25 Random Things About My Father

I mentioned once before, just in passing, John Eldredge's claim, in Wild at Heart, that every man is wounded somehow by his father. I implied in that earlier post that such wasn't the case with me. Today, Father's Day, I want to state it outright.

I do not believe I suffered any psychic wounding at the hands of my father, ever.

Honestly, that's no small claim. I've watched other men and their dads. I've watched women and their father's too. I had acquaintances long ago that couldn't return home when they left the Air Force Academy they hated because their fathers told them not to come home if they quit. I had a so much more than friend, who will likely read this, who went there for a year, because her father told her if she would try it for that long, he would foot the bill for college elsewhere--she did; he did not. I've heard fathers say things to children in public that made my heart ache.

I had and have the best father I know. I know a couple more who are right up there with him (my new father-in-law among them), and I have friends who think or thought the same of their fathers. We are lucky people, those of us in this club, and today is a day we celebrate that luck.

Not all that long ago, I posted 25 Random Things About Me. Today, I'm going to take a shot at publishing another 25 about him. Wish me luck.

25 Random Things About My Father

1. He has taken up the drums. At least, he bought a drum set months ago, and for a while at least, he was playing them. This is especially interesting to me because a little less than four years ago, I took drum lessons for a short while. Neither I nor my father knew this about one another, which is a good segue to the next point:
   
2. My father's life has mirrored mine in so many ways that it's genuinely eerie, especially romantically. I could elaborate, but I'm going to leave it at that for now.
3. I suspect my father of being a closet adrenaline junkie. He owned a motorcycle from the time my parents split up until well into his second marriage. And he was, after all, a volunteer fire chief for over a decade.
4. When I left for the Air Force Academy, over three decades ago, the last thing I remember him saying to me as I walked out of Charlotte's Douglas Airport to climb the stairs to a waiting jet, other than, "I love you," is, "If you get there and you don't like it, son, you know you can always come home." It put staying there all on my shoulders. No expectation, no threats, no rebellion value in leaving (not that I ever felt any need to rebel). It made it possible to stay even during the months that I hated it most and seriously thought of leaving. Having options makes almost any task less onerous.
5. In all the years of my youth, he gave me only one spanking I hadn't genuinely earned. That one time, he was acting on misinformation from my Sunday school teacher. I didn't forget, but I didn't really hold it against him either. I just never liked that teacher much after that.
6. I've seen him pitch nearly perfect games of horseshoes. At Five Forks ball park in China Grove, NC, I watched him and Lee Smith, on their way to winning first place in a church league, throw ringer after ringer from one end to the other. It was awe inspiring.
7. He taught me gun safety at an early age, and how to shoot birds on the wing, to drain a rabbit's bladder before putting it in your hunting coat, how to build a rabbit trap, and how to enjoy the beauty of good bird dogs working a field.
8. He also taught me, by example, to think of all men as equals, at least equal in worth and rights, vehemently disdaining all the petty prejudices that so many fathers so sadly wean their children on. The stories in this regard are almost legend and fodder for longer posts at a later date. I'll simply say here that had Harper Lee known him, and if you knew him and her novel, you would think him her model for Atticus Finch.
9. He blames a long tour in Alaska, at Gambell Air Base, on St Lawrence Island, for the early loss of his hair. His seven brothers each kept theirs most of their lives.
10. His children have always come first in his life. Whatever other ambitions he may have had, I truly believe that being a good father was the ruling goal of his existence. God knows, he put up with more, and sacrificed more, for our sake than any other man I know would have.
11. Right behind Atticus Finch, the character from fiction that he is most like would be Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry. He was, for all practical purposes, the unspoken mayor of the small town in which I grew up. Smaller than Mayberry.
12. He can teach anyone to waterski and he was always good at it himself. For the most part, when anyone learned to waterski with us, they learned to slalom, right out of the gate.
13. He plays a wicked game of hopscotch. He always played with us on the shore during our annual vacations at Windy Hill Beach, SC, and I have since played more than a few times with my own daughters.
14. He loves tractors. He may think we haven't caught on to that, but he does. I'm not entirely certain there isn't a frustrated farmer trapped in him somewhere.
    
15. His two greatest shots in golf may have been his hole-in-one and his blind eagle. The hole-in-one was so dead on that it bent the base of the pin going into the hole. In basketball lingo, he "stripped the net." His blind eagle I was there for--a par-four on which he'd hooked the ball into the adjacent fairway, hiding the green from him behind a set of pines dividing the two holes. He hit the ball over the pines on his second shot and into the hole. I found it there. He was still looking everywhere else.
    
16. His dedication to golf during my youth was such that my youngest sister once recited the days of the week as, "Sunday, Monday, Golfday, Wednesday, Thursday . . . " He worked all day on Saturdays until he retired, but only half a day on Tuesdays. He is as good a golf coach as he is a ski coach. I should have tried out for the golf team at the Academy instead of wasting my time with track.
17. He would still like to learn to fly. He says he's let that ambition go, but I think I know better.
18. He can fix or build just about anything.
19. So far as I know, he has never cultivated any of the vices that other men, including myself are prey to. He doesn't swear, drink, or smoke, and yet he doesn't begrudge other men those "pleasures." I think he is simply cautious of the genes he carries, having had a father, grandfather, and more than one brother for whom these things were problems.
20. He is fiercely and poignantly patriotic. I remember him once calling me to the window over our kitchen sink, pointing to the flag flying at the fire station he helped found about a quarter mile away, and saying, "Isn't that beautiful?"
21. In our family business, he was all about Total Quality Management and focusing on the customer long before TQM became a watchword for the rest of the world. I remember trying to figure out what the fuss was about when the Air Force tried to institute TQM because I had always thought those principals were common knowledge. I've learned better since.
22. He is a true gentleman--gentle and yet fiercely strong. He is always polite. He opens my stepmother's car door, holds her chair, helps her with her coat.
    
23. He's more or less ambidextrous. He plays sports left-handed, yet he writes right-handed. It makes him very handy to have around when your ball is up against a tree and you really need a left-handed club to swing.
24. What he lacks in distance these days, he more than makes up in accuracy. I've been able to outdrive him since college, but I've never outscored him on the links.
25. I love him. I admire him. And I still want to be like him when I grow up.

Happy Father's Day, Dad.

Green Travel

Are you racked with guilt over your carbon footprint on mother Earth? Well, for tree-huggers and recovering Catholics (for whom guilt never fully recedes), United Airlines (whom I used for at least half of my recent trip west) has set up an online confessional of sorts. You can visit their Carbon Offset Program, and there you'll find a convenient Carbon Offset Calculator to quantify just how much guilt is appropriate. You can then decide whether bearing it is something you can live with, or you can select from a variety of available indulgences, allowing you to travel guilt-free, or at least as nearly so as possible.

For my recent roundtrip from ATL to COS, for instance, the suggested donation to International Reforestation to offset 0.4927 metric tons was $5.91. Instead, I rented a Prius and drove nearly 300 miles on less than five gallons of gas. I found the overall effect of the Prius rental to be so environmentally sound that I felt compelled to offset my carbon offset by spending the $5.91 on a Venti Iced Mocha Latte at Starbucks just to take the self-congratulatory edge off. Thing is though, the buzz from coffee grown using environmentally sound methods is only serving to make me even more smug. I may just have to go out and crush a dandelion before anyone can stand to be around me. I can barely even stand myself.

