Analyzing the Revolts

In a long analysis of the Egyptian unrest and the possibility of the overthrow of the Mubarak presidency, long-time left-of-center middle east observer Juan Cole wrote in “Egypt’s Class Conflict“:

Why has the Egyptian state lost its legitimacy? Max Weber distinguished between power and authority. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, and the Egyptian state still has plenty of those. But Weber defines authority as the likelihood that a command will be obeyed. Leaders who have authority do not have to shoot people.

With all due respect to the Professor, this is wrong.

The Egyptian state is nothing without human beings. What are weapons without people? They are rubbish. They are completely lacking in worth. It is human beings which make weapons effective. Until the day Skynet takes over and Terminators become reality, that will remain true.

President Mubarak is not going around shooting people with a gun in his 82 year old hands. As a practical matter, power is the ability to get people to obey your orders. If you can’t get people to do that, you have no power. The state may have guns, but they are of no consequence whatsoever.

The purpose of Professor Cole’s separation of power and authority is so that he may attack Mubarak’s authority as being illegitimate using an analysis bearing all the hallmarks of mainstream Marxist thought. I say this not as disparagement, but as simple fact; rare is the historian who does not pay lip service to Marxist historical analysis using class and economic grievances to explain every major social event. I will certainly not argue that such analysis is always wrong. I will only point out that such analysis is self-serving, as it reinforces the notion of immutable, unchangeable destiny towards revolution and “popular government,” when history has hardly proven this idea to be truth in all cases.

What history does prove is that it is the harder core, the harder working, the hungrier (in the figurative sense) and the meaner and nastier who tend to rise to power during a crisis. Let us bear this in mind when people argue that the Muslim Brotherhood, or something worse, are unlikely to gain power because a national unity government will drown Egypt in hugs and teddy bears and all will be well. The people who are organized, who can get their people to obey orders – it is they who have power, and that power has a way of coming out on top.

Ergo, religion is political power. Let us keep this in mind.

Legitimacy in Authority

The thrust of Professor Cole’s argument is backed by a recital of exhaustive facts about the urbanization of Egypt, the continuation of the Middle East’s trend towards higher population, unabated by the typical modern reduction in birth rates that occurs when religion loses its force and people can afford easy birth control. Alas, religion has not lost its force in Egypt and the majority are not able to afford modern birth control with the ease that a citizen of Western Europe can, so I don’t see why this should be surprising at all, really.

Anyway, the analysis continues to recite how an increase in GDP and trade left much money in the hands of the few rather than the many, how worldwide economic shocks both reduced the oil-producing countries’ revenue (which cut into Egyptian expatriate income, and therefore cut what they could send back to their families), raised food prices and inflation, and otherwise continues the same unhappy story we would find in most any country around the world today.

So, the point is, Nasser was great stuff because he made Egyptians feel like he ran Egypt for the Egyptians, whereas people now feel that Egypt is an economic scam being run on behalf of Americans and Israelis, so it is a combination of being on the wrong side of global politics (i.e. on the side of the United States) and not being enough of an economic re-distributor, so of course they want Mubarak’s head on a pike.

Fine and well, but seriously?

The Tangible Reasons For Loss Of Authority

Let’s have a brief mental exercise. What is modern Egypt known for in the world? Guess.

Peace with Israel.

Is this popular in Egypt? Well… some 30 years after it happened, with a great many young people who weren’t even born when it was signed, it probably is not.

So that’s one context, and it is a context which fits neatly with Islamist thought.

Second, the real problem with authority in a state apparatus sense is a weakened grip on the army, you know, the one the United States subsidizes with over a billion in aid per year as a sort of compensation package for not causing Israel trouble. It isn’t as if Egypt can’t find other countries to give it military support; after all, that $1.2 billion is for 100% list price of lavishly expensive American hardware; other countries’ weapons are usually spectacularly cheaper. The military-industrial complex is priced at what the American Taxpayer will pay, not what the global market would.

So why has Mubarak’s hold weakened? It’s really quite simple.

In all his years, Mubarak had not appointed a vice-president, until yesterday. You see, Mubarak had been Anwar El Sadat’s VP when Sadat was assassinated following peace with Israel. So, Mubarak – who represented the military’s interests – quickly took over. He learned the lesson that having a VP ready to take over encourages assassination… so he didn’t appoint one.

In fact, the buzz was that he was arranging a dynastic succession by bloodline for Gamal Mubarak, his son. This caused a great deal of heartburn in the military, and it’s not hard to understand why. The military has, after all, essentially picked who would run Egypt since the Suez crisis. A dynastic succession would rip that power away from the military… and greatly reduce the institution’s clout in the long-term running of the government.

You can imagine how the leadership was not… enthused.

Furthermore, apparently Mubarak had promised to appoint Gen. Omar Suleiman, his long-time intelligence chief and the Robin to Mubarak’s Batman, the indispensable sidekick who had his fingers in Mubarak’s every pie, a supporter without peer with impeccable military generals. Then, Mubarak reneged and caused his #1 man to resent him for the act. Through Suleiman, the military itself was slighted, and found Mubarak shunning it in favor of his own flesh and blood.

This is how Mubarak’s authority was damaged. It is hardly worthy of an air of mystery.

The larger problem is why younger members of the military are joining protesters or otherwise not exactly suppressing them. Well, that too is relatively simple: unlike the police/ internal security forces, the army is composed of draftees who are brought in from the general population. Therefore, these individuals are young, male, and really don’t have any special reason to love Mubarak. Certainly, no reason to favor him over the public at large.

Mubarak ran a police state, not an army state. Today, it shows. Without the police in the street and handling things, he has a critical lack of allies here.

Authority Flows From Power

It isn’t that Mubarak lacks power because his authority is weak. It is that he lacks authority because his power is a lot weaker than it has been in the past, and is being tested beyond the limits of his allies’ willingness to back him.

This has nothing to do with legitimacy. It has to do with force, pure and simple, and Mubarak doesn’t have enough of it vested in himself to guarantee a positive outcome.

Now, Mubarak’s made the simplest and most positive move he could make to rectify this: he appointed Suleiman as his vice-president. This makes it highly unlikely Gamel can succeed his father, and gives the army leadership a reason to save Mubarak’s skin.

The question is, is it too late? Can the army leadership save his skin? Or will the army rank and file simply refuse to obey orders?

Remember, weapons without people are garbage. They are utterly useless. It all comes down to organization.

Besides Islam, what holds Egypt together is police and military discipline. And with the police out of the way – for that matter, the army is actually helping keep the police out of the way – it comes down to how much military discipline these draftees have to spare.

If it comes down to who has the most discipline, the army or the Muslim Brotherhood, then Egypt as we know it is on borrowed time.

There are no guarantees here, but put simply, Mubarak got greedy. He openly led a campaign to cut the army out of its (self-styled) birthright to determine the fate of the state. As he is not loved, he put himself in a position where he had to rely on the fear his police generated; once this fear lapsed, and he actually had to rely on the army, he became its prisoner; and now that he is its prisoner, the army itself is a prisoner of its own rank and file.

In such a situation, people default to the strongest authority they know.

Do you really think that authority is democracy? Human rights? Economic resentment? Class consciousness?

Or is it Islam?

I guess we’re going to find out soon enough. – J

About the author: Jeremiah Bourque is a professional Japanese and English language tutor. Former professional Japanese to English translator, culminating in translating the “Slayers” light novels (1 through 8) for TOKYOPOP. Has written about strategy, politics, history, and many subjects large and small.

