ‘Tiger will never come back. He’s washed up, the greatest “could have been champion” in history. ‘ We wanted to smack them so hard with a 9 iron, and we would have if it weren’t for our faith. In you.
We so desperately want to be able to tell our kids we actually saw you play. We want you to get your mojo back. I know most of us have had our flings, and screwed up, but the world didn’t care. And we would have loved for you to have been offered the same privacy, but we had no choice. We had to put you through this ritual humiliation, and we are deeply, (pause for breath) deeply sorry. How else could we work out a way for us to come back and watch you play, and not have someone screaming in our ear that we were condoning your sexual promiscuity, or dissing your wife and all betrayed women. We just want so bad to see you play again and win. So do your 12 steps, make amends and all, and come back with an improved swing, so we can get back to our weekends of watching you play, having time away from our screaming kids, and drinking with the boys. You’ve been our role model all along. Don’t let us down.
Oh the stories we shared on Inauguration Day a little over a year ago, the feelings we had of the beginning of a brave new world, the sense of common purpose among the huddled masses on that cold, cold day-where did they all go? Why did the dream die so soon?
Today, we have a stalled Presidency and a stuck Congress leading a stalled economy of a stuck nation. We are waiting for respite from the recession more eagerly than we are waiting for our recent snow to melt. We are waiting for someone to tell us that this will get better, that there is way out of this mess and that we are indeed traveling in the right direction because frankly, more and more of us think we aren’t. What we are waiting for ultimately, is leadership and vision, the very things we thought we were expectantly celebrating on that freezing January day last year.
Promises have become excuses, mixed with Tea Party angst, a weird Palin-McCain redux, and people abandoning ship. Powerful Congressmen are resigning in frustration, citing a worn out election cliche “the system’s broken.” But this time, they mean it. The only response from the White House seems to be a Presidential make-over. If ever there was an ominous signal that they don’t get it, rehiring David Plouffe showed they saw the rumblings less in terms of the future of the country, and more in terms of the future of this Presidency. Plouffe is employed to stage a less ‘out of touch’ Obama, reaching out to the masses, at least one photo op a week. The Cinderella cycle that I wrote about in my book The Presidential Plot starts all over again. Government by fairytale does not work.
The system may be broken but the founders broke it, giving us a government of three independent parts. They designed a broken system in the first place. A king would have been much easier. Any Government divided over major issues is healthy. That is the way it was meant to operate, because the Constitution was created by thinkers who feared tyranny more than factionalism. If the President wanted one thing and the Congress another, and the Court decided that both were unconstitutional, the founders did not see that as broken so much as how the will of the majority finally got worked out in compromise. What they did not envisage was that government would become so contradictory as to be unintelligible, that it would make no sense, or that it would veer off into a dangerous lunacy.
Steve Pearlstein captured the contradictions in his insightful column today. (Washington Post Feb 17th 2010 A-8) “They want Wall Street to be reined in….but they are against regulation.” Affordable health care but no government role, more jobs but less spending to create them, a balanced budget but no spending cuts. It is insane, and that is what Obama as the leader has to stop complaining about and start confronting, to bring America back to some sanity. When Congressmen sponsor a bill only to cynically kill it, or when they dramatically oppose a stimulus package in Washington and then, shamelessly claim the credit in their electorate for federal projects, you realize that politics has taken the art of hypocrisy to a whole new level. Throw in a Supreme Court that flouts election reform in one huge precedent shattering decision, and you have it all.
Governments come and go. Some we like. Some we abhor. But the bottom line for goverment to work is that it makes sense. Some people thought Ronald Reagan was an heroic President, some that he was a disaster, but we knew what he stood for, we knew his vision for reviving Pax Americana. The vision that he was able to communicate so persuasively galvanized a nation into both support and opposition. Voters knew what they were supporting or rejecting. Candidate Obama like Reagan, used every rhetorical flourish he could to rally the voters to a vision that”Washington was indeed broken” and that ‘partisan bickering was eating away the people’s trust.’ He told us all of that, and we agreed, and many of us voted him in as Sheriff to clean up Dodge. But a year later, the headlines scream, “Washington is broken” and ‘partisan bickering is undermining trust, ‘ and it is President Obama himself who is telling us this in his first State of the Union address. At least Obama gets to reprise some of his best stump speeches. But he has had a year to start making it better, and it would appear to be getting worse.
