Lying With Your Job

March 11, 2014 By David Griesing 1 Comment

Recent weeks and months have provided several reminders of how often people lie with their jobs.

Priests, lawyers, policemen, doctors, parking enforcers, tax collectors: guardians of ethical and lawful behavior, with power that comes from standing over the rest of us in their appointed roles. The obvious disconnect between what our supposed guardians tell us to do, but don’t manage to do themselves, can be either tragic or comic.

The problem (I’m afraid) is when we stop being surprised by confrontations like this. When they no longer make us either laugh or cry–or even matter.

The part of the world where I live—the malodorous Northeast Corridor—produces more than its share of “now you caught me’s.”

Of course, punishing commuters from a place where the majority of voters didn’t vote for you by complicating their commutes (As governor, I will perform the duties of this office faithfully, impartially…) is currently getting the most press. But others compete “like hell” for the ink.

Hermit Gosnell (whose oath as a physician included having the “utmost respect for human life from the beginning”) was recently sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for systematically killing babies born in his West Philadelphia abortion clinic, and the priests of the Philadelphia diocese who preyed for years on altar boys, their brothers and occasionally sisters (after vows of chastity) are regularly profiled as they traipse through our justice system.

Of course, there are plenty we can snicker at when they lie with their lesser jobs too, a hook that a cable network recognized several years ago when it started broadcasting “Parking Wars,” a real life comedy about the men and women who ticket and tow our cars here. Each one of these “enforcement officers” is like a bank for the Philadelphia Parking Authority, writing several times their annual salaries in violations each year: but that speaks more to their motivation and our resentment.

Last month, it was Mwanamke Jordan, (at least until recently) PPA’s Deputy Manager for Ticket Enforcement, who gave the still suffering public here some comic relief. As profiled in our newspaper of record, Deputy Jordan recently had her own car “booted” (a dreaded device that disables you from driving your car until you pay all the parking tickets and penalties that you’ve accumulated). Her picture here is from an earlier newspaper profile which began: If Mwanamke Jordan’s love life were a reality TV show….”

Last but hardly least in the Comic Division is Richard Cosentino—not for what he did, but for his picture when he got caught. Cosentino, a former NYPD sergeant received more than $200,000 after claiming that he was allegedly “too depressed to go outside” after the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11. In January, he and 81 other ex-cops, firefighters and corrections officers were busted for allegedly soaking taxpayers for $21.3 million for stress-related injuries they fabricated so they could collect disability payments. Allegedly.

Richard Cosentino 553x369 — COSENTINO AND HIS TUNA

Does the non-stop perp walk of these stories and pictures (and all the others like them) deter us? Deter me or you? Is there any moral dimension left in them at all?

At this point, I’m reminded of that timely update of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter in Quentin Tarrantino’s Inglourious Basterds. It comes in the very last scene, where the Gestapo’s Hans Landa (who goes from exposing Jews “like rats” to “ratting out” the Nazi leadership to the Allies) is now about to get his reward: a nice little place “on Nantucket” for all his help. It’s the moment right before his freedom, where Lieutenant Aldo “The Apache” Raine takes out a ridiculously big knife and carves a swatskika on Landa’s forehead. Why? Because you just shouldn’t get to change “your clothes” so easily afterwards.

It might be different for the oath breakers and job hypocrites if others could see it on their foreheads too, like soot from Ash Wednesday.

Different for all of us.

It Only Takes One to Take a Stand

August 17, 2013 By David Griesing 3 Comments

There was a remarkable photograph in the papers on Thursday, taken as Egyptian troops were leveling the encampment of Muslim Brotherhood supporters in Cairo. It depicted a solitary woman standing between a military bulldozer and a wounded man on the ground.

We’ve seen this all before, but it never gets old.

There was a similar confrontation in Tiananmen Square in 1989, with a lone protester blocking a column of Chinese tanks. That picture still speaks to the courage of saying: “Stop.” “No, you cannot do this any longer”—even when no one else is standing with you.

On its anniversary this year, China’s leaders continue to suppress any discussion of the uprising of the human spirit that took place 24 years ago. It is a continuing exercise in “thought control” aimed at ensuring that those who were alive then start to forget, and those who came after never manage to find out. But some of the power in pictures like this is that they won’t go away, and in their permanence will always call to those who can recognize a part of themselves there.