888-453-1922 Is Not Verizon

If you get a text message (as I did today) reading:

Free VZW msg. UR on track 2 incur overage charges for Minute, Data, or Message usage. Call 888-453-1922 NOW for more info or Dial #MIN & #DATA to check usage.

Or if you get a call from some automated system along the same lines, DO NOT CALL. This is not Verizon. You'll find trails on this scam going back well over a year, here and here.

I guess the people that sell those vehicle warranties had to find something else to do.

The Earps Always Know

Quote for the day: from Wyatt Earp.

One of my favorites from the too-long biopic starring Kevin Costner. Spoken to Wyatt by his father, played by Gene Hackman:

You know this land is full of people doing wicked things to each other.

I gotta tell you something Wyatt. I told your brothers when they went off to fight, and I suppose the time has come for you. You know I'm a man that believes in the law. After your family, it's about the only thing you've got to believe in. But there are plenty of men who don't care about the law. Men who'll take part in all kinds of viciousness, and don't care who gets hurt. In fact, the more that get hurt the better. When you find yourself in a fight, with such viciousness, hit first if you can, and when you do hit, hit to kill. You'll know. Don't worry. You'll know when it comes to that. The Earps always know.

Heck, even the trailer's too long--more like a short film. ;-) But it did include part of that quote.

Re-invent This: GM's Total Confidence Ads

I'm percolating a post about my incredibly jealous Spitfire, but first this.

Between every story on the CBS Evening News Online last week, I had to listen to the insult below from GM. Why "insult," you ask. Because the clear implication, to me at least, is that GM's current crisis is somehow my fault. That I'm not trying hard enough. That I need to put on my "rally-cap" and "dig in" for America's comeback to work.

News flash for GM: What's needed is for GM to grab GM's ears and pull until GM hears a loud pop. That will indicate the extraction of GM's cranium from its rectal orifice is complete and then perhaps a comeback can begin. Perhaps. I'm not certain it isn't too late. Welcome to the 21st century GM. Who could've seen it coming? Duh.

It ranks up there with the ad that used to play before movies a couple years ago, using a lie to dissuade a theft.

I couldn't find a video of that old ad, but I found another site that said nearly exactly what I was about to say. So to save time, here's someone else's spot-on rant:

The anti-piracy ad running in movie theatres across the country is a big fat lie.

The ad features a set painter. He explains that movie piracy hurts him more than it could ever hurt the big fat rich movie producers.
Hmmm, that's interesting, because a set painter isn't affected by piracy at all.
A set painter gets paid the same, whether you pay to see the movie or not.
A set painter's job doesn't depend on the box-office revenue of the film.
A set painter gets paid even if the movie is never released at all.

This set painter is a liar. The MPAA are liars.

Here is what the MPAA says on their website, respectcopyrights.org:

YOU'RE THREATENING THE LIVELIHOOD OF THOUSANDS

The entertainment industry isn't made up only of familiar actors, actresses and directors. It is made up of over 500,000 everyday working people that bring the magic of the movies to you.

But, when movies are illegally downloaded from the Internet, these are the people that suffer the most.
It's the woman who does the make-up,
the guy who rigs the lighting,
the sound technician,
the costume designer,
the set decorator
and the caterer.

Do you really want these people to lose their jobs?

Show of hands, people.
Who thinks they're gonna stop making movies because of piracy?
I already noticed they stopped making good movies.
The price of a movie ticket has tripled in the last decade and the movies get worse and worse.
Here's my advice. Steal from the greedy miserable lying bastards.
Pay for one movie, sneak into two. Download anything you can find.
Show the MPAA that we don't like lies and the lying liars who tell them.
And here's my advice for the MPAA: Don't annoy people who paid for their movie tickets
by forcing them to watch a phony ad about piracy. They bought tickets.
Instead focus your ad campaign on the internet where the piracy is.
Buy ad space on a file-sharing site, Jesus Christ. Don't you ever talk to young people?

Sort of forfeits the moral high ground near the end, but I so understood the sentiment. Used to make me seethe every time I saw that ad before a movie.

GM's new campaign has pretty much the same effect. I can't help but wonder if I'm all alone on this, or if it's going to backfire on them. Then again, maybe they know what they're doing. Maybe they know they're doomed and this is just step one in their plan to put the blame on us. That seems the most likely scenario of all.

Swat-a-Litterbug

We all have our pet peeves. One of mine is people tossing their cigarette butts, usually still burning, out the window of their cars. Well now, according to this article from the Wilmington Star News, you can do something about that, at least in North Carolina:

Some motorists and car passengers in our area might benefit from a letter from the colonel of the N.C. State Highway Patrol.

That’s what happens when alert witnesses report litterbugs to the state through its Swat-A-Litterbug program. The offenders get a letter, informing them that someone spotted them littering, what they did was illegal and that fines range from $250 to $2,000 and can double on subsequent convictions. It’s signed by the colonel.

And according to the N.C. Department of Transportation, more people are tattling. More than 9,600 littering reports were made to the Swat-A-Litterbug program in 2008, up 23 percent from 7,800 in 2007.

Now I'm not sure how many people this will actually deter from littering, but I know it'll make me feel better if I can arrange that sort of correspondence for them. It'll be the next best thing to one of the best ideas George Carlin ever had for handling bad drivers. (And if anyone can find a video or audio of the a--hole flags routine, I'll be happy to post a link. Some of you know what I'm talking about.)

Just in case you feel your inner police informant vibrating in harmony, here's the rest that you need to know:

The Swat-A-Litterbug program is administered by DOT’s Office of Beautification Programs and the Highway Patrol. If you [spot] someone littering from a vehicle, you can make a report through the mail, over the phone at 1-877-DOT-4YOU or online (the preferred method) at www.ncdot.gov/~beautification. Mail-in cards can be obtained by calling 1-800-331-5864. To make a report, you need the vehicle’s license plate number, date and time of the incident, street name, city, county and a description of the offense.

Enjoy.

Skydive Carolina

[I publish this with a disclaimer of sorts. I wrote it early this morning, first thing after my perusal of the eight front pages I scan on a daily basis. But rather than publish it immediately, I sent it to the DZ manager of Skydive Carolina to fact check. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure he's gone to the Parachute Industry Association Symposium, so I may not hear from him for a while. If I've gotten any details wrong, I'll publish corrections. Meanwhile, I'm confident enough about the principles involved to go with what I've written.]

Some things are newsworthy only by proxy. If a man has a heart attack on the neighborhood basketball court and dies doing what he loved and among friends, it'll make the news. But if a man simply gets a bloody nose charging the lane during a game, it's hardly newsworthy, unless it happens on the same court the very next weekend.