Obama is not succeeding in precisely the area of reform he promised to come to Washington to achieve. His story as President is shifting beyond his control, fragmenting into disconnected and drawn out campaigns on energy and finance and health care and defense. There is no Big picture, no Big Story, no integrating vision of how this all fits, and where we are now in relation to the goal we need to reach. All we have is lots of little stories, competing and contradicting each other, and Obama acting as a White House drone plane, hovering over the halls of Congress, hoping to pick off votes and not get shot down, but never prepared to take courage, to get on the ground, to wrestle hand to hand with the obstructionists and the opportunists that seem to have infected the business of government.
President Obama let Congress lead where he should have led. He stirred up a vision of a brave new world in getting elected, and then choked on it, deciding that pragmatism is the safer bet. Audacity is only for selling books, it seems. The President needs to find his courage. He needs to re-read some of his best electioneering speeches and craft from them a more compelling vision. If we are going to Renew America’s Promise, as he says, what does that mean, other than a piece of puffy politicking. How come a President Kennedy could send Americans to the moon, and this administration can’t even replace the space shuttle and we will have to hitch a ride with the Russians? How come we are only planning some high speed rail corridors when Europe and Japan have over 40? What ever happened to Greater America, the land of dreams and opportunity? We are lacking meaningful government because we are lacking meaningful leadership. It is all playing out as predicted when, In my book written almost 18 months back, I wrote
The government can only work if the story works. If the story doesn’t work, then that signals a fundamental breakdown in meaning making, that things don’t make sense anymore because they are not going anywhere, and no matter what individual initiatives work, there is no center to the whole, and things fall apart, as Yeats predicted. We need the coherent story. We need the big story that inhabits and enlivens the little stories. As a manager friend from Lockheed Martin loves to quote to me, Leadership is meaning making in a community of practice. If the breakdown is at the level of meaning, then is it any wonder that we as citizens feel powerless and stuck. (The Presidential Plot P.255)
‘Snowed Under” is a familiar excuse we all use to say ‘We are Sooooo busy.’ But this past week in Washington DC, we are indeed “snowed under” and it means the very opposite. Unless we are driving a snow plough or salting the roads, we aren’t necessarily busy at all, not with our usual routine at least. Most of us are confined to quarters, rugging up for the next blizzard.
For a city so used to a daily frenzy of 2 million commuters, the streets are eerily quiet, undisturbed by Metro buses or normal traffic. It has that “The Day After” ( the Bomb’) feel that would startle a visitor-’What happened? Where did everyone go?’ Was it an earthquake? Another terrorist attack?
Last sabbath the white stuff fell like manna and it didn’t stop. The poor old trees were so snowed over that many fell onto wires. The inevitable power outages rippled through the county and 250,000 plus lost power. We were lucky only losing power for 10 hours because some are still waiting in the dark. The radio was urging us to call the power company to report outages. When you dialed 1, and then 3, and then 2 to hear it in English, the message was reassuring “Our brave workers are on the job day and night.” Great. But then the words trailed off, telling us ‘This might well be a ‘multi-day event.’ Whoa! A what event? Then it finished with a brilliant example of non-directive counseling ’suggesting that “these circumstances might make it important for perhaps some users to adjust their plans accordingly.”
Presumably what they meant was- ‘it might still be snowing on Monday, OK?’ and ‘ that if you were on a kidney machine or severely pregnant, then HELLO! you had better hatch a back up plan when the roads got blocked or power went out.’ But that would be way too direct for Washington where in the year of Obama, we have got so used to strategic indirection. I called back three later times and got the exact same message. No updates, no estimates of repair time. It’s as if the power company had recorded one vague message to last two weeks before they all skipped town to the Caribbean.
As a recovering English teacher, the language breakdown disturbed me even more than the snow or the cold. I had never heard anything being called a “multi-day event” before. We have multi-vitamin capsules and multi-grain bread, and that means they have lots of vitamins in the one pill, and lots of grains in the one loaf. Maybe they meant that ten hours without power is going to feel like three days. But if it wasn’t bad enough to lose power, why make it worse by robbing language of its power to deal with it?
