Category: Personal

The Burden of Leadership: Hypocricy Might Be Ok (?)

My cat is sick. I have to take her to the vet to get bloodwork once a month. On the way back just now the radio station was discussing that people seem to be swearing more now a days. They blamed it on the recession. As evidence, they played a bleeped out tape recording of Fox news anchor Shepard Smith posturing about the U.S. torture policy. You can see the Huff Post article here. There is ‘right to the point’ clip in the huff post article. Here is the whole segment:

I can’t help thinking:

Where were you four years ago, ya hypocrit?

That said the issue of torture is not easy. It’s very clear, morally, but it’s not simple. It’s like killing civilians.

I saw an episode of The West Wing once (greetings Professor Sorkin; kind of like Professor Falkin in War Games) in which Bartlett decided to kill a ‘known terrorist’ who was an un-triable foreign national. Perhaps think Ghadaffi, or Hussein.

“You have to do this” says the Chief of Staff.

“Why?” say Bartlett.

“Because you won the election” says the Chief of Staff.

nagasaki-before-afterPunishing/killing people without trial, without probable cause is very bad. Not ok. Killing civilians is very bad. Not ok. Part of the outrage over Vietnam was that we were killing civilians.

But this is territory our nation has grappled with (I think) every generation. For example: to end World War II we dropped nuclear bombs that wiped out two entire cities in Japan. The image to the right is Nagasaki before and after the blast.

We killed entire populations of non-combatants in order to save lives going forward. Was that ok? Let’s assume that it did in fact end the war early. Was it ok?

There are moral absolutes in this world that every individual should adhere to, and be held to. Oddly enough, it is harder for our leaders – in our service – to live up to the same absolutes.

I am personally, absolutely, against torture and killing of non-combatants. I am not confused there. And I do not believe that the war on terror justified the practice. I think it was a clear abuse of power. But perhaps, sometimes, it really is necessary to pick the lesser of two evils. I believe that’s why they call it ‘The Burden of Leadership.’

Paul’s Corinthian Letter

peter and paul from the greek orthodox church websiteAs I’ve written about in prior posts, in my forthcoming book I do a wee bit of tracking the history of the relationship to the human body. Of course, one of the highlights is the Christian relationship to the body, and the writings of St. Paul. Here’s a small passage that explains that as founded, Christianity sees sex, and the concerns of the body, as an impediment to holiness. Holiness in human form – Jesus – being the guide for all humans, rejection and denial of the body is inevitable. This has strongly influenced how we today consider our bodies….

Christian writings make a tie to the body as impediment to a higher spiritual calling. The Apostle Pauls famous Corinthian Letter responds to the community in Corinth, which was agitating to create a Utopic society in preparation for the coming of Christ. As Peter Brown establishes in his brilliant text The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, the Corinthians proposed a radical ideal.

[The Corinthians] would undo the elementary building blocks of conventional society. They would renounce marriage. Some would separate from pagan spouses; others would commit themselves to perpetual abstinence from sexual relations. The growing children for whose marriages they were responsible would remain virgins. As consequential as the Essenes, they would also free their slaves. Somewhat like the little groups described by Philo outside Alexandria, men and women together would await the coming of Jesus holy in body and spirit.

At a time when Christianity was just growing, the Corinthians radical notions threatened the inclusion of more mainstream elements, and so Paul wrote to put down this rebellion. That a critical concept within the religious fringe was abstinence is telling. That Paul himself was celibate points directly to early Christianitys troubled relationship to the body. In ministering the Corinthians toward sex, his words expose a very negative conception of the act. In Corinthians 7:36-38 Paul wrote:

If any one thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed [in some versions virgin], if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes; let them marry – it is no sin. But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desire under control, and has determined this in his heart, to keep her as his betrothed, he will do well. So that he who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better.

Paul declares that marriage is a negative, undertaken only to ward off the sin of sex before marriage. Second, marriage, and sex, are negatives that are better to be refrained from altogether. Paul states this even more clearly in an earlier passage, Chapter 7 verses 32-34.

I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and his interest are divided. And the unmarried woman or girl is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please her husband.

Marriage calls into question the ability to focus on the Lord. Married people lack the quality of what Brown analyzes as “the undivided heart”, and are therefore lesser Christians than those who are married solely to Gd.

[excerpt from Somatic Ecology, copyright R. Bettmann 2009]

The purpose for me in researching this was to document exactly how negative our culture is in relating to the body. That negativity, with ancient roots, has some modern expressions.

Other than that, how did you like the play?

taken from: http://annak.smugmug.com/gallery/5691633_NZqfy#350962380_7LL2bI was talking to my mom today and she said something really funny.

Until very recently my parents had three pets. The cat and the older dog both had to be put down unexpectedly in the last month. Now the young dog has a blood disease, and is going to have to be put down soon. So thats really painful. Losing a pet is one thing. Losing all three, randomly, one at a time, within a short time span, is awful.

Things in my life have been difficult lately, too, though in a very different way. But weve talked about that. You keep going, and you try to enjoy the world.

We chatted about our plans for the next days, etc, and she quipped, “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?”, which made me laugh. Sometimes its hard to really enjoy even the nice things in daily life, because of bigger issues.

I googled the phrase to find an image to illustrate, and found that a lot of people like it as a title. The image here is from a series of camping trip pictures with the same title. I’m glad I wasn’t on that trip!

Sometimes daily appreciation for the good – or bad – gets overwhelmed by the context. I think that happens in both personal and professional ways. It’s easy for people who know you a little, interact with you a little, to draw certain conclusions. I know I do that. Sometimes life is just like that… you’re going along with your personal stuff and someone walks up and asks (more or less directly):

“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?”

‘course the nature of it is that sometimes I do that without knowing I’m doing it. So it goes. In the same google search I found a blog by a very smart government employee. The post on the front of the blog right now is about new media efforts in government:

Changing the paradigm from producing products to producing conversations is never an easy transition…. . Interestingly, many planners forget this step and that, paraphrasing the Cheshire Cat, “if you don’t know where you want to go, you will probably end up someplace else.” But the direction must be light. We work with creative people and we have to let them be creative in their own ways. We must also recognize that MOST of the creativity available to us is outside our own organization.

I’m sure he’s right. But sometimes we explain the world so beautifully that there is no way to develop action off of the inspiration…. Sometimes work and planning get abstracted. I wonder how much all of this new media writing will actually influence things.