This article from the Charlotte Observer this morning is like that, only worse--its sloppy use of language does the finest drop zone (DZ) in the Carolinas, and all the Observer's readers a disservice:

For the second time in slightly more than a week, a skydiver suffered a mishap while landing at the Chester County Airport. This time, the jump ended without tragedy. A skydiver suffered minor injuries Sunday afternoon after a hard landing at the end of a solo jump, said James LaBarrie, general manager of Skydive Carolina. The man might have suffered a sprained ankle, LaBarrie said.

Eight days ago, a first-time skydiver steered safely to the ground after his instructor suffered an apparent midair fatal heart attack. Both incidents involved Skydive Carolina, a skydiving company that operates out of the Chester County Airport.

First, the incident itself is analogous to that basketball game in that a new solo skydiver landing hard and spraining an ankle isn't something that happens every day, but when it does, it's hardly more newsworthy than a bloody nose or a twisted ankle on the neighborhood basketball court. It made the news today only because of the prior weekend's much more newsworthy event. Unfortunately, even that event is misrepresented here.

In addition to being a skydiving instructor with years of experience, I'm also an English professor. While skydiving is my love, teaching literature and writing pays the bills. I stress to my students, on a daily basis, that above all, they should be careful that the things they write are true. To say, "For the second time in slightly more than a week, a skydiver suffered a mishap while landing," is wrong, untrue, misrepresentative, and downright lazy. In the incident the previous weekend, the tandem instructor, after safely deploying the main canopy and even exchanging a few words with his student, suffered a heart attack before reaching the ground. The student, a young soldier with the kind of situational awareness and initiative that makes our armed forces the finest in the world, then steered the canopy to a safe landing and even attempted CPR on the instructor. That's not a "mishap while landing." That's not even really a skydiving mishap. It may be arguable that it's even a "mishap." Everyone is saddened by the loss of a good man and fine instructor, and yet most of us, at least most people I know, harbor a very real hope that when our time comes, we'll have the good fortune to go so peacefully in the middle of doing something we love, rather than wasting away in a hospital bed with some form of cancer or living long enough for dementia to set in and no longer being able to find our way to the DZ. Thus, even the word "tragedy" may be a misnomer. That same heart attack suffered on the road on the way home could have been a far worse tragedy. (And for those wondering, had it come earlier, before deployment of the canopy, yes, there is a backup system that would have deployed the main canopy at a set emergency altitude.)

But I'm allowing myself to become distracted. My point is this. A sprained ankle at a DZ is not news. Barring the previous weekend's events, it would never have reached the threshold of public awareness, and to report it as if it were a part of some ominous trend is sensationalism at its worst. I can only guess it was a slow news day in that corner of the Carolinas.

For what it's worth, I've skydived over much of this country, from Maryland to California and from Florida to Washington, either for pleasure, or in demonstrations with one military team or another. Every DZ has a certain character, an ambiance, and a reputation within the skydiving community. I made my first jump at Skydive Carolina back in 2003, and I made my last attempt to jump there this past Saturday. It was an attempt because the winds were a little high. Not so high that many of the places I've jumped wouldn't have pressed right on. (The United States Parachute Association's (USPA's) Basic Safety Requirements (BSRs) are really more "recommendations" than "requirements." The Skydiver's Information Manual refers to them as "risk-reduction procedures," an unblushing acknowledgment that ours is a sport in which risk is only reducable, never capable of full elimination.) At other DZs I've patronized, those winds, sporty without doubt, might easily have lost out to the interplay of testosterone, adrenaline, and the fact that an aircraft on the ground earns no lift fees. Not at Chester. Skydive Carolina, after waiting the winds out for a while on the ground, called it a day rather than risk an off-DZ landing or injury should enthusiasm get the upper hand of good sense. I cannot stress enough the difficulty and cost of borderline calls like that and just how much they say about the character of a DZ's owners and manager.

And that is what this post is really about. The contrast between a good DZ and poor news reporting. With great power comes great responsibility. Our media these days are heady with power, and more than a little short on responsibility. By saying anything at all about a non-event and by saying it in language that can be described most charitably as "inprecise," the Observer does all of us, jumpers and readers alike, a disservice. Either more was needed to put the report in proper perspective, or nothing at all should have been said. All that is unspoken has the effect of suggesting too much that is untrue.

I've recently moved back home to the South after 31 years wearing Air Force blue. I expect to spend a lot of time at Chester. It's friendly, it's clean, it has amenities other DZ's only dream of, and above all, it's safe. When she's of age, Skydive Carolina will likely be the DZ where my youngest daughter makes her first jump, and perhaps, if we can get off the golf course long enough, even my dad.

And that, for what it's worth, is my two cents on today's skydiving "news."

What Frightens Me: The Case of Todd Newmiller

Below is a video you may not have time to watch. It's long. It is likely to amaze you. It may make you angry. Me, it frightens. Again.

I was at the appeal hearing, a part of which is presented in the video below. I was there because Todd Newmiller's parents are my friends. I've known them since 1991. Todd's father was one of my mentors when I first began teaching. I was also at, at least part of the original trial in Colorado Springs. I lived in Colorado Springs when the unfortunate death for which Todd was convicted took place. I noted the event in the morning paper. As the Deputy Head of our department, I learned of my friend's son's intimate connection with it very shortly thereafter.

In the beginning, no one doubted that Todd would be cleared of the crime. Knowing the facts of the case and watching the trial unfold and then watching the appeal left me saying, earnestly, that if I were ever wrongfully accused of a serious crime, the day I were released on bail would be my last in the United States. A lot of us said that.

This is, far and away, the worst miscarriage of justice with which I have any personal familiarity. And I do not exaggerate when I say it frightens me. I've reached that age where I have, as a rule, little faith in institutions in general. But one can get by on very little faith, so long as one is not reminded of why such faith is generally misplaced. Todd's case is one of those reminders from which it is difficult to return to complacency of any sort.

So, you've been warned. I doubt simply watching the video, if one is unfamiliar with just how egregious the railroading was, will be as profoundly erosive of one's peace of mind as experiencing the trials in person could be. Nonetheless, I'm compelled to say, view at your own risk.



Video originally posted at: Bearing False Witness, a site maintained by Todd's family and dedicated to publicizing his cause and the larger cause of all those wrongfully convicted.

A Conversation: "Where More Credit Is Due"

Over at The Archer Pelican, blog buddy Phil posted the following thought provoking proposition three days ago under the title, "Where More Credit is Due":

An emerging thought:

In America it seems to me that we often give too little respect to how hard things can be: whether the length of time it takes to mourn a lost relative, or how difficult it is to find the courage to apologize, or how scary it is to leave a job or a relationship.

That said, it also seems that we have to little faith in how strong we can be: whether in the ability to keep functioning while taking the time to cry, or the resolve to push our way through to saying what needs to be said, or the will to walk out a door and to keep walking while everything tries to pull you back.

I could be wrong, but that's the way it seems to me.

To which, a couple days later, I mustered the following response:

Phil, I'm gonna object to just one thing here. Well, not "object" so much as "recast." Among the things you think people don't credit the difficulty of is how scary it is to leave a job or a relationship. You're right, those things are scary, and sometimes one needs to summon the courage to do just that: leave. However . . .

