What Kind of Leader Do You Want?

Time again to pick a leader.

Time again to try to put aside the babbling voices of bought-and-paid-for pundits and decide who will stand up for the people of this nation.  Time again to think of the future.  Time again to find someone who will not simply talk a good game on ensuring your future, but actually do it.

And time again, apparently, to watch the corporate titans of this land race to install a leader they can bend to their will.  A leader who will, when asked to, quietly maintain the status quo.

Corporate power has become a gale force wind that for forty years has decimated everything in its path – your wages, your savings, your healthcare, your voice.  It has bent your government to its will, reduced your free press to a billboard for its interests, and slowly but steadily eroded your power.  It has changed the United States of America to the United Corporation of America, an institution in which you are not a stockholder.

Whom do you trust to stand up to that power?

We’ve been deprived of true leadership for so long we no longer remember what it sounds like.

It sounds like this: whatever is oppressing you, I will stand up to it.  Whatever is harming you, I will make it stop.  Whoever cheats you, lies to you, steals from you, I will put a end to it.

The job of a leader is to have the courage you don’t.  It’s to fight the fights you can’t.  It’s to sacrifice their comfort for yours, and not give in to whatever threatens you, no matter how big its claws are.  A leader’s job is to have your back no matter how difficult that might be.

If you can’t do that, you have no business leading.

So what do you want?

Another leader whose personal best is to tell you everything you want to hear, then quietly capitulate once again to those powers while telling you that’s all they can do?

Another ineffectual “centrist” who will talk a good game on your economic well-being and then secure their war chest by selling you out?  Another blandly likeable drone whose idea of victory is letting it get only a little worse?  Who will tell you that standing up to that which has taken everything from you is radical, unrealistic, or even dangerous?

Standing up to bully is always a radical idea to a coward.  The thing is, leadership requires exactly that courage.  A real leader is not afraid of a bully.

Or in bed with one.

You cannot stand up to a power you’re in bed with.  You can’t be supported by corporate power and fight it.  You can’t hitch your wagon to the very thing destroying the middle class and then oppose it.

Wall Street has grown fat by keeping wages low, by ballooning the cost of medical care, by making the cost of a college education ten years of indenture.  It has turned your children’s schools into a factory for fat contracts and done the same to our military.  It’s taken your pension and your savings and it’s kept its tax rate low by raising yours.  It’s skyrocketed the cost of living while making sure you live hand-to-mouth.

And to keep the gravy train rolling it has hand-picked leaders either too stupid or too cowardly to ever say no.

Think of this nation’s economy as a tree bent all the way to the ground by that gale force wind.  To bend it back straight and true what do you need?  A timid breeze or a force as strong as that gale – one that will blow against it with equal power and force it upright again?

That wind isn’t going anywhere; the only question is how much more it will be allowed to destroy, and who will stand against it, and bring it into alignment with the needs and the rights of the people again.

The leader you pick will be the one standing against that gale.  That requires the courage of a lion and a backbone of steel.  It requires someone who does not believe victory is only letting the hole get a little deeper, but pulling you out of it entirely – and bending that tree back to a straight and even keel again.

Choose wisely, and choose well.

On Class, Character, and Leadership

 

Our descent into folly as a nation can be measured over decades by one metric:  the decline in merit of those who rule commerce, civic organizations, and government.

Gone are the days in which those we looked to for leadership – whether we agreed with their politics and philosophy or not – were at least of such mettle that we could in good conscience encourage our children to grow up and embody their virtues.  Gone are the days when the city fathers, those keepers of enterprise, could be expected to display a sense of civic responsibility (and if they did not, be sure of getting the boot).  And gone are the days when those who held elected or appointed office were expected to comport themselves in a manner that brought no shame upon our collective sense of pride in our nation.

