Tag: reflections

Posted on

Quitters can be Winners

Chrissy and I were talking re our kids and friends and quitting.  It is always easy to advise people to just keep on going, don’t quit.  But is that good advice? 

Below is the family at four-corners way back in 2003.  There is one in each state (Az, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico).

It is both generous and smart to leave something on the table when negotiating.  It makes sense to quit while you are ahead.  It goes against some of the popular wisdom, but maybe quitters can be winners.

The effort involved to achieve returns in most enterprises follows a predictable “S” curve.   It usually takes a lot of effort to get started.   Then at some point it gets easier and you get into a sweet spot where you get a lot back for the effort you put in.   As you get closer to 100% solutions, it gets a lot harder again.  When the going gets really tough, the smart person quits and moves on to something easier.  Sounds terrible, doesn’t it?  But it is true and well known among those who study these things.

The reason is the cost of opportunities.  You only have so much time.  The time you spend doing one thing is time you cannot spend doing another. Is it better to achieve 99 points in one place (99) or 90 points in ten places (900)?  It is often harder to get the last 1% than it is get the earlier 90%.  So just say no to perfection and yes to diverse opportunity.  

There are two inflection points on the curve.  The first is where you are moving from the difficulties of start up into the sweet spot of easy returns.   This is the place where loser-quitters usually throw in the towel.  The second inflection point is where returns drop off.  This is where winner-quitters wisely withdraw and move to greener pastures.

So what is our advice? The best is usually not that much better than the very good.  It usually just is not worth the trouble.   AND those always pursuing the best almost always end up with the second rate.  Do lots of things.   Moderation in most things is the best advice.  Quit when the going gets tough if you have other options; hang around if you don’t, but don’t complain.

Posted on

Life is Good

Below – back again in the USA for a couple weeks.  This is the airport bus.

I am back in the U.S. on my last R&R.   I can easily see that my country that is prosperous, peaceful, clean and full of opportunity – and very green in Virginia.   Yet all I hear on the news is how tough everything is.   Maybe all those whiners should check out some other places. You really have to wonder about the points of reference.

My point of reference is the 1970s, when I started to pay attention to things like jobs, the economy and the environment.   Then like now, I was very concerned about the environment; it was a lot worse back then.  Lest we forget, Lake Eire was declared dead and you couldn’t safely breathe the air in major cities.   Many people seem unaware of the improvements and perhaps most think the opposite, but the environment is indeed better.  So is the economy.  In my economic courses back in college, I learned that unemployment of around 5% was “full employment” and almost impossible to sustain.   I remember the stagflations and unemployment rates of 10%+.  Of course, when I was apt to whine, my father would point to his youth during the 1930s.  Now I hear that unemployment of around 5% compared to the Great Depression and economic growth of only 1% is called a recession.  What great times we live in when such trouble we have is cause for gnashing of teeth.  

It doesn’t get very much better than this in terms of opportunity, despite what politicians are promising.   Maybe that is precisely the problem – it doesn’t get much better.  Let me give a individual analogy. Alex has been working out for a year so that he can now toss around hundreds of pounds w/o much effort.  He is worried re “plateauing”.   It is a little sad to reach a goal, but at some point you are about as good as you can get.  Society is not the same as an individual person.  Experienced people understand that general conditions do improve – over time – and it is indeed possible for them to improve their own circumstances with hard work, patience and a little luck.  But some aggregate measures will never get much better.  It is not possible for unemployment to drop much below 5%.  Some “problems” are merely tautologies.  Half of all Americans will always earn less than the median wage, for example.  And the weather is always bad someplace.  If you look for reasons to be depressed you can find – or make – them, but why would you do that?

What I take a bit personally is the rotten information being generally believed about Iraq.   I could sum it up like this, “Let’s call our victory a defeat because it was harder than we thought.”  There are movies and TV programs about Iraq, none of them show our troops in a good light.   An episode of ER was on my flight’s entertainment center.  It featured a crazy, drug addicted and mistreated vet.  It turned out that he had gone nuts because he had seen so many Iraqis abused.  What kind of crap is that?   I saw a variation of that on “Law & Order” a couple of months ago.  We have to call attention to this.  Some people in the media seem to be working up the same type of slander they pulled on the Vietnam vets, only this time they pretend to care about them as victims. 

