Tag: import100207

Now it’s getting personal

As angel investor, founder and, ultimately, CEO of the Dynamac portable computer company, I never doubted that Apple would prevail over Dell – I felt it so deeply that I now choose to conflate Apple’s completed quest with the one before The Rest of Us.  

American democracy is in the tank deeper than Apple was in 1997. My hope – and confident expectation – is that our little team of visionaries and world-class programmers can help us to generate another headline that’s sorely needed:

Which means that more people vote based on person-to-person, authentic conversation than from mainstream media illusions. There so many examples of achieving the impossible that we should feel confidence and energy for this vital mission. In 1997, everyone just knew that Apple was toast. Today, everyone just knows that we’ll never regain the buoyant optimism and even-handed government imagined in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It’s as likely as Apple valued more than Dell.

We need the persistence and wisdom to prevail on behalf of governance by the people. None of us possess Steve Jobs’ brilliance and arrogance, but we can at least have the patience of Job.

3:11:52 PM    

I love the word “grace” as Doc uses it, so well and frequently. A grace is a boon offered without asking – a benefit that connotes a kind of divinity, whatever its source. Surely there’s no more human gift than this, acting on our highest instincts, and we may achieve it only a few times in our life. The absence of grace is what makes life nasty, brutish and short.

The defining trait of civilization is forbearance, by which we refuse to act as drastically our instincts urge us. Where grace is an exception, forbearance is the rule. Most of us do not cut each other off in traffic or react to most verbal slights. We are especially patient with children and others of reduced social capacity. 

Forbearance is not only civilization’s fruit, it is also its marker. For what is civilization, but a dance of mutual forbearance? Families are the crucible of forbearance, and we cannot comprehend it unless we study its practitioners at home, from birth. No wonder so few of us master this bright art.

Extend and Embrace 

Just as families forge forbearance into national cultures, so must higher functioning nations practice restraint in dealing with the less disciplined societies. In fact, wouldn’t that be the sole marker of authentic power? Children and weaklings are never in a position to exercise forbearance – it can only be extended by those with the power to prevail. This unique brand of of American forbearance seems to have been in remission the last few years. The unilateral, gratuitous invasion of Iraq aroused a lot of dismay from those who conflate forbearance with America: “WTF?!! America doesn’t attack first!” 

Similar reactions followed the disclosure of our torture of prisoners. Now we’re wondering why the gummint needs to listen in on so many conversations. The point is not that we will do anything we can in order to protect ourselves – we remain appropriately reluctant to nuke Iran or North Korea, at least at this point.

I know a little bit about making a personal investment in our country’s forbearance. In 1968, our C-130 was shot down by a North Vietnamese gunner who strolled over from Cambodia every day to ply his craft off the runway at Katum, Vietnam. So I’m not speaking from a theoretical viewpoint. I say again: all wars have consequences, even the Global War On Terrorism. We need to assume the wrath of fundamentalists will cause more deaths in this country. But we’re now the front line warriors and we should expect to lose a few of us. If you think not, then you’re saying that you’re not prepared to give your life for your country.

New Year, No Fear

So I propose a toast to American Forbearance: a mighty, globally-respected brand that the current management is trashing beyond recognition. Let’s celebrate the rule of law, even when inconvenient – some call it law and order. Let’s be honest about our fears and rise above them rather than follow them further into this dark night of our national soul.

And let’s remember that being tough is how you take it, not how you dish it out. You know, like Jesus.

12:30:52 AM    

I’ve wanted to use that phrase from Carousel for, like, ever, so thanks, Joe and Kathy, for the opportunity at last. On  Saturday, the Trippi family threw their annual clambake on their Maryland farm, so naturally, it was a bit of a Dean campaign reunion.

It was also a memorial to the recently departed Kasey – the wonder dog who was the spiritual inspiration to so many  people at the Dean Campaign -  a West Highland white terrier with the heart of a lionness. In his eulogy, Nicco Mele described how Kasey could coax another three hours of fortitude from him when no other power could. Like a tiny Scottish Presbyterian cleric, Kasey would roam the cubicles at 60 Farrell Street and, seemingly, hound the slackers. You could almost hear her little burr as you halucinated over your keyboard at midnight: “Well, it won’t be doin’ the Guv’nor any good for you to be slacking, will it laddie?” No dog of any size could intimidate Kasey, who was so energized when cornered that she looked forward to being cornered. Like the Guv’nor.