The men and women who currently run this nation’s greatest enterprises are indistinguishable from pool hall hustlers; those running our civic organizations have all the integrity of sideshow barkers; and those sitting in the highest seats of authority within this nation resemble nothing so much as used car salesmen.  And we gaze upon them and wring our hands, wondering what it is that ails them, that has brought us to a place where we are ruled by those who lack – who lack —

The truth of these creatures is stark and simple: they have no class.

Class, as my grandmother explained it to me, has nothing to do with money.  It has nothing to do with one’s knowledge of fine wines, ability at ballroom dancing, or sartorial finesse.  It has nothing to do with social status or even education.

It has to do, quite simply, with the amount of respect one shows for oneself and for others.

The unfortunate truth of the motley crew of individuals currently running politics, Wall Street, and so much of society is that they display an utter lack of that very respect.  Regardless of whatever wealth and station they might have been born into, they act like gutter children; they display a crudeness and cheapness in their every action more suited to the warrens dogfights are held in than the very seats of power within this great nation.

I can go to the poorest neighborhood in any city or town and find children possessed of great class, whose manners and comportment indicate a sterling quantity of respect for themselves and those around them.  And I can, sadly, go to a mixer at the most expensive prep school in this nation and find children so boorish, so crude, and so obviously devoid of any true civility they resemble ill-raised curs.  This does not and never did have anything to do with money (except that those completely lacking in respect for themselves and others so often find it easy to make a mint).

There is a stark difference between a man of the people and a boorish jerk without kindness, decency, or civility; to suggest that the two are the same is to defame the memory of men like Truman, Eisenhower, Carter and Reagan, as well as such shapers of industry as Sloan, Kettering, Levitt and Korvauer.  The ruse of selling a total absence of class as somehow egalitarian is wearing thin, and we ought to stop falling for it.  Lincoln was born in a log cabin, and had more class than the entire current leadership of Wall Street.

As bad as this utter lack of civility is – as corrosive as it is to the entire fabric of our society – it drags with it an even more ominous twin.  Those who lack the very respect that class requires are also generally lacking in character, and it could not be more obvious that the current power elite are shockingly deficient in this quality as well.

Character is the ability to demand of yourself behavior that places the interests of the greater good above your own, the sheer will to choose integrity, decency and civic interest above your own petty needs and desires.

The men and women currently stewarding industry and our government – a few shining exceptions notwithstanding – display a paucity of self-respect and a lack of character so chilling it shocks the conscience.  They sell themselves to the highest bidder like the cheapest whore in the streets; they consider all virtue a sign of weakness; they will say and do anything to attain their own petty desires, without a thought of the greater good.  They are callow hucksters incapable of even recognizing an ideal, let alone displaying fealty to it; they are, in a word, cheap.

To place our greatest assets as a nation in the hands of those with so little respect is a bit like trusting a temperamental toddler in a room full of Waterford crystal; and to allow our common values to be entrusted to a breed so lacking in character is like trusting an ax murderer to babysit your child.  These men and women could not be safely trusted with custodianship of a garbage heap, let alone our most precious possessions and ideals.

This grotesquerie afflicts both sides of the political aisle, I’m sorry to say, and has infected every industry and enterprise within our nation.  It is why we no longer create and build great things, for creatures so callow as this cannot recognize quality, only market value; it is why Washington teems with whores, not statesmen, for creatures so shallow as this cannot recognize truth, only a sales pitch; it is why this nation is no longer a shining city on a hill, for creatures so base as this cannot recognize the sacred, only the profane.

The only way this nation’s greater destiny can be reclaimed is to reject rule by the craven in favor of rule by the truly sterling.

Whether your political beliefs are liberal or conservative, Republican or Democratic, I ask you to approach the ballot box this year with the question of who has character and class firmly in hand.  I ask you to begin the arduous journey toward reclaiming our nation by placing the questions of does this person show respect for themselves and others and does this person demand of themselves the placing of public interest above their own interest first and foremost in who you choose to guide us.  Only then can we recover what we have lost.