Beating the Bushes

.
I was watching an NFL game last week.  I must admit I don’t really remember which one. I tend to watch pro football the way my wife watches LMN – it’s wallpaper, a song you have heard over and over, it could be surf, the wind, you know, white noise.  But suddenly there was a glitch, a disruption.  One of the commentators; again, my bad – big white guy, maybe a former player or coach? Anyhow, he said something like, “I don’t think Reggie Bush should give back the Heisman. He won it with his play on the field.” I was momentarily stunned that someone who makes that much money could say something so stupid.  Then, of course, I laughed at myself. So, today I would like to talk with people who earn their living as sports commentators or sports talk show hosts, particularly those who agree with the big white guy quoted above .  .  . 

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I speak frankly? 

Today I would like to talk with you about beating the Bushes.  No, not the George Bushes – that’s so yesterday.  I mean the Reggie Bushes – and I don’t actually mean Reggie himself.  If you overlook the fact that his greatest collegiate demonstration of broken field running was sprinting around all the regulations intended to determine eligibility for student athletes, Reggie is actually doing the right thing.  He is returning a trophy to which he has no right, because he had no right to be on the field.  Hence, I have an issue with all those folks who feel Mr. Bush should get to keep the trophy because “he won it with his performance on the field.”

Let’s do a little time travel exercise – maybe 1980, Lake Placid, NY, the Olympics.  The Miracle on Ice was not just the fact that the USA won the gold medal in hockey – the miracle part was that a bunch of American collegiate amateurs defeated a Soviet team that was by every definition a professional team.  The miracle was that despite the Soviets circumventing the spirit, if not the letter, of Olympic regulations, the American amateurs won the day.  And we were proud.  Allowing Mr. Bush to keep his Heisman would stand that perspective on its head – it would make Soviets of us all – because in doing so we essentially say that only what happens on the field matters.  How you get there is unimportant.  I hope the commentators who argue that perspective realize that by doing so they also stand four-square behind the use of performance enhancing drugs, behind tutors writing papers, behind special degree programs for athletes, because it is “only what happens on the field that matters.”  Shame on you.

In the interest of full disclosure, I need to admit that I am biased on this issue.  I am a college professor.  For more than thirty years I have told my students – and the hundreds of student athletes among them - that you play by the rules, that you do your own work, you become educated and no one can ever take that away from you.  Bush broke the rules of a world to which I have given my professional life.  Bush winning the Heisman was glaring evidence that sometimes cheaters do win, sometimes a person who is ineligible, who has no right to be on the field, gets the glory.  Letting him keep it would be saying, “And that’s OK.” To the extent that you think Bush should keep the Heisman, I repeat, shame on you.
.

Entitlement Politics

.

To whomever may be listening: May I Speak Frankly?

One has to feel for the President. Well, no, I take that back. One obviously doesn't, with the Mad Hatters running all over the country throwing tea parties that blame him for everything from broken oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico to broken families in Kenya. They obviously don't feel for him. But, really, think about it for a moment - he actually wanted the job. And I suppose a lot of people do. Why, I'm not too sure. I mean he's now getting slammed by Mo Rocca for redecorating the Oval Office. Jeeeez.

Even his teabag distractors admit he is a "cerebral" president, though they cast it as a flaw. But, one might question his intellectual "cred" when you realize he still wanted the job even though he knew he was going to inherit two questionable and unpopular wars that were draining the national treasury faster than Paris Hilton on a spending binge. He was also going to get a Congress so petty that they make the folks on Jersey Shore look, well, cute. Republicans and Democrats alike seem to define policy on the basis of vehemently opposing whatever the other holds most dear. We know they started out as lawyers, but you wonder how many of them started out as divorce lawyers?

"I want the Big Isle Potted Orchid!"
"You only want it because I want it!"
"You'll just kill it!"
"You will!"
"You'll send it to a death camp!"
"I'll send you to a death camp!"
"Madam Chairman, I yield my remaining time to the representative from . . . "

What the President, and anyone else seeking public office, needs to realize is that we are living in the age of entitlement politics. No, I don't mean social programs run amok - I mean that the folks making the loudest political noise - and it is mostly noise - are the kids who wouldn't pick up their rooms, who demanded a computer in the bedroom when they were five so they could work on their preschool "homework" and who always blamed the teachers if they got bad grades. Unfortunately, their parents agreed and acquiesced and we got "slacker pols."