In addition to the what-are-you-doing-now questions I asked of everyone, there were also conversations around how ‘Net-mediated conversations might continue to inform politics, especially compelling to me since the pace of growth is not as galvanizing as it was at the start.

I had a stimulating conversation with Matt Stoller, who’s now working on Jon Corzine’s campaign for New Jersey Governor. We didn’t discuss that campaign, but Matt described the importance of what he called “micromedia connectivity” – the localized feedback loops that were once supported by local papers discussing local issues, before print media got ClearChanneled.

Back-Channeling the Clear Channels

The key to political success, Matt reminded me, is to show up at local party meetings and get involved enough to become part of the political process rather than simply being what I’ve been: a smart-ass commentator in a blogosphere that no one in local politics knows how to spell, much less attend to.

The problem with party meetings is their accidental cynicism – they seem purpose-built to attract only those who like party meetings: people with too much political ambition or not enough real life. Do you know anybody who goes to local political party meetings? Do you know anybody who knows anybody who does? I didn’t think so. Naturally, you and I think that people like us should be running things, and we’re mad as hell that we don’t, and we resent it that people like us are so disinclined to hang out at the power centers that there’s really no place for us in the political process. That’s why our jaws drop in stunned amazement as we watch the doofus political insiders cavort with glee at a Presidential nominating convention. It’s scary that these are the people minding the spigot disgorging our candidates: Who are those people and why the hell are they the political power base?

Because they show up. They show up for meetings that you and I would flee for an elective root canal. And that’s just fine with the insiders running politics.

The disinclination of centrist Americans to “do” politics is at the heart of my assertion that, based on American voter data, it takes a zealot to even get out and vote, let alone get active. As for the people minding America’s political power levers, they are so few in number that our politics is a central planning realpolitik. If the Swiss ran their politics like we do, they’d be Albania.

Clearchanneling has homogenized media so that its “content” is as predictable as a shopping mall’s tenant roster. A corollary cocooning has insulated most institutions from their constituents, whether it’s an annual shareholders’ meeting, a nominating convention, a city council meeting or your homowner’s association. And that’s the stonewalling that stops “regular” Americans at the doorstep of local party politics. It’s not just laziness, it’s the user interface.

Matt Stoller knows so much about this that I’m embarassed to opine in the wake of our conversation Saturday, there on the dock in the sunset on Cummings Creek. But there’s a distinction in our viewpoints I can’t leave alone. Matt has concluded, like so many others who are drawn to the tech side of politics but who have faced the reality of actually doing politics, that the newly energized people just have to develop the will to go to party meetings.

I’m more cynical. I’ve concluded that “real” Americans (i.e., people with a life) never will do the local party thing and so we need to develop a robust and seductive back channel for governance so that, as in the run-up to the American Revolution, a new population emerges, taking over politics by using technology as disruptive as Ben Franklin’s press was in his day.

Technical Determinist at Work

Technical determinism is politically incorrect. The sophisticated observers of culture, politics and markets don’t like technical determinism which seems, to put it delicately, to really piss off the humanists among us. As a lifelong card-carrying humanist, I’m not so sure. It seems that we humans and humanists carry out our right-brain agendas totally circumscribed by the information that we apprehend and by the reality we build from that mental picture. Of course, all the elements of our constructed reality are pawns of the communications technology that has been erected for us in our immediate past. We’d like to think we are free intellectual agents, perceiving reality and making astute judgments of absolute value, unfettered by transient constraints and filters. I suggest that we’re really corks bobbing in the perceptual stream of media flowing past our forebrain: that technology is the real determinant of what we perceive and, perforce, of what we conclude.

At the O’Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In at the ETech conference in February 2004, I chatted with Dan Gillmor briefly about the Dean campaign I was just coming off of. Dan dismissed Dean as someone who wasn’t fit to be President. I asked Dan if he’d ever met Howard Dean, and he answered “No.”

How do we “know” someone we’ve never met? I won’t argue with Dan that Howard Dean wouldn’t have intrinsic difficulties connecting with world leaders and the electorate based on his apparently bristly nature, but it seems hubristic of any of us to conclude a leader’s true nature while observing him through the multi-element lens of Main Stream Media.