An Idea That Didn’t Come Easily

It is not an exaggeration to say that I spent a large chunk of my life working towards what I am writing in this article. I knew there was something here, and I was searching for specifics, but those specifics – and words useful for describing them – were very elusive. Finally, I have found a proper mental frame for this.

In political thought, there are basically, when you boil everything down, two theories.

Theory #1 is that the human mind is a battlefield to be conquered and taken over. You break a person’s “prejudices” down (another word might be “culture”) and instill a wholly new set of values that reflect the will of the conqueror. I first wrote about this idea here, but the basic notion is at the core of all Western argument and debate.

Radicals tend to apply this concept to government and society as well. Although much of radicalism surrounds obtaining control over money, in fact, it is really the other way around: it is about obtaining money to gain control. Control is the heart of this theory: control over thought, control over behavior, control over circumstances. Exercising this control is the radical’s proof to himself, and other radicals, that he has won. Therefore, there is a constant search for control and a constant effort to display this control, even – or especially – over the most petty of issues.

Theory #2 is what I would call the stereotypical oriental ideal of agreement through mutual understanding: two wholly formed, adult sides discussing an issue for as long as it takes, without putting any pressure on each other whatsoever. This approach is not tried in the West because it never results in anything substantive. It is only tolerated in the East because “resulting in anything” is culturally besides the point. This is great at maintaining harmony between people who are on the same side, broadly speaking. It is really bad at resolving genuine differences.

So, I realized that neither of these theories suffice for the behavior I was trying to quantify. It is not about conquest, nor about talking each other to death.

Rather, it is about stretching.

Redefining Comfort Zones

We all enter situations with our own personal comfort zones. We have our own well developed ideas of the self, of what we can do and what we are willing to do.

Stretching the human psyche means taking a person out of that comfort zone, but without going beyond a person’s breaking point.

Yes, you can do this. The human mind can be stretched. If it could not, no labor contract would ever be signed. Until forced by deadlines and the credible threat of losing negotiated gains, no union wants to sign a deal; doing so, even for something that seems reasonable, will only convince people that either management is weak and could have been squeezed for more, or management is diabolical and has pulled the wool over the negotiators’ eyes. Whether management is mastermind or dunce, the union side believes that nothing is to be lost, and everything is to be gained, by intransigence. That is, until the proverbial or literal eleventh hour.

Contracts are signed because people redefine what they are willing to do when faced with an adverse circumstance.

However, people have a breaking point. Further, this breaking point is relative.

The Physical Characteristics of the Mind

Imagine an elastic band.

If you slowly pull on opposing sides of the band, the band will stretch a great deal.

If you violently tug on the band, the band will either reach a point beyond the capability of your hand strength to expand, or will snap without warning.

That is what “breaking” people is like. It works on some people; some people can be broken down and remade with rhetorical violence. Those upon whom it does not work will dig in their heels and resist you with all their might.

That is why real leadership is not about control. It is about influence.

Influence Peddling

Once upon a time, there were reasonably well functioning monarchies on the face of the Earth. These tended to decline greatly when the main raison d’etre of monarchy – leading the nation in war – became a quaint relic in the middle of the modern era. Nonetheless, monarchies were not established on a pure merit system, even in the days of Charlemagne or Henry V; ruling was not about your ability to physically crush all your immediate opposition.

Nor, however, was it about control. Control in a feudal monarchy was… impractical, and moreover, politically toxic. Proud peoples directly descended from what the Romans would have called barbarians, and perhaps at that time, not incorrectly, were filled with the sword and shield era’s equivalent of American advocates of the right to bear arms. Having conquered less warlike peoples, those who became “nobility” by virtue of their ancestors’ deeds clung to their arms, their rights, and their freedoms. Of course, this also went hand in hand with land, the financial security land provided (even in the cash-less or low-cash Dark Ages), and technological advantage (which in that day meant the cavalry warhorse).

No, it was not about control. It was about influence.

Kings found influence to be a far more reliable basis for running things. Knowing that they couldn’t control everything even if they tried, they didn’t try; rather, they established courts to take care of the really big and egregious problems and left local affairs to local rulers. After all, these same local rulers provided troops to the crown. Treating them like children would not work.

Having said this, successful kings had firm control over that which was theirs exclusively. Failure to keep your own house in order cost you influence fast.

But how does one influence a nation one does not directly control?

Rather than compete with every knight in the realm, kings addressed what their subjects could not. A lone knight might be better at swinging a sword or riding a horse, but he cannot build a cathedral. A baron might be able to build a small castle, but he cannot build and maintain a highway. A merchant might be able to establish a small fleet, but he cannot sustain a national navy, even a small one.

More importantly, the pageantry surrounding kings was a core part of the system. The idea was simple: stretch the existence of the monarchy beyond what others know in their daily lives, even the ranks of the nobility. That is, don’t be in a different dimension completely, but do establish yourself as something higher and apart.

You can’t just concede everything and expect to be respected. French kings who made themselves look like knights and act the part once every thirty years, only to lose spectacularly in actual battle, made a real hash of the Hundred Years War until things were quite desperate, but they were doing this during the decline in the battlefield role of the horseman. A king trying too hard to live up to the ideal of a knight has it backwards; the king needs to be a good king first, and let other people worry about being good knights. Anything else is just showing your own lack of confidence.

With The People, But Not Of Them

A businessman who will remain nameless for purposes of this article is known to me.

This businessman has fairly good relationships with his employees, and has a tendency to work them rather hard in the context of a thriving construction based business. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement for the well compensated employees and, of course, for the businessman owning the enterprise.

This man has been invited to the homes of his employees for dinner, and he has, on occasion, accepted such invitations, treating the homes of his employees with respect. However, there are two very important caveats.

First, he never shows any favor for anything like that. No one is buying him off with a dinner.

Second, he never goes drinking with his employees. He could, he is free to, but he does not.

He is their boss. He is not their drinking buddy. He can be friendly with them, he can eat at the same table without reservation, but the lines are never blurred. Authority is kept black and white so that no one expects favor for social relationships – because no one is going to get any with him, so they’d better not get that idea.

Thus, he is able to interact with his employees in a no-nonsense, personable way, but he is never mistaken for “one of the guys.” If he was, that would be the funeral for his influence. No matter what his levers of control might be, only brute financial force would be useful for maintaining any order in his business.

Instead, he keeps it clean, people know where he stands, and they respect that.

Now, I’ve seen a film where a Roman Consul drinks with the men and even engages in fistfights with them, but that’s not really how it’s done, and it’s not because consuls were stuck-up pricks (though I imagine a lot were). It’s because they can’t have people thinking they are the same as others. The leader must be different.

It doesn’t take much, and a leader who stays close to the men is often much appreciated for it, but there is a line that must not be crossed, or contempt will be the result.

Applying These Lessons

Maybe it doesn’t seem like a big thing, but when you see how mental conquest is the foundation of enormous quantities of social and political activity in modern times, maybe it becomes more obvious how the limitations of breaking into someone’s mental house and beating him up are big factors in judging where to show restraint.

But, a lot of people see “judicious restraint” as nothing but pure weakness. Sure: if you see the world as all control and no influence, any let-up in control is weakness.

It’s just not so, that’s all.

Even considering the oriental philosophy bit, real business is done by making the other party stretch its psyche without breaking it.