Our best companion during the snow siege was my battery operated radio. In fact, what I now call my multi-battery radio. I had it on the local all-day news station and it was like having someone to talk to while I shivered in the dark. Every five minutes, they were warning kids NOT to be walking on the uncleared sidewalks, telling students NOT to be throwing snow balls around Dupont Circle, telling drivers NOT to be driving the wrong way over Key bridge. To all snow shovellers, they said, ‘Be sure, you bend the knees.’ It felt like coming home from college and being yelled at by Mom for leaving your socks on the floor and feeling reassured. It was Warm and Fuzzy Worry Wort Radio. As they used to say about the Pope raising the Cardinal’s urinals 6 inches to keep them on their toes,, the radio kept us on ours.
The other strange phenomenon about snow storms is that it brings out the primal ape in us guys. We get out there, rolled up and rugged like fat polar bears, our shovels aloft. We know that if we shift two inches of snow now, its not going to make the slightest difference when 6 more inches fall and it all turns to ice. But we were not meant to sit and mope, we are men of action. Snow awakens some ancient bonding ritual. In our reptilian brains, if Sun means go bask in it, Snow means get frisky in it. We have to do something and at least it keeps us warm.
All my neighbors were out there so I joined them, though embarasingly shovel-less and armed only with my pathetic 6 inch plastic dustpan. Two young lads across the road must have seen me and felt a boy scout’s duty to help this old codger. They kindly shoveled my driveway out. One was from Gonzaga and plays on the football team; the other from SIdwell Friends and goes to school with the Obama girls. It could be described as a multi-student encounter, I guess, and I am grateful to Jesuits and Quakers apiece.
Now we are hunkered down again. The snow has become a multi-multi- day event, this being Tuesday and the last fall being Sunday. Schools are closed. Universities are closed. Even the Government is closed. What the Republicans have worked for all year has finally been achieved by Snowmageddon 2010. I haven’t seen any flakes yet, but I did go multi-item shopping ( now I am getting the hang of this) to get more wine and chips. The bare essentials, I know.
If you call, or if you are waiting in London or Paris, Belfast or Brisbane for that contract to be returned, we will tell you that we are snowed under, and we really mean it. Our multi-day event continues, and we are adjusting our plans accordingly, and in the background, our ‘over the Top’ radio is still telling drivers “TURN those headlights on! NOW!”
When ‘Google’ became a verb, and not just a search engine, we knew that we were witnessing a dramatic shift in the way we access information. In the old days, it used to be the encyclopedias that opened the door to true enlightenment. Now, for every inquiry, we google it and it takes us to Wikipedia and we read what the collective wisdom says on any one topic. Its all so easy.
Knowledge used to be what you went to college to acquire, or you bought books to read. Now its at your fingertips. But with that shift comes a deeper dilemma. If we have so democratized access to knowing, are we as citizens any better off, or any the wiser? The answer is No, because what use is knowledge if we don’t know what it means.
I recall having lunch with a friend who works at the US Treasury some 18 months back and her telling me that the managers were working 18 hour days in a panic because they were getting economic data and indicators that were all over the map. They hadn’t seen the pattern before, or didn’t know if there was a pattern behind the figures. Were these signs of a recession or just an aberration? They were awash in data and none the wiser. Of course, now we know.
Another telling example is the various 9-11 reports, official and unofficial, that all say the same thing, that we had all the clues to identify who the potential terrorists were, and we even had strong hints as to their murderous intentions, but the data was never shared to be pieced together by the various agencies to work out what was going on. The same story is told about Pearl Harbor.
Our contemporary dilemma is no longer simple ignorance. We can google away a lot of that. What we really desperately need is understanding, or getting a larger sense of what it all means? Whether its the fate of the economy, or the fate of the planet, the data lends itself to contradictory explanations. Things as complex as that don’t add up to one simple answer. We have to develop a new interpretive mind, and evolve more effective tools for dealing with complexity, chaos and the chain causality we experience in networks. We are rarely dealing with only one thing anymore. What we decide to do in Afghanistan will effect what happens in Pakistan, and what happens in Pakistan will feed in to what Iran does, etc. Foreign policy used to be a game of chess. Now its a game of dominos.
Knowledge is overrated. Sometimes, knowing all the facts that there are to be known only paralyzes us further because we see too many options. And it is now a tactic of defense. When some whistle blower alleges corruption, a department or corporation will release a blizzard of documents and emails and say-you want to know, take that, take all of it. Good luck in finding the needle in that haystack.
