RE: [Futurework] Ten simple rules

[Karen Watters Cole]

Good Morning.  First, the ad I saw was in Newsweek, not Time, but of course could be many places.     Second, I am not denigrating the process by which men and women are recruited or trained in this discussion.  I am concerned with the end product use.    If we accept that there is a new direction and application of US power and resources, specifically in regards to a Pax Americana or new American Empire, it seems to me that we are undergoing a shift away from idealizing the educated to idealizing the well-trained, who it seems by current propaganda and political appointments, must be associated with the military or its Establishment system.   Long ago, Americans admired the self-made man, whether humble or not.  It used to be that men and women of intelligence who wrote well were admired for their vision of what this country should be.  Now, in simple terms, if Kaplan and others are allowed to be the only voices, have the biggest megaphone, we will look simply to problem-solvers, “go-to guys” and players in the system.    If foreign policy and vision for the future can be relegated to Ten Simple Rules, we have evolved to not just a List Society, but one where, as the author suggested, the citizen soldier, able to train others or kill them, is the ideal.  That leads to a whole area of discovery for the rest of us who are not citizen soldiers.     KWC   Military people are sent to ALL colleges in the country.   They practice equal opportunity hiring and they send you to whatever school you are eligible for or in the area of.    Their education policies will send you to Harvard if you qualify.    For me it is an issue of performance.   We largely have a non-performance intellectual driven type form of work that doesn't produce much of ultimate significance other than keeping people at work doing things that subvert their talents and potential.   My experience of most of the private sector is that it resembles uncomfortably the movie the Matrix in which people are asleep and dreaming about performance and living but are surrounded by "ghosts" who seem to indicate that there is so much more.   The military has some rather sinister purposes but it still operates on a more honest mandate than world business.   REH As if to prove my point, that today’s measure of success is portrayed in uniform; while scanning the new issue of TIME magazine with dinner tonight, lo and behold a full-page ad next to the back cover:   Photo of a handsome, intent mature black man in suit and tie, sitting at a CEO desk, inset photo as if one of his shoulders was still in uniform, heavily decorated. SENSE OF MISSION Mark “Ranger” Jones.  United States Army 1986-2003 “Security is a critical issue these days.  Especially for high profile leaders and dignitaries.  No one understands this better than Mark Jones, founder and CEO of a security-consulting firm.  Mark is a man who earned the title of ‘go-to-guy’ by being entrusted to jump from 13,000 feet with a former U.S. President.  A man responsible for meeting different heads of state while serving as a Senior Aide to the 14th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Someone who started out as a cook but quickly learned to convert one challenging task after another into opportunity.  A Master Sergeant from the US Army Rangers who, day after day, brought honor to three simple words: “Complete the mission.”   The qualities you acquire in the military are qualities that stay with you forever.”  TODAY’S MILITARY See it for what it really is.  1.866.VIEW NOW. www.todaysmilitary.com     Agreed, Ray, but would we want all our political leadership to come from one Ivy League school or just the Midwest, etc? My concern is the recent tendency to place military people in diplomatic posts at NATO, in the Middle East, the Far East.  While I realize in some places a former military man will command more respect from some cultures as opposed to an academic or just another well-heeled party fundraiser, it is troubling to me that men in uniform are becoming spokesmen and the face of America overseas. KWC REH wrote: Karen and Ed, I would remind you all that the military is the only truly equal opportunity employer in the nation and admits all religions, cultures and only discriminates against Gays and that is beginning to be questioned.   It might be good for the rest of society to question how children from trailer parks and Louisiana bayous can become generals as often as Ivy League school graduates.   It may very well be that the most democratic institution in America is the military.   Like the arts, the military is performance oriented and not build upon the European aristocratic model.    Prejudice against the military is unseemly and we should not carry that prejudice over into creating the kind of anger carried by the police.    We pay the military poorly but train them well and demand much from them.   They, more than any other Americans, can truly speak to the values of equality and equal opportunity.   As they say in the Army,  A  "F...k up is a F....k up" no matter where you were born.    And no one wants to follow a fool simply because he was born with a silver spoon.    They may have loved Bush but Iraq will change that quickly.   The words from the hinterland is that there is a lot of anger and hostility out there.   I smell a change coming.   It seems that the Yale Drama school is the only place producing serious work these days while the other departments are working the legacy routine.    Legacy doesn't mean anything in the theater unless you can produce. Ed, when I read this piece earlier it struck me as you mention, that Kaplan was writing about these events as if he had created them into being.  He glorifies the soldier as the epitome of the modern democratic ambassador, a highly trained, deadly working representative of the superpower.  Hemingway had such an effect, did he not, on a generation of men and women and war? Meanwhile, more retired military fill former diplomat-only posts around the globe and increasingly, multinational corporations with ties to the military industrial technology complex.  Have we undermined public education so much or lost all confidence in it that we only trust the military to train our leaders?  KWC   The current issue of Atlantic contains an article by Robert Kaplan entitled "Supremacy by Stealth". I’ve read most of it, but it's the kind of article that I find difficult to finish. It sets out ten rules that America, as the new Rome, should use to govern the world and make it safe for freedom and democracy, American style. I first encountered Mr. Kaplan a few years ago in an article entitled "The Coming Anarchy", also in Atlantic. The message there, seeming entirely credible at the time, was that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. The message in the current article is anything but credible. It’s that, yes, the world could go to hell in a handbasket, but it won’t because America is there to prevent it from doing so. And it can even be fixed up if America but follows Mr. Kaplan’s ten simple rules. It must, for example, produce more Joppolos, the central figure in John Hersey’s second world war novel "A Bell for Adano". Apparently, Mr. Joppolo knew exactly how to win the trust of the townspeople he had to deal with. As Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated, it would be nice to have people like that, but they don’t come around very often. And, by being "light and lethal", you can accomplish great things, like helping the Bolivian government track down and kill Che Guevara in 1967. (Sorry, Mr. Kaplan, but some of us still remember Che as the eternal revolutionary and a force for liberating the oppressed. I for one do not see tracking him down and killing him as a good thing. It's a bit like the Romans bragging about tracking down and killing Christ!)  Or, like the British, and the Romans before them, by speaking Victorian and thinking pagan you can try to persuade people of the wisdom of your ways, but, if you can’t accomplish that, you do have other means. What Mr. Kaplan suggests is that American forces have already followed his ten simple rules, though perhaps not consistently enough. He says they have done a very good job at times, as when they trained Salvadorian counterinsurgency forces, but he doesn’t then mention is that these forces became government death squads and killing machines that brutalized the countryside and cost thousands of people there lives. The image that Mr. Kaplan presents in his ten points is a clean, tidy and efficient one that, like B52 bombers, flies high above the messy, dirty world of his earlier article. Sorry, Mr. Kaplan, it just doesn’t figure. Ed Weick