The true story of our success in Iraq would be more interesting.  We have heroes.  It is not even very hard to find them if you try. 

Our troops are not victims and they certainly are not perpetrators.  They are doing their duty in a difficult environment and doing it well.  For most, their time in Iraq gives them valuable insights and makes them better citizens.   It is a hard thing to do. Doing the hard things reveals character.

I blame the politically correct culture for these problems.   We essentially have to downgrade heroism and bravery so that we don’t imply those not exhibiting these traits are not as good. We let people revel in victimhood.  In fact, it is legally enforceable.   Somebody claims victim status and it becomes legally hazardous to give him/her a hard time – even when they have it coming. Who knows how the lawsuit will go with a credible (if deceptive) victim?  It certainly is considered bad manners to tell the truth and it is politically dicey.

When Phil Graham made his whiner comments, the whiners came out in force and whined that they were being called whiners.   Of course, politicians distanced themselves from this and listed the many reasons why whining was appropriate.   

Is this the way it is going to be?  I don’t think so.  Most of the Americans I meet are still self reliant.   Most of us still take care of ourselves; we pay our mortgages on time; 95% of our workers have jobs and they dutifully go to them.  We grumble about how things are (grumbling is not the same as whining), but we understand that OUR efforts will improve our situations.  But many of us have the impression that we are part of a small and dwindling minority that practices these virtues.  We do indeed look like a nation of whiners, not because most Americans are whining, but because the whiners dominate the debate and everybody is afraid to say anything, sort of like the bystanders in the “Emperor’s New Clothes” story.

We all have to make choices and we never can get everything we want.  This is probably a good thing, but no matter whether we like it or not, it is just how things are.  It is nobody’s fault.   I understand that I run the risk of becoming a curmudgeon, but I just don’t see the crisis the media tells me about.    We face challenges – as always – which we will overcome and meanwhile life is not bad.  It is just not perfect.   If you find yourself is a perfect world, check your pulse.

Who of us would want to live permanently in a different time or a different place?  We live in a great country and it is a great time in history to be here.   To pretend otherwise is dishonest and to believe otherwise is silly.

Above are Mariza & Chrissy at Mariza’s new place in Baltimore.

Posted on

The Study of History

I didn’t have a picture to go with this post, so I fished this out of the files.  It is from Milwaukee near the lake.  On top of the old building is the Schlitz globe.  This is an interesting historical study.  Schlitz was once the world’s biggest brewer, but it declined and disappeared in the course of around ten years.  I used to think it was because my father, a big beer drinker, switched from Schlitz to Pabst and ultimately to Bud (which is not really beer, since it is made from rice) but I suppose there were other reasons too. 

Its former headquarters are now yuppie condos. I think they call them “Brewer Hill.”  Milwaukee no longer gets that sweet smell of fermentation I recall riding my bike past the place in the early mornings on my way to a job at Mellowes Lockwasher factory on the north side.  

Schlitz became famous and “made Milwaukee famous” in 1871, when Joseph Schlitz sent wagon loads of beer as a relief measure to the victims of the great Chicago fire, better than the usual donations, IMO.  The other historical curiosity involved in this is that most people have heard of the Chicago fire.  Fewer know anything about the great Peshtigo fire, which happened about the same time.   The Peshtigo fire was the largest fire in North America.  It destroyed thousands of acres and didn’t stop until it hit Lake Michigan.  These guys didn’t get any beer. 

I have not been to Peshtigo in more than thirty years, but I still remember that you could see the mark on the ecology even a century later, with the relatively even aged old growth.

The Study of History

When I talked about big Arnold in college I meant Toynbee, not Schwarzenegger.  Arnold Toynbee started off as a classical historian and developed a comprehensive theory of history.   I think he was the last serious historians to try such a thing.  Nobody dares do that today.  Any comprehensive theory will be wrong in some specifics.  Legions of grad students and professors will find and amplify those errors until they are like a festering bucket of puss on an otherwise glittering career.   Today they will be joined by an even larger group of internet searchers who like nothing better than to enhance their nerdy little status by pulling down somebody big.