So those are the issues I want to deal with as our new little company tries to build the next round of tools for people who want to govern from their arm chairs and not from their local party meetings.

11:47:40 PM    comment [commentCounter (348)]

We’re never as original as we think. In response to my notes last night about the bug in my display, Frost Fan kindly posted Robert Frost’s poem, A Considerable Speck, as a comment, but the line breaks didn’t survive the comment processor.

Here it is, formatted properly, to further humble me. My reaction to my small friend was a dim echo of the original but, happily, as spontaneous. You can hear Frost reading the poem in 1956 here, listed as Robert Frost, Part 3. That page notes that Frost once described a poem as “a momentary stay against confusion.” He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924, ’31, ’37 and ’43.

Momentary, indeed. There’s no sign of my micro-Roomba today.

3:51:50 PM    

Well, he’s in my display, actually. He’s one of those tiny little mites, usually red I think, that race around, seemingly randomly, on a sheet of paper or a napkin, otherwise unregarded. Well I’ve got one of those as a new friend, racing around on the back side of the glass on my LCD screen, just a mite bigger than the period on this sentence.

Yep, the little guy’s trapped between the information on my screen and its protective glass. My new little friend runs the scaled equivalent of about a mile a minute, zipping diagonally across my work space. Like a Roomba vacuum, he vectors forward a while, right for a while, vectors left, circles and repeats. He disappears behind the display’s bezel, then emerges a ways downstream and continues to seek better options.

A life form sharing the window on my virtual world reminds me that the greatest silicon-based experience is totally trumped by the most trivial carbon-based life form. A bit ago, I must confess, when I assumed he was on the front of my display, I reached out my forefinger to morph my imminent friend into a tiny smear. He’s the kind of bug that’s so inconsequential and non-messy that you’re not embarrassed to murder him and condemn his potential progeny–the kind of mayhem that humans have perfected. But, like the liquefied crystals that define my reality, he was protected by an improbably large and light piece of coated glass.

So this life form is doing what life always does, so inconveniently for the rest of us. He’s in my face without actually affecting my reality. A more focused individual would just ignore him. But I can’t because he’s exactly like me and, I assert, you.

We spend our days scanning for opportunity and fleeing threat. If we can’t discern an opportunity or a threat, we make one up, though I’m not sure my new friend is so self-destructively imaginative. For sure, my avatar-under-glass is as convinced as you and me that his existence not only matters to the universe, it is the universe.

9:45:42 PM    

Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) was a connoisseur of Nazi concentration camps, having been a guest at four of them over five years. His report on how good and evil really work is called Man’s Search for Meaning, which sold nine million copies in 24 languages:

“Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

“… it must be stated that even among the guards there were some who took pity on us. I shall only mention the commander of the camp from which I was liberated. It was found after the liberation – only the camp doctor, a prisoner himself, had known of it previously – that this man had paid no small sum of money from his own pocket in order to purchase medicines for his prisoners from the nearest market town.

“(An interesting incident with reference to this SS commander is in regard to the attitudes toward him of some of his Jewish prisoners. At the end of the war when the American troops liberated the prisoners from our camp, three young Hungarian Jews hid this commander in the Bavarian woods. Then they went to the commandant of the American Forces who was very eager to capture this SS commander and they said they would tell him where he was but only under certain conditions: the American commander must promise that absolutely no harm would come to this man. After a while, the American officer finally promised these young Jews that the SS commander when taken into captivity would be kept safe from harm. Not only did the American officer keep his promise but, as a matter of fact, the former SS commander of this concentration camp was in a sense restored to his command, for he supervised the collection of clothing among the nearby Bavarian villages, and its distribution to all of us who at that time still wore the clothes we had inherited from other inmates of Camp Auschwitz who were not as fortunate as we, having been sent to the gas chamber immediately upon their arrival at the railway station.)

“But the senior camp warden, a prisoner himself, was harder than any of the SS guards. He beat the other prisoners at every slightest opportunity, while the camp commander, to my knowledge, never once lifted his hand against any of us.

