About 1,000 words or 3 pages.
A lot
of mistakes are happening these days—summer of 2020—because we don’t have much
of a clue as to what we’re doing. Oh, there are a few highly educated types who
think they have a clue: just hide out
until you starve to death; and there are some at the other end of the spectrum
who say to throw all caution to the wind.
Where is the via media, the great middle way of navigating which
normally leads our daily lives?
The
historian, Barbara Tuchman, came up with her famous law: “the fact of being
reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five-
to tenfold” (or perhaps an even greater number).” In today’s world, there are no journalists,
just megaphone holders, and everyone’s got a megaphone in social media. I’ve taken to reducing the vehicles of news
reporting that I observe to just one:
the printed daily Wall Street Journal. No twitter or other social media, and no
reading of bathroom walls (and have you noticed that those bathroom walls have
gotten a lot cleaner now that the types who used to write on them now use
social media instead). Life looks a lot
saner with at least no megaphones yelling at me. However, even from what I read what we’re
doing seems rather clueless.
There
are the Ivy Leaguers who think they have a clue. To take a stroll down an
unfortunate memory lane, in my lifetime, I remember our country being led by a
room full of Harvard types who masterminded the Bay of Pigs incident. To their credit, they did learn something and
crafted a naval blockade of Cuba that averted a thermonuclear war. That was good. But that same room full of
brains then turned around and get us into Vietnam. Which in turn became the
downfall of a certain cowboy school teacher as president. That president said something to the effect
of (and I paraphrase), “no bunch of little Commie bastards in Indochina are
gonna push us around…” Barbara Tuchman,
in her work, the March of Folly outlines the great mistakes of history,
and (along with the Trojan Horse and several others) this included the Vietnam
War.
Does
this pattern sound familiar? The nerdy
Harvard types tell us to hide under the bed and perish, and the backwoods types
tell us to ignore it all and go belly up to the bar: “no stinkin’ little virus is gonna make me
wear a mask over my face.”
Don’t
get me wrong, there’s a time for the more brawny type, like when you need to
get your car out of the ditch or open a can of whoop ass on that pesky
terrorist trying to light a shoe bomb on the airplane. And, of course, we need a few Ivy League
types too, like when you need to brag about the neurosurgery you just did, or
if you want to impress those in class by asking a sesquipedalian[1]
question.[2]
What we
don’t seem to have on hand is a lot of decision makers somewhere in between
those two pillars. It’s simple enough to
say sit home and perish in the face of stagnation, and it’s also quite simple
to go the other way and just try to forget it all. We get either macho BS or erudite BS. Where’s the in-between mix? Or does fostering the in-between not work in
an era of millions of social media megaphones?
After
this current unpleasantness passes--and it too shall pass--there will be a new
school of thought with studies, white papers, and pundits galore to analyze it
all. Models will burst onto the scene
which have the epidemiology on the same graph as the economics (gee, what a
thought).
Perhaps
that research is already out there, but there are few takers. The attention is going elsewhere like to the contingent
protesting and promoting a culture intent on cancelling any research if they
don’t like what it says: sort of their
own version of spouting macho BS. I
guess that odd political culture-- if we can measure it-- is another variable
on the graph with epidemiology and economy; and three simultaneous variables and
their interactions are about all that humans can successfully try to read.
Where
are the great heroes of today who have fine minds and tested leadership in the
field? We need, say, a Henry the Fifth,
who in addition to being the inspiration for Shakespeare to write arguably the
greatest speech in history (St. Crispin’s Day)[3]
also led England to its greatest victory until Churchill took up the mantle a
few centuries later. Both those men studied at fine schools and were tested in
battle. Somehow they knew the middle of
the extremes.
I read
the St. Crispin’s Day speech again. It is given before the battle on the field
at Agincourt where the English were terribly outnumbered and outgunned. It doesn’t whine about not having more troops
on hand or wish for better conditions or even a better leader. It doesn’t
complain about never having been on the awful terrain before. It simply declares the happy willingness to
give it everything with only what is here. To not just go through the motions,
but instead to live or die—and to be all in and all in with each other as we
are-- and to be glad to be in the fight with the scorecard we have and to hold
it dear:
…And gentlemen in England
now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not
here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
They
didn’t know if they would win, but with courage they followed King Henry and
did so. We have had in the past great
leaders among us—those of sharpness and strength meant to save us in the
moment. But they don’t really save us,
they only remind us of our better selves.
[1]
Sesquipedalian is a great word. Sesqui
means one and a half in Latin (hence sesquicentennial is 150 years), so
sesquipedalian means one and a half feet, as in using words that are one and a
half feet long.
[2] I
had a friend at Harvard business school who said they spent a class learning
how to raise their hands just so and formulate questions in such a way as to
make one look impressive—getting the answer was irrelevant.
[3]
The speech is in Shakespeare’s history, Henry V (Act IV, Scene 3); there
have been excellent film adaptations (Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, and
Netflix, The King). The speech
has been used by many to rally strength and is a shining example of courage
exemplified in the Western Cannon—for those who still learn from such great
works.