Professional historians today study esoteric fields where nobody has bothered to go before (often for good reason), preferably ones dominated by obscure sources or oral histories (which are usually protean and riddled with error but impossible to debunk).   Today’s great historians, such as David McCullough, Joseph Ellis, Victor Davis Hansen or the late Stephen Ambrose, are often derided by the cognoscenti as popularizers.    It is too bad.  People, ordinary people, are hungry for the sweep of narrative history.  That is why “The History Channel” is so popular, why “Band of Brothers” sells so well on DVD or why even semi-historical series such as “Rome” are watched by millions.

I am not arguing against being correct and careful.  I am the first, as many know, to complain about mistakes in historical detail. The trick is to know that something is not perfect and know that it is still useful and good at the same time, and not just throw the babies out with the bathwaters.  “Rome”, for example, is wrong on many (most) details, but it is still worth watching for some insight into an ancient world.  It makes you think and that is worth the effort.Victor Davis Hanson commented on “the 300”, which was literally a comic book version of that great confrontation at Thermopylae.  Sure, he said, it was wrong in details, but the idea of it was right (I paraphrase).  But it was better to get history into popular culture than to leave it completely out.  Serious people will check the facts and it might be the start of a life-long interest.

I fear this malaise has spread through the general culture.  We check, recheck and second guess every statement and decision, so that nobody can any longer be bold. Even if you are not wrong, the constant investigation will take its toll.  The Lilliputians will pull down any Gulliver; the hammer of public opinion will pound down anybody who dares stick up for any reason beyond mere vacuous celebrity, which ironically seems exempt probably because it doesn’t smack of true effort and is therefore non-threatening to the indolent.Any comprehensive theory of history must be wrong because such a complicated system is unknowable by mortal man in all its details.  That does not mean the effort of finding one is frivolous.  W/o some kind of mental model, history is just a meaningless jumble of one darn thing after another.    We all understand the world through mental models that are simplification of reality, maps of territory.  You need the map, but you know it does not include all the details.  Everybody has and uses mental models.  Most of them are unconscious.   Just because you do not study history or think through a model does not mean you don’t have one.  It is just that you picked it up inadvertently and you have not thought about it. For example, most Americans have a mental model of Roman history based on Edward Gibbon’s “Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire.”  Most people have never heard the book and almost nobody has actually read it, but this is the model they have unconsciously accepted for Rome and to some extent erroneously extrapolated to the modern United States.   Gibbon was not right in many respects and it is better to make a conscious choice. In the metaphysical sense, no model is complete or right, but some are useful and some are more useful than others.  We should not stop striving for the useful truth even as we understand that the ultimate truth is beyond our beyond our capacity to understand.  It is best to use a kind of scientific method, constantly testing and refining our ideas and adapting them to changing circumstances.  One more thing re the Lilliputians who refuse to allow greatness, no individual is consistently great or great in all aspect of his life.  Close scrutiny will reveal the flaws and the small minded take significant pleasure in pulling down those who boldly try to stand tall.  Internet makes this easier. 

I was thinking re one of the greatest men in history, George Washington.   Today he would be out of luck fast.  The incident at Jomonville Glen (when he failed to stop his Indian ally Half King from bashing the brains out the French commander) would have ended the career and probably the freedom of anybody today.   Washington was not a great man his entire life, in everything or to everyone.  He was great during several key times, sometimes key MOMENTS, such as putting on his reading glasses and stopping the Newburgh conspiracy from subverting our Republic.   Those couple of seconds were enough. I don’t have my own theory of history.  I have cribbed from Toynbee and accreted lots of modern management and decision theory.   I don’t know if I would be bold enough to assert my own comprehensive theory; I am reasonably certain that I am not smart enough to develop one, so I am stuck with my hybrids.

I do worry that we, as a society are often mired in minutia and not seeing the big picture and we have to criticize everything about our most prominent members.  It is hazardous. 