That is why the narrative question of “What is the story of the Story?” is so important. It moves us to second level meaning making. We are always using a bigger story to make sense of a smaller story. And its that meta level of meaning making that our data rich-meaning poor age demands.
What prompted my thinking on this topic was a new book coming out soon from a colleague, Michael Margolis. He is a New York marketing and branding guru. He encourages us all to assume the mind of Henry the Navigator, and find new maps to find our way. I think he is right. The critical question that used to determine if we got the job, or if we passed the exams was-’What do you know?’ Now the critical question is “What does it mean?’ We don’t need investigators, we need interpreters. Michael is a good one.
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It always helps to have a good question.
Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” is a pretty good question. It opens up not only his dilemma but ours too, as to the fundamental why of our existence. The Special Prosecutor’s ” How much did he know and when did he know it?” was the question that helped unlock Watergate and implicate President Nixon. And “Truth? What is Truth? is the one Jesus gets asked, and one we still struggle to answer.
A good question is a wonderful tool in focusing our attention, as much as it is a means to get a right answer. It tells us to pay attention here, notice that, or it warns us where not to get sidetracked or hoodwinked. Stay with the question, we tell ourselves, even when the answer we get is a total disconnect.
When it comes to narrative analysis, the incisive question that opens it all up is not the obvious”What is the story?” but “What is the story of the story?” It is a question that gives us narrative room to step back from the immediacy of the story experience and to declare some space, invite some light. It declares a moratorium in the in-between of what was offered for consumption and how it was cooked. Or to shift metaphors, it makes us get curious as to where and how this story has moved to get from where it was first witnessed or assembled or imagined, to where we are hearing or reading it. What is the story of that in-between? Or Who moved my story-not my cheese?
We normally think of a story as a noun, as a thing, a piece of content, but when we think of it as a dynamic system of meaning-making, we open up a richer description of the process. It turns “story” into a verb. How are they storying this? Not ‘What is the story of Obama’s UN visit?’ but ‘Why are they storying the visit this way?’ Not “What is the story of Obama and race?” but ‘How does race get storied into these issues? ‘ What is the story of the story? Once story becomes a verb, it becomes a much more powerful tool for analysis.
What are we on about here? Another great question. In other words, what is the story of our story? (Get used to asking that question.)
We want to create a way by which we as citizens can more consciously give consent to the stories we allow to shape our public conversations and seep into our private lives. And we seek to empower citizens to more consciously refuse to give some BIG stories any power if they feel they are distorting our sense of what is important .
The stories in the public forum set an agenda of issues that we are supposed to care about, and sometimes too easily drown out the personal and local stories which are just as important to us. With the demise of the local radio and the local newspaper, media empires now dominate the local scene, and they manufacture and distribute their stories like General Motors sells cars. We as a nation are in danger of being homogenized and pasteurized into talking always about the same thing, only taking our cues from this story industrial complex (SIC) that is selling their story, rather than telling ours. They can all appear in their ads to reassure us,”We are on your side,” but we know that’s hokum. Our purpose is to wise up, to wake up, and for us all to become storywise.
The anti-war movement used to have a great saying-What if the government declared war but no one came. Well, what if the media or the government told us their BIG huge story-about Afghanistan or about Terrorism, or about Health Reform, or about financial regulation, and we didn’t listen, because that wasn’t our story at all. When you are out of work, or when your kids are struggling at school, or when your mother is ill, these are your stories because this is your life. Another surge in Afghanistan? That can wait.
And if we did get a chance to tell our story, our story might remind people that Hamlet’s question sometimes jumps out of the scene in a play and into our lives in a way that the media or our politicians never seem to grasp.
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A year into the Clinton Presidency, the pundits were already writing the obituary. After the Travelgate and the Health Care fiascoes, ‘this is a one term President,’ they said. Clinton, if we recall, was elected on a similar wave of enthusiasm for change. But how quickly it went south. Now, of course, despite even the scandals and the impeachment, Clinton is fondly remembered by most, and assumes the role of elder statesman.
Obama has had a luckier start. He assembled a more professional team to run the show from the beginning, and avoided any major scandals. But as expected, the shine is coming off the silverware as he moves towards the one year mark. And it is to be expected. The President has basked in an extended honeymoon so long as he gave lofty speeches and didn’t try and do much. But now that he has upped the ante and is working to bring real change to Washington, the change that he promised, the opponents are energized like never before.