Indeed, I think we linger over images of solitary personal courage because we hope that someday we’ll be up to doing the same. We keep looking because the individuals depicted are standing in for the best part of each of us too. We wonder:

Will I have the courage to seek out the circumstances,

and when those circumstances require it, stand up for what I believe in,

even when there’s no one else is around?

The “thousand words” in these pictures speak about a life force that won’t be pushed down any longer. It caused a woman in Cairo and a man in Beijing to leave the relative safety of their homes behind so they could speak their particular truths to power. It’s what many children do with far greater ease than us grown-ups: the ones who know what’s important to them and don’t fear the consequences of putting themselves on the line.

Maybe we have such children, were such children.

However what experience has taught us over the years is how to protect ourselves from risks & confrontation, to sidestep & keep our heads down. Our experience teaches us almost nothing about taking a stand for what’s essential in our lives and work.

That’s some of what these pictures do.

They help us find the power of a child, when playing an adult’s game.

At Work I’m a Dancing Machine

May 19, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We hear a lot about work, how it’s wearing us down, or covering the bills, or how much it lets us “contribute to the economy as consumers.”

Less attention is paid to looking at our bodies at work: the rhythm of routine, the mesh of collaboration and the reach of accomplishment. It’s how we’re sometimes reduced to a fist by what others think of the work we’re doing, or elevated to a higher state by the sense of purpose it gives us. It’s man as Icarus but also as machine.

The Jobs Project, playing in Philadelphia through today, is a bold, imaginative, and sharply executed dialogue in words and movement that captures familiar and unfamiliar truths about the work we all do.

We say it with paint or poetry or sculptural forms because they open up levels of meaning that are simply not available any other way. This is true of dance too, but The Jobs Project from a company called RealLivePeople(in)Motion, gets its singular edge by also being a hybrid. It pairs the cadence of one to six dancers with recorded comments from men and women about their work, and mid-dance interviews with the performers themselves about what they do when they’re not dancing—or do so that they can dance—all to an hypnotic score by Ilan Isakov.

This inspired mash-up of inputs provides take-aways about the workplace that add both layers and textures to what we think we know about what happens there every day.

The Jobs Project is the brainchild of Gina Hoch-Stall, its richly gifted choreographer and director. Gina dances too, with the precision clockwork of a troupe that includes Molly Jackson, David Konyk, Sara Nye, Mason Rosenthal and Hedy Wyland.

Ingredients essential to the whole were provided by others too, like Andrea Calderise (artist), Megan Quinn (dramaturg), Patricia Dominguez (costume design), Maria Shaplion (lighting) and those joining Ilya on the sound score (Four Tet, Garth Stevenson, Michael Wall, Nathan Fake and The Books). Grassroots support for a performance that’s been building for more than a year was given a welcomed assist by the Puffin Foundation (“continuing the dialogue between art and the lives of ordinary people”), the Latvian Society (by hosting) and Yards Brewing Company (by wetting the whistle).

Like a start-up company, almost as breathtaking as anything here was the ability of this dedicated core to make something this wondrous come to life.

You can see a bit of the magic for yourself in the rehearsal footage here (with some or all of the piece to be posted later). While you’re watching, I invite you to imagine an element in the performance that made one of the most important points of all.

The Jobs Project was crisp and precise, but improvised and spontaneous too, like the best work. It is one of the dancers, Mason Rosenthal, who interviews the other dancers as they crisscross the space. The fun he had throughout, and how his seemingly off-the-cuff comments both relieve and accentuate the rigor of the forms around him, said something essential about the work we all do.

That it can and should provide a measure of fun while you’re doing it.

Hats off to all!

Admiration Means You Must Be Doing Something Right

March 10, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

What the Chinese are thinking about us is no laughing matter if we’re listening to experts talk about how they are holding America’s mortgage with one hand and stealing our most valuable secrets with the other. But our worries could become more realistic if we also considered just how much the Chinese admire us and the way of life they think we have going on here.