Posted on

Writing Things Down

I am reading a good book called “Partners in Command” about the relationship between George Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Biography is my favorite form of literature.  I am always surprised how much these guys wrote down.  They evidently all kept detailed diaries where they wrote their thoughts and plans.  Besides this blog, I have never had the discipline to do that.  I write a lot, but when I write, I tend to speculate and riff, much like you see on this blog.  Even if I assembled all “my papers” I don’t think I could write a decently documented autobiography and nobody else could make sense of it at all.

These guys started keeping journals long before they became famous enough to justify one.  I wonder if the journal keeping helped make them successful.

I HAVE developed one reasonably good journal habit.  It is not biographical, but more pragmatic.   Before something big happens, I write down my prediction and then I don’t look at what I wrote again until well after the event has been decided. Before I look again, I write a brief note of what I thought was going to happen, not what did happen but what I thought I had predicted.  Then I compare them.  I learned this method from a good book on decision making called (appropriately) “Decision Traps”.  

According to the authors, we overestimate our judgment because our memories are not like tape recorders.  Rather they are constantly rewriting and editing memories in light of subsequent events.  We try to make sense of chaotic events and with the benefit of hindsight we emphasize our understanding of trends and facts that turned out to be significant, even if we didn’t recognize them at the time, and forget about those that came to nothing.  That is why all of us are rich and successful in theory but fewer are in practice & that is why we are always sure we could do better than those who were responsible for decisions.  I found that is true for me.  When faced with the evidence written in my own hand, I am often surprised not only by the mistakes I made in the past but also by the fact that my honest memory has been edited to elide or even expunge my most serious  errors. 

The exercise of specifically analyzing my decisions using a concrete written method has improved my decision making, however.  Experience is not a good teacher if you don’t pay attention to the lessons.  I have learned be a lot more disciplined in seeking a wider variety of information, looking at data that disconfirms my assumptions and understanding significant role that chance plays in outcomes.  Of course it is still important to be “certain” once the decision is made.  The hard part is holding the contradictory facts in mind at the same time.  I still make some of the same mistakes I made twenty years ago, but now I see some of the patterns and can anticipate and mitigate.

Anyway, I think the journaling probably provided this kind of look back to great men like Marshall or Eisenhower, just as it does to ordinary guys like me.  They made some serious misjudgements.  Eisenhower was sure he was a failure as a militiary officer and thought he would be selected out.  Douglas MacArthur didn’t think the Japanese would ever invade the Phillipines.  What that shows is that even the best make big mistakes.  Their greatness involves adapting and taking advantage of changes, not in making great predictions.  Eisenhower also said something like no plan every works, but planning does because it makes you think through the permutations.

Our modern Internet age is a little too harsh on people.   Some nerd will fish up any statement you make and use it against you later.  Let me quote Emerson for any future nerd thinking of giving me a hard time.  “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”  You have to change your mind when facts or conditions change, but at the same time you need to be firm when finishing a job.  Both things are true.  People not involved in real decisions cannot seem to understand the nuance, but as usual I am drifting.

My Iraq blog has helped me and I thank those of you who (I think) are reading regularly.  It is easy to backslide when you are in it alone.  Having others watching tends to make us all more consequent.  I apologize that I sometimes have to generalize or take out details.  Security does not allow me to share some details; others I just prefer to keep to myself.  I hope the story is interesting to you.  It is interesting to me when I go back and remember things I certainly would have forgotten, flushed down the memory hole.

Posted on

Dreaming of Iraq

I often wake up at night and don’t know where I am.   I think I am back in Iraq and even when I am in Iraq I often think I am someplace else.   I think this comes more from the constant moving around than from Iraq specifically, but my dreams of Iraq remind me that I will soon be going back to Anbar.

Modern travel makes for a strange phenomenon.   You can be in the yellow desert one day and back on the green grass of home the next.   And then back in the desert again the day after that.  In America now, the world of Iraq means nothing.  It is like a dream, maybe a nightmare, but it is unreal.   Right now, sitting in Virginia, it feels like I never left home.   I know that in a few days when I get back to Iraq, it will seem like I have always been there.   The two worlds do not mix, even at the edges.   That is probably a good thing.