The media are having a field day, causing the President to emulate the Bush strategy of media envelopment, appearing on 5 interview shows over the weekend, trying to get his message out. However, he might also take counsel as to how to better manage expectations as much as he worries about managing the passage of the Health reforms.
For the Obama Presidency to be great, he has to have obstacles. For him to become a hero, there has to be a series of villains. The halo of this holy warrior has to tilt and fall off at some point, as he journeys from innocence to experience. That is the narrative arc of great Presidents and great stories. Think of Lincoln, or Roosevelt and why we remember them so fondly-because of what they overcame, because of how they led the country in its moment of grave crisis.
All the problems, with the economy and with health care and with foreign wars are all issues that Obama inherited. Its as if as the new Sheriff, he is having a hard time cleaning up Dodge. But none of these will define his presidency. His moment of truth lies ahead, in something as unpredicatable and as threatening as 9-11. That is not trying to be clairvoyant, it is simply mapping the trajectory of most Presidencies on to his. We can’t be sure of much, but of this we can-that this story is only beginning.
If the polls drop dramatically, and if the media are writing about a “one term Obama” and some of his cherished reforms are stalled or blocked, all that proves is that this was never going to be easy. And this will ultimately test the character of our President, and reveal what kind of leader he is going to be.
To date, we have only seen the prologue of the Obama story-with the fairy tale aura of its surprise still resonating. But now that the gloves are off, and now that the conservative forces like Glen Beck and Limbaugh realise that he is vulnerable, one can return to one’s seat to watch the main act. The real Obama Presidency is about to begin. Now we will see what he is made of. As Shakespeare might say, Let the play begin.
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They used to say, ‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer,’ but perhaps we need to revise that to say that ‘three swallows definitely does’, because three totally disconnected outbursts by people in the public eye losing their cool has been heralded as The ATTACK OF INCIVILITY. I hear the Vice President is so vexed he is seriously considering creating a new Department of Homeland Civility. These attacks threaten to ruffle the national fabric of American niceness.
It has started a veritable plague of Op Eds and talk back shows decrying the outbreak of some sort of social malaise that might now spread like the swine flu. We are all to receive vaccinations of good manners. But if one steps back for just a moment, one sees that this is totally absurd.
Three people getting flu doesn’t make an epidemic of anything. Three elderly people died yesterday but how come we have no headline, “National Outbreak of Old People Dying.” Because celebrity and bad manners is a gift to a stale news cycle exhausted with all the bad news on Health and Wealth. and shows us that at least someone is venting. Given what the economy is doing, who wouldn’t want to scream? Perhaps the real story is how civil we still are to politicians and bankers and mortgage brokers, after all the mess they have got us into.
Congressman Wilson shouts “You Lie” and becomes the hero and villain of a comic opera. The second act features his unapologetic apology that he made because “they told me to make the call.” Will Rogers used to say that if you introduced truth into politics, you would kill it. In Australia, calling a Prime Minister a Liar is a tautology. And in other parts of the world with a more robust Parliamentry system, calling a speaker a liar is an insult to the person who yells it, being a sign of his political illiteracy. You have to finesse -”Sir- What you say is not a lie but nor is it objectively correct” or “You have the facts but you are twisting them into a spaghetti of the truth,” or even reprise the old Bushism “Fuzzy Maths,” but not the brazen “You Lie.” At least his was an honest outburst revealing he didn’t have to think hard about it.
When you translate most of political speak uttered by opponents, it means,’You lie.” So what is the fuss? Did someone tear up the Constitution? Is this the death knell of the Health Care reform? In fact, has Congressman Wilson ever said anything else in the House that anyone remembered? This is his five minutes of fame, so let him bask in it. It won’t come as easy again, unless we read of a future exchange with the Speaker that might read: “Shut Up.” Congressman Wilson explained.
And then there is tennis. Oh for the days of John McEnroe when abusing umpires, throwing racquets at ball boys and screams of “You must be joking” were part of the entertainment. Tennis loved to hate the bad boy. And now, its all become so nice, so Wimbledon and strawberries. Thank you Sarina for livening up the contest. Outbreak of incivility? She is playing in the American Open, so its not a tea party. At least some raw emotion is easier to tolerate than interminable grunts that come with every backhand. Get a grip people.
