June 19, 2020

Dear Interested Readers,

 

Is “Living On Tulsa Time” Appropriate For These Times?

 

Donald Ray Williams is gone now, but he is in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Williams sang many hit songs, but one in particular, “Tulsa Time,” written by Danny Flowers, was number one on the Country Music charts in 1978, and has been running through my head this last week as the president plans to go to Tulsa to exercise his power to smear the balm of the adulation of his base on his self inflicted wounds. It seems that threatening the health of the graduating class at West Point last week provided only temporary relief to his pain.  “Tulsa Time” is the lament of a man not succeeding in life who decides to go home to Tulsa where he is understood. The refrain is:

 

Livin’ on Tulsa time

Livin’ on Tulsa time

Gonna set my watch back to it

‘Cause you know I’ve been through it

Livin’ on Tulsa time

 

I am going to take you to Tulsa by way of my own memories, comments from two faithful “interested readers,” a few of my own current observations, and a short review of a piece in The Atlantic that I hope you will read if you have not already seen it. So here we go. We’re off to Tulsa.

 

When I think about what I hear people say, what I see people do, and what I observe in reports in the media, it occurs to me that I have never experienced a more confusing moment in my life. The convergence of fatigue from the COVID-19 pandemic and the explosion of racial feelings following the death of George Floyd and other young black people in encounters with the police this year make this the most volatile moment that I can remember in the last fifty years. But there have been other tense moments in our history.

 

My earliest memories are from the late forties when my family lived in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, which lies about forty miles south of Tulsa. Okmulgee is the capital of the Creek Nation. I have many memories of my parents in the late forties and through the fifties discussing Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Communist threat, the space race with the Russians, racial tensions, and the fear of polio. I remember my Dad waking me up to tell me that the Russians had put a satellite in orbit. My first response was what’s a satellite? I also remember our first attempt to launch our own satellite. The members of my sixth grade class were gathered around a television to watch our nation’s first attempt to put a small satellite, hardly larger than a grapefruit, into orbit. That in itself was not encouraging since we were told that the Russian Sputnik was more than twice the size of a basketball. At the end of the dramatic countdown, and following “ignition!” we got a new definition of “blast off.  The Vanguard rocket slowly rose about 20 feet into the air before it stalled and began to sink, and then there was a fiery explosion as the rocket fell off the launching pad like a big tree that had been blown over in a storm. (Be sure to click on the last link if you have never seen this dramatic failure.) 

 

Even before I began to fear for our future because the Russians were smarter than we were, I began to hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr. and the talk about “demonstrations.” The Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December of 1955 and continued to December 1956. Unrest from Civil Rights demonstrations and Vietnam ran like a steady rock and roll baseline to the melody of our lives for more than a dozen years from 1963 until the mid seventies. We witnessed three assassinations, and hundreds of demonstrations and riots in many of our cities. The riots in the cities and on the nation’s campuses were ugly expressions of the tension between what America was and what many thought it should be. The unrest then, as now, led to deaths. The student riots and protests on  campuses with students shot by the military at Kent State and by the police at Jackson State made sane people wonder about the future of freedom. In 1969 I witnessed the equivalent of a military engagement on the Harvard campus when students occupied University Hall, the building behind John Harvard’s statue. As we fought our way toward the mid seventies, we saw a near constitutional crisis with Watergate, and witnessed a president leave office in disgrace. 

 

We have learned to live with a deeply divided partisan government over the last forty years with only a brief reprieve of unity following the horror of 9/11 before launching into 17 years of futile military action that has accomplished nothing. We have wasted thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of human lives at a cost of trillions of dollars– for what? But all of these horrible low points of history and troubling events were processed over a much longer timeline with more moments of reprieve, and with less personal involvement by the average American, than the experience we all have shared since the coronavirus disrupted life as we once knew it. We have no memory of a foreign power landing on our shores and creating a swath of destruction across our country, but now a virus has done what we vowed no army would do, and we have lost more lives than we did in World War I. 