“It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils. Certainly, it was a considerable achievement for a guard or foreman to be kind to the prisoners in spite of all the camps influences, and, on the other hand, the baseness of a prisoner who treated his own companions badly was exceptionally contemptible. Obviously the prisoners found the lack of character in such men especially upsetting, while they were profoundly moved by the smallest kindness received from any of the guards. I remember how one day a foreman secretly gave me a piece of bread which I knew he must have saved from his breakfast ration. It was far more than the small piece of bread which moved me to tears at that time. It was the human “something” which this man also gave to me – the word and look which accompanied the gift.

“From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two  the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of “pure race”  and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.

“Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil? The rift dividing good and evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.

Was Frankl suggesting an alternate interpretation of a recent declaration?

Regarding the Germans who Just Went Along

“But my point,” [Frankl] continued, “is that heroism ultimately can only be demanded or expected of someone – of only one person. You are never entitled to place the demand of heroism on any one else, not unless you have been in the same position, facing the same decision, the same way facing death as punishment. But anyone who had immigrated to the United States and, viewing the situation in the past from that place, is not entitled to tell anybody who had remained in Germany that he should have joined the resistance, unless he himself has done so, facing all the risks, facing the question of whether his responsibility toward his whole family had allowed him, because he would have thrown his own family into the concentration camps.”

Al Solzhenitsyn Chimes In

Then there’s the Alexander Solzhenitsyn viewpoint, troubling to absolutists because he’s an even more famous concentration camp survivor, in his native Russia.

“The universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between countries, not between nations, not between parties, not between classes, not between good and bad men: the dividing line cuts across nations and parties, shifting constantly. . . . It divides the heart of every man.”

Old News

Why Bother?

“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So let us be alert – alert in a twofold sense:

9:32:12 PM    

A little Consideration, a little Thought for Others, makes all the difference.
                                          — Eeyore (A. A. Milne)

I should know better than to ignore advice from Eeyore. I wrote something last time after months of not speaking up, and it came out as an insult to Jeff Jarvis. I apologize, Jeff, for saying things hurriedly and hurtfully. It’s not personal. But I insist that the issues are important.

There’s one sure way to churn up a lot of buzz, and that’s to have a disagreement with Jeff, the buzzmachine, about how to react to terrorism. Jeff, naturally, disagreed strongly with my assessment last time of the value of his passions stemming from his 9/11 experience, accusing me of psychoanalyzing him and being condescending. He reacted as I suppose I expected, declaring to his huge following that my last post was “strange”. He and his readers are now carrying on a useful dialogue in the comments over at buzzmachine.com, on whether there’s any value in understanding our enemy and whether everyone who is not consumed with rage is some kind of Islamic fellow traveler and unpatriotic scumbag (that would be me, in case it’s not obvious). The reader comment I most appreciated:

Let me ask your question a little bit differently: would you tell our military in Afghanistan to feel hate for our enemies? I know soldiers who’ve fought there, and the striking thing to me, talking with them, is that the best of them *don’t* feel hate, even in the heat of battle. They can’t, because that would cloud their judgement, and get innocent people harmed– including their own men.

Jeff lays it out for clueless me:

Bin Laden = Hitler, 9/11 murderers = SS murderers. Got it so far?

…I’m not a soldier, Britt. Your analogies don’t work for me. I’m a civilian. And it was as a civilian on my way to work that I witnessed mass murder that day. So don’t tell me I have to follow your orders to be cool under fire. I’m not in your army. Scared? Well, as much as I also bristle at your macho-military attempt to belittle and demean that perfectly sane reaction, I will say that, of course, I was scared and I still am and so should you be, so should America be. Personal? You bet your ass it’s personal. But I wasn’t talking about that in the post you didn’t like. I was talking about the portrayal of mass murderers in network entertainment and wrote my opinion about that. You are the one who tried to make the discussion personal. And I am responding personally: I am insulted by your post.

My point to Jeff when we first discussed this in person at eTech 15 months ago is that, like it or not, we’re all soldiers now. We’ve been thrust into the fray, so we need to act like it. Since I’ve had a little experience in these matters, I want to offer whatever insights I can. This doctrine of quiet mind and grace under fire has been my theme for as long as I’ve been blogging:

Our obsession with every imaginable “threat” to our person has overwhelmed our ability to maintain our personal compass in the life we really live in. We forget that we’re all going to die sometime.