A worse thing, I think (and recent experience of course makes this personal) is the corollary of that failure to respect the difficulty of a thing, i.e., the expectation people have that something should require little effort in the first place. This applies especially to relationships. If I understand you, you are saying that, in this country, we expect everything to come easily. And worse yet, we expect those things to be perfect. A good relationship is almost always the result of hard work, and even the best relationship is never perfect. Some relationships need to end, and the worst ones often take the most courage to leave. But our failure to respect the difficulty and complexity of human relationships sometimes means that people bail without really trying.

And trying to endure is not the same as trying to make a thing better. Better to bail than throw up one's hands and embrace martyrdom. But that false expectation of ease, I think, too often leads people to the martyr label before they have made an effort to make a thing better. Be it job or relationship. Again, some things are unfixable. I know that. But a corollary of your observation is that too many people don't think they should need to try.

I offer both here as an example of the reason I write or read blogs at all. They are, the ones I treasure most, like an ongoing seminar with people who are not only smart, they're my friends. When Susan Jacoby indicts blogs on the whole as anonymous venting by semi-literate, anti-rationalists in her book The Age of American Unreason (which I finished over the holidays and will have more to say about later and elsewhere), I can't help but think she lives in a different blogosphere than I.

Heaven Help Us

Over at Enrevanche, Barry's post today struck a nerve. What follows is my comment, posted over at his place.

See? See, Buck especially? See? This is why I'm fed up with my former party. This is the same BS as claiming that Obama wants to teach kindergartners about sex. Low, dirty, shameful lies. Anyone who allows, "I'm (insert name here), and I approved this message," to go on the air with something like that can't be trusted to wash windshields at a stoplight, let alone serve in public office.

What shall I do? I dislike Obama's policies just slightly less than I despise McCain's, and now Dole's, tactics. Sitting on my file cabinet is a flag flown over the capital for me by Dole. Like Tommy Lee Jones's character from In the Valley of Elah I am tempted to fly it . . . upside down.

God help us all.

Why I'm Leaning Toward Obama

Leaning, mind you. Much can change in the next few weeks.

There is an axiom that goes, “Show me a young conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains.” (And it was not Winston Churchill who said it, though he’s frequently given credit.) If it’s true, that axiom, then like most of my life, my politics are backwards.

I’ve been a lifelong Republican. I think, for the most part, I still agree with most Republican principles, though these days, I consider myself an Independent, sick to death of the false dichotomies which rule two-party politics. Politicians of either major party I find to be a lot like too many evangelical Christians I know, backed by a philosophy and principles I can understand and appreciate, but that have too little effect on their daily conduct.

I know that some people stress that a vote for party rather than person is, in effect, a proper vote for those principles. I’ve bellied up and bought into that in the past. I don’t think I can this year. As much as I find myself on the side of Republican principles, I don’t think I can find myself on the side of Senator John McCain. I think that probably, once upon a time, there was a man and warrior named John McCain who would say exactly the same thing about the person the politician has become.

The reason an ad hominem argument is considered a logical fallacy is that it substitutes attacks on an opponent’s character for worthwhile disputation on the issue(s). Admittedly, in a presidential race, character is an issue. Sadly though, every attack I’ve seen thus far (in mainstream ads or chain mails) on Obama’s character has done more to turn me against the attacker than against Obama. The end result has been to make me a somewhat reluctant Obama defender. And in those instances where the attacks have come from the official McCain campaign apparatus—the ones that finish with “I’m John McCain, and I approved this message”—those have convinced me, in the end, that McCain made a conscious decision at some point that honor was a thing he could dispense with in order to win the White House.

Earlier today, I got a link to a video from a good friend. I’ve not hyperlinked the foregoing phrase because I want to qualify the video before anyone heads off to it. About the most insightful thing you’ll find on the page with the video may be this comment left by someone who had seen the video earlier: “Just one more proof that racist, idiotic ideas are not the province of one race or gender. This guy is a nutcase and his momma was a nutcase if she instilled vicious racism into her son. Sickening.” I couldn't have said it better. While certain historical facts contained in the video rant you’ll find there may be truthful, the interpretation of them, laden with prejudice, name calling, and utterly despicable inferences about the character of a woman the speaker never knew, are worse than sickening.

And, as near as I can tell, a number of the historical assertions made about specific events are true, but the conclusions one draws from those events can vary widely. I don’t recommend watching the video, but if you do, and if you’re curious to know more about the facts behind it, I would suggest going here, to a January 2007 article in the Daily Mail. The gist of that article is that most of the assertions in the more recent video are true. So? (Of course, the Daily Mail itself deserves some qualification as a source. I had thought of lamenting that journalism is not what it used to be, but then I decided, more likely, it is exactly what it has always been. See here for information on the Daily Mail, including details of more than one episode of its having been sued for running stories that were less than factual. So it goes.)

I can hear some of my friends already protesting a double standard. “How can I take McCain to task,” they ask, “for furthering falsehoods about Obama, and yet let Obama off the hook for being less than truthful about his father?” Well, how shall I answer? Like so: In the one case the falsehoods are designed to make a political opponent appear a less decent, less admirable person than he probably is, and to attribute to him actions he didn’t take and views he doesn’t hold; in the other, the falsehoods are designed to cast a family member, the teller’s own father, in a better light than he probably deserves. Can you seriously question the difference in degree of these two falsehoods? For me, they are telling.

The argument can also be made that, in some ways, the somewhat mythical construct of father that Obama has offered to the public has more relevance to his character than does his true sire with all of his human flaws. Obama appears to have had a loving mother who, for whatever temptation she may have had to give Obama the brutal truth about the man who sired him (and I’m sure there were moments when she was tempted), gave him instead an image of a father that gave us the Obama whose fate voters will decide in November. The truth is that both are relevant: the real Barack Sr. and the maternally constructed absent-but-better man each had a role to play in the creation of Barack II.

The Daily Mail article offers two good reasons to suspect this, both equally related to the roots of Obama’s ambition:

A family friend said: "He is haunted by his father's failures. He grew up thinking of his father as a brilliant intellectual and pioneer of African independence only to learn that in Western terms he was basically a drunken lecher."

This ugly truth, say friends, has made Mr Obama ruthlessly determined to use every weapon that he has to succeed, including the glossily edited version of his father's story.

And the article's observation on a passage from The Audacity of Hope:

This tome contains one telling paragraph, in a section in which he fumbles to try to justify his abrupt leap into the national political arena: he is, he says, chronically 'restless'.

"Someone once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father's expectations or make up for his father's mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady."

So, bottom line, while I might be a Republican at heart, in another month, I’m likely to cast a vote for character, and I find Obama’s more admirable, in the end, than McCain’s, or, more accurately, less suspect than what McCain, whatever he may once have been, has become. Because let’s face it, American politics of late has become even more a science of what to vote against than what to vote for.

Perhaps it was always so.

The Coming Crash

Cormac McCarthy was right when he said in Suttree: "There are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse."

I've been saying for some time that, economically, things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. Part of that has been a carry over of a general sense I had, and have commented on before, that this year, the world as we know it, was going to change. Not a small change, but a major shift on its axis, the kind that leaves us measuring time in a new way: before the change, and after. It's not a personal shift I have in mind, but a shift for all humanity. It will feel personal, very personal. But our personal perception of it will only be a part of something larger.