That is, it may be outside what we call “the comfort zone,” but the person or group is still comfortable enough to do business.

This is the sweet spot of life.

This is where you attract customers but don’t scare them off. This is where you invite people in your life without wearing your heart on your sleeve. This is where you bring people to your side without crowding them. This is where you use a crisp, clean logo rather than one that beats the customer over the head.

What makes it more complicated is that people are different and have different properties. Some respond well to extremes; others shy away from them. Some people like roller coasters; others would be terrified to ride them (in a bad way).

Yet the principle is the same.

Once you understand the principle, the rest is just fine tuning for specific circumstances.

Elegance

The destination of all this thought is the idea of elegance.

Elegance means ramping back on the control freak business without simply bringing things to an end. Where control ends, art begins.

Art that acts as a vehicle, gently carrying a person’s mind forward, is something that influences without appearing to command a particular outcome. It is the carrot, not the stick.

The stick still exists. The stick is out of the way, out of sight and out of mind. It never comes out unless it has to.

The carrot is relied upon. The carrot is made interesting and attractive. The carrot is made the centerpiece of existence, but subtly and without force.

This is the art of elegance.

By employing elegance, the human psyche is gently stretched in the direction the artist desires. The other party is permitted to enjoy that which fills the gap between control and pure nothingness. The other party is empowered to discover what has been laid along the path.

There is nothing crude about this. Yet by the same token, there is nothing weak about this.

Crudeness is not strength; it is fear of weakness.

Elegance, on the other hand, is proof of confidence; and thus, strength.

These are my observations of the world around us, the people in the world, and life. – J

About the author: Jeremiah Bourque is a professional Japanese and English language tutor. Former professional Japanese to English translator, culminating in translating the “Slayers” light novels (1 through 8) for TOKYOPOP. Has written about strategy, politics, history, and many subjects large and small.

The Spiritual Core

As readers of this blog may be aware, I am a person who has thoroughly read and studied Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. I even wrote a book explaining the terse passages at some length, with less arcane language, though I’d be kidding if I said it was successful; I just didn’t want to let the inspiration lapse. Besides, it was good to get everything out; I can shorten and write about specific things at will, and it’s easier.

But Sun Tzu can’t teach you everything.

Ultimately, The Art of War was written for generals; high ranking servants of the state with a specific, unforgiving task. It doesn’t really get into the issue of how to be a leader. Why would it? It’s highly presumptive for a general to be telling a king how to be a king.

Honestly, one thing that frustrates me when reading novels that include royalty of some kind, and so forth, is the idea that being a king is hard or complicated. Becoming a king is certainly a nearly impossible task. Actually staying in power, and exercising it… that’s not as hard as people make it out to be.

As for being complicated… when a leader is losing himself in complexity, that leader ceases to be effective. Put another way, officials can always make things more complex, but only the leader can keep things simple.

This is a critical role.

Animal Spirits: The Intangibles of Leadership

Animal spirits is a term that has been used in the past by economists to theorize about the business cycle. The idea is to invoke non-Christian religions and treat these ideas like, well, totems; animals as metaphors for action. Thus, the wolf, tiger, hawk, bear, and so on, represent drive, vibrancy, and motion.

Strategy gives a person a large array of tools with which to analyze a situation for the pursuit of goals. Establishing those goals, and prioritizing those goals, is the province of the leader.

More to the point, only the leader can do it.

Being a “details person” is rarely an asset in leadership. If it is an asset, it’s only because this type of leader learns the discipline to focus his or her understanding of details on those issues which are most important and most critical to the organization. In other words, it means narrowly focusing on a small set of problems, even though the set of problems for any organization is obscenely large.

No one else has the liberty or the perspective to choose which small details require this kind of personal attention. Everyone else has been assigned tasks and, for better or worse, people are not going to be sticking their noses into the tasks of others without creating, or being on the receiving end of, a lot of interpersonal hardship and organizational chaos.

Only the leader can bring focus.

In many personal combat situations, with opponents roughly matched in strength and reflexes, seeming to move faster is not a function of “speed,” but of eliminating wasted motion. Through not expending energy, time, and space on unnecessary movements, the combatant appears to move faster.

Thus, focus produces velocity.

Harnessing the Animal Spirits

Focus is a small word encompassing a lot of big things.

It isn’t a matter of following a list of numbered steps. It’s about lavishing attention on what is important, and impressing upon other people that their attention should be on what is important, too.

Not what is important for them as individuals. They’ll do that anyway. Their jobs demand they do so. No, the leader has to focus people on what is important for the organization, even if this goes beyond the formal individual responsibilities of each person.

Who else is going to do it?

After all, the true nature of the animal spirits is simple enough: they are the energy and drive of your people, harnessed towards a goal that is clear and evident to all.

The leader isn’t imposing leadership because his own energy can see this through. That’s not possible. It is only through his own energy pushing others to use their energy, that which they generate on their own with their own hopes and dreams, individual brilliance and group coherence, that makes an organization shine.

The goal is clear and evident because the leader makes the goal clear and evident. What is required to accomplish this is made simple because the leader makes it simple.

The real world will make everything complicated enough later. Only a simple, powerful idea that people can latch on to can overcome these innumerable obstacles.

Mysticism used as metaphor is for describing this process, not replacing it. Having vivid mental concepts is great, and I love to use them, but one should never forget that descriptions are formidable when they are connected to something in the real world.

Amusing Origins

The Economist has an entry for Animal Spirits reading thusly:

The colourful name that KEYNES gave to one of the essential ingredients of economic prosperity: confidence. According to Keynes, animal spirits are a particular sort of confidence, “naive optimism”. He meant this in the sense that, for entrepreneurs in particular, “the thought of ultimate loss which often overtakes pioneers, as experience undoubtedly tells us and them, is put aside as a healthy man puts aside the expectation of death”. Where these animal spirits come from is something of a mystery. Certainly, attempts by politicians and others to talk up confidence by making optimistic noises about economic prospects have rarely done much good.

What silliness.

Confidence isn’t about some politician mouthing off. It is confidence in yourself and what you are prepared to do to make a business work.

Business is not a game of roulette. It is an undertaking where effort is king.

The king just has to focus that effort in order to make it productive – figuratively as well as literally.

Ruling a jungle means occasionally having to get up and swat something. It’s just a matter of knowing when to get up, and what to swat.

It’s about focus.

About the author: Jeremiah Bourque is a professional Japanese and English language tutor. Former professional Japanese to English translator, culminating in translating the “Slayers” light novels (1 through 8) for TOKYOPOP. Has written about strategy, politics, history, and many subjects large and small.

A Failure In Leadership

This article is based on a historically important article in the New York Times on the BP oil disaster. I will be referencing this article.

Point of Failure #1

The article, which is important and should be read in full, walks us through publicly known (though not all well known) data about the BP oil spill. Indeed, many of the details are known to me as an avid reader of news. The article does contribute greatly to our understanding of the human elements, and it is on this, and not technical issues, that I wish to focus.

But Mr. Holloway detected no concern in the drill shack. Whether the team was distracted by other tasks or rushing to get done or simply complacent may never be known.

“The question is why these experienced men out on that rig talked themselves into believing that this was a good test,” said Sean Grimsley, a lawyer for a presidential commission investigating the disaster.

“None of these men out on that rig want to die.”

Actually, it’s not hard to understand at all.

BP (formerly British Petroleum)’s executives were there on a mission: to get a troublesome well finished and capped before storm season. The New York Yankees of the drilling industry, with a perfect safety record for the preceding several years, had done the drilling fast – but fast creates risks.