The equivalence of Muslim murderers and Nazi murderers isn’t hard to understand, and is obviously valid. That’s not the point. The point is our technique. What’s the best way for our society to impose its values on the people who want to destroy our values by killing us? Until those societies adopt our values willingly, we are at risk.

It’s not Personal

My comments feel personal to Jeff, because all of us hate suggestions about our behavior. Remember what it was like taking driving lessons? It was scary and ego-threatening and something most of us never got comfortable with, because we never did it enough. We felt personally judged and we didn’t like it. Pilot training was like that for me, but after a while you got used to being questioned on the smallest points of your technique, and you get over the sense that it’s personal. This is true of all military training.

I’ve been candid that I never felt like a professional military guy, but I was in a lot of hairy situations and I learned from them. As a total amateur in the adult adventure camp called Vietnam airlift, I concluded that we were all regular guys trained in specialized techniques. This is why I feel qualified to suggest that any of us can learn how to be less impassioned if we see the value in that technique. Calling for someone to change their technique is not a personal attack, though it can feel that way. I am not better than others because I had that experience. But I learned some tips and tricks that more of us should master.

I don’t want to get into the link-building exercise of “you said – I said”. Jeff peers into my motivations and seems to nail it:

Britt then goes on to give a spiel he tried to give to me at e-Tech a year ago — and he’s no more successful getting me to drink his Kool-Aid now than he was then. Britt was a Vietnam pilot and he likes to talk about the cool and unemotional reserve of a warrior pilot. I wonder whether it’s some odd effort to bring together his Vietnam warrior days with his Deaniac peacenik days — but then, that would be psychoanalyzing him, wouldn’t it?

But I wasn’t a peacenik. This is what I published on 3/4/2003:

If we are to rise above whining about each others’ stupidity, we have to acknowledge each other’s core starting points as valid. You know—war  vs. no war; profiling vs. not; right to choose vs. not; marijuana vs. not;  etc. . .

• We’re not in a war but we are in a street fight, with guys who will die to bloody our nose.
• An unacceptable number of us will be killed by terrorism in the next couple of years.
• If we don’t occupy Iraq now, the body count goes up—not because  that’s where the terrorists are, but because we will not have been forceful enough to do so and silence the Arab machismo affect.

. . . Opponents of this war need to acknowledge the need for the rare war when you cannot accept the continuing threat of attack. The acknowledgment makes for a nuanced conversation. People who revere their inner child must also respect their inner demon.  As Deepak Chopra says, the inner dialogue is the saint and the sinner comparing notes.

Warhawks need to acknowledge the possibility that there are times when we shouldn’t project our power on others, even when they hold wildly differen
t views. They have to stop thinking like missionaries in order to hold a nuanced conversation, which should not be avoided just because it’s more difficult than fighting.

Let’s be clear. We will establish the Pax Americana, as Jay Bookman wrote in the Atlantic Journal-Constitution last September. With luck, we’ll do it with no more than a fright display, as John Perry Barlow  suggests and upon which the animal kingdom relies to keep the peace. If we  don’t colonize Iraq now, we will surely do it after the next terrorist attack, and we’ll be a lot more belligerent then. The reason we will colonize Iraq is that we’re in a street fight that won’t stop until we put an end to it.  It doesn’t matter that the terrorists aren’t in Iraq. The terrorists are watching what happens in Iraq to gauge where and how to attack again.

Back to our Regular Programming

When you need to do something important and potentially life threatening, it’s wise to bring all your faculties to the table. And that means that this War on Terrorism should be done correctly and not stupidly. So far, I don’t think we’re doing a particularly good job of managing the War in Iraq, because we lost our cool and are spending far too much money with far too little effect. That is a comment on technique, not intent.

The reason it’s important to manage a war well is that the people, especially the American people, soon tire of spending money without much to show for it. We didn’t send enough troops into Iraq to begin with, when we could, and we are spending too much money on expensive weapons and not enough on fighting the root causes. If you want to know how to fight terrorism, sit at John Robb‘s knee and learn about global guerillas and the marketplace of terrorism.