Americans are not paying much attention to Iraq any more.   I watch the news every day and there is not much coverage.  What news they do feature is is formulaic.    People seem to have made up their minds re Iraq and every new piece of news is trimmed to fit the preconceived perception.   I am afraid that some people are willing to throw away our success for the short term pleasure of getting out.   Candidates are arguing who can get out quicker.   It is silly and pernicious but popular.  The media has frozen our image of Iraq in 2006 and this is not good.

People don’t ask me much about Iraq.  They either don’t care or think they already know it all and I understand that they don’t want to hear my anectdotes.  I am not sure which ones I would tell anyway.  Some of the best stories are those I cannot share, at least not yet.   Beyond that, it is hard to communicate unless you share some basic background & assumptions.   People seem to think Iraq is a constant struggle to stay alive.   They don’t believe me when I tell them that most Iraqis I encounter are friendly and open and I generally do not feel threatened.  The danger is only sort of background noise; the real challenge is just the unrelenting nasty surroundings and climate.  The heat and the dust is beyond most people’s experience, so there is not much use in trying to explain that either.  Riding in helicopters is another hard thing to explain.   I can explain what it is like to ride, but I cannot explain what it is like when that ride becomes merely an unpleasant routine and explaining how it feels to be sitting in a small space on that helicopter as it vibrates in the hot sun is beyond words. 

I watched “Lost” yesterday.   They had a street scene that was supposed to be Iraq.   That is the perception people have.   Chrissy asked me if it was like that.   It’s not.  But I could not really explain how it was different.

Below – the lizard blends with his surroundings

I am not looking forward to going back.  My perceptions have changed.  In September I was afraid of the danger.  I am still aware that risk remains, but now my main focus is on the plain discomfort.  I know what that will be like.   On the other hand, I am looking forward to getting back to my colleagues and the important work we are doing.   Back in September I had no idea we would be doing so much and such a variety of things.   I regret that I will not see most of the projects achieve their full results.  I will not see most of the seeds we planted grow.   On the other hand, my curiosity is not so powerful as to make me want to stay beyond September.   My successor can pick up where I left off.  If I do my job right, it will be easy to transition.  Nobody is indispensible.  I am sure the new guy will bring new skills and talents to the job.   My job will be done.  My year in Iraq will be over.   I will never to back and my dreams of Iraq will fade into the yellow haze.     I just hope it will have been worth it.  Actually, the best thing would be if it is so successful that people say it would have happened anyway.

Posted on

Arthur Treacher’s, A&W and Other Endangered Gastronomical Delights

The only free standing Arthur Treacher’s I know about is near my house.   All the others have gone the way of the dodo, except a few remnant populations in food courts along the New Jersey Turnpike.   I like the original fish and chips and the offerings of Long John Silver or Red Lobster just do not measure up.  Someday, maybe soon, this one will also be gone.  On that day I shall mourn.  BTW – Notice the pay phone, another endangered species.

A similar fate has befallen A&W stands.  You can still get the root beer at the grocery store, but they are mostly gone as free standing stores with the honest  draft style root beer.  The only one I know about is on HWY 29 on the way out of Charlottesville.   When I was a kid, my cousin Lani used to take me to swim at Racine beech.  We would stop off on the way back at the A&W on Lake Drive.   I think that is some kind of drive in bank these days.   Near Holmen there used to be one across from the Skogan’s IGA.  I could walk to that one from Chrissy’s parents’ house.   It still features root beer and still even has the drive in, but it is no longer A&W.

Of course, all sorts of new chains have come to take their places.   At the Taco Bell near my house, you really cannot order in English and expect your order to be correct.   I guess that is why the numbered menus are so useful.   You can just hold up as many fingers as the item you want to order.  American high school kids used to work at these places, but now you find nothing but recent immigrants.   The other day I went to Taco Bell and was amused to find some Asian immigrants in the back speaking in heavily accented Spanish.   It must be challenging to be the immigrant within the immigrant community.