At the critical point, BP’s people were talking with the Transocean people (who actually operated the rig).

Strictly speaking, the BP people did not veto ideas of proceeding more cautiously in the face of an unsatisfactory test as to whether there was any leakage of gas from the well. (You know, leaking gas can be, well, bad…) Rather, it’s that the BP people engaged in a filibuster, talking the idea to death until the Transocean people, under immense financial and business pressure (and the upcoming hurricane season) to get things done now, “talked themselves” into agreeing with an approach based on business issues and not safety.

Any objective observer would have screamed foul, but Transocean could not be objective. Not with BP people physically present and creating immense psychological pressure on Transocean’s people… but there was never a “veto,” and thus, never a specific decision that could be traced to a specific individual.

To the modern management mindset, an untraceable decision is an advantage. In a situation regarding industrial safety, it is a point of failure, a proverbial disaster waiting to happen, soon followed by a real disaster.

But we are not finished.

Point of Failure #2

Up on the bridge, the crew was busy showing off the Horizon’s impressive capabilities to the V.I.P.’s.

Andrea Fleytas, one of the bridge officers, felt a jolt. Curt Kuchta, the 34-year-old captain, also sensed something wrong. There was a high-pitched hissing. On a closed-circuit television, they could see mud flying into the sea.

Suddenly, gas alarms began lighting up Ms. Fleytas’s computer console. The lights showed gas spreading over the rig, from the drilling floor to the main deck. There were so many alarms it was hard to keep track of where gas was being detected. More frightening still, the lights were all magenta, signaling extremely high levels of combustible gas.

Don’t forget about the first line of this quoted text. It’s important.

After discussing how Transocean had changed the general alarm system to a manual one:

Ms. Fleytas, 23, had graduated from maritime school in 2008 and had only been on the Horizon for 18 months. This was her first well-control emergency. But she had been trained, she said, to immediately sound the general master alarm if two or more sensors detected gas. She knew it had to be activated manually. She also knew how important it was to get crew members out of spaces filled with gas.

Yet with as many as 20 sensors glowing magenta on her console, Ms. Fleytas hesitated. She did not sound the general master alarm. Instead she began pressing buttons that told the system that the bridge crew was aware of the alarms.

“It was a lot to take in,” she testified. “There was a lot going on.”

I’m keeping my quotations to the minimum possible, but this is the critical point.

First of all… have you ever had an alarm clock? Quite a lot of alarms come with a snooze button. Pressing this allows you to have the alarm temporarily stop ringing. After a fixed period of time, the alarm rings again. This allows a person to “snooze” for a time.

I don’t like snooze buttons. I could quite literally press a snooze button without realizing it, turning an alarm off and rendering the alarm impotent. For this reason, I keep my alarm clock physically out of reach. True story.

So, I don’t think the New York Times got this part quite right in terms of the implications.

Obviously, as in accordance with the article itself, the general master alarm was set so that it would not automatically activate immediately upon detection of dangerous gases. The key word, however, is immediately.

There’s no way that this woman would have had to press buttons to make the alarms go away unless it was similar to a snooze button: a manual override to avoid the general master alarm triggering after X period of time. This is a technological question, and if no one’s picking up on it, I’ll be very clear: this woman was muting the alarms.

Of course, we may ask ourselves… why?

Let’s go back to the top of the quoted text: because a gaggle of BP executives were being shown around the bridge.

The BP executives need not have ordered anyone to mute alarms. Indeed, it is extremely likely they did not. At this critical moment, they did damage merely by existing.

God Is Coming – Look Busy

My father used to work at IBM.

It was a very long time ago. His mindset truly is far better suited to being an inventor of a tool for the housing construction industry… which he now is. Patent pending. But, that is not the point of this story.

While at IBM, he was told by an executive that

God is coming in three weeks. – Nameless IBM executive

Treating this like a military inspection by a high-ranking officer, “real” work effectively stopped as the office building was subjected to an overhaul, including a complete repainting to make it look pristine for the higher ranking executive VIP, i.e. “God“. The pressure to look good is titanic, and is rolled downhill by the people in charge of a facility to even the lowliest worker. The word goes out, similar to what is usually thought of as a joke: “Jesus is coming. Look busy!”

The absolute last thing that people want to have happen during one of these inspections is for dirty laundry to be aired in front of VIP’s.

Remember, Transocean had a perfect safety record going back years. It was the cream of the crop for drilling rigs. This is why it had been picked to complete a behind schedule, technically difficult project that ought to have been treated with more care from the top down.

To sound that general master alarm would have meant heads would roll. It would have been an embarrassment. The woman could have lost her own job; or, she could have cost the job of one of her bosses and become persona non grata in the team. She would have been squealing, exposing internal business.

In other words, she made herself believe that the alarms couldn’t possibly mean what they did, because she felt the breath of the VIP’s on the back of her neck.

It isn’t that the VIP’s did anything in particular.

It isn’t that the VIP’s ordered her not only to not sound the general master alarm, but to hit the mother of all snooze buttons and silence the alarm system.

It isn’t that the VIP’s made her say they had a situation rather than say they had a well breach.

It is that the presence of VIP’s, in and of itself, made anything else too horrible to contemplate.

So, under immense stress, she cracked.

Not stress because an explosion was pending.

Not stress because she wasn’t trained to do what she should have done.

But stress because the VIP’s were right on the bridge at the critical moment.

For The Record

In the midst of trying to say that none of the general shutdown operations would have necessarily worked, well, it’s like what people say about Communism: they were never really tried.

In particular, this woman’s lawyer makes the point that:

Ms. Fleytas said it never occurred to her to use the emergency shutdown system. In any event, she explained, she had not been taught how to use it. “I don’t know of any procedures,” she said.

No, her job was not to use the emergency shutdown system. Her job was to sound the general master alarm, to alert to other people that they should use the emergency shutdown system.

That’s why a system that relies on people can break down when put under extreme stress: the stress of the presence of VIP’s.

Point of Failure #3

This is a broader point in some sense but… anyway, bear with me:

By 8 p.m., after redoing the test, they all agreed that the Macondo was stable. In a few hours, the drilling crew’s 21-day hitch would be done. They were working unusually fast. In seven years on the Horizon, Joseph Keith had never seen so much activity while sealing a well, and it made him uncomfortable. His job included monitoring gauges that detect blowouts. But all the jobs going on at once — transferring mud to a supply vessel, cleaning mud pits, repairing a pump — could throw off his instruments. Mr. Keith did not tell anyone that he was worried about his ability to monitor the well. “I guess I just didn’t think of it at the time,” he later testified.

You’ll see why I focused on this in a second:

Mr. Holloway and Mr. Barron were working on the main deck when Mr. Holloway happened to glance up at the drilling floor. He could not believe it. Drilling mud was gushing up from the well, just like a water fountain.

It would be nine minutes before the first explosion, well data shows.

Nine precious minutes.

The drilling crew had trained for blowouts. Floorhands like Mr. Holloway were the crucial first responders. A driller would call “Blowout!” and time their response. This usually involved quickly installing a special valve on the drill pipe to end the imagined blowout.

But confronted with the real thing for the first time, Mr. Holloway realized there were no floorhands on the drilling floor to respond.

So why weren’t there any floorhands on the drilling floor to respond? Because they were doing all sorts of other things!!!

