Reflections on the cancel, more-perfect culture

It will surprise no reader to read that the phrase, so effusively tossed about in American political rhetoric “a more perfect union” is nothing less than a tautology.*

Leaders whose public adulation seems to be boundless, like Barack Obama in retirement, will often be heard uttering this inflated, even bloated phrase, as if it were a call to inspire the American people to even greater effort, in pursuit of this “even more perfect union”. No one would desire, or even expect, political rhetoric, in an age of digital explosion, existential climate threats, economic turbulence and now, a global pandemic, to have a tautology like “a more perfect union” expunged from the podium or the interview set. However, some of the more subtle and too often concealed implications of pursuing perfection as an organizational, and especially a national goal, can be judged offensive, if not somewhat dangerous.

One of the more recent rhetorical and political and thereby cultural memes, is another equally distasteful phrase, “cancel culture,” the attempt to scrub out every last molecule of whatever might be considered dirt, morphed from anything that might hurt another, out of existence. Whether the form of “cancelation” involves:

    definition (speaking privately to an individual about perceived harmful, problematic actions or opinions, or calling in),

    calling out (criticizing an individual or organization publicly, usually on social media),

    boycotting (withholding financial support from a company in order to force a change in policies or practices)

the action involves a deliberate corrective, presumably in the spirit and tutelage of the late John Lewis’s honouring of “good trouble”….

Doubtless, each of us does not go through an hour in a weekday in which someone cuts us off on the road, smokes a cigarette in our breathing range, flips off another for some usually trivial insult. And as the anxiety over the pandemic and the concomitant precautions, restrictions, ever-shifting regulations and directives, mounts, the tendency to ‘chirp’ (like the linemen in a football game, trying to get under the skin of an opponent) whenever the “opportunity” presents itself. Retail workers currently wear shirts emblazoned with the words, “be patient and kind” or some version of that injunction. Hospital corridors shout an intolerance of offensive behaviour, and in one case, a supervising psychiatrist was hired because of his record of “law and order” control in his previous hospital.

Cancel culture, naturally and predictably runs directly into the concrete abutment of whatever the culture of the situation, organization, authority deems intolerable. Several years ago, I encountered a news story out of Colorado detailing the expulsion of a straight A grade ten student because there was a paring knife in the glove box of her vehicle in the school parking lot. (It was there to assist her in peeling fruit and vegetables for her lunch!) Back in the 1990’s a three-strike-you’re-out policy came out of the Clinton White House as a measure to address  the proliferation of illicit drugs. Not only was the practice not effective, it piled on power and authority into the already bloated briefcase of “the authorities” in their failed attempt to stamp out illicit drug consumption.

Just this week, in a visionary, creative and highly effective measure to address the problem of homelessness in Vancouver.

“The New Leaf project is a joint study started in 2018 b y Foundations for Social Change, a Vancouver-based charitable organization, and the University of British Columbia. After giving homeless Lower Mainland residents cash payments of $7500, researchers checked on them over a year to see how they were faring….Not only did those who received the money spend fewer days homeless than those in the control group (not given the $7500), they had also moved into stable housing after on average of three months, compared to those in the co9ntrol group, who took an average of five months…. Those who received the money also managed it well over the course of a year….Almost 70% of people who received payments were food secure after one month. In comparison, spending on alcohol, cigarettes and drugs went down, on average, by 39 per cent.” (Bridgette Watson, CBC News, October 7, 2020)

It may seem unfair to juxtapose a 3-strike practice in the 90’s with a stereotype-shattering experiment in 2020 given that times have changed, along with expectations, and also with the infusion of new minds, hearts, imaginations and the long series of failed experiments based on very different expectations about how the underclass will act if actually shown empathy, compassion and real help. Perhaps, it is fair to say that the many failures, incarcerations, illnesses and deaths resulting from the application of a far more punitive approach, paved the way for experiments like that in Vancouver.

Nevertheless, the “zero tolerance” “more perfect” attitude continues to operate at all levels of North America culture. Cancel culture seems to be a refinement of the cancel culture, and, while this next statement will likely offend some, it is also reasonable to link the dots between the historic political stance on the death penalty, the wave of minimum sentences imposed by the Harper (and other) governments on judges, and the explosion of prison populations south of the 49^th parallel. Cancel culture advocates, are at best, making instant and unappealable judgements of others whom they declare to be hurtful to them personally or to their ‘group’ (gender, demographic, victim).

Joe Biden has been severely criticized for his resistance to defunding the law enforcement departments in American cities. His more moderate (and less tolerable to justice protesters and advocates) approach seeks to bring law enforcement and civil rights leaders together, in an optimistic initiative of political leadership, to design a more fair, accountable, transparent and thereby sustainable relationship between those wearing “blue” and those in communities needing help and support from a variety of injustices.

It cannot be overlooked that, in some cases, institutional leadership has either  turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to legitimate complaints of injustice, even assault, among the people in those organizations. And in other institutions, because of the potential political damage that could and often does occur, if legitimate complaints are ignored and their authors silenced, other executives have tended to bend over backward, in complicity with what has become as “zero tolerance” objective. Squeezing out of the application of such policies and practices, however, is the messy, costly and even more difficult to execute process of a full, complete, fair and legitimate “due process” based on the ideal, fought and died for, of “habeus corpus”, innocent until proven guilty.

Given that our public discourse has been riddled with stories of public complaints of serious offences having destroyed both reputations and careers of hundreds if not thousands, without the benefit of even a private, objective and comprehensive investigation of the details of many of those complaints, it seems reasonable to wonder if and when the balance will be permitted to swing back to something like the process advocated by Biden for law enforcement.

Clearly, the racial injustice that blacks, native Americans, immigrants and refugees have suffered for centuries cannot and will not be eliminated in whatever processes, rules, changes and laws emerge from the Biden effort (if he is elected). Nevertheless, the model of bringing opposing sides, effectively the sides of the abuser and the abused, into the same room, at the same table, in what will have to be a protracted and complex process of reconciliation can serve as a model of hope, promise and example on other issues.

While there are examples of both forgiveness and tolerance among what are considered heroic individuals on both sides of  deep and profound hurt (emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual and also legal and ethical), the natural penchant to “tribal protests,” although they garner public attention, they serve really to bring about initial expressions of “the unfinished man” as Biden called himself, in a phone call to Senator Cory Booker, following an especially passionate debate about race, in the Democratic presidential primary.  As Booker told his host on MSNBC, Biden was willing to acknowledge that, as a white man, he needed to listen, really actively listen, to the pain of the black community, in order to be better equipped even to attempt to address its many complications.