The thing that drives me so far away from political issues these days is the unceasing acrimony and truly breathtaking stupidity on display by those "slacker pols" who hold office, are seeking office, attempt to garner huge crowds to oppose those in office on general principles, or blather on endlessly and antisocially via "social media." It is a foregone conclusion that little of import will occur in American politics until the midterm elections are over, because between now and then the "slacker pol wannabees" must demonstrate that they are suitably rabid to appeal to the "lunatic left or right wing fringe" of their party.

Someone who truly sought to bring the calm reason of the middle ground to politics today - anywhere, here, Iran, Israel, France, Columbia, spin the globe - would never be heard. They would not be entertaining enough, they wouldn't be extreme enough, they wouldn't angry enough. They'd be so uncool. They'd be so 20th century. They'd be so missed . . . .

.

The Illusion of Inclusion

 .

I usually like to pretend that I am talking with people who actually live in the real world.  Today I am going to make an exception, I am going to talk with the guys on the U.S. Supreme Court – and I use the word “guys” intentionally, because I really just want to talk with Chief Justice Roberts and his buddies in black, Justices Kennedy, Thomas, Scalia, and Alito.  My charge that these guys don’t live in the real world usually stems from the fact that they can never be fired, always have a parking place in DC, and spend most of their careers immersed in documents that few people in the world can read – let alone understand.  These five Justices just added another nail in that coffin.  They just clarified that companies and organizations are “people” whose right to express support for political candidates is the same as yours and mine.  And it is that notion that large organizations are “people” that intrigues me.
.

So, Gentlemen, May I Speak Frankly?

Your Honors, or Honori, or whomever - may it please the court - having worked for, or studied at, large organizations for almost 40 years, I am fascinated by this notion of companies as “entities” with the right to freedom of expression.  I mean we all realize – I hope – that IBM and AIG and the AFL-CIO aren’t really people.  So I assume that you mean to declare that these collections of buildings, people and databases, these companies, are people in a purely legal sense – a sort of intellectual fantasy like much of the law.  I think it runs deeper than that, which is why most folks stand still for that kind of silliness.  I think that we really do allow ourselves to become part of the metaphor of the organization as organism, and to believe that we are meaningful parts of that organism.

In our early days with the organism we might see ourselves as a small but important element.  Maybe the thumb.  No, it’s not a terribly showy appendage but it does separate our company from others without that valuable, opposable digit.  After a successful decade we may see ourselves as an arm or a “good right hand.”  A couple more decades allow us to feel close to the heart of the organization, eventually even the brains or the soul; and we come to believe that others contemplating our departure or demise do so with fear and trembling.  It is a pleasant fairy tale.

The recent and hopefully receding recession proved the illusion in that feeling of inclusion.  We are neither the heart not the soul of the organizations we serve.  The people who make up an organization are far more analogous to hair or fingernails.  They may help the organization look good, but when the survival of the organization is in peril, they are easily trimmed away.  That does not deny the precious relationships we may craft with our workmates, but the organizations are not those people. Companies and organizations are entities with objectives that transcend, and usually outlive, the needs of the people who attain those organizational goals.  It doesn’t matter if you hawk the free samples at Sam’s Club or plan global strategy for Lehman Brothers – if you get in the way of the organization’s eternal, and inhuman, existence you are expendable.

These “corporate individuals,” your Honors, are the ones you have decided should have a louder voice in electing the individuals responsible for enacting the “will of the people.”  That is more than a tad creepy.  If you are elected to office through the intervention of a non-human entity, who or what is the constituency you are charged to represent?  Do we hope that John Connor shows up in time to prevent the non-humans from taking over, or have the political “machines” already won?

Well, you have made your decision gentleman, but it was hardly Supreme.
.