I've been speaking from the gut, from personal experience, from a strange sense of foreboding and little else. Over at Enrevanche, Barry posted a piece in toto by someone qualified to speak on the economy from more than his gut.

If you need to keep your head in the sand in order to avoid despair, then don't read this. If you believe that knowing what's coming doesn't really make it any worse, if you're committed to seeing the crisis through to the other side by simply putting one foot in front of the other, one day at a time, then, by all means, read it.

We look back on history and we wonder how some of the worst things could have been allowed to happen. Where were the good Germans during the Holocaust? Why didn't someone stand up to Joe McCarthy sooner? How was the massacre in Rwanda allowed to happen? You can find your own example of something, I'm sure, that you just know you'd never have allowed to take place on your watch. Well, it's our watch now. In the coming days, probably years, there will be ample opportunities to show our mettle, or to burrow into a corner in the interest of self-preservation. I had said "cower in the corner," but I'll not cast that stone. For some, saving one life will mean putting other lives for which they're responsible at risk. The firefighter who's a sole breadwinner for a family does that every day. Not everyone faces that dilemma, and not everyone facing it decides for altruism.

We look back on history and wonder. When our children and grandchildren look back on the coming days and wonder, it will fall on us to explain. If we can.

Be kind to one another. Putting one foot in front of the other will carry our bodies through this. Nothing less than kindness will ferry our souls across.

Jill Greenberg: True Evil

I don't have a lot of time to blog these days. I don't even have enough time to keep up with the blogs of my friends who do. I will, again, eventually. But this transitional time is busy, sleepless, crucial, overwhelming, exhilarating, and terrifying all at once.

Still, now and then I have a second to peruse my old haunts. And tonight over at Lex's place, I hit a thread I almost wish I hadn't. Lex ran a post about Jill Greenberg's portrait of John McCain for the October Atlantic. That led me to a post in American Digest that contained the outtakes causing all the hubbub. Even this didn't get my ire up. Politics is ugly. What she did is unacceptable, base, unprofessional, etc, but not necessarily evil.

Then, somehow, I found my way to a site about Greenberg's End Times. I learn there that this is a woman who intentionally invoked anguish in children.

Photographer Jill Greenberg has whipped up a storm of controversy with her new exhibition, End Times. The pictures in the show, for which she deliberately provoked tearful outbursts from children by taking away lollipops she had just given them, have been described by some as tantamount to child abuse.

Greenberg herself insists that the children had the sweets returned within 30 seconds, that no lasting harm has been done, and that her concern was to depict what she says reminded her of the "helplessness and anger I feel about our current political and social situation."

I'm sure this issue has been covered to death already. But I'd not heard of it, and maybe some of you hadn't either.

I'd like to know, just for the record, Ms. Greenberg's position on the interrogation technique known as waterboarding. And I'd like to ask her about those photos again, just as soon as her panic subsided with no lasting harm done, say, 30 seconds after the towel was removed from her face.

Interesting difference here between me and her, I guess. There are complicated reasons, that, though I'm not in favor of the practice, I wouldn't consider waterboarding a terror suspect "evil." Yet, deliberately inducing anguish in children, even temporarily, I do think of as deserving that label pure and simple. For her, I guess, it's the other way around. There's room for both of us to be wrong, but I sleep just fine on my side of that line. I wonder about Ms. Greenberg's slumbers.

Mercy Is Wasted on the Unremorseful

At dinner tonight, we played a few cards from a game called Table Topics. One of the questions to come up was, "Which is more important, justice or forgiveness?" My answer: it depends.

Why? Because sometimes, justice precludes forgiveness; and sometimes, forgiveness is justice.

An example: I knew a family once, shattered by the perfidy of someone in a position of trust. To this day, one member of that family thinks that another member of the family is "unforgiving" because of the grudge they bear the betrayer. I happen to disagree. The particular wolf in shepherd's clothing in question not only failed to show any regret for his actions, but as nearly as I can tell, has since moved on to even richer pastures for the plunder of innocents.

Asked for my opinion on the matter, I offered this: even God demands that we ask forgiveness, because even God understands that mercy is wasted on the unremorseful.

Adventures in (not) Shoplifting

I have much to do today. I took a day of leave from the office to get it done. But I have to tell this story.

About an hour ago, I decided to make a quick run to the store for lunch. I figured I'd grab some sushi from the deli and knock out a little grocery shopping. This is not a leisurely exercise mind you. I have a list. I'm on a mission. Typical guy shopping. Get in. Get out. Get it done.

Checking the pantry beforehand to finalize my list I see a bottle of wine I've been meaning to return and exchange. Nothing expensive. I used to buy wine by the case when I had someone to enjoy it with every afternoon. Now it's more haphazard. And typically, a bottle will go bad before I finish it, suction corks and inert gassing notwithstanding. A few weeks ago, I picked up a couple bottles of shamefully inexpensive wine on the recommendation of the shop owner. He'd been dead right on the better bottles I'd purchased over time, so when he said this little $4 cab was worth a try, I figured what the heck. A cup of coffee costs more at Starbucks.

But when I went to pull a bottle back out of the rack at home, my hand came up all wet from the wine leaking around the foil. Figuring that bottle had a better than average chance of being corked, I set it up in the pantry to prevent it leaking onto the carpet if I left it in the rack, and I made a mental note to exchange it.

Fast forward a couple weeks to an hour or so ago. The wine shop is next door to the grocery store. I'm not going to mention any names here because I like these people, or I did. Still like the husband. Probably keep shopping there just out of sympathy for him. Keep reading, you'll understand why.

Anyway, I park right in front of the door of the wine shop. I take my bottle of wine and step inside. Not a soul in sight. "Hello." Wait. "Anybody home." Wait. Nothing. "I'll come back." I turn around and head right back out the door, open the driver's side door to the Jeep, lay the bottle on the driver's seat so I don't forget to go back in and try again, close the door and walk away to the grocery store. Mind you, I never stepped more than four paces inside the door of the wine shop. I was, presciently, a little worried about going deeper into the store without someone to witness that I was bringing the bottle in the door with me.

So, I press on to King Sooper, whiz through my grocery shopping, and am back at my Jeep in probably 15 minutes or so. Waiting for me are a man and a woman. As I'm putting my groceries in the passenger side, the woman begins to speak.

"Sir, we just want you to know that we've written down your license number and the police are on the way." Oddly enough, this isn't said in an exactly friendly tone.

I knew immediately what was going on. I think I must have foreseen it when I stepped in the door to start with and no one was there and I knew better than to go further.

"Well good," I said, really not unkindly or argumentatively. It helps to know that you're in the right. I wasn't really worried about how it was all going to turn out. I was mostly concerned about getting things straightened out and getting back here to get to work. (This blog entry is therapy--a winding down.) "When they get here, we can all look at your security tapes together. You do have a security camera don't you?"

"Yes. We know we're missing a bottle."