And the spirit and the motive of Biden’s “vulnerability” as an honoured indication of authentic courage, is a model, too of the need for a similar moment of “aha” from the millions of those who consider it enough to blurt out their savage attacks, under an emotional and hyper-injured ejection of contempt (and pain, injustice and offense), without even considering their balancing responsibility to seek to find the whole truth.

In a culture so weaponized,

Ø in which even a mask to prevent the spread of a lethal pandemic is used against those who responsibly and patriotically choose to wear one, and

Ø in which those who have held power for decades, cling to its perks and its opportunities for self-aggrandizement, and for legacy-building at the expense of performing those duties to which they swore an oath, and

Ø in which millions have lost their jobs, their homes, and their families, and for some even their lives,

 

the leaven of counting far past “10” before vomiting the kind of instant, toxic and too often character-assassinating judgements into that anonymous phone or tablet, needs to be modelled at the highest levels of political and leadership perches. Parents, on the verge of administering some kind of abusive punishment on a disobedient child, have for decades been cautioned to “count to ten” as a way of deflecting and dissipating their intense frustration, anger, impatience and offense.

Words, when deployed as weapons, attacking the character, the dignity and the respect of another human being, for the simple reason of paying a debt to the offended ego of an insecure and neurotic spokesperson, slip like mercury smoothly, glibly and effortlessly from the larynx, over the tongue, through the lips and into the atmosphere. There is no “record” of such abuse, except in the heart/mind/spirit of the victim of that abuse. And while we have all colluded in forming an voluntary mass army of accusers, we have not, simultaneously, generated a similar battalion of those willing to put a hand on the arm, a raise of the eyebrows, a nod of the head, or even a phone call or text, if and when we know that someone in our circle is about to “flail” at another, with or without cause.

This space is not the place to advocate for, or even to make judgements of the many offences and their perpetrators whose stories have made headlines. Nor is it the place to judge that all of those headlines were based on untruths. It is however, a legitimate space in which to note the dangers of a cultural convention that has the potential to infect every single person on the planet, even potentially to destroy each individual, without that potential even being moderated, and certainly not eliminated, through the removal of impunity.

If each person who slings a potentially lethal arrow, or bends a potentially lethal knee on a neck, or observes such an act, were to count to ten, and to ask another for counsel, and to take him or herself out of the moment of the “enflamement”, it is conceivable that together we might cut the incidences of hate, racial, gender and domestic abuse and even parental abuse of relatively innocent children. That kid may be in fact “guilty” of a specific act, considered in that family as offensive; however, it is important for every parent to take note of the fact that that specific act is not, and must not be permitted to define that kid’s version of himself. Neither should a homeless person, or a person completely and utterly dependent on even a hard drug like heroine, be judged by another individual, and especially by the collective judgement of a society, as “worthless” and “undependable,” and “unworthy” of help, support and care.

None of us is without our own “bentness” and none of us should be categorized as “worthless” or hopeless. If and when we enter into such judgements, we are declaring our own refusal to acknowledge our own vulnerability. And if and when we can safely own our vulnerability, we will no longer need those ‘zero tolerance” and “cancel” culture steps which do not protect us from ourselves, anyway. 

 

*Tautology: in logic, tautology is a formula or assertion that is true in every possible interpretation; a repetitive statement..(Wikipedia)

Reflections on faith as an election factor

 There is a collision long in the making about to smash into the public consciousness on November 3, 2020, (and in the days and weeks following) that pits some irresistible forces against some other immoveable objects. Which side is which, however, is a moving wind-tunnel of the toxic gases that thunder through the political vortex in Washington on that day.

In the age of identity politics, when identities are as diverse as the number of people in any population, each person seems to be determined to affix him or herself to one or other of a dominant group with the specific cause of that group serving as the magnet for those committed. The complexity of the convergence of the many energies that are infused into the individuals and their respective groups, while seemingly discernible and divisive, also discloses some serious overlaps, subterfuges, unpredictabilities and seemingly unresolvable conflicts.

For example, those for whom the overturning of Roe v Wade, and for many of these also the Affordable Care Act, is a paramount moral decision for the American society, in what they believe is a return to the Godly position as outlined by the Roman Catholic church, have signed up for trump/pence. Also, among American Catholics, who have strongly opted for Biden/Harris, there is less emphasis on the need to overturn Roe v Wade (“established law”) and a need to reinforce and enhance the Affordable Care Act, especially in the middle of a pandemic. African Americans also break into different demographics, with those demanding social justice under a reformed law enforcement system flowing to Biden/Harris, with those who champion the slogan “law and order” seeing civil protest as a threat to the peace and security of neighbourhoods, towns and cities siding with trump/pence. Mixed deeply and deliberately into this “issue” in the public mind is the injection of words like ‘antifah’ and Proud Boys, representing the far left and the white supremacists respectively. Even the degree of importance placed on one or other of these forces by prospective voters, signals their tilting toward or away from trump/pence, and toward or away from Biden/Harris.

Polling having become so prevalent by so many different organizations, universities, corporations and media outlets, cataracts of data flood morning television screens, shouting, for example, dramatic shifts in popularity among seniors toward Biden, or tight races in states like Florida and Texas. Each talking head pays attention to a selected range of polls, while ordinary political amateurs are left pondering the philosophic and ideological underpinning of those polling agencies, including the development of their specific questions, the size of their sample and the statistical reliability and validity of their calculations.

Thundering phrases, like “a change election” or “I am a transitional candidate” or “stop this clown” or “shades of Mussolini on the balcony” or “a fight for the soul of this nation,” while evoking intense emotions on all sides, may or may not have a direct and measurable impact on the result.

For some time, the question of the health of the economy had a rather significant role in voter preferences, now seeming to be replaced by the health of the president, the White House and Pentagon officials, and the spread of the lethal and ubiquitous COVID-19. And of course, the personalities and character of the competing candidates for the Oval Office, as well as their respective ages, factors into the intimate, and often unconscious motives of the voters.

Compassion v narcissism, stability v unpredictability, thoughtful v impetuosity, moderate v extreme, dependable v unreliable….these are just a few of the bandied-about comparative emotional and somewhat thoughtful measurements used by voters to align with or refute their choice of president and vice-president.

