House of Eratosthenes

I’ve lately been thinking about leadership. That President’s Day is approaching, may at first blush look like the cause, but if you have been reading about what’s going on in the world you understand that that’s not it, P-Day is just a coincidence. A trolley has come off the tacks somewhere, and it’s costing us big-time. Just a casual glance at our “leaders” today confirms this, and it’s not a United States thing. It’s a First World thing. Somewhere, somehow, a pricey sweet vintage of Riesling has turned to vinegar. Our history is swollen thick with legends of leaders, born with their gifts and then chosen by destiny, who pulled victory from the jaws of defeat. It happened both within and outside of the military. They showed by their various words and deeds that they weren’t replaceable. They rode their horses into musket fire and cannon fire without flinching. Their opinions were not all popular; sometimes they swam against the tide. They refused to segregate their troops by skin color or to disregard the advice of females, during times when it would have been accepted and popular to do such things. They had courage and they had principles. So we know what good leaders are, and we have had some.

Nowadays they’re all buffoons. It’s more than a pattern. It’s setting in as an ironclad rule. The most lightweight stuff is floating to the top. Listing examples would be futile, and far more time consuming than listing exceptions. Somewhere we’ve lost our way.

I’m talking about what, exactly? We could start with the resume, distinguishing past employment that involves actually building something that works, from “make work” jobs, “no show” jobs, “being in the right place at the right time.” Making decisions that change the course of cause-and-effect. Getting your hands dirty. This is enough to substantiate, although not necessarily prove, that I’m calling out something tangible here, that it isn’t all in my head. We’re looking for something and not finding it. We’re finding lots of things that try hard to look like it, but the goods aren’t making it to our doorstep, as if we’re bringing empty grocery bags home from the market.

G-7 I think it started when people began to associate leadership with certain mannerisms. Public school “education” got us started on this. In the 1970’s it became fashionable to “let the kids choose their own leaders,” and the kids would respond by anticipating which ones among them would be chosen by everybody else. And then this Captain of the Football Team, Class ASB President, would saunter up to the head of the class in his name-brand clothes and speak from behind the podium with great bumptiousness and confidence…desperately pretending to know what he was doing. Which would have been an act he had been performing from an early age. It was all about the swagger. Inspiring people to say “There’s just something about him I can’t explain it!”

But, nothing that came out of his mouth changed the course of anything. It was all a bunch of bromides.

Okay so that’s one thing; a real leader says things that are merely manifestations of the weighty thoughts he’s been having, a fake leader’s “weighty thoughts” consist mostly-to-entirely of how to word his speech to make himself look good. How does one distinguish? We must be looking for something apart from the default, something people are not born doing. This much we know, because we stopped finding it when we merely stopped looking for it. We didn’t engage in a drive to forcefully extirpate it. Except maybe for manhood, I suppose. Our current social climate frowns on carelessly intertwining rugged manly mannerisms with any notion of “leadership,” arguing this would potentially deny us the benefits of good leaders who are female. I think that’s correct. But, here there is a clue: If it’s something that’s been happening ever since my childhood, I remember certain things about my childhood. On television, good leaders were still manly. At school, where we selected our leaders from among ourselves, or where our teachers took it upon themselves to show what leadership should look like, they were all female or effeminate males. Looking back, it’s easy to see what was happening: Progressives were retooling our cultural framework, as they are wont to do, as they can’t stop doing.

The truth is, though, that the testosterone eruption possesses neither a superset nor subset relation to genuine leadership. But it isn’t mutually exclusive either. The progressives, once again, steered us wrong.

A real leader is engaged in cause-and-effect, and autonomously invokes if-then thinking. “If we don’t guarantee the right to vote to persons of all races, there won’t be much point to the prior guarantees we have made about banning slavery and equal representation under the law.” “If we don’t seize such-and-such a hill, or beachhead, the enemy can launch attacks and counterattacks on us without warning.” Fake leaders have thoughts about not having thoughts: “Who am I, to say marriage is between one man and one woman?” “How do we have any more right to be out here, exploring, than this Crystalline Entity that’s floating around killing people?”

Perhaps if we could thaw out someone who got frozen a century or two ago, this change in prevailing zeitgeist would become more apparent. “It’s a good thing he’s in charge, otherwise something worse would have happened…” has fallen off the table. We have a President of the United States who has done nothing good — and yet, he’s the right guy for the times. He speaks with great force, and creepy whispers, and if he knew where he was he’d be like a Terminator robot — can’t be reasoned with, won’t show pity, remorse or fear. That’s today’s “leader” for you, there’s no point discussing anything with him. There’s an impulse to just knuckle under and do what he says, like in times of old. But back then you did what the leader said because that was your best hope of coming through the battle in one piece. Nowadays, it’s more like a depressed sort of resignation. “Oh well, one year down, three to go.” And this is what we have accepted as leadership.

It isn’t just Placeholder Joe. You heard his partner in crime: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.” There it is again, the grand flourish before the nonsense, the swaggering confidence, the “pretend to have a thought in my head when I really don’t have one.” We have accepted this as a sort of new-normal in leadership. If we want to do what these people say, it’s no longer because that’s our best shot at coming out of something alive. It’s more like it’s just too much of a pain in the ass to argue with them. How did we get here?

I think we got here when we decided leadership had something to do with personality, and if someone was fit to lead us, they should be fun to watch. Maybe that was it. I’ve heard a lot of people say a lot of things about George Washington, but I’ve never heard of a contemporary say he was fun to watch. Super duper tall, commanding presence, persevered in the face of near-certain defeat, made good decisions, etc., yeah. But not fun to watch.

I shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the cosmetics, though. Our obsession with appearances has refocused our attention onto characteristics that aren’t just irrelevant to the search for real leadership, but deleterious to our objective of finding some of it. This part is particularly hard to define. Real leaders move a certain way. It isn’t a swagger. It’s an ease with physical labor that reflects past activities and attempts. President Obama digging a ditch with His fanny sticking way out, was a good pictorial representation of it not being there. I recall participating in a lengthy online inspection into our male movie stars, wondering what had happened over there. How come thirty year old men today don’t speak, move and act like Sean Connery back when he was thirty? What’s different? Someone came up with the bit of trivia that young Connery, the man of a zillion jobs including pugilist and milkman, had actually been routinely punched in the face and maybe we’re seeing some of that. Yes; that could be it.

The change reeks of a bad trade, a “birthright for pottage” exchange, as if we’ve given up something irreplaceable, imbued with a value that escaped our understanding when we traded it away, for sake of something left on the table, that we didn’t even get. Placeholder Joe and Kneepads Kamala make dreadful decisions, and they’re not even fun to watch. I look at a picture of the G-7, and I feel like a huge reservoir of oxygen has been sucked directly out of my bloodstream, or I’ve lost a week or two out of my life just by laying my eyes on the spectacle.

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LeadershipSunday, February 13th, 2022

Leadership
Sunday, February 13th, 2022