House of Eratosthenes

“CALWWNTY” is my name for a time-honored and widely-exercised tactic of managing people. I actually touched briefly on the concept last month, throwing some compliments in the direction of — of all people — Former President Bill Clinton. The following exerpt captures the point I was making:

Bill Clinton, the guy who actually won a couple of times, almost never said “it is a neverending morass of muck and mire and surrounded by the putrid stench of failure and when one wades into it his eardrums swell with the sound of weeping, wailing and the gnashing of teeth and I know we can do better.” President Clinton nearly always found a little bit of sugar in the status quo…no Democrat who is big enough to get his name in the limelight seems capable of doing what Bill Clinton did. They can’t say “there is a lot that’s good about the status quo but there are shortfalls too, and we can do better.” If they said that, they’d do what Bill Clinton did: Win. This is such an intoxicating elixir, when you say “you done good — let’s see if we can improve some more.” People can’t get enough of that.

It is an acronym for “Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet.” The effective manager who strives to make his office a truly rewarding experience for those who report to him, is going to interpret this as an encapsulation of the messages that must be articulated. That is a productive and benign use of the concept, and it is outside of my intended meaning when I use this to criticize.

What I mean to criticize, is abuse of the concept. This is how the tactic is seen by shameless race- gender- and sexual-preference-panderers: It’s a cassette to be played as an endless-loop. This is like dangling a carrot in front of the donkey’s nose, while riding in the cart that he’s pulling, so that he never actually reaches the carrot. That this works, at least according to legend, is testament to the donkey’s lack of reasoning skills.

Well, CALWWNTY works great, especially when it’s being abused. And when it’s abused, it’s a testament to poor reasoning skills. Let’s review, shall we.

Women: About 38 years, give or take, of bitching about unequal pay scales, glass ceilings, skimpy Hooters waitress uniforms, and being sent down the hall for coffee and slapped in the ass on the way back. Thirty-eight years of coming a long way. Making great strides. “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Those who lead the charge of the feminist movement, once summoned to comment on the issue, invariably take the position that no, not quite, we’ve still got a lot of work to do. Not there yet.
People of Color: Forty-two years, plus a whole lot more — add another century if you want to capture what the Republican party did to abolish slavery. And if you want to add the tensions that led up to the civil war, you can tack on an additional couple of centuries. That’s a long time. Come a long way. Not there yet.
Homosexuals: Okay, this is a somewhat legitimate use of the term, although “not there yet” has a lot to do with legalizing gay marriage, and allowing homosexual couples to adopt, efforts which I personally oppose. People are entitled to their own opinions about things, and if they see this as something that has to be done, I suppose they could say they’re “not there yet.” Nevertheless, isn’t it a little bit conceited to establish a political agenda that is contrary to the wishes of so many other people, who are equally entitled to vote against it — and regard it as an unfinished task, just because the agenda has not been imposed on those who don’t like it?
Peace in the Middle East: Puh-leeze.

And this is why people like me get so frustrated. I’m an ordinary guy. I have no formal education beyond high school. Nobody in their right mind is going to pay twenty-five cents for my opinion about anything, let alone four hundred dollars an hour. And yet, in a distressing throwback to the Clint Eastwood problem, I could have easily predicted that comments like these, uttered at Coretta Scott King’s funeral, are bound to invite criticism from several different directions and renewed controversy about where to draw the line in eulogizing departed people who were politically active in life.

The criticism will ultimately be devastating because it will be offered by people who don’t give a rat’s ass about political parties. And, further, it will be devastating because it will be entirely valid:

Like speakers before him, former President Bill Clinton reminded those attending that the work the Kings set out to accomplish is not complete.

“What are we going to do for the rest of our lives?” he asked, urging others to follow in the footsteps of the Kings.
:
Some of the speakers took not-so-subtle stabs at the current White House.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, former head of the Southern Christian Leadership, which King helped found in 1957, gave a playful reading of a poem in his eulogy:

She extended Martin’s message against poverty, racism and war
She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar.

:
Former President Carter alluded to the hardship faced by the Kings in their struggle for civil rights, including — he added, pointedly — secret wiretapping and harassment by the FBI.

“The struggle for equal rights is not over,” Carter said. “We only have to recall the color of the faces of the people in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi � those who are most devastated by Katrina � to know that there are not equal opportunities for all Americans. It is our responsibility to continue.” — [emphasis mine]

Okay, so we’re about a half-century into this loathsome practice of defining special-interest demographic groups of people, shunting aside any hopes and dreams and ambitions they may have on an individual basis, and defining some perceived shortcoming they may be convinced they share as a group. There may once have been a valid reason for that, but read back to the previous sentence…HALF A GODDAMN CENTURY!