Having watched much of the coverage, this scribe’s concerns are drawn to the question of the importance, subtlety and seduction of “religion” on the voters in a nation that champions itself as a ‘christian nation’.

Claiming that God is on “my side” is a traditional and even pervasive cliché among military generals, dictators, revolutionaries, and even democratic candidates for election. Endlessly attempting, in a flowing white-water of polls, events, speeches, tweets, and mis-steps, each political candidate flays away in hope that s/he will not flounder on the rocks, or drown in the eddies. Each candidate also brings his/her own religious experience, teachings, values and perceived identity to that “flaying”.

We all recall Obama’s igniting a storm of political backlash when he mused that many people who are frightened turn to the Bibles and their guns. While his headline was guaranteed to ignite intense, reactive and even defensive emotions among many Americans, it is my personal experience that millions of Americans, sadly and ironically, deny their fears, their insecurities, the anxieties and protest far too much in bravado to convince an “alien” clergy of their sense of wellbeing, confidence and hope. Invariably, those things we are especially committed to ignore, deny and cover up, nevertheless, exert an even more inordinate impact on our lives and on our culture. That is not ‘my rule’ but rather an inescapable truth in which we are all embedded. Truth is that those willing to unpack those previously denied, ignored and covered-up traits, including those willing to talk openly about how such ‘demons’ have reared their heads spontaneously in our private lives, are demonstrating and modelling a courage and a confidence that so far escapes those in denial.

Integral to the development of a mature confidence among adults who have and continue to face the hard truths of pain, loss, failure and desperation is a notion of the nature of “God” in that journey. If, for example, the deity is attributed to be a punitive, wrathful, unloving God but also one who is not usually involved in human affairs and is seen as impersonal and distant, and religion may be seen as a means to other goals (like eternal life), according to the research of Spilka and others, many of those who share this view seek money, prestige and power. (The Psychology of Religion, Eds. Spilka, Hood, Gorsuch, Prentice Hall, 1985, p. 28)

Over against this perspective, is an orientation based on “interpretations (attributions) of self, God and the world as nonthreatening and positive. Personal capability parallels a sense of trust in others and the deity.” (op. cit.)

Perceptions of how “God-fearing” a candidate is, projected onto that candidate, and by comparison, withheld from his/her opponent, is a phrase that emerged from the recent “evangelical” rally on the Washington Mall, headed by vice-president pence, the man adjudged to be a ‘man of God” by interviewed supporters. Some present even went so far as to claim that “trump was sent by God” and therefore he must have qualities approved by and congruent with what God wants. Biden’s comment, in reference to anyone who next questions his faith, (as a presumed comparison to pence or trump), “The next person who questions my faith, I am going to stuff my rosary down his throat!” rings like a deeply personal plea for fairness, even among Roman Catholics. Biden’s faith, according to his own account, has sustained him through several deep and painful tragedies in his life, as it continues to do.

In America, in this time period, when crass brutish, seemingly immoral and highly unethical and destructive attitudes and behaviours are on display, at the highest levels of the government (read the White House), the question of how human beings are to be treated, considered and supported has risen to the top of the agenda totem pole for millions of voters.

“No theme expresses the spirit of religion better than the identification of faith with humanity and community. Whether the term describing this relationship is love, justice, compassion, helping, responsibility, mercy, grace charity, or a host of other similar sentiments and actions, the message is one of positive feeling and support for others. Niebuhr tells us that ‘Love is, in short, a religious attitude.’ It is the essence of interpersonal morality—a free giving of aid, of sympathy, of the self to realize the highest ethical ideals of religion. In a similar vein, Pope John XXIII wrote in his noted encyclical Pacem in Terris, that ‘the social order must be a moral one.’ Judaism also speaks of the ‘right of our neighbor and his claim upon us.’ The Western spiritual tradition continually stresses obligations and duties to others as fundamental moral imperatives. These are ideals. (op. cit. p. 274)

The target, subject, object of the compassion, responsibility, mercy, grace and justice, as perceived by each voter, will, whether consciously or not, play a significant role in the choice each voter makes on November 3 (or before). Similarly, the target, subject, object of “anxiety, contempt, fear and loathing, or even disdain and disrespect will also play a role in the decision. For those who argue for hope over fear, they have to rest their own vote in the possibility and potential that hope will overcome the national fear and angst. On the other hand, for those who believe that the current upheaval, unrest and disarray is a sign that things are so bad only the act of God can rescue the nation, their choice will likely favour the trump/pence ticket.

Projection of ideals as well as fears is only one of the less reported ways by which voters express their attitudes and their beliefs. I have been struck by my own consistent contempt of the attitudes, words, actions and obsessive needs of the current president, likely unaware of what in myself that I cannot tolerate is to be found in him. Similarly, I have found the moderate, temperate and measured attitudes, words, actions and lesser need for attention and acclaim in the Democratic candidate to be reassuring, confirming what I consider to be those traits I like to consider part of my own temperament. Nevertheless, I am less conscious of how much calculating ambition, creative strategy and demonic tactics it truly takes to win the office of the president of the United States.

And, my deepest anxiety is that a pastiche of respectability, responsibility, moderation and gentility will drown in what could become a tidal wave of hate, anger, white supremacy, sexism, racism and a flood of undetected cash from sources too illicit to reach public scrutiny. The Mueller Report, ostensibly generated to rein in the president’s obvious culpability on more than one front, failed both in its execution (seemingly based on a fair and limited assessment of the role of the special prosecutor) and in its public release, under a Barr-cloud of disparagement. The again respectable and responsible pursuit of a “COVID-Relief bill, by the House Democrats, has been blocked by both the president and the Senate Republicans, (and just yesterday scuppered by the president, to be reclaimed as his personal prize today). And the infamy of bribing millions of literally hungry and hopeless Americans with a personally signed cheque of $1200, over trump’s signature is the most blatantly hucksterish, mobish, scurrilous and reprehensible campaign tactic.

However, is it just possible that the Americans who have already been seduced into the trumpcult will convince too many others of their quiet desperation to provide a skin-of-his-teeth victory, or worse, a hotly contested legal process that ultimately results in a Supreme Court ‘win’ which can only be seen from history as a profound and damaging tragedy to the nation?