Duncan Donuts is doing all right, having weathered the low carbs craze of a few years back.   I always preferred Duncan Donuts to the Krispy-Kreme sugar-dough balls.   Krispy-Kreme sailed ahead from its southern bastions until it was wrecked on the low-carbs rocks, taking its customers and sharholders on a roller coaster ride.  Duncan Donuts abides.  Up in Boston, there is a Duncan Donuts on every corner.  There are not quite so many around here.  They do make the best coffee. I don’t like Starbucks as much.   I can never figure out what all the various coffee types are called and which ones I like. 

Speaking of coffee, there is an interesting relationship.   Back when I was a kid, gas cost around quarter.  Everybody looks back with great fondness to those prices, but everybody made a lot less money too, so it was about the same number of hours/minutes worked to fill up.   But coffee used to be a nickel.   Today gas costs $3.39, but if you go to Starbucks or someplace like that, coffee costs about the same as gas, so gas is a much better deal than coffee.Away from Iraq, as you see, my thoughts become more prosaic.  

The great privilege of freedom, BTW, is the freedom to have prosaic thoughts.   When everybody thinks serious thoughts most of the time, you know the country is in trouble.

Posted on

Running After the Meaning of Life

I know my title is extravagant and vainglorious, but it makes some sense to me.  I have been running regularly literally my entire adult life.   I began to run in along the lake trails at U of Wisconsin in 1977.   It was in style back then and technology had just made regular running possible.   Shoes are the key to success in running and the Nike “wafflestompers” were just coming out.   W/o good shoes, you wreck your knees and few guys my age would still be able to run with the old shoe technologies.

I don’t run for exercise alone; I would never do it on a track or treadmill and I would never – every – bowdlerize the experience with an I-Pod.  I run with nature, to be in the environment feeling the wind & sun, hearing the sounds, feeling the undulations of the topography and getting to know the place – and my place.  You cannot really get to know anyplace until you have put your feet on it and it is important to experience different seasons and moods.  Running gives you a chance to think and the movement helps you think clearly.  Running (hiking too) balances me.  I suppose there are other ways to do that, but it is hard to think of easier or more effective ones.  Running has the side benefits of good fitness and the virtue of being cheap and universally available.  You need the good shoes, so running costs around $100 a year.  Other accessories are even cheaper.  I still wear a sweatshirt that hails the 1987 Minnesota Twins championship.  I don’t doubt that I have some clothes that are older, but they don’t have dates printed on the front.  The per-use cost of these thing is vanishingly small.  Everything else is free.

I have run all over the world.  I really cannot say which is my favorite trail.  I still look back with fondness to my “original” trails through Grant and Warnimont Parks in Milwaukee and the lake trails in Madison, but Norway on Bygdoy and Brazil, through the lush woods at St. Hilaire Park also hold strong positions.  My favorite trail in Minneapolis was in Wirth Park. I loved running in Las Wolski in Krakow, with the caveat that there was significant air pollution sometimes.  I ran on the old road between Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts.   That was wonderful because of the surface of the road and all the historical buildings around it, but I only did it once.  You see, I collect running memories the way some people collect coins or beanie babies.

Washington region has lots of possibilities.   At lunchtime at work I run around the Capitol Mall.  That is the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” run.  You get to go past the Capitol, Whitehouse, Jefferson, Lincoln, Washington Monument Vietnam, Korea, WWII and the Smithsonian all in around a half hour.  Talk about inspiration.  The W&OD trail in Virginia follows old railroad lines, so it provides a long trail w/o too many hills.  It goes all the way from Washington to Purcerville in the Blue Ridge.  Of course, I have never run the whole way, but I have been on many segments.  The pictures are from the part of the trail nearest my house on the W&OD and the nieghborhoods around and from the Washington Mall trail.  I have been running on this trail since 1997.  

Below is a neighborhood of Vienna, Va near the trail.  I cut down along these suburban roads.  Nice houses in pretty surroundings. They completed that one just last year. They do a good job of making them fit in and seem like part of the established neighborhood.  The homes are not cheap.  Maybe less expensive now with the mortgage crisis, although I doubt this is a subprime place.

I have gotten a lot slower over the years.  I used to repeat my miles in less than six minutes. Now I feel doing them less than nine minutes is an achievement.  It still feels the same and I have a hard time believing I am moving 1/3 slower than I did before, but it has been more than thirty years.  Sometimes young punks come flying past me, but I assume they are just sprinting at the end of their runs. I have replaced my running watches several times, since I figured they all must be defective, but I have been unable to find one that records my miles at anything less.