This is critically important context. By splitting up the two parts, it may make for a more gripping tale, but the New York Times isn’t doing its most to tell us why those floorhands were absent. Fortunately, I was able to remember immediately and group the two parts together for this post.

No Clear Responsibility – That’s The Problem

So, there’s no one person who clearly deserves the blame. There’s no one person we can point to and say, “He was in charge.” There’s not even a group of easily defined people that we can say, “These people bear the direct responsibility upon their shoulders, and their shoulders only.”

That’s kind of the point. No one was responsible because there was no clear command structure, creating ripe conditions for manipulating safety protocols.

This manipulation did not require orders, either verbal or written. It was simply a product of management pressure through physical presence, talking a real-life safety problem away by making it seem not critically important, by taking advantage of areas of possible ignorance (i.e. Transocean’s people weren’t really trained in how to second guess an initial bad test; that’s why they ought not have tried, but they let themselves get talked into it), and by just in general having a one-track mind and being focused solely on the schedule and on the financial bottom line.

And to a man, these people will say it’s not their fault because they’re oil executives, not drillers, and it was Transocean’s responsibility to drill safely. In other words, Transocean’s people’s responsibility to tell them, to their faces, that they were ignorant hacks with no place on a rig performing a delicate and critical operation, who were rushing the workers and creating stress that encouraged sloppiness and distraction that could lead to a monumental industrial, corporate, and ecological disaster.

Right, no problem. Transocean will get right on it. Sure. Sure it will.

Let’s call this the New and Improved Golden Rule.

He who owns the black gold makes the rules. – Me

There’s no way in hell that Transocean’s people were going to tell the petroleum industry giant BP that it was making operations unsafe through its people acting like they owned the place. The percentage of ownership interest and BP being the operating partner of the well really isn’t the point here; it’s that VIP’s were interfering with the operational command of the oil rig at the exact moment disaster was most likely to strike, and at the exact moment the rig was the most vulnerable, in large part because listening to BP’s sweet whisperings had caused Transocean to distribute its people throughout the oil well on various duties to save time under what is, in hindsight, an infuriating and maddening presumption that things were safe and no one really needed to be minding the store.

A Hard Lesson For Leaders Everywhere

There is no strategy in bringing chaos to your subordinates’ efforts.

When a leader appears, it should be to make things better, and not worse.

It isn’t as if the party line on inspections by VIP’s is obscure and secret. This is how the real world works. An inspection making all sorts of waves is the least likely way to get an accurate view of the true situation, as junior “officers” spare no effort to deceive senior “officers” that things are better than they seem.

A group of high ranking people combines all of the disadvantages of leadership presence while providing none of the benefits.

Failure to establish clarity in who is in charge contributes to disaster.

Those with the knowledge and competence to run local affairs should not be interfered with without proper cause.

To hide behind blurred lines of responsibility while mouthing platitudes of “no one said to compromise safety” ignores that you do not have to say it to bring about that result. It is an abdication of responsibility.

A system that relies on human beings will break down under human created stress far more surely than stress created by inanimate objects.

When people feel they do not have the freedom to raise alarm, figuratively or (in this case) literally, history and training do not matter; people will freeze out of deference to human beings.

When a strategic failure is compounded by a leadership failure, disaster truly strikes.

Just because people go around saying “no one could have predicted this” does not change the above. I admit, “No one could have predicted this” is one of my least favorite lines. It is spoken in cases where it is completely untrue, and where someone should have predicted problems, but chose not to; and where someone should have overcome problems, but came up short.

Please, learn from these fools. Please. – J

About the author: Jeremiah Bourque is a professional Japanese and English language tutor. Former professional Japanese to English translator, culminating in translating the “Slayers” light novels (1 through 8) for TOKYOPOP. Has written about strategy, politics, history, and many subjects large and small.

Baseball Idioms In Politics

Here’s an excerpt from this article on a bill to boost health compensation to “first responders” (health workers, firefighters, police officers) who responded to the World Trade Center attacks and are believed to have suffered higher rates of cancer etc. as a result.

“It’s the ninth inning and we need a good closer to win the game,” U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney told the bill’s supporters at their rally at the Capital Visitors Center, and she called upon President Obama to use his clout to sway Republican Senators.

The context is that failure to pass this bill now will lead to greater Republican resistance once the results of the November election have kicked in with the new session. Therefore, its best chance of passing is right now.

This creates fertile ground for calling this the ninth (9th) inning, which is the last opportunity (in a game that is not tied) for a team that is losing to win the game. For the team in the lead, a closer is a replacement pitcher who is fresh, good, and skilled, whose job is to come in and protect the lead, and therefore close the game and protect the win.

So, President Obama is being urged to be that closer: to come in and lobby Congress and make the bill pass before time runs out.

Whether the bill (and the fees assessed to pay for it) is a good thing in and of itself is beyond the scope of this blog and this post.

About the author: Jeremiah Bourque is a professional Japanese and English language tutor. Former professional Japanese to English translator, culminating in translating the “Slayers” light novels (1 through 8) for TOKYOPOP. Has written about strategy, politics, history, and many subjects large and small.

It’s Not Realistic

Background Here

If you peruse the above article, U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden is carrying the flag for Department of Justice (DOJ) efforts to prosecute Julian Assange, who Biden characterizes as more of a “high-tech terrorist” than a publisher of secrets.

Let’s back up for a second and review a salient fact in light of the Pentagon Papers incident.

Daniel Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. There had not been any controversy about the ability of the DOJ to charge him on behalf of the Pentagon and, in legal terms, the People of the United States of America. The case fell apart not because of concerns about the applicability of the act, but because President Nixon had the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist broken into for incriminating evidence, among other prosecution misconduct. The charges were dropped before a judge threw them out of court to even greater embarrassment.

The only reason this case went to the Supreme Court (as New York Times Co. v. United States) is because the DOJ sought to ban publication before the fact, what is known in legal terms as prior restraint. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that prior restraint bore a heavy legal burden for the American government, and, as two lower courts had ruled, the Nixon administration had not met this high legal burden, which would prove that the national interests of the United States would be irreparably harmed by publication.

Lack of prior restraint did not indemnify the New York Times Co. from being sued later, but that didn’t happen, did it?

So it’s not that Assange can’t be charged. It’s also that it isn’t unprecedented; it’s just not well-precedented outside WWI war hysteria and a wide range of legal abuses that took place under the Espionage Act of 1917. Now, this act was revised later, but I still don’t think that’s the point. The Ellsberg prosecution was never found lacking on the merits of the Act; it was tossed due to misconduct. It’s not that the legal foundation of the charge had lost in court.

The Assange Case

While speaking high-minded about his not being able to comment on the process of searching for legal grounds to prosecute Assange, he pushed a narrative that has been pushed into the media from anonymous sources: that Assange conspired with Bradley Manning, the Private First Class being held for downloading wholesale from an unwisely created mass database of intelligence related diplomatic cables that there is no way a member of the Army would have had access to prior to the creation of this database. Supposedly the guy who turned Manning in had cut and pasted chat logs showing Manning talking to Assange over the Internet but can’t prove it to us because the FBI has his hard drive.

As someone who has used chat programs extensively, well, you can fake a log. It’s not actually that difficult. You just have to do a lot of plain text, and it’s 100% proportional to the length of the alleged conversation.

Assange has denied knowing Manning, so we’re left with three scenarios.