Reflections on "power" in the west...sources, definitions and implications

 In this space, much time has been dedicated to the issue of the means, the manner and the consequences of how power is deployed whether that is power inside a family, a neighbourhood, a school, a church, a military or quasi-military battalion or a corporation. It is a primary contention here that how power is designed, organized and deployed is not only determinative of how the ‘organization’ functions, but also is indicative of the kind of thought processes, myths, cultural archetypes and conventional cultural modalities apply at the time of the power deployment.

Let’s anatomize, again, the deep foundations of “power” in the western culture, especially in North America, starting with the basics of how history is comprised of recorded actions, recorded and performed primarily by men. Given that hubris underlies much of western history, and given than men, universally and almost exclusively, regard their/our “superiority” in primarily, if not exclusively, in physical terms, it is not rocket science to remind ourselves of just how deeply embedded in our collective unconscious is the notion that big, strong, fast and agile are all adjectives attributable to masculine heroes in history. Of course, there are the requisite antitheses of the hero’s tragic flaw, and the glaring ironic examples of quixotic and excessive failures. These ‘dark’ moments, however, show in greater relief the “light” and sensational accomplishments of others, lauded for their heroism.

The cultural concept of hero is inextricably embedded in the notion of one or more deities.  Man creates God, or God creates man?…whichever your mind holds most credible, (or for some perhaps both, in the most intimate and inextricable endless mutual relationship), the question of absolute power, as embodied in a deity, has served, and continues to serve as a ‘crown’ on the top of the cultural totem pole that signifies western culture. Aspiring to the quality, traits, attitudes, beliefs and ethics of a deity (as we envision, speculate, and even pontificate upon this complexity), continues to both inspire and frustrate those of us inhabiting this planet.

And undoubtedly, there is a paradoxical as well as highly complex relationship between aspiring to the “good” and potentially becoming alienated from both self and the rest of the world. Losing identity, in a kind of surrender to something larger than the self even if that ‘something’ is deemed to be holy, sacred and honourable, is a danger for all people whose intensity, focus, drive, ambition and myopia is not safeguarded by and through detailed, intimate and confrontative associations, collegiality and community. However, such linkages depend on a shared commitment to open acknowledgement of the most difficult truths. Too  often, at least in my experience, the issue of ‘truth-telling’ has been sacrificed to the more valued ideal of ‘political correctness’ ‘social affability’ or even personal aggrandizement and career building.

While this sacrifice is not exclusive to men, we men are highly vulnerable to its bright sheen, in our enculturation to succeed, to compete, to rise in the eyes of vaunted supervisors, and to reach some summit of achievement in which we and our kin can and will take pride. Some of the specific sabotages that too often emerge in such a cultural mythology include elevating size, strength, speed, numerical size, fiscal size and strength, academic degrees, portfolio burnishment,c and even political and career titles. All of these symbols, in western culture, impede the full and authentic development of men in particular, but, by extension, their families who are themselves embedded in this myths, and their shared institutions and organizations. Others will argue, with some relevance and validity, that “growth” in numbers, and size and dimension, are legitimate measures of the relative success of leadership, and the beliefs that underpin that leadership.

Capitalism not only thrives on this mythology, it actually depends on its concrete embedding in the educational, ecclesial, management and even social systems theory as applied to both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. And, as a natural and inevitable follow-up to these myths, all processes, strategies, tactics and the structural foundations of such processes must contribute to the larger goal of bigger, better, faster, more facile, more universal and more dominant.

Although this anecdote might be misinterpreted as bigoted, it is not intended as such. The comment refers to the process, and not to the dogma of its speaker. A Roman Catholic priest once spoke to a clergy of a protestant church and asked, “How many kids are there in your church education program?” And when the answer, “About a dozen,” came back, he retorted, “You can talk to me when you reach 400, where mine is.”

The seductive appearance, and for him the reality of “power in numbers” (extended obviously to dollars, and parishioners and all things empirical) cannot and must not be laid exclusively at the foot of that priest. It lies at the front door, and in the archives and in the boardrooms, and in the strategy sessions of virtually all of the organizations operating in North America. And the corollaries that keep it front and centre among all executives, of both genders, include how to balance budgets, how to position new hires, how to design and execute all communications, both interior and exterior, how to celebrate the successes of the organization and how to indelibly imprint this period of the ‘history’ of the institution into the doctoral theses of the graduates pursuing their degrees.

These, of course, are all masculine-intuited, incarnated, and embodied myths. And one of the other less tasteful corollaries about the need to maintain and sustain these “appearances” is that whatever does not “accord” with the veracity and validity and viability of these myths must be ignored, denied, disavowed and even disallowed.

Now, if Edmund Burke’s aphorism “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” has any merit and bearing on this discussion, it is especially applicable to the history of the Christian church, beginning with the church in Rome. Set aside, for a few moments, the dogmatic beliefs of the church, and join me in a reflection on a piece of cultural history, originating from the pen and mind and research of the Head of Harvard University’s Department of Evolutionary Biology, Joseph Henrich. His new book, entitled, “The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous,” is reviewed by Judith Shulevitz, herself the author of “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of A Different Order of Time”. Her review is included in the latest edition of The Atlantic.

Henrich posits that the natural human inclination is to kinship, and early western history illustrates how people clustered in their communities, close to their families. Broad and generally accepted marriages between and among family members, including cousins, were relatively frequent, until late ‘antiquity’. Here is a quote from Shulevitz’s review, reporting on Henrich’s thesis:

As of late antiquity, Europeans still lived in tribes, like most of the rest of the world. But the (Catholic) Church dismantled these kin-based societies with what Henrich calls its ‘Marriage and Family Program,’ or MFP. The MFP was really an anti-marriage and anti-family program…..Forced to find Christian partners, Christians left their communities, Christianity’s insistence on monogamy broke extended households into nuclear families. The Church uprooted horizontal, relationship identity, replacing it with a vertical identify oriented toward the institution itself. The Church was stern about its marital policies. Violations were punished by with-holding Communion, excommunicating, and denying inheritances to offspring who could not be deemed ‘illegitimate’. Formerly, property almost always went to family members. The idea now took hold that it could go elsewhere. At the same time, the Church urged the wealthy to ensure their place in heaven by bequeathing their money to the poor—that is, to the Church, benefactor to the needy. In so doing, ‘the Church’s MFP was both taking out its main rival for people’s loyalty and creating a revenue stream,’ Henrich writes. The Church, thus entitled, spread across the globe. Judith Shulevitz, “Why is the West So Powerful—And so Peculiar?” in The Atlantic, p 93-4)

As the most powerful institution operating as a mouthpiece for God, the Catholic Church, obviously had immense influence over the people in its charge. Not only could and did the church authorities impose definitions of ethic, moral and spiritual standards (in this case of appropriate family life), they enforced their own standards by with-holding what to many would have been, and continue for many today, those ‘gifts of grace’ which the church asserts accompany compliance and a secure place in eternity.