 

And, we will lose many more lives as this president loses interest in the virus and heads off to Tulsa. He is driven by the combination of not knowing how to lead or what to do, and the fear that he might lose an election. In a combination of no action in some areas, wrong actions in others, and always focused on self serving action, he passes on the obligation of his oath and office to protect the lives of all Americans. 

 

Since mid March, our physical concerns have competed with our fiscal concerns to see which fears could produce the most catecholamine driven anxiety–the fear of illness or the fear of personal financial ruin. Millions of people are out of work, and for many their old job will never come back. More than half of us have financial losses. Now, the attempts to stop the economic losses compete with the strategies to fight contagion and limit the loss of life as we have come to the low point of deciding how many older, poorer, and disadvantaged Americans we could sacrifice in exchange to quell the fear, anger and frustration of three months of concern about  survival. With fear of financial ruin and almost 120,000 lives lost, and with the prediction that the number will certainly top 200,000 before the election in November, we are numbed by an overload of emotional current for which there is no apparent breaker switch. 

 

Yes, these are remarkable times. In times past, some of us protested. Some of us went to war. Some of us lost a job. In times past, all of us lived under the threat of nuclear extermination. But, we learned how to ignore those threats just as we now ignore global warming and the pollution of our planet. At no time in the past have so many people experienced threats as real as the financial and physical threats associated by the COVID-19 pandemic. To the threat of contagion there is the added threat to our national health of our shared “pre-existing” conditions of racial disharmony and dysfunctional policing that have become too obvious and too potentially dangerous to everyone to be ignored any longer. Against the background that we are experiencing times like most of us who are alive have never experienced before, we have the great burden of suffering from a lack of effective leadership and the real possible of the emergence of a theocratically influenced authoritarian state in America. Perhaps you think I exaggerate? From where do you get your confidence that all will end well?

 

In response to my last post on Tuesday, “Pandemic Fatigue and Follies,”I got two comments that spoke to the issue of how the realities of the pandemic and the racial disharmony are multiplied by a president whose talent is his ability to manipulate anger and whose desire seems to be to use denial and force as a substitutes for the leadership skills he lacks. The first comment came from Eve Shapiro who is a passionate advocate for both patients and providers. Eve wrote:

 

This is a shocking reminder of how we got here and the insecurities, bluster, and unparalleled stupidity of the man in the White House that led us here. When we compare our pre-pandemic and pandemic response and non-response to that of countries like Germany and Taiwan, I am reminded of that hollow phrase, “Make America Great Again.” What does Great look like? An unsurpassed number of deaths from Covid-19, maybe, with hundreds of thousands more to come if he has anything to do with it? As of today, he has not been in touch with Dr. Anthony Fauci for at least 2 weeks. There’s another shocking line for your bulleted list…

 

She went on to challenge me to find a larger audience and then concluded her comment with two quotes, the first applies equally to us and our president, and the second is a stark reminder for those of us who are flabbergasted as we find ourselves in a world that we never dreamed could be as vulnerable as it seems to be:

 

Here are two predictions from your soothsayer friend, taken, of course, from George Santayana and Edmund Burke, respectively: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”; and “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to stand by and do nothing.”

 

I immediately thought of the first quote when I read of the deficiencies in the fund of knowledge of current events, history and geography of our president that John Bolton’s book is reported to reveal. It is clear from the president’s actions, attitudes, and policies that he has no appreciation for science, but it is hard to believe that he thought Finland was part of Russia, and that he did not know for sure that Britain was a nuclear power. I will give the president a pass on Juneteenth Day. I first witnessed what an important day it is to black Americans as a child in Texas, but I have not heard much about it except in books about America’s racial insensitivity since then until now. The president grew up in a wealthy bubble in Queens.