1. Assange is telling the truth and did not communicate with Manning beforehand.
2. Assange is telling a half-truth and did not know Manning, but had communicated with him over the Internet.
3. Assange is telling a complete lie and did know Manning’s nature, at least enough to know he was a uniformed soldier with access to intelligence.

So where does this leave the government case?

Put very bluntly, either the government can prove Assange conspired before the fact, or it cannot. If it can, Assange is in a heap of trouble.

If it can’t, the government is left with with a case that Assange’s promise to publish secrets and his own, shall we say, hacker lifestyle, provoked Manning to commit crimes and leak the data even if neither man knew each other, and even if neither had spoken a word to each other through direct Internet communication.

Biden’s words leave either prosecution scenario open.

Conclusion

While either case seems a dream, the latter case is truly an exceptional reach. It’s grasping at straws.

Look, either the government has logs and can backtrack using Internet Service Provider (ISP) data and all its fancy tricks for hunting down spies and Al Qaeda to prove that Manning talked to Assange, or it can’t. It’s not just a matter of whether or not it happened; it’s a matter of having the proof.

Until that proof emerges and is certain, prosecuting Wikileaks and Julian Assange remains just a dream.

All Biden is doing is gently rowing the boat a little.

About the author: Jeremiah Bourque is a professional Japanese and English language tutor. Former professional Japanese to English translator, culminating in translating the “Slayers” light novels (1 through 8) for TOKYOPOP. Has written about strategy, politics, history, and many subjects large and small.

A Contradiction In Terms

The problem with trying to write an article about Canadian culture is rather simple. As a Canadian, I am well placed to be fully aware that most Canadians have renounced any concept of a Canadian culture.

There’s an awful lot of identity, and built upon that (or is that the other way around?), a lot of identity politics. In other words, very little is taught in the schools about how to feel, and a great, great deal is taught about how to respect who others are… and to a much smaller degree, to respect who you, yourself, are, in terms of the identity of your ethnic group.

Contrary to something I read at a website while researching this article, normal Canadians do not treat “ethnic” as a dirty word. We all have ethnic groups, including plain old descendants from England proper; I am not among them. Therefore, “English” is an ethnic group, as is “French,” or if you want to cut it a lot thinner, “Quebecois,” often confused with the broader term “French-Canadian,” and “Acadians,” who are usually forgotten and treated as appendixes when the term “French-Canadian” comes up. In fact, forget Acadians. Don’t bother assuming they’re being referred to when the word “French-Canadian” is used. If people mean Acadian, they’ll say so – and they probably don’t.

As a practical matter, aside from French-Canadians (who have a historic special status guaranteed since the start of Canada itself), you’re either what’s called a “visible minority,” such as  ”First Nations,” which is the “in” term for a “native person,” at one time called Aboriginals or Indians or what have you, but if you can use a specific tribal name, go ahead and use that; blacks; Jews; or something else visible along those lines, or you’re just another Caucasian and no one cares what your ethnicity is. You’re just plain vanilla, nothing special.

So unless you’re part of a “special group” deemed by academics and political activists to deserve more attention than others, there is essentially no Canadian culture taught in schools whatsoever. (The preceding caveat exempted.)

Canadian “culture” is therefore very hard to define, because very little effort is expended into studying such a thing. Instead, there is some effort on studying history – to a point – but with an emphasis on getting away from “dead white men” and spreading attention around, diluting the little that Canadians tended to recall of their own history into a pool of near nothingness.

However, we can make a very limited number of broad observations.

1. Canadians are united by Canada

In other words, Canadians are, broadly speaking, united by actually liking Canada. They find Canada to be a nice place to live, a vast country with a high level of technology, a decent level of economic development and wealth befitting a “first world” civilized country, and limits to the reach of urban sprawl and the crush of humanity… depending on where you actually want to live. You could always pick a forgotten rural place like I live in, but recent immigrants tend to flock by identity in the major cities.

2. …Unless they’re not

The long-running drama of Quebec separatism has left a lot of bad blood over the years. The push for “Quebec sovereignty” (the in-vogue term among separatists) failed some years ago after coming very close to making the first step towards an awkward break-up of the country.

Certainly we cannot claim that the losers of that argument are motivated by a special love of Canada. It may be their country, but as a result of worked-up feeling over the whole issue of Quebec being a former French colony militarily conquered by the British, there is no attachment to the Queen of England, “the Crown,” and all the trappings of British civilization.

3. English is a tool

English is not learned because of some kind of special attachment to it. While broadly speaking, the Canadian education system regards British spellings and pronunciations as correct and American variations as incorrect, practicality and the mixing of language makes Canadian English a middle ground, neither wholly British nor wholly American. As such, it is very accessible, and Canadians who resist the temptation to overuse regional dialects usually have no difficulty being understood around the English-speaking world.

4. Official state institutions are overwhelmingly British

This is a product of history, but the important thing to understand is that British trappings of the state mean as much to Canadians as Roman trappings of the state meant to the citizens of ancient Rome; namely, very little in practice. Unless the issue is an immensely specific one, such as using “common law” as the basis of the civil court system rather than the Napoleonic Code, or the coats of arms used on official documents, British culture is mainly the legacy of colonial history: architecture, monuments, military organization, and the heavy use of the word “Royal” in regards to organs of the state. (Example: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or RCMP.)

My point being, respecting these institutions is respecting the state, which most Canadians actually like. These trappings are NOT to be confused with the cultural identity of the majority of Canadians. People identify with them, or don’t, as individuals and groups, but it is not some sort of universal cultural monolith.

5. We’re Not All The Same – And That’s OK

As  such, with the major caveat that these British trappings of the state are considered vital to keeping Canada together as a country (which we may shorthand as “the greater good”), the defining trait of Canadian culture is the tolerance of ethnic cultural identity. People may not agree with something, but they will keep their disagreements out of the public arena and will tolerate it without complaint.

So no, we’re not all the same. We know it, it’s not going to change… and that’s OK. There is NO ENFORCED IDENTITY beyond the barest of the bare minimums.

That’s why I titled this article “so-called Canadian culture.” When you really boil it down, there is a broad Canadian identity, but to call any of this “culture” approaches bad joke status.

It’s Not All OK, Honestly

Even given the really thin things that we can peg as “Canadian culture,” or as I propose, “Canadian identity,” the schools are doing a very poor job of actually teaching this. Though, I suppose that isn’t all that different from the other subjects they’re not teaching as well these days…

Still, the point is, if you try to make culture something that is everything to all people, soon you have something that is nothing to everyone.

Some may find this enlightened. It has practical problems which are unfortunate, but nothing is going to be done about it, so that’s how it is.

Non-Identity/ Cross-Identity Culture

So if we can firmly lay to rest the idea that Canadians are one people in any acceptable sense of the term, we can take a brief look at culture that is not rooted in “identity,” or more importantly, identity politics, that plague upon civilization. (And yes that is my opinion – J)

Two examples will suffice, but I intend to get much more into this genre of writing in the future.

1. Hockey

In Canada, hockey is not only the de facto national sport (yes we know lacrosse was declared the national sport but do you see anyone care? No? I thought not…), it is a sport that has always crossed the English/ French cultural, geographic and linguistic divide.

While I’m sure a lot of this was rooting for one’s own group against the other, it wasn’t especially rooted in anything ethnic; it was rooted in cities and the realities of those cities. It’s the sort of tribalism that goes back to the Romans. We could call them the Reds and the Blues instead of the Canadiens and the Maple Leafs, and it wouldn’t change a thing.