Whoever speaks, in any manner, as a surrogate/representative/prophet/shaman/clergy for God, whether that be an institutional or personal voice, there is a high degree of perceived authenticity, veracity, validity and even reverence for those utterances among many people. The implicit and attendant iron filings of meanings that accompany those magnet words, phrases, concepts and commands are showered over and among the many pew-dwellers, coffer-donors, and heaven-seekers among ordinary people. Applied to an audience, many of whom were not yet literate, offered an even more fertile ground in which to plant those seeds of conformity, financial stability and world evangelism.

Henrich does not address the question, “Why did the church adopt (the MFP)?” and states as his bottom line, “the MFP evolved and spread because it ‘worked’.” (op. cit. p. 93) However, speculation about the church’s motives, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, while not pretending to be exhaustive, has to expose the bare minimum of institutional needs, aspirations, perceptions and beliefs.

Henrich’s work, and Shulevitz’s review includes these words:

Around 597 A.D. Pope Gregory I dispatched an expedition to England to convert the Anglo-Saxon kind of Kent and his subjects. The leader of the mission, a monk named Augustine, had orders to shoehorn the new Christians into Church-sanctioned marriages. That meant quashing pagan practices such a polygamy, arranged marriages (Christian matrimony was notionally consensual, hence the formula ‘I do’), and above all, marriages between relatives, which the Church was redefining as incest. Augustine wasn’t sure who counted as a relative, so he wrote to Rome for clarification. A second cousin? A third cousin? Could a man marry his widowed stepmother?

He could not. Pope Gregory wrote back to rule out stepmothers and other close kin not related by blood—another example was brothers’ widows….Not until 1983 did Pope John Paul II allow second cousins to wed. (The Atlantic, op. cit. p. 92)

Originating in a common belief and perception among church elders, the power of the Church stemmed from “upon this rock I will build my church” biblically recorded as an intention to the apostle Peter. Declaring what is/was/will be such matters as incest, polygamy, monogamy, and the inevitable measures to assure compliance is a meagre extension of that original Godly direction/intention/documentation.

Initially seated in one man, this power, the pontificate, has continued for these two millenia, not only in fact, but also in symbol, for many, if not all, of the institutions, trade associations, craft guilds, city councils, and national governments. “Dominant male figures” is the cultural archetype that is continually replicated at the most visceral level, as if it has proven its value, over the centuries. However, it has also demonstrated considerable, and some argue, lethal and persistent dangers.

For one, the ‘top-man’ model implicitly argues for a ‘final decision’ by a single man. It clearly champions the too-often repeated slogan among ambitious capitalists, “don’t speculate, just react” as a modality of action, while clearly opposed to and rejecting of reflection, consultation, deliberation, investigation and protracting the process of decision making, especially on highly important matters.

The DOW index, geared to data each nano-second, the instant other-side-of-the-coin to “instant gratification”…instant rebuttal of anything that smacks of threat, danger or damage to the public image (of individuals, organizations, sales, investments, profits and “success” so measured). The genuflecting gyrations of a COVID-infected president, fawning in a hermetically-sealed Suburban, while subjecting secret-service-men, and their families to his starved and humiliated ego (starved and humiliated by his own actions, perceptions and beliefs) is only one of millions of “instant reactions” to the obsessive-compulsive need for instant gratification.

Just as the church could and did announce, and then promulgate its insidious and nefarious plot on the family, so too can and do millions of mostly male executives announce, and then promulgate and then enforce and reinforce their “power” over whomever happens to be “under” their charge.

And when even the doctors fall sway to the ego-demands of an infected and infectious president, to “inflate his spirits” and “prevent depression” (as is and has been the dependent cases of millions of heaven-aspiring church believers throughout history), then we must all reflect on our own subservience to rules, laws, processes and personnel whose primary purpose is to serve the interests of those promulgating those edicts, and not the wider, and more applicable and more ethical interests of the whole community.

The church does not shoulder the whole responsibility for how we conceive and operate power among our society; yet, it must account for much of our western cultural mythology, as we strive to deconstruct and tear down those walls behind which we have been cowering.

Reflections on "news" v "messages"

 The news is overflowing with talk of racism, taxes, relief packages, Roe-v. Wade, Affordable Care Act, Supreme Court appointment, pandemic numbers treatments and vaccinations. Each of the topics has relative merit, and to some extent, each gets lost in the turbo-vacuum of power rhetoric, power perceptions, power traditions, power righteousness and power imbalance.

Entrenched power, for centuries, has been the bane of ordinary* people, for the simple, obvious and undisputed reason that those in power consider their power to be legitimate and as ‘permanent’ as possible, and their persons as “legitimate” holders of that power. Whether that power is embedded in a misguided perception that only those with theological training, for example, can be permitted to read holy scripture, as was the case for centuries prior to the printing press, or whether that power is embedded in body, brain and heart cells that declare unequivocally, that white race is superior to all other races, it is the power that is embedded in the dominant culture, that essentially and effectively rules.

Entrenched power, the self-imposed, and too often complicity and sometimes innocently and even naively endorsed and supported by ordinary people right to rule, is not nearly as clearly defined as it once was in a monarchy, or a papacy or a tyranny. Single person rule, while offensive and worthy of evolution, if not revolution, to erode such power, nevertheless, was so clearly visible, identifiable and also removeable, should adequate force(s) be brought to bear. With a single  stoke of a pen a ruler could dispatch an army, a navy, and any number of explorers, traders, conquerors, and empire builders. With a single stroke of a pen, a single ruler could also impose any one of multiple forms of tax, loyalty, feudal harvest, military service and even a geographic boundary.

In the pursuit of that maintenance of single ruler power, the lives of both the holders of such offices as well as many opponents of those specific office holders have been lost. Similarly, when the tolerance, and submission of those governed by tyrants grew too thin to be sustained, any of a number of forms of protest, conflict and even insurrection have erupted. One theory of leadership, deeply embedded in the North American culture, through the writing of Chester Barnard (mid-twentieth century), is that the “governor” can maintain power and authority and responsibility only with and through the consent of the governed, the people over whom s/he has responsibility.