And the MTV awards? Kanye West dared to publicly endorse the loser, not the winner. Oh well, at least it wasn’t another Superbowl fashion mishap. But if this is the final nail in the coffin of civility, then the media are struggling for that third shoe to fall. Someone abuses the President, yes- a famous Tennis star loses her cool, OK, and then, a video star upstages the winner. Oh, yes, one can see a very definite trend. Its so clear. Mothers, shield your children.
What becomes clear in narrative analysis is not the story, but ” the story of the story” which exposes all this drama as nothing more than a beat up. Three events get co-opted into one melodrama-driven story line that becomes the starting point for public conversations about the decline and fall. Everyone swallows it. No one calls it out as bogus.
As I wrote in my book “The Presidential Plot” on the 2008 elections, this story pattern of “Decline and Fall” is a story that writes itself. Its part of a lazy story cycle, not a news cycle. Obama has been riding high for 7 months, and that story has become a little tired, so in the next 12 months, the media will be obsessed with “Has Obama lost his Mojo?” and that will write itself until Christmas. No one need do real news. Then, we have all next year leading to the mid terms for the media to ride the story of “Is Obama regaining his poise?” Stay tuned.
Its not written in the stars. Its just how stories work. The media are not about news. They are a story factory, a story industrial complex. (SIC) Rise and Fall is one of the stock in trades that they can dust off when three people get swine flu in Oregon, (Swine Outbreak hits Out West) or when the Red Skins lose their first three games, (Redskins haven’t Got it) or when Jay Leno’s first three shows don’t get rave reviews. (Leno Tanks) Funny how it has to be three events, but that is how stories work. Two events are a coincidence.You need three to declare a definitive trend.
So,watch for the next time when the media co-opt three unrelated things into their melodrama. Its a narrative sleight of hand.. And catch on to the series of lazy opinion driven pieces that declare the “The Decline and Fall” of anything. They have been running those stories since Plato. They are not news. They are simply old stories and storytypes being recycled. The Decline of Civility is one story that once had a use-by date around the 1600’s, a hundred years after Erasmus wrote his best seller on ‘Civility and Children.’ Welcome back. We missed you.
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I remember my sister coming home from exams and telling all the family that she had failed dismally. When the results came out, she passed, of course, and we were all so relieved. She was exhilarated and I remember asking her, “Why did you tell us you failed?” and she said, “I wanted to be surprised.”
It’s a funny mental game we play with ourselves, and sometimes, it makes sense. We watch our house burn down, and we say,”At least we are still alive.”:We cheer ourselves up by imagining the very worst and then, console ourselves when it ain’t so bad. But when the media and the government are doing it, however, we had better beware.
The unemployment figures came out a few weeks back. We hit double digits, but “not as bad as expected,” we were reassured. How bad is 10% ? The worst in 20 years!!!Then, this week, more figures and the headline is “The latest figures are not as bad as first thought.” That was the first line.
It works. We feel better already. But then, when you think about it, you see the con. Titianic sinks but only 1523 lives lost, not 2200. Or, 9-11 kills 3000 but could have taken 50,000. Swine flu pandemic only kills 12. HItler only wants the Sudetenland, not Poland and the rest. Whew!!! What a let off! We are going to be OK!!!
Are you feeling better? The danger is we are kidding ourselves. Hiding the bad news in the threat of worse news is a con man’s delight. Its a narrative technique of creating optimistic catastrophes. Make us feel better by saving us from feeling worse.
The ability to look reality hard in the face and not blink is the way most leaders lead us out of the morass. Lincoln doesn’t tell us that 650,000 deaths is a small price to pay for ending slavery. Churchill doesn’t suggest that seeing London destroyed is good medicine.
When your doctor tells you he has good news and better news, and that the good news is you have cancer and the better news is that you don’t have lukemia, you know you are with a spin doctor. The medicine the economy needs most is some reality therapy. Tell us the truth. Don’t fudge it-That’s what got us into this mess. But then, it could have been a lot worse. An asteroid could have hit us and the martians could have invaded.
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What is torture? When if ever is it legal? Does it ever work?
What has got me intrigued in listening to these Senate hearings this week on fundamental moral issues is how they appear to converse without having to display any hint of understanding first principles.
Not that they have to agree with these principles- no. But at least their competence as leaders demands they know what they are talking about, particularly if they are advocating radical changes as to how we traditionally determine right from wrong. For instance, if water boarding got some captured Japanese Generals executed in the wake of World War Two, what has changed to make it legal for us? Not I presume because we are not Japanese, or that we didn’t lose a war.