 

The second quote from Burke is an admonition to you and to me. The quote reminded me of the moving experience that my wife and I had when we visited the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington. I consider myself to be fairly literate in terms of world history, and especially the history of the twentieth century. I was humbled by my visit to the museum because I knew facts, but I had not adequately dealt with the emotions that the facts should elicit. There was a special exhibit at that time. I do not know if it is still there, but the focus was not so much on what the Nazi’s did; the focus was on what good, religious, “respectable” Germans did not do. Most of the German people were not enthusiastic members of the Nazi Party. They just kept their heads down and let it happen. The exhibit focused on what had happened in Germany between 1933 and 1939, when there might have been an opportunity to speak up as there was increasing persecution of the Jewish population. “Kristallnacht” should have produced an outrage greater than the events that followed the death of George Floyd, but it did not. Most good Germans looked the other way as their Jewish neighbors, friends, and business associates were subjected to a nationwide pogrom by Nazi inspired thugs that destroyed enormous amounts of property and led to the loss of many innocent lives while the government smiled and did nothing.  

 

Eve’s quote reminded me that there was a time when good white people stood by in America and looked the other way while the property and lives of black people were destroyed. I did not know of the “Black Wall Street” massacre in Tulsa in 1921 or the riots in Chicago in 1919 following the stoning of a 17 year old boy who innocently swam into water on Lake Michigan that was traditionally reserved for “whites.” Perhaps the most starting realization that “good people” can rationalize what works for them is the concept of “Manifest Destiny.” 

 

When I won the DAR medal for the best student in 8th grade American History, I could have told you that “manifest destiny” was the belief that America was “meant” to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. What I was not taught was how many native Americans would die in response to that achievement or how black Americans would do much of the work to build the cities and wealth that stretched from “sea to shining sea.” I was flabbergasted when I read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) to learn that there were at least 20 million people in America when Columbus discovered the New World. Over the last twenty years the exact number has been debated with some authorities suggesting that there may have been more than 100 million indigenous people in the New World when Columbus arrived in 1492. By 1890 the population of native people in America was 250,000. The current number is estimated to be about 6.7 million. 

 

An honest appraisal of American History must conclude that the wealth we enjoy today has its foundation in the land that was taken from native people and the enslavement and subsequent denial of opportunity to black Americans. As an eight grade student, I knew dates and battles, but I did not know the whole story. What we hear from this president is that there are “good people” on all sides. “Good people” who go along to get along can rationalize why a world of hurt for others is “good.” I would modify Burke’s statement to say, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to blind themselves to the pain of others, or rationalize that maintaining the status quo is “good for the economy.” 

 

The second comment came from Justin Locke. Justin has been a friend since about 2009 when I saw him on “Chronicle” the daily evening “magazine” on channel 5, WCVB, in Boston. He was discussing his self published book The Applied Principles of Stupidity. That book and several others from Justin are  still available on Amazon. The title and the interview intrigued me. I learned that Justin began his professional life playing the bass for eighteen years in Arthur Fiedler’s Boston Pops orchestra. His first book had been Real Men Don’t Rehearse. He was a student of what made a good conductor. My wife suggested that I act on my impulse and contact him, which I did. 

 

After I read the book, I gave a copy to every member of my management team, and invited Justin to speak to managers and physicians at a couple of our organizational meetings.  The Applied Principles of Stupidity [POAS] is very funny in creative ways that make valuable points about human nature and behavior. I still consider it one of the best “business books” that I ever read. Justin and I have remained friends over the years. Even after my retirement, I have availed myself of his good company, both in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Justin’s first comment was:

 

Well Gene as I read this I cannot help but be reminded of

Principle of Applied Stupidity #22: “When Smart Meets Dumb, Dumb Always Wins” and

POAS #28: “Slowness of Mind, Not Quickness, Puts You in Charge.”

I always try to look at the bright side of things and I am starting to think in some ways we may have dodged a major bullet here . . . what if Trump was less of a toddler with ADD needing constant attention and more of a Kim Jong-un sort, who applied some actual planning and intelligence to acquiring and concentrating individual executive power? – jl

 

I posted his comment and then wrote back to him:

 

Justin,

Thanks for another astute comment. I have posted it. If you mean to say that he is just stupid enough to unwind his own success, I agree. It just pains me to watch because there is a cost to repair what he has done.