Over time, however, that theory of consent, so lauded by the evolving and increasingly penetrating tactics of persuasion, influence-peddling, classical conditioning of rewards and sanctions for specific and required compliance (or its opposition) has been impacted, and perhaps even dimmed like a sepia photo, through the work of other theorists like Maslow, and Mihaly Csikszent’s “Flow”, Dr. William Ouchi’s Theory Z, (loyalty through a job and well being for life), to some of the more contemporary leadership/management theories, including transformational leadership, leader-member exchange theory, Adaptive Leadership, Strengths-based leadership, and more recently Servant leadership.

Transformational leadership is where a leader works with teams to identify needed change and seeks commitment to bring about that change. Leader-member exchange focuses on the two-way relationship between leaders and followers that develops through three stages. Adaptive leadership attempts to facilitate how organizations adapt to change effectively. Strengths-based Organizational Management (OBOM) focuses on maximizing efficiency, productivity and organizational success through development of ‘strengths’ like computer systems,  tools and people. Servant leadership, as its name implies, posits that the main goal of the leader is to serve through listening, persuading, conceptualizing, applying foresight and stewardship…examples include Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer and Mother Theresa.

Regardless of the relevant and currently deployed theory and model of leadership, underlying all modalities are some critical pieces of rebar that hold the organizational foundation in place: results have to be attained, costs have to be reduced, profits have to be increased. How the equation is framed and executed, including the relative significance of the “people” to the relative significance of the “leader” nevertheless determines the level of trust, compliance, integrity, openness and even effective and efficient “productivity” (however that variable is to be measured).

Power in every organization is interminably shifting, as the wind ripples, or erupts lake waters, dependent on the velocity, endurance, direction and the wind-breaks of that force. Unlike the formal study of physics, however, the flow of energy as political/leadership power and influence seems to be elusive and so far beyond the ken of algebraic equation. Whether or not this power/leadership/influence is amenable and expressible in an algorithm perhaps has been discovered in some high tech lab. Naturally, if and when this power/leadership/influence is finally captured as a finite entity, there will be a tidal wave of highly affluent ‘leaders’ seeking to acquire whatever means is more likely to make the achievement of that “finiteness”.

However, what is even less amenable to a kind of algebraic or alorgithmic definition, is the culture, the mind-set and the degree of compliance/defiance of whatever power and leadership they might be experiencing. Demographics have evolved almost to the power at which “knowing” about others by those seeking to know rivals or exceeds the long-time small-town attribute in which everyone “knows” everything about everyone else. Only, through digital technology, the personal information, collected, curated, compared and then sold and disseminated, has become a marketable commodity. Those whose business, political, cultural, philanthropic, educational, and even ecclesial goals and objectives depend on targeting limited resources toward increasing “revenue” (participation, votes, enrolments, trust donations, sales) rely on this personal “so-called” private information as the GPS for their organization’s growth.

Leadership, in some cases, has devolved to a point where, for example, knowledge of and interpretation of something called “analytics” is more important in assessing talent (especially in professional sports) that the former attributes like character, personality, work-ethic, and those old formerly reliable “bromides” of litmus tests for those in the hiring and selection business. Nevertheless, in whatever organization, corporation or whatever, there is a growing trend toward enhancing and even gildening of the ‘rose’ of the single leader, that is most offensive.

Single leaders, provide clarity and simplicity in a world seemingly gone nuts with the overflow of information and opinion, multiplied by the armies of dispensers of information and opinion (websites, podcasts, blogs, newsletters) to the point where opportunistic power-seekers, (themselves highly needy of adulation and attention) have even administered a kind of political thalidomide to the formerly trusted and reliable public news sources, defaming them as ‘fake news’.

So, one of the first and foremost tasks of ordinary people, is to be able to discern the difference between information demonstrated and verified to be accurate and the layers of opinion that is embedded in the presentation of every piece of information. And because this discernment is becoming increasingly complex, given the subtlety and ubiquity of much of the flow of paid advertising, marketing and political messaging, and unvarnished hard news.

Just recently, Susan Delacourt wrote in The Star, a column that took note of the difference between “messages” and “news”. As a long-time highly regarded columnist based currently in Ottawa, Ms Delacourt is growing frustrated with the plethora of “messages” that are being churned out as a method of ‘branding’ a political messenger. Is that messenger a “right” or “left”-leaning public figure? Is the (likely) press release inevitably devoid of hard information, and full of blathergab that reinforces the nudge the author (and/or his/her publicist) seeks to put on the scales of public opinion. Telling the people of a constituency the ‘brand’ the political operative knows will resound favourably among the ‘locals’ is another way of gobbling up free media coverage, given that many local media outlets themselves gobble up press releases from Ottawa, in their relentless pursuit of their own readership, who are themselves, ready and pliable consumers of the latest ‘gossip’ of the life of their candidate. Feathering that local nest is also like a saving account of public acceptance, anticipating a time (again almost inevitable) when the party or the candidate him/herself will stub a toe and will need to draw on that reserve account of public acceptance as an antidote to the bad news.

Some 40% of the American voting public in about to cast a ballot for trump, in the upcoming presidential election. Many of them are proudly attired in t-shirts blaring the epithet VOTE YOUR FEELINGS! This, to remind others that, regardless of whatever the president utters, does, or does not do, how one feels about him (as ordinary, a doer not a talker, a judge-factory, an abortion warrior, a health-care destroyer, as plain-if-vulgar speaker) matters much more than anything else. The obvious and indisputable facts that that he lies, that he defames everyone including American allies, that he fails to implement measures that would prevent thousands of unnecessary deaths, hundreds of enchained children separated from their parents. The feelings of those voters, apparently, take precedence over such glaring features of his tenure including a denial of knowing David Duke, a denial of knowing the Proud Boys (while ordering them to stand back and stand ready), the denial of empirical science, even if it is continuing to evolve) while exhorting governors to open schools and businesses, thereby threatening thousands of lives.