It is funny – almost paradoxical given my other attitudes re running – that I don’t like to run w/o the watch, but I really don’t care about the times.  I know the distances along the W&OD because there are mile markers, but most of the places I run I don’t know how far I am going and I don’t try to find out.  But over 30 years of running I have gotten the idea that it is not really running w/o the clock running.  My saving trait is that I don’t write the times down and do not keep good records.  I can kind of fool myself that I am still not that slow and the self deception doesn’t cause me much distress.

Only a shallow person lives a life w/o contradictions and only a fool tries to resolve them all.

Posted on

Service & the Ivy League Marines

Below are kids waving at our convoys.  The kids come running out when we drive by.  Sometimes we worry that they will run out in front of the vehicles, but they seem to know better.  I hope that our work here will make their country better in the future than it was in the past.

The lieutenant told me that before joining the Marine Corps he had been a financial manager for Princeton University’s endowment fund.  He was a Princeton graduate with a high paying job, but he thought that serving with the Marines in Iraq was a more important thing to do right now. 

We have relatively few Ivy League graduates around here.  Although I am taking into account only what I see and do not have actual statistics, most of the Marine officers seem to come from State Universities.  I asked the lieutenant about this and he agreed that his Princeton classmates tended not to join the military or serve in government in general – this despite Princeton’s ostensible position as a training ground for government officials.

Princeton had a high profile fight a couple years back about its Woodrow Wilson School.  The university received a big donation to help the Wilson School develop programs to train future civil servants, but very few Wilson School graduates actually took government jobs.  The donor’s family wanted to rescind the grant.  Princeton won the court case and kept the money but the Wilson School is still turning out lots more investment bankers and international business leaders than civil servants.  Government jobs just cannot compete on salaries and bureaucracies are be difficult places for impatient high achievers.

Below – Marine officers often make very good diplomats

Service, however, can be very fulfilling.  We have a real community & and sense of mission here in Iraq that it is hard to find other places.  I won’t miss Iraq when I am finished here, but I will miss my colleagues and that feeling of community.  I thought about that a couple days ago when I drove one of my team members to our airport.  On my way back to Camp Ripper, I passed a bus stop and asked if anybody needed a ride down.  This seemed natural.  Others have done that for me, but I don’t think I would do that back home and even if I did, I don’t think many people would accept my offer.

My new friend from Princeton and I also talked about the obvious – that we liked to do something good for our country.  I always liked that aspect of FS work.  Even a mundane task is more fulfilling when you keep that in mind. 

Service does need not entail working for the government or serving in the military.  I think the old idea of a calling is valid.  You should do what you are good at doing and do it well – serving the task, not the master.    That can make any job noble.  I fondly remember Bogdan, our driver in Krakow.  His job was simple but he took such pride in doing his job and doing it right that everyone respected him.  He also observed the people and events around him and I learned a lot from talking with him during our long drives around southern Poland.

The work you do is too important to be something you just do eight hours a day for the money.  I pity the fools who think their jobs are meaningless.  Like everything else, the jobs we do have the meaning we give them.  I know that is easier with some jobs than others, but then I think of Bogdan. 

People used to search for “a calling”, the thing they were supposed to do in order to better serve God.  Whether or not you accept the religious aspect of this, the idea that you should strive to do the work you should do, to be of service – however you define it – to something beyond yourself is a valid idea.  I think it is one of the most important keys to fulfillment and happiness.  We need to live a total life and work is only one part, but it is a big part and we should get that right.

There is a big distinction between pleasure seeking and meaning seeking behaviors.  Too much emphasis on pleasure seeking leads to unhappiness.  Most good things are hard to get and require significant sacrifice.  I will get off the soap box now.

Above is a view of Hadithah from one of the sheik’s houses. Desertscapes just are not my thing.  I think this is pretty, but still too baren for me.