All the best,

Gene

 

Justin responded with a second comment that I must share with you:

 

Well I guess what I meant to say was, he is at heart a wannabe fascist dictator but he doesn’t have the brain power of, say, a Putin, to actually capitalize on the fluke chance of getting elected president.  Good thing too, because many of the Constitutional safeguards designed to prevent such a thing have failed us.  

But also, reminiscing about POAS, I feel like many people are mistakenly exhausting themselves trying to make sense of Trump’s intentional non-sense.  He keeps so many people off balance with such ease.  Also there is the Irregardless effect, one gets so fascinated with one insane thing you don’t notice anything else.    

Again looking on the bright side, I like to think that a lot of somnambulant folks have realized that voting is essential. I was sloppy about voting until I visited the cemetery above Omaha Beach. I have not missed an election since.  

I also wonder if, without the Covid work stoppage/cabin fever, would anyone have taken their focus away from their 60 hr work weeks to notice one more black man being killed by the police? Much less go out and march?  And absent Covid, would Trump now be marching towards a November triumph?  

Strikes me as a truly odd set of circumstances.  Just a fascinating moment of history.  What will happen next? Just have to wait and see 🙂  

Best,  Justin

 

I would agree with Justin that we are living in a fascinating moment in history, and one major source of hope is that our leader may be running out of steam. I also know Justin well enough to know that he is not suggesting a passive response to the threat to our national stability and the future of the world that this president represents. What he is suggesting is that those who do care must be sure to vote, and that there will be much more for us to consider and survive before November. If John Bolton’s forthcoming book is right, we have been very lucky to make it through the past three years. Based on the last five months, the next four and a half months may be like a roller coaster ride. 

 

The Atlantic published an interesting analysis on June 6th by Franklin Foer that does not contradict either Eve’s or Justin’s responses to my piece containing many of the missteps and a few of the lies that we all have witnessed since we first heard of the coronavirus. As a follow up to their observations, I would add Hans Christian Anderson’s fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” If you don’t remember the story, click on the link. 

 

Foer’s article is entitled “The Trump Regime Is Beginning to Topple: The best way to grasp the magnitude of what we’re seeing is to look for precedents abroad.”

 

Foer begins by suggesting that we look abroad as we think about what comes next:

 

Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has indulged his authoritarian instincts—and now he’s meeting the common fate of autocrats whose people turn against them. What the United States is witnessing is less like the chaos of 1968, which further divided a nation, and more like the nonviolent movements that earned broad societal support in places such as Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia, and swept away the dictatorial likes of Milošević, Yanukovych, and Ben Ali…The president rose to power by inflaming racial tensions. He now finds his own fate enmeshed in the struggle against police brutality and racism.

 

Foer references Gene Sharp, the author of a “how to guide” to toppling autocracy, From Dictatorship to Democracy.

 

Foer references and explains Sharp’s central thesis:

 

“Obedience is at the heart of political power.” A dictator doesn’t maintain power on his own; he relies on individuals and institutions to carry out his orders. A successful democratic revolution prods these enablers to stop obeying. It makes them ashamed of their complicity and fearful of the social and economic costs of continued collaboration.

 

I paused there for a second as I asked myself if Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Lindsey Graham, or Ted Cruz were capable of changing course because of shame, or what else might be necessary for them to experience shame and regret for their actions and apologize, as did General Mark Milley, the leader of our military. Milley held a press conference and said that he was sorry for his “walk to church” in uniform through the protesters in Washington for the president’s photo op with a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. 

 

The essence of the strategy that Foer recommends is to erode the support of the dictator from the outside into the core of his supporters.

 

The allegiance of individuals in the outer circle of power is thin and rooted in fear. By standing strong in the face of armed suppression, protesters can supply examples of courage that inspire functionaries to stop carrying out orders, or as Sharp put it, to “withhold cooperation.” Each instance of resistance provides the model for further resistance. As the isolation of the dictators grows—as the inner circles of power join the outer circle in withholding cooperation—the regime crumbles.