Hockey is a very physical sport, but it is also one that requires a great deal of skill, a sport that rewards strategy and team play, and yet does not lose sight of individual accomplishment. When it moves, it moves quickly, so like with international football/ “soccer,” there can be fast turnarounds. This has made the sport a rewarding one for fans, historically.

Nowadays, Canadian nationals play for American teams left and right, European players have made strong entrances, Americans even play… and expansion of the so-called National Hockey League (even though two countries are spanned!) and financial stagnation of the dwindling Canadian teams has greatly altered the sport since its heyday. Nonetheless, it is a sport for which interest crosses many identities, peoples, and cultures, without the slightest regard for WHO you are, only for what you can do on the ice.

This is refreshing.

2. Comedy

Jim Carrey is perhaps the most currently famous of this group, but Canada has been the birthplace of a great many comedians’ careers. Not only this, but Canada has a reputation for producing good comedy, which is certainly something to be grateful for. Granted, not all is good, but it is nonetheless one of the small blessings of the country.

With Canada not having been able to support anything like Hollywood productions for most of the 20th century, comedy was a way for acting and speaking talent to emerge at very low production cost. Of course, no one would call Carrey cheap at this point in his career! However, the general principle holds: Canada has produced fine comedians who went on to fame and wealth, of varying degrees, in the United States.

Once again, comedy is not the monopoly of any ethnic group or ethnic culture. Some is much more specific than others – Jewish humor should be left to Jewish comics for reasons of propriety, after all – but a great deal of comedy is nonetheless universal, something people can appreciate across cultural boundaries.

Anyway, that’s the gist of it.

Canadian Culture: Broad, Thin, But Strong

It may be fair to say that the Quebec separation dispute led to a great deal more displays of “Canadian culture” (heavily financed by the government of the day, which became a subsequent political issue) than had been the case for quite some time beforehand.

The real point about “Canadian culture” is that it is not restrictive. If you follow certain very broad guidelines of acceptability, tolerance runs very high. Conversely, Canadians tend to cling very strongly to the things they can identify with the country itself, which is overwhelmingly popular, even though it is a colonial construct and was only reinvented after the fact as a multicultural bonanza.

The real bottom line is, teaching, promoting, and enforcing “Canadian culture” would make tolerance of ethnic and cultural identity utterly meaningless.

That’s why you see very little teaching and promoting of it. And enforcing? Ha. Please.

Sorry, that was a Canadian trying to be funny.

About the author: Jeremiah Bourque is a professional Japanese and English language tutor. Former professional Japanese to English translator, culminating in translating the “Slayers” light novels (1 through 8) for TOKYOPOP. Has written about strategy, politics, history, and many subjects large and small.

Movie Logic

In American television and film culture, or put another way, movie logic, we encounter, with overwhelming frequency, the flawed, imperfect action hero.

The flaws in this hero are usually obvious. They are easy to see, and easy to understand. The hero may be, in fact, a quite despicable person in many respects; the flaw varies, but it is usually there.

In romance novels, the heroine is rarely the most beautiful woman in the book. In action movies, the hero is rarely the most “pure,” but this is usually spun as a necessary trait. After all, people who are content and normal would never be able to put everything on the line (including their own lives) and “do what has to be done.”

Among the key features of the imperfect hero is a period of doubt leading to doubts being thrown away. In other words, a hero has some kind of dramatic setback, a time during which he is weakened and must rely on others. At times this is because of serious physical injury; at other times, it is because of some sort of shock, or even apathy which the hero must then be shaken out of.

Whether fully recovered or not, the hero is compelled by events to put himself in danger of death, often to inflict death and destruction upon others for a cause. This cause may be more noble; often, it is simply personal, something the person cannot let go of regardless of “right” and “wrong.” This, too, is something that the male viewing audience will relate to, because “being right” is not the only determining factor.

We pick our sides. We often pick our sides for reasons of family, friendship, and honor. We humans are not purely creatures of logic; though many of us would, if we were in that kind of business, flock to the villains of the movies for employment, money, and protection from the norms of society, we want to deny our weaknesses by sympathizing with a figure of strength. This is not perfect strength, but that makes that strength more accessible to us as viewers.

In other words, we may not be able to imagine ourselves as tough or as resourceful or as lucky as the hero on the screen, but we can at least cheer for him and agree with how he feels about the conflicts he faces. His physical victories become our moral victories, and even if he must perish in the end, we feel better having watched him take down bad people with him on the way out.

Of course, like romance movies, action heroes often have happier endings. This is partly to not leave a bad taste in the mouthes of the viewers; this is also because a dead hero means no sequels.

Really, though, it is not about the ending. It is about the journey.

It’s just that the occasional imperfect hero has to come to a bad ending to remind us that in real life, people who attempt to “play hero” suffer bad ends. That is, however, precisely why we cheer when we see them on the big screen – regardless of the final outcome.

About the author: Jeremiah Bourque is a professional Japanese and English language tutor. Former professional Japanese to English translator, culminating in translating the “Slayers” light novels (1 through 8) for TOKYOPOP. Has written about strategy, politics, history, and many subjects large and small.

A Flower Pot

By Jeremiah Bourque

This is a flower pot.

What is a flower pot for? It is not for cooking. It is for holding flowers.

One puts the flowers into the pot. The flowers are displayed while in the pot.

Flower pots are a feature of a great many homes. These pots are an important part of the English lifestyle, and many other kinds of lifestyles as well.

Flower pots are not just for flowers. The pots are used to move small plants around. Plants can be left outdoors in the sun; when cold weather or high winds approach, the plants are brought indoors while in their pots.

Flower pots can be simple or sophisticated. They can be very plain, but they can also be very ornate with artistic designs upon them. By choosing one’s flower pots carefully, a person, usually the woman of the home, can project her personality upon the house. Flower pots can therefore be decorations.

The many uses of flower pots make them a common feature of homes throughout the English-speaking world. They are with us every day through thick and thin. When we leave the home to travel, they are sights for sore eyes when we return. We know them like the closest of friends.

This is a flower pot. There are many, many more.

About the author: Jeremiah Bourque is a professional Japanese and English language tutor. Former professional Japanese to English translator, culminating in translating the “Slayers” light novels (1 through 8) for TOKYOPOP. Has written about strategy, politics, history, and many subjects large and small.

Deny Not Others Their Hope.

Semi-occasionally, I glance at the blog by Andrew Sullivan. Not that this is his fault, as he’s quoting two other people having an online argument, but this post is grievously depressing.

Essentially, it began with an argument that it is – and I quote – horrible to teach to children that, like Harry Potter, you need to be chosen, that the highest places in this world are by celestial fiat, and that the world is not a pure meritocracy. Granted that it isn’t, but kids shouldn’t be taught that.

Look… I bothered to read the books at the age of, I think I was 31 at the time. I wanted to know what everyone was talking about. Harry Potter may enter a mystical world, but it is strictly from the bottom, with benefactors but being treated very badly by his family, being constantly looked down upon by genuine aristocrats in the world of Wizardry, and increasingly treated with nationwide contempt and revulsion as his refusal to become a political pawn leads to government-sponsored newspaper campaigns against him.

I don’t want to spoil for those who plan on viewing all the details in the final film, but a life as a prince or a national leader is not coming for him. Rowling does not idealize aristocracy; quite the contrary, much of the books present aristocracy in an immensely negative light. (Having said this, in spite of its many failings, government is treated as an important force for good that must be protected by sacrifice for the good of the many.)

