Re: Ref.: Re: Kisses to you, too! (was Re: Argentina can arise! (was Re: Argentina down and out)

[Ray Evans Harrell]

I would agree.   And a happy birthday to you and Sally, Arthur.    I too pledge my loyalty to this list. There is one question I would put to the last two posts.    How do you distinguish between leaders and leadership?   Is not that the quality of those being led?      In the Arts we have a kind of patronage called "Strategic Giving."    It basically means this:  How little can you contribute while still getting what you want?     If you can stimulate other giving by giving little then you are determined a "winner" in the strategy of giving.   Considering that I exist in a Judeo-Christian-Muslim culture as an artist and pagan (follower of the natural world) I find myself, especially in this holiday, at odds with the rest of the society.   In my society it is not the person who saves the most that is the most honored but the person who gives the most.   However, when I deal with fundraisers and those who give, I experience a kind of game which resembles the children's game of "tag."     If a person can stimulate a colleague to give more than he (or she) then the one who gave the most is "it" or the "sucker."     To my way of thinking, it is the one who gave the least who is doing the sucking.   UNLESS: Occasionally you have a different kind of person.   When J.P. Morgan died, his friends remarked that he wasn't even "wealthy" because he left an estate so much smaller than theirs.     It seems that Morgan cultivated the culture of money for the purpose of furthering things he believed in.   When I meet a person like Morgan, I am always struck with how much they get done on so little.    Rather than "sucking" for simple venal purposes, they continually walk on the edge of things and sometimes fall.    They are the ones who are never "poor" but have "cash squeezes."     When their companies fail, they never fail to pay off their debts and they also never fail to get credit for having done so.   The owner of the NY Yankees has had four different company failures but even when he was without money he was never without the capital of his mind and his good name.    These are the real Entrepreneurs, not the stereotypical capitalists who never risk because they believe in very little, including their own capacities.    The real Entrepreneur creates products and leaves artifacts of where they've been that benefit far beyond themselves. One can call them the true philanthropists, benefactors, etc.    To Jesus, since this is a time of looking towards that religion, the poor widow who gave her entire savings to the temple, was more of a risktaker, believed more in the economic principles of the Temple and  was closer to the God of the Temple than the bankers who took less risk and gave more but withheld themselves.   Jesus spoke of the same when he told the story of the three brothers who were given the same amount to keep for the father.   One buried it, another invested it modestly while a third used it to great advantage. When the Father came back the third gave him the triple, the second doubled it and that first gave him what he had been given.  Needless to say, he didn't approve of the first choice.   I've always wondered what he would have felt about the third choice if he had lost the original amount like the Prodigal Son.   On the surface they seem to be about money but when taken as a whole, they seem to be against a conservative approach to life and for a sharing of the wealth. So what does this have to do with Leaders and Leadership?   For me the issue is not "Leaders"  but "heroes."    A Leader, in my tradition, is a servant of the people.   J.P. Morgan seems to have been a servant of his people. Jesus seems to have been a servant.    Isaiah was the "suffering servant." Heroes do things that everyone cannot do.    No one ever knows until afterwards, who is the Hero. But the Leader brings his community to express the best of themselves for the community and he or she does the same in their lives.    If you have a Leader then everyone knows the part they play.    Even the Disrupters or Tricksters.    The world needs us all in all of our parts or jobs.   Leaders demand the best from themselves and bring out the best in their communities. Heroes are different.   They are often failures at leadership for in the world of the Hero you are a "winner" or a "loser" a Hero or a follower. Leaders must be creative but Heroes are  more goatlike  than creative. When the wolves come the Goats serve as Heroes to gather the flock, keeping them together in adversity.   They also demand the most from a pasture and often leave it in ruin, cropping everything too close and creating a mud pen. So I would desire the Leader who, if wealthy, gives beyond according to his/her means, and if not then who uses his/her  money wisely in order to stimulate the success of what he or she believes in. What does this have to do with Argentina?   Well, Mike Gurstien's story about the police, could have happened in NYCity with anyone coming from the Airport who can't read English and takes a Taxi.    There is a stiff fine but thieves are not limited to private companies or government agencies. During this time of renewal in the year, it is the time when we think about growing better people.    