Posted on

Nothing Too Much

This is the kind of place I always find, a little stream in a quiet park.  I am sitting again in the garden park near the Parliament.  I put the kids on the plane at 0655.  My plane doesn’t go until 1805, so I figured that I would go to the Archeology Museum, the one I missed because of the strike.   I will write about that later.

I sat at this very spot before the kids came a few days ago.  The feeling was different.  That day the sun was shinning; today it is overcast and drizzly.  My moods reflected the weather on both occasions.  Then I was about to get on the Metro to go and get them at the airport so that we could see Greece together.  Today I am getting ready to get on the Metro to go back to Iraq.  The kids have left.

The excitement of Iraq wore off with the first step I took in that dusty desert. Now I just want to finish my job.  Some people think it is a bad idea to go on R&R, especially the short ones I have chosen.  The received wisdom is that getting out for a short time just makes you want to stay out.  Of course that is right, but most people still want to take the R&R. 

Above is a very from a hill in Aegina, an island near Athens.  Maybe because I am in Greece, I remember the classical debate about having and not having.  Some thought that you should not have anything you could lose, so as to avoid the pain of loss.  Most Greek thinkers were moderates, however,  who didn’t believe in excess – nothing too much. They understood that an excess of pleasure seeking would lead to unhappiness, but they also knew that an excess of denial would produce the same result. 

I enjoyed being with the kids and finally seeing this place and adding Greece to our shared landscape of memory.  The joy of having done these things greatly outweighs the pain of losing it and the memory will brighten up my time left in Iraq.  It is not that long anyway.  I have half done and since I have saved my R&Rs for the second half of my tour, I have lots of time out coming.

Below are cats in Poros sharing the catch.

Iraq has been a fantastic experience, but it is less attractive prospectively than retrospectively.  This is a great thing to HAVE done, less fun to be doing.

Posted on

Mayor Daley Rule

A long time ago in my Foreign Service career I discovered the Mayor Daley rule.   The Mayor Daley rule is named after the major of Chicago (take your pick which one) and it is simply a test of reasonableness.  It works like this.  When planning to provide/inflict a program or policy on our foreign friends and colleagues, I ask myself how I would feel if a foreigner proposed doing a similar type of program in the U.S.   To make it more concrete, I think of it how it would play in Milwaukee or Chicago. 

If I conclude that it would be inappropriate applied to us/me/Milwaukee/Chicago, I have to ask myself why I think it is appropriate for them.   Sometimes after further consideration I understand that it IS appropriate, but usually I have to modify the program in light of the paradigm shifting thought experiment. 

It is also important to be aware of CHANGING circumstances.  I remember when working in Poland many of the programs that worked well right after the fall of communism were no longer useful a few years later.  At some point, our tutelage is no longer required.  That doesn’t mean that the job is done; it only means that we cannot take it any further.   Our goal as a PRT is exactly this – helping the Iraqis get beyond needing our help. 

I remember when we taught Mariza how to ride a bike.  I always held onto the seat and she couldn’t balance alone.  Then I let go and before she realized she was balancing by herself; she was riding.  Of course, she kept on going and ran right into a brick wall on the side of the road.  I can still picture it on the little road above our house in Oslo.  I raced over to make sure she was okay.   She was happy to have been able to ride the bike and didn’t seem to consider the fall very important.

The reason I am thinking about this has to do with some of our governance programs.  A couple of our contract trainers were weathered in at Al Asad on their way to Rutbah.  They wanted to turn around and go back.  This would have been a bad thing, since we promised a program to Rutbah and we need to keep our word.  I saw that communication in person would be better so I drove up to the landing zone with one of our Marines to encourage them to press on.  They ended up taking our advice.  In the process of talking to them I also got a chance to find out more about their program.  The program seemed very good, but I wonder if it passed the Mayor Daley test.  

I am concerned that the program was too generic.  Every place is different and programs must be adjusted to local needs.  I am afraid what we are doing might be like taking the Chicago program to San Francisco w/o modification.  Comments about Cubs & Bears probably would not mean the same things in both places.  I don’t directly manage these particular programs or people & I am not aware of any trouble, but I am making it my business to figure out how well they are working in light of the Mayor Daley rule.

The Cubs are the baseball players, right?