There is always something valuable to be learned when others are both coveting and admiring what you have. As La Rochefoucand famously said: “Sometimes we think we dislike flattery, but it is only the way it is done that we dislike.” Thinking about what we like and don’t like about how many of the Chinese people view America today has some interesting things to teach us about ourselves.

I had the chance to visit China a couple of years back.

I’m glad I went when I did and probably wouldn’t recognize much of the place today. It was a few months before the Beijing Olympics, and the country was moving so fast you could almost feel the wind. But what I remember most was how excited regular folks—particularly young people—were that we had come all that way to see them.

They tried out their English on us and surrounded us for pictures. We were their chance to sample America, in the same way that they were already sampling KFC and Polo Ralph Lauren. At the time, analogizing their admiration to eating or wearing did not seem entirely misplaced.

This inkling got some support when I came upon a piece about “architectural mimicry” in China. While the copycat buildings that are springing up there aren’t always American buildings, easily the most duplicated structure in China today is the White House.

The building serves as the model for everything from seafood restaurants to single-family homes to government offices in Guangzhou, Wuxi, Shanghai, Wenling and Nanjing.

There are duplicate Chrysler Buildings and other Manhattan skyscrapers too.

That “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” is certainly part of it. But it’s more than this, and has many antecedents in this ancient civilization. Emperors regularly built parks with an Epcot Center of facsimile structures from remote lands. Both then & now, it is a pretty straightforward effort to enhance their legitimacy by demonstrating China’s de facto appropriation of the known universe.

Today, the Chinese are trying to swallow other aspects of the American way of life as well.

Much of the dynamism you can feel in China today results from a billion people embracing capitalism all at once. It was a forest of timeless bamboo scaffolding clinging to a mountain range of 21^st century construction projects that really brought this home to me when I walked around Beijing. Since almost everybody in China wants to become the next Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, it is hardly surprising that the American rags to riches fantasy has also been made available for mass consumption.

It’s been turned into the equivalent of a fortune cookie.

The Chinese love short motivational phrases even more than Americans do, if that’s possible. They have been a vehicle for transmitting community values from Confucius to Mao, and they are still in active use today. Only now it’s so-called American values that are being conveyed, and what’s being shared has a lot more to do with individual fortune than collective harmony.

Evidence of this comes from the apparently spontaneous rise of 20 or so “allocutions” or commandments that many people in China today believe are written on the walls of Harvard’s library. These commandments speak to the commitment, diligence and self-denial that are supposedly bolstering their counterparts’ remarkable performance here in the States.

One says, “Happiness will not be ranked, but success will—at the top,” while another envisions a slightly different, though related reward, “If you study one more hour, you will have a better husband.” Struggling through exhaustion to get where you’re going is key in this messaging: “Nodding at the moment, you will dream. While studying at the moment you will come true,” and similarly, “Most great achievements happen while others are dozing.” Perhaps most succinct of all is this commandment: “Please enjoy the unavoidable suffering.”

Wherever it comes from, this distilled wisdom about American motivation clearly haunts the Chinese imagination. In an article about the phenomenon by Robert Darnton, Harvard’s university librarian, we learn that:

the allocutions took root in China’s educational system and were widely used in primary schools, in English courses, on exams, and even in interviews for admission to Beijing University. They have appeared on bulletin boards, in newspapers, on telecasts, on a website of China’s Ministry of Commerce and on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. Above all, they have reached millions through the Internet, thanks to endless transmission by blogs, including one that registered 67 million hits.

As a result, it should come as no surprise that the most numerous queries on Harvard’s “Ask the Librarian” web page are about these allocutions, with many of the questions originating in China. When informed that no such commandments appear on the walls in any of Harvard’s 73 libraries, Mr. Darnton records the following responses: “Well my teacher has been using this fooling me,” and “Are you kidding? We grown up with these mottos.” Or even more interesting: “Thank you for liberating us” and “When I know the truth I can’t stop crying.”

Of course, there are both comforting and disquieting things about tokens of flattery like this, as well as the fact that Chinese people will probably be eating fried chicken in a mock-up of the White House later today.

For example, we may like it that the Chinese think we’re this successful, but disquieted by their distortion of us into sleep-deprived automatons. It’s like Eleanor Roosevelt’s ambivalence about one of her tributes: “I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.”