Why no mention of the time tested idea of “the end never justifies the means” which is a core ethical teaching, one with a thousand years of commentary to justify why it is such a core principle. If they want to reverse it, fine-but at least do the hard thinking as to why. Engage in solid moral reasoning and not sound so political and mercenary. Even argue as former VP Cheney does on the basis of pure pragmatics. It worked, so shut up! But then, outline why in this case pragmatism serves as one’s moral compass, and if so, show how a society might function on pure pragmatics, where what works determines what’s right. Then intention or motive don’t matter-which if we accepted, we would have to rewrite the entire common law but hey, this is America-results rule. I attempted to murder X but failed so, if there was no consequence, there is no guilt, no crime. Does that work? If it works its fine. It it doesn’t, its a crime.
In law school, you used to learn on day one that extreme cases make for bad law, and again, you can disagree, but at least acknowledge you are reversing the hallowed tradition. Show at least you know the maxim exists and why it is taught, rather than resort to this tiresome ticking time bomb argument which is trotted out by these supposed great minds. I would ask my 17 year olds in a high school civics class to demolish this trite example of how to hype the hypothetical. Exceptions normally prove the need for the law rather than overthrow it. In national emergencies, you suspend the law, but you don’t get the Office of Legal Counsel to make what is illegal legal. You have the courage to say, ‘Guys, this is normally illegal but urgency demands it. OK? “Lincoln did it. It was eventually declared unconstitutional, but Lincoln knew that and the country understood they were in crisis.
The lack of competency in moral reasoning of some of our elected and formerly elected officials, or their seeming intellectual disdain for this deep field of expertise is alarming. One would think to listen to them that our torture dilemma is totally new, but the Romans and Greeks and the Turks and the British all had to deal with it. Britain tortured the Irish and provoked an uprising. The Church tortured heretics and is still making up for it. The glorious history of Torture has yet to be written, though a certain Vice President might be inspired to write it.
These paper thin arguments that parade as moral reasoning collapse when exposed to any critical review. They will eventually be exposed as being not right or wrong but just plain dumb, or even worse, to be parroting the same arguments that Stalin and Hitler used, to save the Proleteriat from the greedy Kulaks, or the Germans from some mythical Jewish conspiracy. We have been here before but you’d never think so to hear these latter day Plato’s postulating in their own caves on Capital Hill.
When elected officials and members of the administration have to make the hard moral choices, often between two evils, or even between two conflicting goods, they are obligated to make a reasonable case, to follow some traceable path that it recognizable as moral reasoning, knowing that they will have to give an account that stands up to the scrutiny of history. Moral discourse unfortunately cannot be easily disguised in political rhetoric, because we know when someone is stacking the odds, or bluffing. The reason why we know is that we all make moral decisions. We all know how hard it is at times, so our leaders need to honor us as thinking citizens, and appeal to our brains, not our fears. Torture may be right and torture may be wrong, but to torture the well established field of moral reasoning with such a lame conceptual grasp of the basics is to invent a new form of moral hazard. The jury might in the end find the Office of Legal Counsel to be not right or wrong, but even worse, to be just plain dumb. Whatever about water tortures, these guys seem out of their depth.
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I was an avid follower of the 2008 elections because I was writing a book on the campaigns, using them as a case study in narrative critical method. If the contest was really a battle of stories, how could one elucidate the process and predict the result without reference to polls or focus groups? Maybe it was not so hard, but we predicted that as a story, Obama had to win. and even if he lost, he was the bigger story. He was the narrative heavy weight.
In my final chapter, I predicted that the glow of the Inauguration would last about a day. and I was not far wrong. The Republicans have convinced themselves that the best defense is attack and the President, taking the advice of his Chief of Staff, is impelled into action,not to waste this economic crisis.
We have huge stimulus bills to save the banks; we have energy bills to save the planet; we have plans to save the health care system, and we have a new deal in education. Any one of the above could be a lofty and honorable goal, but all four at once! It defies narrative logic.