 

Foer points to the decision by Twitter to identify the president’s lies as evidence that his control is weakening. I marveled this week that Justice Roberts voted against the objectives of the president in the Supreme Court twice, in the LGBTQ+ gender ruling, and again in the DACA ruling. Justice Gorsuch, who owes his seat on the court to Trump, voted with Roberts and the four “liberal” justices on the case about gender discrimination. 

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There are cracks in the wall. Foer points out that large corporations, even the NFL, have responded positively to the Black Lives Matter movement. Is that evidence that there will be further rejection and greater isolation of the president with his friends, “the good people,” in the white supremacist movement? Time will tell. Finally, I see the ill advised political rally that the president will stage in Tulsa tomorrow as evidence of his frustration and fear that things are “slip slindin’ away.” Only the irrational and the irresponsible would join twenty thousand other shouting, spitting, snarling, hate filled people shoulder to shoulder in an indoor arena which is a perfect exchange environment for the aerosolized transmission of disease. Trump needs adulation so desperately that he does not really care how many people will die in his pitiful attempt to feed his own starved id.  

 

My advice to you is to heed the words of Eve and Justin. Move from Justin’s category of “somnambulant folks.” Follow Eve’s advice and join the ranks of those who pay attention to the messages from history, and become active in the face of a threat to this nation. Join the growing number of your neighbors who want a leader that is not a self serving obstruction to America being the catalyst for a better life for everyone on the planet as recompense for its many past errors. At  minimum follow Justin’s Omaha Beach Cemetery commitment to use the vote that so many people have sacrificed to give to you. Finally, expect more craziness and perhaps even a constitutional showdown between this wannabe strongman with authoritarian tendencies, and the real rule of law before we all eat Turkey as we give thanks for surviving yet again. 

 

The Drama of Nature as Witnessed Lakeside

 

It’s summer time at the lake, and we don’t need Tulsa for excitement or enlightenment. It’s been a week since we had the joy of seeing for ourselves that for the first time in several years the pair of loons on our lake had successfully produced a baby loon. The loons feel safe in the cove at our end of the lake so we have had the joy of observing the day to day changes. My wife is pretty good with her Nikon camera, and she has produced some stunning photos as demonstrated by today’s header. 

 

There was a little drama yesterday just a few yards off shore. Our lake and its shores are home to many interesting neighbors from the natural world. We have had several visits, some in daylight, by a young black bear who has taken up residence in some of the protected forest land along the shore. We see a heron from time to time, as well as mallards, and mergansers, but the menace to the loons is our eagle. The eagle is a majestic site as it circles high above, and on occasion will dive down and grab a fish swimming too close to the surface in open water. Eagles love to eat baby loons. Yesterday, my wife spotted the eagle circling above one of the loon parents as it relaxed with the baby loon near our dock. The loons are great parents. They have a division of labor that is inspiring to watch. One will go off to fish and feed while the other waits tending the baby. When they sense danger they go into action with wailing cries that echo up and down the lake. I don’t speak “loon,” but it is easy to know that the message delivered yesterday was, “Come back quick! We are in danger!” The roaming parent did heed the call, and quickly returned. We watched the eagle decide that the odds of two to one were not worth the effort, and it soon settled into a tall white pine and was not seen again for the rest of the day. 

 

After the drama, I took a good swim and put out the mooring for my sailboat. As I enjoyed the chilly water, I was thankful for the opportunity to see for myself that in nature vigilance pays off one challenge at a time. There will probably be more encounters between the eagle and the loons, but for now the threat has been thwarted, and my wife will continue to enjoy documenting the loon baby’s progress. 

 

Be well! If “Juneteenth” is a new holiday idea for you, explore its significance. Still stay home if you can. If you must go out, wear your mask and practice social distancing as best you can. Think about the America you want for yourself and others. Think about how a better America might evolve with the Triple Aim as one of its foundational pillars. Demand and work for leadership that is empathetic, thoughtful, truthful, capable, and inclusive.  Look for opportunities to be a good neighbor. Let me hear from you like I heard from Eve and Justin. I would love to know how you are experiencing these very unusual times!

Gene