What the hell is the matter with you people?

What if your mechanic worked on your vapor-lock or your tune-up or your flat tire for fifty years and when you asked him how it’s going he said we’ve made GREAT strides…come a long way…we’ve still got a long way to go.

It just amazes me. Hundreds of thousands of women out there, might get a stopped up drain, maybe they’ll bust the garbage disposal. And before their poor husbands have had time to grab at the chicken bones that are stopping the thing up, they’ll be all “that’s taking way too long, you obviously don’t know what you’re doing, I’m calling the plumber.” But they can be told by race-movement activist overlords and feminist-movement activist overlords, “come a long way, not there quite yet, need to concentrate our energies for the struggle ahead” for freaking generations. Oh no, nothing wrong with that, I’m sure it’s all on the up-and-up. Just get back to me in five or ten years and let me know how the “struggle” is doing, okay?

You know why that little speech never changes? It has to do with defining the pain threshold downward. In the sixties, women really were treated like second-class citizens. A lot of people didn’t take them seriously…and you know, even that is a trivial complaint. Think about it. You’re a woman doctor in 1966 and everyone expects you to be a man, or they talk to you like you’re a nurse, or they look all surprised when you open your mouth and turn out to actually know something. That’s not abuse. That’s not being forced to work out in the cotton fields for fifteen to eighteen hours.

NOW, we’ve “come a long way” to the extent that a woman can end a guy’s career if she can walk into a room where he’s sitting, and tell someone “he made me feel uncomfortable.” Nobody’s being forced to sit in the back of a bus. In order to find grievances, we’ve got to send analysts out into the business world with their clipboards and see how the statistics look. No individuals can find anything to beef about, but the average woman makes 5% less than the average man, and the median woman makes 10% less than the median man…oh dear, we’ve got a long way to go.

The litmus test is this: Can the leaders of the activist movement articulate exactly what it is that has yet to be done? The answer is almost always no. For those exceptional cases where the mission of an activist movement really does include a measurable goal that has not yet been realized, it’s only natural to ask a second question: When the movement first started half a century ago, could you have sold this objective that, today, according to you, remains unrealized? And I can’t help noticing, the answer to that is always no.

So people are buying into something, years into some kind of struggle, that they would never have bought, had they not yet invested the effort and emotion into that struggle. That’s the equivalent of bringing home a puppy to see if you want to keep it. Or driving sixty miles to hear a pitch for a timeshare.

These are bad ideas.

And here’s another thing. One more thing that will ensure we can, with things left unchanged, hear the CALWWNTY drumbeat for another fifty, hundred, two hundred years without any change at all. It has to do with personal attitudes. Politically-incorrect personal attitudes. Listen real hard next time you hear someone say we’ve “made great strides, but still have a long way to go” or “we’ve come a long, long way, and should congratulate ourselves, but not pause long to do it because we’ve still got a long way to go.” Treat it as a special occasion when those cliche-masters define exactly what still has to be done. What do you hear? Is it what I hear? I’ll tell you what I hear…a lot of jawing about other people’s personal attitudes. The fact that some knuckle-dragging cretins, in that sacred space between their neanderthal ears where they have the God-given right to form whatever opinion they want — think that homosexuals complain a lot. Or that a woman isn’t as physically strong as a man. Or that certain ethnic groups eat a lot of certain kinds of food.

Horrors! We’ve got a long way to go!

That’s when things get scary. The fact that in a country that’s supposed to cherish free speech and freedom of choice, you can form certain thoughts in your own brain, and if you say something that betrays these thoughts and some uptight activist zealot doesn’t like it — it’s an incomplete political agenda. And off he toodles, to sell to his loyal followers, CALWWNTY — boy howdy we’ve come a long way, but you KNOW we’ve still got a long way to go because you know what I heard some guy say in the shopping mall today?

That’s not a grievance. That’s not a legitimate complaint. What that is, is people ripping each other off.

People taking other people for a ride, are always going to be among us. And people willing to be sold a bill of goods like this, are also always going to be among us. But must it be so popular to sell CALWWNTY in so many places and so many ways, so much of the time, with so little effort to disguise it? And must it work so often, and be exposed to so little challenge?

Clop clop, clop clop. Walk faster, little donkey. The carrot awaits…

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Too much CALWWNTYTuesday, February 7th, 2006

Too much CALWWNTY
Tuesday, February 7th, 2006