Without commenting on whatever problems they were having accurately tracking their inventory, I went back to the camera. "Have you looked at your tapes? If you'll look at your tape, you'll see that I came in the door with that bottle of wine to exchange it. It's leaking. I expect it's probably corked." As I say this, I'm walking around the Jeep, getting the wine out of the front seat, and walking into the store. "If you'd simply waited inside, you'd have seen me come back, get the bottle out again, and walk into the store."

Inside the store, the woman alternates between ignoring me in favor of the one other customer they have and continuing to cast accusations my way.

"Well what did you run away so fast for?"

?? "I didn't run away. I put the bottle on the front seat of my Jeep so I wouldn't leave without remembering to try again, and I walked to King Sooper to do my grocery shopping. I didn't run anywhere, and I wasn't even going to drive away without coming in the store again."

"We're missing a bottle," she repeated.

"I can't help that. I paid for this one weeks ago. I brought it back to exchange because it's leaking. Here," I said, taking a business card from my wallet, "I'll go you one better than a license tag, here's my business card. Look at your tapes!"

The husband meanwhile, who has driven in from home, has verified that the bottle is, in fact, leaking and possibly corked. To him, the truth of the situation is fairly obvious. Who's going to enter a store, make a circuit of the place and abscond with a $4 bottle of wine, drop it in their vehicle parked by the front door, then walk away, shop for a while and return. He says as much. Adding that it makes sense to him. If I were going to steal something, I'd certainly have chosen something worthwhile. But the woman, meanwhile, is having none of it. I've been tried and convicted in her book, and if I'm not guilty of stealing the wine, then, I'm by God guilty of making her think I did.

"Why didn't you just wait?" she asked.

"Because I have things to do, and it was no trouble to go on and do my grocery shopping and return since you were obviously busy in the back somewhere. I called out twice. For that matter, why didn't you, just wait? If you'd waited inside the store for about half a minute, you'd have seen me return, retrieve the bottle and come in to try again. Or better yet," and this was truly the snippiest thing I said during the entire conversation, "if you'd been up here doing your job, none of this would have happened."

"I was using the bathroom."

"I understand. People have needs. But if you came out in time to see me put the bottle in the Jeep, then why didn't you come out the door and shout at me then?"

"You're much taller than I am. I came in and called him."

I kid you not. I was dumbstruck. A thousand witty things come to mind now, and even non-witty, frank questions, like, "Do I look like I go around beating up shop owners?" (I'm wearing jeans, suede Timberline loafers, and a white golf shirt today.) Or, "I'm taller than him too you know." I stood there. Speechless.

"Will you please look at the tapes? Are the police coming or not?" I'm hoping they are. I want to be there when she looks at the tapes and sees that I never got far enough in the door to take anything.

"No. I didn't call them. I didn't want to ruin anyone's day."

"Well this has clearly ruined yours."

"I'm fine."

"You don't seem fine. And the boss had to come in."

"For your information, this is my husband, not my boss."

"Clearly," on the inside. "Sorry," out loud, looking at her, but really meaning it for him.

At this point, the husband is apologizing as much as he dares. You can almost see the mental calculations going on. Piss off a customer vs piss off the wife. I'd have kissed the customer goodbye too. And I wasn't even pissed off. Anger germinates in fear, and I never really had anything to be afraid of here. Loss of time, maybe, waiting for the police to review the security tapes, but the truth of what was going on was too intuitively obvious to the husband to require that.

"I'm really sorry," he said at one point. "Before we put up the cameras, we were losing a lot of inventory."

"I understand," I said. "Believe me. I grew up in a grocery store in North Carolina. I completely understand." I was trying, really trying, to find some common ground here.

The rest of the conversation gets somewhat fuzzy. I can't remember exactly what it was she was saying that kept making it clear she just wanted me to leave and she didn't care if I ever came back. I kept trying to find some middle ground where we could all be friends again, but apparently, if shoplifting is a misdemeanor, not shoplifting but looking like you might have--even though you tried studiously to avoid that appearance--is an unforgivable felony.

Still, I'd rather be the guy wrongly accused than the guy who wouldn't hold the cross while she nailed me up. Even after all was said and done, it was clear she was still convinced she'd caught me red-handed trying to make off with a bottle of wine worth considerably less than a gallon of gas. Worst of all, now the husband was my accomplice. All her left over anger had to go somewhere. I should pick up a good Scotch later today (from somewhere else) and drop it off for him in a gift bag. I think he's gonna need it.

Just World Theory: Two Views

"The arc of the moral universe is indeed long but it does bend toward justice." --Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason.

>-) Doc

Better to Give than Receive? Shopdropping & Secret Santas

Shopdropping

Here's an interesting thing to be on the lookout for: "shopdropping." I'd never heard of it before a short article in this morning's paper, but I can easily imagine the appeal to the right groups:

Otherwise known as reverse shoplifting, shopdropping involves surreptitiously putting things in stores, rather than illegally taking them out, and the motivations vary.

Anti-consumerist artists slip replica products packaged with political messages onto shelves while religious proselytizers insert pamphlets between the pages of gay and lesbian readings at bookstores.

Self-published authors sneak their works into the “new releases” section; personal trainers put their business cards into weight-loss books; and aspiring professional photographers make homemade cards — their Web site address included, of course — and covertly plant them in sta- tionery-store racks.

Just fascinating. Wikipedia apparently considers it a subset of "Culture Jamming."

Secret Santa Lives On

In a better example (value judgment intentionally implied) of the meaning behind the axiom that titles this post, Dave Ramsey, on today's show, interviewed a successor to Larry Stewart as the Secret Santa. In many ways, Stewart's practice, as I understand it, captured at least the initial element (the performance of an unsolicited act of generosity or kindness) of the idea inherent in "Pay It Forward," a concept at least as old as our nation (see Wikipedia's citation of Benjamin Franklin as one originator) and popularized through Catherine Ryan Hyde's novel, published in 2000. The novel was made into a movie by Warner Brothers. The ideas of the novel find continuing promotion through the Pay It Forward Foundation.

Returning to the idea's more seasonal manifestation, the Secret Santa World homepage offers the following explanation of why these particular elves do what they do:

The compassion shared from one spontaneous random act of kindness is elevating, priceless and not easily explained. It is an instant connection between souls that can change a life forever. This is the experience of being a Secret Santa. Being a Secret Santa has blessings beyond words.

If you're interested, you can find more information on the Secret Santa program at SecretSantaWorld.net.

Don't Almost Give

Lastly, if you're not up to donning a Santa suit and can't afford to give away $100 bills to strangers, but you would like to find a way to give something to those in need, during this season and throughout the year, one more organization has been pretty vocal lately, at least in this area, with a series of radio ads that mildly irritate me with their blatant dose of guilt; yet, they did inspire me to visit the website while this post had me on the topic. The Don't Almost Give web site provides a wealth of suggestions for how almost anyone can get involved through volunteering in something of particular interest to them. It's worth a visit.

And while you're there, you can view/hear some of the "Public Service Announcements" and decide for yourself if they're hitting below the belt, or if the end, in this case at least, justifies the means. I'd be interested to hear, through comments on this post, what others think.

Merry Christmas to you all.