I don’t think John and I see things similarly just because we both flew C-130’s for Uncle Sam. I hope it’s because he’s laid out a thoughtful, disciplined and long-view study of how to fight guerrillas effectively. One of his several important briefing documents is one that he published about a year ago, summarizing an interview from about 15 months ago. My point is that, for thinking people willing to do the homework, it’s old news that, like a skilled martial arts fighter, Bin Laden cleverly used America’s passions to attack America:

AL QAEDA’S GRAND STRATEGY: SUPERPOWER BAITING

What is al Qaeda’s grand strategy? An in depth interview with Saad al-Faqih, an expert on al Qaeda, provides some insight into this. Dr. al-Faqih highlights the role of Dr. Zawahiri in evolving the strategic thinking of bin Laden:

Let’s look at the best part again, Dr. Zawahiri’s breakthrough insight from February, 1998: “The American mentality is a cowboy mentality.” John continues:

War Against a Stained Dress

In this case, it was Bill Clinton who played the macho cowboy role and got sucked into Bin Laden’s ploy. His critics called it a Wag the Dog tactic in his larger War Against a Stained Dress. If Clinton hadn’t chosen to pander to America’s fear and anger, no one would have noticed that Bin Laden had decided to kill us all, and he would have had to find a different way to recruit soldiers. The e. coli bacteria has also decided to kill us all, but we haven’t poured unlimited resources into that fight. Rather, we’ve poured the right resources into it.

This is a tangible, testable and metric-filled demonstration about how expensive it is to do the wrong thing when provoked by a far weaker enemy. 3,000 people died needlessly on 9/11 for two reasons: we elevated Bin Laden to a cult icon and we chose not to harden cockpit doors because the airlines didn’t want to pay for them. Both of those were stupid responses to known stimuli.

But it gets better, this briefing from a year ago about a strategy from seven years ago. You should read the whole thing. The money quote is precisely about the difference between the futility of red-eyed, slogan-slinging revenge and the effectiveness of acting like the trained warrior, patient, mild and effective:

There are many people in America who want to tackle the matter in a much more intelligent manner but they have been silenced by this pervasive McCarthyism. There are people that are very tired with this cowboy attitude. Once the next attack occurs they are likely to say that Bush has had two years of this cosmic battle against terrorism and we ended up with an even bigger attack. Now is the time to try a different approach. Now of course the right wingers, the Zionists and the arms lobby will refuse to give ground and then a clash inside America is likely to ensue.

Those of us who enjoy the notoriety of our own blogs might be another force unwittingly supporting the “clash within America”: it’s good for circulation. But it’s not good for the circulation of the next round of innocents whom we might kill by participating in this “war” for i
ts energizing effects rather than because we have a job to do, whether or not we’re trained for it: being smart, detached and effective. How do we explain to the next round of victims that we were so caught up in our passion for attacking Iraq that we didn’t have the money to inspect the cargo containers?

Mind game: Is there any objective way to tell if I really feel strongly about this point or whether I have suckered Jeff and his cowboy war boosters for GoogleJuice in the same calculated way that Bin Laden played the U.S.? After all, what better way to increase my linkage? Even the possibility makes the point that passion is a poor substitute for careful planning.

America is being played like a bigmouth bass on a 5-pound test line. Until we quit going along with the rich Arab fisherman, we are in mortal danger. When we get smart, we win. It’s time to place our bets.

7:42:43 PM    

I like Jeff Jarvis. A lot. He introduced me to Spirit of America, which allowed me to take the Dean Design Principles to the next level, and that directly led to the formation of our new company, Open Resource Group, LLC. So I owe Jeff a lot, and I’ll never forget it.

But Jeff and I have a fundamental disagreement on a core principle. I believe that you can be a warrior and put yourself in harm’s way without hating your enemy, but he seems committed to hate and revenge as a result of his near-death experience on 9/11. Every time he touches on his personal experience that day, the bile spills onto the page and, to my gentle sensibilities, poisons the dialogue that is the core of the give-and-take of blogging. Jeff seems to seek out opportunities to pick the scab of his near-death experience. Today’s example is his “dread” (Jeff’s word) of Brian Grazer’s NBC mini-series on 9/11, presenting the viewpoint of the perps, whereby Grazer hopes to portray the Muslims in the way that Das Boot humanized the German U-Boat crews.