The “messaging” is an expression that comes from the corporate world, a world so dominating, ever so subtly, that much of North America hardly recognizes, and certainly would mostly deny the seduction we have permitted. Even the churches and the universities now boast or complain, depending on their relative affluence and attendance numbers, of needing to “serve” those in their orbit, or to “gather” new recruits in order to maintain or to grow their value. The public relations business is the heart and mind of the messaging business. How to manage a crisis, especially, has taken on a whole vocabulary, a methodology and a contractual relationship between the practitioners of the new business and the organizational or individual resident of the crisis. Corporations, and by default, individuals seeking to reclaim a public trust and reputation turn to the professional “message-makers” whose task it is, for considerable fees, to transform a public debacle into an easily forgiven or forgotten mis-step into a ‘win’ another of those “measureable” turning points in the life of an organization or an individual.

News, like the numbers of deaths and mental defects that will remain with the children in Flint Michigan, for example, are so painful and so tragic, that their capacity to continue to impact the life of the nation has faded, partly through the deluge of other competing headlines, and partly through the cultural tendency and proclivity to deny really painful information. Similarly, the encased and separated children at the border is another piece of news that has faded from public consciousness, in the tsunami of emotive sludge pouring through the president’s twitter feed, and into the Fox “news” channel.

There is an oxymoron, if I ever heard one, “The Fox New Channel”….no longer a channel for the dissemination of news, it has become the no longer alleged, but now openly agreed, official mouthpiece of the occupant of the Oval Office. The capitulation of Fox to the Oval Office, rendering Sean Hannity a literal subject to be channeled by the president, in pursuit of re-election, has effectively elevated propaganda to the level of formerly diligently researched, objectively confirmed, and articulately reported news. And once propaganda is indistinguishable from news and reliable verifiable news, in the minds of millions of voters, regardless of the reasons for that merging, the healthy pulse and the energetic breathing of a democracy, in medical terms, has to be considered in danger.

Whether that democracy can be judged to be ‘on life support’ or merely ‘in a coma’ or perhaps ‘under the influence’ (of a seduction), or even ‘infatuated like an adolescent’….the diagnosis seems irrelevant so long as the lifestyle choices, habits, perceptions and attitudes of that forty percent continue to be locked inside the cult.

Can the other sixty-odd percent provide the needed naloxone (opioid antagonist) to render the American body politic recoverable from this nightmare?

Shackling hope and opportunity with the chains of entrenched power

There are some disturbing cliches that limit, if not actually preclude, the seeding, nurture and development of a global, tolerant, supportive and ultimately survival attitude and mentality needed for the next century.

Some of the cliches are relatively new, while others are traditional. Among those relatively new rhetorical epithets, are:

·        Globalism, and a global economy will lift all boats

·        Technology will solve our most pressing problems

·        Economics are the core of all public issues and debate

·        Jobs must prevail over the protection of the environment

·        Labour rights and protections are a drag on the balance sheet of major corporations

·        Racism, sexism, ageism and religious bigotry reside only in the eyes and minds of those who consider themselves victims

·        Colonialism is the generator of the world’s history of development

·        Individual morality trumps a shared ethic

And among the more deeply rooted epithets that impede a ‘world view’ consciousness are:

§  All politics is local

§  All leaders must submit to a microscopic disclosure of their history, if we are to trust them enough to vote for them

§  My father always bought a Ford, GM, Chrysler and those Asian cars only take jobs away from ‘our people’

§  The unique characteristics of our town, village, township demand that we reinforce them in our kids: how we ‘see’ strangers, how we value (or disparage) change, how Catholics and Protestants do 9or do not) get along

§  How our neighbours acted when there were disputes

§  How the “outside” authorities (province, state, nation) ‘saw’ our little town, in respect to the pork-barrel we received, compared with other towns in the riding

§  How we elevate our local heroes to the stature of rock-stars, as a sign of the pride in what an ordinary kid can accomplish

§  How we denigrate our “failures” as a way of denying, avoiding and condescending the back-stories, in which we might have a part, in order to avoid any shared, collective, and community responsibility

§  How we revere the locals with excess wealth, as if they are the primary custodians of our best values

§  How those living in the biggest houses are both revered for their political and social influence, as well as despised for their arrogance in ‘reverse snobbery’

§  How our local media, in addition to the ads, and the obituaries, concentrate on the police report, the court report and the church/fund-raising socials, as if the core themes of issues mattered only to the official and elected representatives

§  How fires, ambulances, burglaries, murders and tornadoes, while significant, like magnets attract both supportive help and festering nests of gossip

§  How family breakdown, alcoholism, drug addiction is seen and spoken of in a “tutt-tutt” righteously superior manner, by those looking in from the outside

§  How homeless is regarded as a “scourge” on the community, committed by the “no-goods” (not even the have-not’s) because if they were any good, they would not be this ‘drag’ on our community…they are certainly not role models, nor contributors, nor even respectable members of our community

§  How churches, in too many cases, turn up their noses and cast aspersions downward on those less well dressed, less fluent, less educated and certainly those of the LGBTQ community and those of a minority ethnicity

§  The sinister and lethal level of communal gossip that, like a viral pandemic, scurries over the facebook and the chat lines, Instagram and twitter, as a superficial glue and a toxic bullying tactic in both feigned superiority and inclusion, (in a small cell) as well as a lethal weapon of exclusion. The veneer of congeniality that, like mascara, attends public interactions, teaches everyone the acceptable topics of public discourse and the rejected topics of public discourse, both in families and in the community generally.

In a previous life, I encountered a slogan on a consulting firm that read:

           “Sustainable support for your most valued resource---your people”

Implicit in that sell line, were numerous, often obvious, implications that if that firm were hired to be an effective instrument in growing and developing the people in a workplace, there would be considerable attention paid to assessing:

ü the degree of open, frank and free communication,

ü the relationships between and among individual workers

ü the relationships between and among the levels of authority and supervision,

ü the cultural norms, expectations,

ü the relative comfort with change, and resistance to change

ü the conceptual framework of the organization (pyramidal, circular, ad-hoc teams) including how power/decision-making is both perceived and actually conducted

ü the individual traits of workers, leaders, and influencers..their strengths and weaknesses, from a professional perspective (without clinical assessment, and certainly not through deployment of some WACO personality test)

ü relationship of this firm to its relative competitors, and allies, suppliers, financial resources (again not from an accounting perspective, but from the impact of its over-all health on the performance of the objectives, goals, targets of the firm

Left outside the conventional parameters of the assessment, report and recommendations would be the various cultural, belief, and normative ‘bounds’ on the organization and its people, that either enhance or impede the effective functioning of the organization. These considerations would be considered extra-territorial, mere narrative backdrop, and like the finer details of each biography of each worker at all levels, would be considered the stuff of something akin to an anthropological or even archeological piece of research.