The Service Gap; One Clerk Too Many; The Most Important Job You'll Ever Have

Everything I know about service, I learned as a teenager, from my father and grandfather, working in our family store. I mean that literally. I can't think of a single thing I've learned since. I've been reminded of one thing or another over the years, but always with the reaction, "Oh yeah, I knew that."

Greet the customer when they walk through the door. Smile and say hello. Always ask if you can help them find something--even the folks you know probably know the store better than you. If you don't know the answer, tell them you'll find out--and do. If you're busy with something at the moment that you can't stop, acknowledge their presence and tell them you'll be right with them--people will wait patiently longer than you would think possible so long as they know you're aware of their existence. There is always something to do--stock shelves, pull items to the front, dust, sweep, put away carts, clean windows--in most service industries, you are paid for your time, not the tasks you accomplish; the sooner you learn this, the more valuable you will be. Employers, whether you know it or not, are constantly keeping tabs on what your time is worth versus your co-workers. And finally, the customer is always right.

The nuances of that last one are hard for many to grasp. Someone gives you a five, and as you count their change, they protest that they gave you a ten. Maybe you're dead certain it was a five. Maybe you're certain they're merely confused, or maybe you're certain they're scamming you. You have only one question to answer: Do you want them to continue to be a customer? If yes, then they're right--no questions asked. If no, then the rule that ended the last paragraph doesn't apply anyway does it? The awareness is key. You need to be aware that contradicting them, sticking to your guns on that five spot, may very well mean they're no longer a customer. Is it worth five bucks? Not likely. That applies to almost any situation where you and your customer may disagree. Giving in may cost a little in the short run from time to time, but it will almost always pay dividends in the long haul. This rule was the beginning, I think, of my awareness that truth will often fight its own battles, and that allowing it do so, after you've stated it quietly and clearly (see the previous post on Prof Kirkpatrick), will almost always raise your estimation in the other person's eyes far above what your skills at debate might. The next time you disagree, they will remember the outcome, and they will give your words more weight. If they don't, then they are simply slow learners and their opinion of you should have no bearing on your opinion of yourself.

The Service Gap

What, you may be wondering, got me started before I'd even finished my second cup of coffee this morning? An article on the front page of today's Gazette put a name to a frustration I and others have been experiencing more and more lately: "the Service Gap."

If you’re older than 50, you’ve probably had this experience:

You’re standing at a checkout counter, ready to pay, and the twentysomething behind the register is talking on her cell phone. So you wait, and wait, and wait, and when the clerk finally finishes her conversation, she offers not an apology, but a grimace that suggests you’ve interrupted.

Sound familiar? It has a name: the Service Gap. It’s business-speak to describe a phenomenon fueling plenty of holiday-shopping frustration: the difference in the way baby boomers and members of the “millennial generation” define the concept of customer service.

I disagree with just one thing. I think this has little to do with differences in definition. I think the clerks we're talking about here, the frustrating ones, have simply never been introduced to the concept at all.

This disagreement extends to the article itself. There are older persons quoted, both consumers and managers alike, who seem to blame it on the younger generation as a whole. Then there are hard working younger folk who disagree:

“They’re clueless,” said Franni Segal, 55, a travel agent with a degree in retailing. “They’re more interested in talking to their friends.”

When she was in her 20s, working on commission as an assistant manager at Bonwit Teller, she recalled, she and her colleagues eagerly courted customers. “Today when you go into a store, they’re not interested in your needs . . . With the kind of service you get now, you might as well be on the Internet.”

But Sarah Collier, a 20-yearold Arcadia University junior who has worked in retail sales, said she thought her peers’ customer-service skills depended on their background and training, not their age.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily the entire generation. I think it’s just the individual,” said Collier, a hard worker who now sells time-share vacations for a Poconos resort. “I know how to give good customer service.”

Folks, Franni should just retire now. Sarah is going places. Sarah is going places for at least two reasons. First, if she's right and she does give good customer service, then she has a leg up on many of her peers. Second, her attitude recognizes that the Service Gap is fixable--Franni's fatalism is damning. I'll hire Sarah to supervise Franni in a heartbeat. Sarah will train her peers. Franni will just whine in the break room about how "untrainable" Sarah's peers are.

Franni has lots of company though. The world is full of whiners and fixers. The whiners drag us all down; the fixers help make it a better place.

My world is no different. I work at an institution of higher learning that likes to bill itself as "The nation's premier institution for developing leaders of character." Every program, every class, every activity gets examined for, must justify its existence through, its contribution to that goal. The problem with placing such intense focus on programs, classes, and activities through this "lens" of character development is that we lose sight of the most important factor of all: the people holding the lens. Leadership suffers from a belief that if we just keep raising the lens itself to the status of holy touchstone, and keep tweaking the programs under finer and finer focus, then eventually we'll get the output we desire: "leaders of character." Sorry. It will never work that way.

Leaders of character are molded through example and correction. All those classes and programs and activities matter, but they mean nothing without daily exposure to the right examples and daily correction and explanation of why what matters, matters. It takes me twice as long to walk across our campus as anyone else I know. Why? Because I am busy, as I walk, teaching. A salute is not a thing to be rendered silently. Proper courtesy demands that it be rendered with "an appropriate greeting." Being absorbed in your own thoughts or in a conversation to the point that you don't notice an approaching or passing officer is not okay. Lack of situational awareness in battle or flight will get you killed. The same lack, crossing my path, will simply get you an opportunity to have a conversation with someone much your senior.

Does that make me an ass? William Withers, "a communications professor at Wartburg College in Iowa who, with his colleague Patrick Langan, has spent years studying customer service," would argue that it does:

What’s the answer for peeved holiday shoppers?

Adjust your expectations — down, Withers said. Or be willing to pay more to shop and dine at establishments that have the time, interest and money to train their employees.

Nobody should waste their breath berating a young clerk or waiter, he said.

“Calling over the manager isn’t going to matter,” Withers said. “The server may still not look you in face. And they’ll be texting their friends about what an ass you are.”

Well, yes, if my conversation with these future leaders or current clerks took the form of "berating" then I would have to agree, even I would look in the mirror and see an ass. But as the candles on my birthday cakes more and more resemble a small bonfire and as the testosterone levels in my blood taper off, I find myself finally able to have conversations with clerks and cadets alike where my vocal cords don't tighten, my blood pressure doesn't change, and in consequence, my young charges defenses don't immediately swing to red alert. A significant factor in that capability rests in recognizing that the problem doesn't lie in the person, as fatalists like Franni would have us believe, or in the culture, as Withers would have us believe. We are the culture. We make it.

Culture is shaped by our own expectations and what we are willing to accept. If we follow Withers' advice and adjust our expectations down, then culture will head the same way, down. Is there anyone who believes that minimized human contact and interaction is an improvement? That interfacing with Overstock.com is preferable to the smiling face and twinkling eyes of the young clerk who made my eggnog latte the other morning and asked how my day was going? Maybe she really cared; maybe she didn't. Maybe she watches Rules of Engagement and took a lesson from the waitress at the corner diner who rebuffed Adam's hilarious rejection by telling him, "I'm a waitress. I work for tips. I flirt with all my customers." I tipped my barista well. If you tip servers who give you gruff service (the rules are different in NYC, I know, which is why I hope I never live there), then for God's sake, stop it! You're in the same class with those other officers who walk across my campus or through the halls of my institution and plop into a chair in the break room and complain about how cadets never greet them properly any more. "What did you do about it?" I ask. "What do you mean?" is the response I get.

