Leadership is like art: it’s hard to define but you know it when you see it. Rudy Giuliani rushing to Ground Zero immediately after the first plane hit is leadership. George W. Bush on September 11 flying all over North America like a scared jackrabbit is not leadership. The House of Representatives scattering to the four ends of the country at the first whiff of anthrax is not leadership. The Senate remaining in session is. Many human talents are easy to judge. Those who exercise those talents create things, the best of which are unmistakably great. We can argue about who was the better ball player, Ruth or McGwire or Sosa or Bonds, but there’s no denying that they all knew how to swing a bat better than anyone else. Bach or Mozart? Edison or Einstein? The differences are fun to think about and discuss but in the end the work and the works speak for themselves. Unfortunately, some of the most important human talents do not lend themselves to such easy judgment.  Teaching, for one. Some of us have been lucky enough to
have been touched by a great teacher. In retrospect it is difficult to say just how or why
the teacher was great. History itself is littered with conflicts between groups of people,
called religionists, who believed their teacher was the greatest.
Nurturing is another talent offering enormous difficulties
in the judging of its quality. Obviously, great mothers and great fathers have existed and
done their marvelous work in the world, but how hard it is to identify just what they do
except in the vaguest, often ambiguous terms ("love" being the most
problematical).
The most visible of these difficult talents is leadership. Driven by ambition for power, money, fame, many people attain positions of leadership where, lacking any significant talent as leaders, they maintain their position through coercive control. Generally, this fear-based survival behavior, which can range from mildly oppressive suasion to outright and brutal tyranny, is what we call "political leadership." It is not so much leadership as it is simple manipulative management. The results of such low levels of leadership talent are at best a shoddy maintenance of the status quo and at worst the economic and political disasters of depression and war. In a media age, when money and talent can create and sell images, the leaders we often wind up are consumable puppets, controlled by faceless handlers. Now we are stuck with this lot: Trained by media advisers, fed speeches carefully crafted
by the best writers money can buy, they can do a good emergency State of the Union Speech,
but can’t be trusted to speak off-the-cuff because to do so would reveal an empty
head.
Funded by corporate big bucks, they can create and sign
bills to speed the rooting out of the bad guys, but have no sense of the possible internal
damage caused by weakening of our own civil rights.
Drunk on the electoral wonders of Darwinian capitalism
("free" markets über alles), after two decades of anti-big government
ranting, our "leaders" find the republic in true peril and are too slow to wake
up to the realization that it is in precisely such a situation as this that the federal
government has a vital, efficient role to play. So we get a splintered government of
small, inept minds giving us endless conflicting, often baseless "information"
about the latest threat.
What to do? It would seem we have no choice until the next election. We can rely only on ourselves. Remember that this same lot was screaming for Bill Clinton’s head but was forced to back down only because the electorate saw the impeachment insanity for what it was. Such was the common sense of the electorate then that it was not fooled either by the rabid words and actions of our "leaders" or by the 24/7 rantings of talk-radio and talk-TV. Leaderless in a time of peril, we will again be saved only by ourselves. Think twice, think thrice before believing anything coming from these guys. END
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Magellan's Log Copyright ©
2001 Texas Chapbook Press
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