After all, the personal beliefs, attitudes, perceptions and the words and the manner of their expression through adaptation to new work routines, to new machines, to new thought processes and research, and even to the ‘outsider’ (consultant) would be at best a series of footnotes, not actually material to the obvious presenting issues facing the organization that prompted the consult in the first place.

Change, new ideas, new research, new notions of technology, and of experimentation, depending on the entrenchment of the culture in preserving everything “old” as “treasured” and “valued” because it is old, and represents the identity of the organization, all threaten the very identity of many cultures, and the people currently in charge with retaining that culture.

Careers have been built, families raised, communities told and re-told the same stories, through, for example, the media’s persistent repetition of the same old myths (new people are a threat, and the rich deserve the power, and the seemingly righteous are not what they seem, the poor have always lived over there, and caused problems as long as we can remember, the professionals think their ‘s- - t’ don’t stink, our only hope is to put a ‘native’ in office), simply because those myths, they knew, would sell their papers, and reap those advertisements on which they depended. Nothing “too radical” was ever permitted to make it past the publisher’s eyes and desk, for fear that the town would ‘turn on’ the paper. Stability, consistency, dependability and the revering of the town’s “foundational premises and assumptions” are at the heart of the local unspoken “secular religion”.

And we wonder why books like Thomas Homer-Dixon’s “The Ingenuity Gap…How Can we Solve the Problems of the Future” are written, printed, and then distributed. Naturally, from this perspective they are desperately needed. While it is true that some of the proverbial constricting, local myths are giving way to a new generation of youth, as well as a series of generations of immigrants, refugees and migrant scholars from around the world, and there is a flattening of the ‘apex’ of white, male, affluent, older and highly educated individuals’ power and influence, there is still a very long way to go even to ‘rounding’ the peak of that mountain.

It is a granite mountain of resistance,  that, while we cling to its reverence, its sustainability simply because it has been around for so long, and, in our mind thereby having justified its value not only for surviving but for the methods by which it was able to endure. We see signs on the entrances to towns and cities, “innovation and history thrive here” “touch the past, embrace the future” which, sadly, display a truth and a political and cultural dream that is very often, if not always, unappreciated especially by the old-timers, the urn in which the ashes of history are carried, and from which the dust of those ashes will continue to spread over the streets and the living rooms and the coffee shops and the pubs for decades if not centuries.

Town Councils, Regional governments, provincial governments and even national governments, as well as the organizations and corporations in their charge, are possessed by the need to ‘focus on the immediate crisis’ while, at the same time, doing so in a manner that will bring the requisite forces to bear on the potential resolution of that crisis. And while, for example, science and technology, through the plethora of labs, individually and collectively, pursue their own unique speciality of a treatment or cure, or a new algorithm, those new designs and discoveries have to find a receptive host outside the labs and the cyber/silicone caves. And it is far easier and more likely that the pill, medicine or software will find an immediate harbour of incubation and nurture, into acceptance, a similar process does not exist for the seeding, the nurture and the growth and acceptance of new attitudes, beliefs, and values especially into the rural and small urban centres across North America.

We hear and read about the ‘culture wars’ between the urban and rural voters in all elections. We also know that corporations tailor their advertising campaigns to ‘fit’ the culture of their specific demographic market. And we know that, for example, yoga and pilates, have found their way into the most remote corners of many communities across the continent. Tragically, so too have the amphetamines and their requisite labs for production and distribution, (AND PROFIT) have also found their way into the streets and the schools across the continent. It is neither surprising nor accidental that cannabis outlets have sprung up everywhere, having been unleashed by national and provincial governments. This is not an argument against those new commercial ventures, but only a manner by which to compare the relative penetration of the many diverse communities by a commercial newcomer, in reference to the likelihood of penetration of new ideas, processes, theories, and even beliefs that might free the local culture from some of the chains that bind it.

It has been argued, and written that the lectures, books and theories that are and have been unearthed in many of the graduate schools, especially of the liberal arts and theology schools, rarely if ever make their way into the minds, consciousness or even the public media in smaller and rural centres. The LGBTQ community, for example, has struggled to gain even tolerance, (certainly not acceptance) among the many churches across the continent. Liberation theology, as another now relatively ‘old’ school from South America, has barely shown its head in North America, although significant religious and spiritual initiatives to eliminate poverty have sprung up, without the added codicil of political activism on a multiple-issue basis.

I recently listened to a ‘local’ businessman articulate his prescription of how aproposed new (yet long established elsewhere) senior citizens centre needed to be brought to life: “whatever is done, it has be done very slowly…that is the way we do things here” were the precise words from his mouth. He was not being arrogant, presumptuous, or even ignorant of the culture of his community. He was merely asserting one of the cardinal rules of “process” for the community. It must be done slowly….

And when parsing the phrase, one has to wonder what are the underlying themes upon which his utterance is based. Is it the notion that by going slow, the town is more likely to get it right? Or is it that going slowly will be less intimidating to the original townsfolk because it kind of ‘slipped’ in by the back door, without causing a fuss? Or is it that going slowly will provide those ‘gatekeepers’ of the town (and every town, hamlet, organization, government, school, university, college and certainly every church has one or more) to assess both the project and the people leading, before putting the official “town stamp” of approval on the project? Or is it that the gatekeepers, because of their longevity, their deep acceptance among the insiders, must fulfil their self-assigned purpose of ‘keeping the sacred alive’ as if their perception of the identity of the town/region were the ‘right’ and the most ‘acceptable’ perceptions?

And, lying underneath many of the clichés like a silent, secret and yet ready to explode fire in the root of the tree of each hamlet is the fear that their unique and historic identity will be shattered by the invasion of new ideas, new people, new perceptions, new values and new opportunities. And whether that fear/resistance lies in insecure individuals inside families, or inside the town councils or the chambers of commerce, or inside the sanctuaries of the churches, or inside the local hospital, school, college or service club, it will inevitably prevail over the naivety, innocence, impetuosity and curiosity and energy of new infusions of talent.

And, that consulting company’s report and  account, while paid, will too often look like the proverbial ball of wet mud, thrown against the white office wall, only to leave a mere stain of brown when it dries. I know I have watched both side of this fault line.