People who are responsible, whether in the World Bank, the Transnational Corporations, the Unions, the Professions or our Governments. People who will raise their children not to accept bigotry or simple classification of groups for the purpose of profiling.   People who instead will grow to understand and appreciate the differences in cultural styles and each culture's genius.    When  Poet Jerome Rothenberg went to Africa and to other areas of the world studying the poetry of Indigenous peoples, he was reinforced in the truth that there are no half-formed languages in the world.   That it follows that each people have "majored" in some element of the human condition that they are better at doing and more subtle in the application than the rest of humanity.      Kurt Sachs the great Ethno Musicologist used to speak of a Romanian violin virtuoso who upon the first hearing of Beethoven Symphonies remarked: "Lots of notes but not much heart!"     It seems that we all think that the other guy's languages, music, poetry etc. are less advanced than our own.     Unless we happened to learn the other guys language, music, poetry, religion etc.    Then it becomes an issue of appreciation. I don't think there is one art form for the world, one religion, one education, one economics and not even one health care.   What is helpful to one group is often toxic to another, destroying their traditions, their relationships, the lives and their unity.   Our anti-biotics often cure what is incurable elsewhere, but a Shaman's chant will also cure a Westerner who has been diagnosed with Cancer and written off as dying.    Each side has its answers about why the other succeeded and why they failed to cure their own.   Life is wonderfully diverse, layered and delightfully complicated. Rothenberg, a Jew who wrote about Jewish traditions and poetry, called his books about the 300 million people on the planet who consider themselves followers of Traditional Indigenous Religion, "Technicians Of The Sacred." As a man who went to live with the various groups and as a poet himself, he stated that the subtlety and complexity of Indigenous songs and poetry were the most advanced of all of the peoples that he had studied.    Our most Avant Garde composers today have studied drumming in Africa, multi-rhythms in the SE U.S. intonation in the Balkans and in Peru, bringing back musics that stretch the mind and erase the distinctions between audience and performer.   It makes our concert halls seem over ritualized, uptight and inflexible.   The musics of our religions are almost afraid of density even having musical revolutions every couple of hundred years in the guise of returning the music to the people and out of the hands of the "professionals."     Except the people in these other areas are more complicated than Western composers and demand more from each other. So what about it?    "The West IS Technology!"   Or is Western Science simple mechanics?    I would contend that allowing a machine to do your work for you builds laziness.   That allowing a politician to be your Hero is also lazy and irresponsible.    That allowing the wild and wooly marketplace to rape and pillage the rest of the world in the name of efficiency and "saving" those foreign folks from their "misery" is also lazy.    To believe that you can understand or encompass a culture in a business trip or a vacation is lazy thinking.    Missionaries always come home changed for the better. (They spend years.)    Even when they live in Missionary compounds and send their children to English schools, they still can't help but be touched by the humanity of the people they wish to help.    It changed Sister Theresa, it changed my relatives and by extension made my life as a Traditional Kituwa Priest easier in a family that three generations ago heard the call of Jesus.   As an Artist I am grateful for the diversity of peoples, arts, religions and cultures in the world.   I find it growing and it gives my life meaning.     Western Technology is wonderful.    The Machine that initially drove people apart, away from their families has taken the form of the computer and today makes this conversation possible. Helping us to experience each other, including cross cultural misunderstandings.    But this machine is not the whole of technology, their are many technologies and each group has a tech-nol-ogy.     When a Tyrant springs forth, he conceives of his tech-nol-ogy as the only or most important one.   He conceives it as an issue of Power instead of growth and knowledge. So in this time of the rebirth of the Sun for those of us in the North and the renewal of the FW list, I too pray for leadership both from our Leaders and our average people.    And I wish you all a Happy Season in whatever way you think of it. Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, December 24, 2001 1:26 PM Subject: RE: Ref.: Re: Kisses to you, too! (was Re: Argentina can arise! (was Re: Argentina down and out) > An interesting an important distinction... > > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > > Now I know that we DO NOT need leaders in Mexico and in Argentina. What we > need is leadership. > > >