To take this and then say, Oh look! Harry Potter is an aristocrat! How horrible to show this to children! is just… morbidly depressing.

Totally aside the little issue of truth and facts, I acknowledge that this isn’t the point at all. Nor do I wish to make it so.

Rather, I think that it is wrong to take away the hope of children who were born with very little.

My own family was not and is not rich, and I hope dearly that a very promising business venture currently getting off the ground leads to greater prosperity. That said, in spite of the extensive knowledge of language I squeezed out of life, my “toy quotient” is really not very high at all. That goes for the rest of the family too. My experience in life is about making the best out of what little we have and squeezing the highest quality of life from it.

The vast majority of children who read something like Harry Potter or Oliver Twist (where Oliver inherits a family fortune and is delivered from a horrid existence in the end) are using these sorts of stories to project HOPE onto these characters and give themselves some comfort in life. The simple fact is, after all, that hard work alone is highly unlikely to deliver everything that people want. Even a great deal of luck and outright genius are often insufficient; legion are the geniuses who were only honored after they were safely dead.

Harry Potter and Oliver Twist began life in absolutely miserable circumstances, even worse than those circumstances of many of the readers. The idea that even people in horrible circumstances may cling to hope and, given opportunities, make the most of them, is something that may not be especially realistic in many circumstances… but at the same time, the idea is one that gives comfort to the masses.

There are people who want to take magic away from this world (in a figurative sense). They want to crush hope to create a generation of angry and resentful children whose only motivation in life becomes envy, class struggle, and finally, revolution. Such people believe we are in a constant state of social warfare. Rather than allow hope, entertainment, fantasy, and nice, completely unrealistic dreams, they want to pop that bubble and drag children back down to the dreary reality they are all too familiar with and wanted to escape from to begin with.

To put it as mildly as I am capable of, this is nasty. I would even go so far as to call it abusive behavior towards children.

Let’s have a truce. Let’s make the dreams of children a DMZ, a demilitarized zone where children can be allowed to enjoy themselves without constantly being dragged into the battles of bitter and resentful adults.

Becoming A Hope Peddler

More broadly, this entire incident has made me look at the issue of giving people hope rather than playing upon their bitterness.

I believe that particularly for people with little, hope is a necessary salve for the wounds of the spirit. Obviously, the fulfillment of greed isn’t an option for one’s happiness if you can’t afford a lot. Therefore, rather than channel all this into anger and resentment, channeling it into hope is something that does a great deal to heal the spirit.

Losing touch of the irrational, quaint, and very emotionally necessary hope that things will get better, just because things are not always absolutely the same in this world, is a saddening thing, and is something we should resist as much as possible. The whole reason people write these books for children, really, is to give them something to grab onto that isn’t at the same level of ugliness that our adult world is constantly filled with: war, destruction, economic disaster, social tensions, and so on.

More broadly, for the vast majority of us in first world countries, daily life is not that bad compared to what it could be. Yet our news is dominated by the negative… and for good reason: we want to know what might hurt us. It’s a survival reflex.

Yet even on an adult level, hope is something that we should not just cling to, but spread as far as possible, like the wings of a white dove soaring above in the bright, blue, lightly clouded sky.

Why? Because we need it, and because the world we live in retains the kind of natural beauty that Zen practitioners focus on in order to maintain some sense of focus and balance against the constant onslaught of negativity.

We need hope. I think more and more that I want to be the sort of person who gives it, who speaks of it, who spreads it – because it sure beats the alternative to shame.

Anyway, that’s my opinion for today. – J

About the author: Jeremiah Bourque is a professional Japanese and English language tutor. Former professional Japanese to English translator, culminating in translating the “Slayers” light novels (1 through 8) for TOKYOPOP. Has written about strategy, politics, history, and many subjects large and small.

A Fable from Aesop

It’s this kind of “ass.” As in, a donkey.

The Ass in the Lion’s Skin

AN ASS, having put on the Lion’s skin, roamed about in the forest and amused himself by frightening all the foolish animals he met in his wanderings. At last coming upon a Fox, he tried to frighten him also, but the Fox no sooner heard the sound of his voice than he exclaimed, “I might possibly have been frightened myself, if I had not heard your bray.”

Clothes may disguise a fool, but his words will give him away

Learning From This Fable

How might we describe the ass, and separately, the fox, using English idiomatic phrases?

Because the ass in the lion’s skin frightened all the animals except for the fox, we might say that appearances can be deceiving.

The ass was bluffing his way around the forest. The fox called his bluff.

The ass bluffed the other animals into believing he was the lion.

The ass paid lip service to being a lion.

The ass was engaged in a shell game.

Though the ass was an ass, it was engaged in monkey business.

The ass’ lion skin ruse was made out of whole cloth, figuratively speaking.

The ass was going through the motions of being a lion.

The ass was lying through its teeth. (Normally “his” teeth however)

Though not a snake, the ass was speaking with a forked tongue.

The fox kept his eye on the ball, not losing sight of an important detail.

The fox was sly as a fox. That is, cunning as a fox.

The fox was not foxed by the ass.

The fox was wise to the ass’ trick.

The fox got it while the other animals did not.

Questions

What do you think of the moral of the fable? Do words really “give people away” like this?

How many of these idioms do you recognize? You should be able to look them up on the Internet with Google easily enough.

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About the author: Jeremiah Bourque is a professional Japanese and English language tutor. Former professional Japanese to English translator, culminating in translating the “Slayers” light novels (1 through 8) for TOKYOPOP. Has written about strategy, politics, history, and many subjects large and small.

The Post of Intangibles

The void of space represents that which is intangible. Though objects exist within this otherwise empty space, it is filled by neither water, nor air; it is for this reason that it is known popularly as space.

Space is real, but it is intangible. It is the absence of matter, not the presence of something itself. In language, it is treated as an object, but in reality, space is simply nothingness.

In English

As regards the English language, there are things that are intangible that go beyond earth, water, fire and wind. These are issues that go beyond the four corners of English education.

Intangibles are affairs of the spirit. They concern not what is on a person’s mind, or in the person’s heart, but what is in the person’s soul.

It is through knowledge of things that are tangible that one can gain knowledge of that which is not tangible, and which leaves no physical markings upon our world, but which exists only within the minds of human beings.

We may gain knowledge of these things, but they are beyond our understanding. Even if we know what is within the soul of another, or even know what is within ourselves, a full comprehension and understanding is beyond us.

Yet even this is not wasted. Even this provides us with immeasurable insight into the thoughts and ideas held within other human beings. Even if the best we can hope for is a partial understanding, this is the very purpose of communication.

Thus, it is through devotion to The Way of English that provides us with insight into The Art of English, which is itself an expression of the thoughts and ideas and feelings held within our fellow human beings, and ourselves, using the limited and incomplete tools of language available to us to communicate, to entertain, and to deepen our social relationships with each other.

We, human beings, are more than the sum of our parts. So it is with English; so it is with the universe.

There is no more to be said of Zen and English. The rest can only be discovered through direct personal experience.

After all, it is only through understanding the limitations of language that we may understand and respect its power and beauty.

- Jeremiah Bourque

About the author: Jeremiah Bourque is a professional Japanese and English language tutor. Former professional Japanese to English translator, culminating in translating the “Slayers” light novels (1 through 8) for TOKYOPOP. Has written about strategy, politics, history, and many subjects large and small.