Imagine writing a drama and having all the action in Act One. If you walk on water in Act One, what do you do for an encore, and more to the point, if your first Act bombs, what can you do to salvage it. You have gambled too big too early, before the cards are even shuffled. The adrenalin rush that new power brings is addictive but sometimes, one needs to go take a cold shower and patiently build energy through anticipation to ensure your most dramatic moves create the most drama. An administration needs to evolve and unfold like a great tale being told. You don’t rush the beginning. You build it up slowly, patiently, giving us time to imagine-what might happen next? “Once upon a time….” The most powerful weapon a President has is his power to command the nation’s attention and he can only sustain that by the way he lays out the story.
The Presidential Plot-my book- predicted that a young, fresh, Prince would steal the kingdom back from the cruel old King. That is how Disney and most traditional folk tales tell the story. But our young Prince needs to be wary of believing his own publicity, and committing that juiciest of sins in ancient drama, hubris. Oh what would tragedy be without good ole hubris. How the Greeks loved it. Just when you think you have conquered all, your own pride trips you up and you overreach. We as audience want to yell at the hero, “Don’t do it.Don’t do it” because we know that we have all done it.
When you have won so overwhelmingly and you have an approval rating off the charts, you could be forgiven for thinking this is all so easy. The world is my oyster, I can rebuild the kingdom and refurnish the palace at the same time, as well as drain the moat and repel the barbarians at the gate, and then, after lunch, I will slay the dragon and shoot a few hoops and cook a three course meal, and then, hold a G-20 summit after supper. And why waste a crisis? Let’s reform everything at once.
A story, as Obama the Candidate knew so well, has a beginning, a middle and an end. The ending he wants and needs most as President is Economic Recovery and he needs that no later than June 2012. Otherwise, he will not get a second term. So he has time, and the priority of the nation now is RECOVERY. Nothing else. That’s the story we are locked in.That is the story in which he as hero must play the unambiguous lead.
The nation has had a heart attack. We need shock treatment to get back on our feet. That is what everyone I know is obsessing about. They are not talking about the finer points of health care or charter schools, or wind and solar power. President Obama feels empowered but impatient-there is so much to be done, but his inexperience has trapped him into an urgency that threatens to dilute his focus. What makes political sense to him and his team does not make much sense to the nation. We only have the attention span to follow one BIG story at a time. FDR wanted us to defeat Hitler. Everything else was secondary to that and today, in a worried and confused nation, we need the ONE BIG story to unify the nation’s efforts.
Obama needs to get back to his ONE BIG story-economic recovery. That’s what his bully pulpit should be bullying us about, how he will lead the nation back. Only when that is securely underway should he introduce Act Two-REFORM, which is an even BIGGER story. Give us enough time and give that story enough space and we will get that too. Reform surely deserves its own full season of debate but don’t schedule it before February 2009.
When the patient is almost dead, you restart the heart. You don’t decide to throw in a face lift, a kidney transplant and a brain makeover. Why use up all the narrative fuel you need to keep your government dramatically compelling by spending it all at once and losing the impact that any one of these reforms could create on its own. The nation is not paying attention because the President’s solution sounds as messy and confusing as the problem.
Obama and his team are standing on their own best stories. He knew how to manage it in the campaign, but the object was clear. He wanted to win. Now, there are too many storylines, and people are not paying attention to anything but the economy. President Obama has had barely 8 weeks in the Oval Office but I fear he is being sucked into too much too soon, and into over promising what he cannot possibly be sure he can deliver. Why risk your credibility so soon?
So here is a memo to the narrative genius behind the President, David Axelrod. You took four years to prepare the Obama candidacy and get it focused and your Candidate was an amazing example of ONE disciplined storyline. He got it. Now that you have won power, the same lesson applies. What is the one BIG story you want the nation to absorb and act out of? We can only handle one BIG story at a time. Recovery AND reform is too much, and it is inherently contradictory. What you do to revive a patient is not what you do to get him back to fitness.
President Obama doesn’t have to keep making giant gestures. Just getting elected was enough inspiration to last us 6 months, and then a concerted effort at recovery. That makes sense. That’s a story that works. That will take at least 12-18 months. Recovery first, then reform. But if the overcrowded storyline of four BIG stories all at once doesn’t work, then nothing else will work and the President will have blown all his dramatic capital in one stunning opening act. It’s a tragedian’s dream. Like Rush Limbaugh, the Greeks wish failure on all their heroes because it is what makes a compelling story. But it should not be Obama’s story. We did not elect him for tragedy. Right now, the Obama team are perilously close to becoming narratively unintelligible. They won, but now they’re losing us and we can’t follow this presidential plot.