The good news about admiration is the often accurate perception that there is something about us worth admiring.

Even when it is somewhat alarmingly expressed, flattery indicates that somebody out there still thinks you’re ahead in the big game.

But there can be another message too.

Whenever there’s a gapping hole between what’s being hungered for and what is actually true, it may be time to torque up that big game of yours before it’s too late.

(On this last day of the Chinese New Year, great prosperity to all!)

Just Plain Funny #2

December 16, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I like a newspaper I can hold in my hands because sometimes the stories across the folds can talk to one another in ways that never seems to happen on a screen. That kind of exchange took place in my newspaper today.

For as long as I’ve been reading it, the Wall Street Journal has a funny, odd or just plain ridiculous story at the bottom of Page One. At some point, the Page One editor must have decided that stories like this are good antidotes to the calamities, logjams and shenanigans chronicled above. These daily stories always froth over to the last page of the “news” where they brush up against the beginnings of the “commentary” section on the other side of fold. It’s here that strangely compatible bedfellows sometimes meet.

Page One’s dollop of the day today was about a long-standing West Point tradition celebrating the graduating cadet, who by academic and other standards, finishes dead last in his class each year. Because of some “informal” information sharing, everyone but The Goat knows who he is on the big day, and when his name is called out from the graduating roster, the cadets erupt into the loudest cheer of the day.

There are two kinds of Goats, according to a disappointingly dry piece in a publication called Failure Magazine. There are cadets who labor through the muck to the bitter end, and those who take the experience just seriously enough to fall inebriatedly over the finish line. Of course, several of the Good Time Goats were actually pretty smart and went on to make history (Generals Custer and Pickett, for example). Several middling cadets did pretty well too. (Eisenhower reportedly said: “If anybody saw signs of greatness in me while at West Point they kept it to themselves.”) But it’s the ones who always struggled to do their best, while barely making it to the end, who are the real heroes of the story.

Unclear whether to be embarrassed or proud of their accomplishment, most of these Goats eventually seem to settle into being good sports about it. For example: “In my class, no one else can say that they’re the Goat and no one else can say that they’re part of this special lineage that dates back so far,” said good sport Roberto Becarra, Jr. in 2007. Somewhat earlier, the bespeckled Goat (below) seems to have had a similar reaction.

When asked about these persevering Goats by the Journal reporter, James S. Robbins said:

The tradition of the Goat is important because it kind of encapsulates that American spirit of—yeah, you’re going to have the top and they’re going to get recognized and they’re going to get stars by their names and all that other stuff. But, you know what? The guys further down, they have their chance too, and they can succeed too and it’s important to recognize them.

While his insight might have been more penetrating had he been a psychologist or meteorologist instead of an historian, Robbins’ remarks did manage to counterpoint similar observations about the value of “keeping your head up” and “putting one foot in front of the other” on the facing page of the paper, where a Journal writer reviews a new book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called Antifragile.

Taleb’s singular perspective is that theories follow practice instead of the reverse. It’s not “the Soviet/Harvard notion that birds fly because we lecture them how to.” We learn by doing it first, and make up the theories that contain all of our how-to-do-it wisdom later on. It is, as the reviewer notes, “a startling [chicken v. egg] insight,” because what Taleb’s debunking allows is a flat-out celebration of the creativity involved in doggedly keeping at it. The many virtues of trial and error.

Taleb makes up the word “antifragile” to mean not only hardy, but also something that has been improved through repeated failures, becoming more resilient in the process. From this perspective, the persevering Goats are not just plodders: more than a few of them embody the adaptation that is at the beating heart of natural selection. As Taleb’s reviewer notes:

If trial and error is creative, then we should treat failed entrepreneurs with the reverence that we reserve for fallen soldiers.

This is why experience is the best teacher. It’s why “A” students who master the theory often work for the “B” and “C” students who rightly suspect that the magic lies elsewhere. It’s why rigidity and too much seriousness is always a bad idea. And it’s why the loudest cheer really should go to somebody who has not only failed most prominently, but also has the spirit to get up and keep trying.

modern-times — CHARLIE CHAPLIN IN “MODERN TIMES”

Not that it’s always so easy.