Do something! Don't be willing to accept poor service. Do talk to the clerk, nicely, if you're the kind of person who can. Talk to the manager if you're not the kind of person who can talk to the clerk without feeling like an ass. If you're not the kind of person who can do either, or if you talk to the manager and get a blank stare, then talk with your feet and shop elsewhere. But don't complain and do nothing. You have the power to change your world. Use it. Whining just drags mine down too.

Listening to people complain is actually my job these days. It's not just tolerable; I even like it. Why? Because it doesn't stop with listening. If the injustice is real (and it isn't always), I get to fix things or to help people through the steps of fixing things themselves. Give a man a fish vs teach a man to fish. Sometimes the fish is a whale, sometimes a shark. That's okay too. I have a rack of harpoons. But, as usual, I digress . . .

One Clerk Too Many

Two final thoughts, mostly for whatever young readers I might have, beginning their journey through the world of employment, whatever form it may take. First, one of the best lessons my grandfather ever taught me in that family store came one day when I was leaning against the soda box chatting it up with a classmate that Grandpa had hired (probably against his better judgment because he would have anticipated exactly the scene before him). He came over to us and said simply, "You know, when I was a young man working in a shop over in town, I was talking to another clerk one day when the owner came over, looked at us both, and said simply, 'You know, I was told long ago, if you've got two clerks talking to each other, you've got one clerk too many.'" Grandpa walked away. Keith and I found work to do. I never forgot that line and all that it conveyed.

The Most Important Job You'll Ever Have

Lastly, I lied, when I said everything I learned about service was learned in that store. At some point after I'd left to don the uniform I still wear, I did pick up one other line that has stuck and is worth repeating here. Either as a cadet or as a young butter bar, I must have complained about the futility of some Mickey Mouse "additional duty" I had been assigned--pubs monitor, unit historian, who knows. "Let me tell you something," the mentor had said, "the most important job you will ever have is the job you have right now." Clichéd? Maybe, but I think not. By definition, a cliché has "lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse." That particular little nugget of wisdom, it seems to me, isn't used enough. It may even be that it needs explanation here, but I think I'll just let it simmer. You either get it or you don't. And in a society where "authorities" like Withers would argue that our disappointment is a result of unrealistic expectations rather than lackadaisical performance, maybe it's not useful anymore in society as a whole.

I can only tell you this. It's been useful for me. It was useful for my grandfather and father before me. I hope it will be useful for my daughters. And it will damned sure be useful for anyone who ever works for me.

Homework

“I’m not seeing the Service Gap,” said Susan Magee, an adjunct professor at Chestnut Hill College who has studied the millennial generation. “I just think they’re kids.”

Remember, she said, it’s the holiday season, and store clerks of all ages are busy and stressed like everyone else. “I think at Christmas, if the person can manage to say, ‘Hi,’ get my item in the bag, and not forget my gift receipt, I’m satisfied.”

She's right and she's wrong. They are just kids. No one is born knowing what customer service is. But if we're willing to accept poor service and call ourselves "satisfied," nothing is likely to get better. The world and the people in it have a way of living up to or down to our expectations. I'm pretty sure that's what The Secret is all about, albeit centered on our expectations for ourselves. It works that way for others too. By expecting more of them, you can help them become better. What's difficult to master is the subtle difference between expecting things to be better from the outset and finding them so versus thinking they should be but not being surprised that they aren't. There's your homework. Good luck.

Update: Here's a link to the original article by Jeff Gammage, published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on 20 Dec. All block quotes above are from that article.

Ron Jeremy Does Colorado College

I attended that debate tonight with a friend from our English department. We made a little bet earlier about what the demographics of the audience would be. He thought more men; I thought more women. The debate over porn is frequently cast as a women's issue, I figured. In the end, it was about even. The house was packed. I attended a talk by Michael Pollan in this same chapel back in February that had only half so large a crowd. Tonight's was overflowing. Chairs outside on the lawn and speakers to pipe the debate out to them. Folks all along the walls.

I've not enough time tonight to sum up the evening. Suffice it to say it was interesting. Instead, I'll offer the saddest thing I heard and the funniest. And I'll point out that, oddly, when the time came for questions, it was the men who thanked Craig Gross (whose anti-porn site is here) and took Ron Jeremy to task; and it was the women who thanked Ron Jeremy and took Craig Gross to task. That, I did not expect.

Saddest thing I heard: Ron Jeremy responding to whether he's ever been in an intimate relationship (meaning romantic). "I've made love five times in my life. I've had sex considerably more."

Funniest thing I heard: A female questioner wanting to know if Jeremy thought he could be in a long term relationship with just one person (i.e., monogamous). "Could you ever see yourself in a long term monotonous relationship." "No, and that's why."

He did qualify that though, to point out that there is such a thing as emotional monogamy, and that, he does believe in.

Engaged vs Disengaged

I had the good fortune to sit in on a briefing this morning from a representative of The Gallup Organization. Central question: Can character be measured? Answer from the speaker: Yes.

It is, of course, more complicated than that. But that's it in a nutshell. Most importantly, I came away convinced.

More importantly still, I came away wanting to work for the company that said they could do it. I came away convinced that they get it. That, for all their inexperience with military culture, they can translate. I came away thinking that the most cogent quote of the day might have been, from John C. Maxwell, translated and paraphrased, "There's no such thing as military ethics. There's just ethics." In other words, for the most part, there's no need for translation.

I also came away a little saddened, and clearer than ever in my mind that, for my good, and for the good of an organization I've loved for a long time, and given 26 years of my life, it's time for me to leave. I am anything but disengaged, but I share too many characteristics at the moment with the disengaged. At some point, when I have time to pull from the web the characteristics I mean, I will explain them one by one. Disturbed, I asked whether possession of the characteristics was what classified a person as disengaged, or if some other test determined that, and then the disengaged could simply be expected to exhibit those characteristics? I was told that the measuring of engagement was independent of these factors.

Let me offer a few examples. The engaged and the disengaged tend to have opposite answers to questions like, "Would you recommend this company to a friend?" or "Do you want to still be working here in a year?" Engaged workers are happier and more productive. I'll buy all of that, but there is still that chicken/egg question: disengaged, therefore unhappy; or, unhappy, therefore disengaged. More importantly, can you still be engaged, yet share answers with the disengaged. These are questions I'm pondering, but questions I'm sure Gallup has the answer to.

Probing my own situation, I found some consolation in one more point. The quote went something like this: "People join organizations; they leave individuals." You can love your job, love your organization, and reach a point where you can no longer watch it driven into the ground by one or many in positions of authority. The longer you watch that occur, the more you may find yourself in the "disengaged" camp in answering certain questions. The more you love your work, your mission, your teammates, the more devastating the impact of poor leadership on your morale. Does that make you disengaged or too engaged? This is more than semantics. There is something very basic at stake here.

There is a book answer, I'm sure. But I'd love to hear any comments. Bookish or otherwise.