In case you might have any doubt about Where Jeff is coming from on this, he titles his rant, Next: The Chuck Manson You Never Knew:

I had to read it three times, not believing that even a Hollywood executive could say something so awfully insensitive and idiotic and so much of a self-parody of show biz PC. But in a story about the 9/11 movies and miniseries in the making, he said it:

Brian Grazer, co-chairman of Imagine Television, which is producing the NBC mini-series – and which has hired The Times as a consultant – said he hoped it would do for Muslims what Wolfgang Petersen’s film “Das Boot” did for World War II-era Germans.

“Every approach prior to that was, the Germans were horrible,” he said. “He humanized them, because they are human. That’s what I’m hoping we do, that we don’t demonize, that we humanize all the different sides, and so we see the seeds, and we get an understanding from each culture’s point of view as to how they got to such a horrible place.”

He wants to “humanize all the different sides.” How the hell do you humanize the evil bastards who killed 3,000 innocent fellow Americans, Glazer?

What seeds are there that make mass murder understandable or justifiable?

What point of view do you need to see that these men are evil?

And if you try to say that you’re talking about the larger world of Islam, then it’s Muslim bloggers who should be flaming your ass right now for presuming that these murderers are in any way representative of them as a people.

Explain yourself, Mr. Glazer.

Jeff, you got the shit scared out of you. It happens. Get over yourself. Please.

9/11 isn’t about you, and it’s beneath your dignity to take it so personally and viscerally. By over-personalizing your experience, you deprive us of the best of your wonderful gifts, which you bestow so freely when you treat every other subject. We get it that it affected you so personally and strongly. Hatred is a drug that’s addictive, energizing and pervasive. The problem with all that testosterone and adrenaline coursing through your system is that you can’t fly your plane as well. There are very good reasons that military aviators affect the archetypal sangfroid that has become their stereotype. To be effective at the controls of a plane, every experience must be dismissed as nothing but a minor inconvenience. Coolness at the controls of an aircraft is a metaphor for how we live our lives.

The first place that emotion is distilled out of military aviators is in the area called radio discipline, and you’re graded on it in flight school. In our world, it would be called blogging discipline. Radio discipline is the most visible indicator of the self-control that the aviators’ guild imposes on its members. In Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, the essence of mental discipline in combat is revealed by an anecdote from the Korean war:

Now it’s time for We the People to control our fear and face the music.

If there is such a thing as right action, it places a demand on our resources whether or not our intellect or gut buys into it. That’s the essence of trusting our instruments rather than our inner ear. It also suggests that, when we must do things that seem threatening to our survival, it’s OK to keep our perspective.

In fact, it will improve the odds of survival.

Better a Cool Response than a Cool Engine

The Grumman aircraft that the scared young pilot was flying was built before the hydro-mechanical fuel control, a kind of intelligent fuel injection for jet engines. In those days, the throttle was connected directly to a valve that dumped raw fuel into the engine, which was, essentially, a blowtorch. Dump too much fuel and the fire goes out.

Suddenly it’s quiet. Ruins your whole day.

Today, an F-18 pilot slams the throttle to max power and starts jiving. In those days, if you moved the throttle from cruise to afterburner faster than about 5 seconds, your fighter became an expensive glider.

Think about it: you’ve just been jumped by a faster, more agile MIG 15. Your job now is to tame your reptile brain and count slowly while advancing the throttle and jinking like a mothafucka (technical pilot talk for turning fast while under duress):

Such suppression of one’s reptile brain requires behavioral modification at an early age. Now we, the front line combatants in the politically powerful War on A Noun, without the benefit of such training, need to keep our heads on straight and learn to fear only Fear Itself.

Are we Airborne?

The question we need to ask ourselves is whether we should model our behavior on poorly-trained, superstitious Muslim terrorists or on our own highly trained military aviators? Because hatred and revenge are the M.O. of terrorists, not cool-headed warriors, we lower ourselves to th
eir standards by relying on their fuels of choice: hatred and revenge. I submit that the work we must do is too important to rely on passion as our fuel. Rather, we must adopt the smart attitudes that are effective, rather than the compelling, visceral passions that feel so good.

9/11 was a wake up call to a reality that we’ve been living in for forty years but have been unable to face. Devolving into ritualized, repetitious rants about how the enemy is evil and that there are no good enemies and no bad friendlies is worse than sophomoric. It’s simply ill-informed and stupid and has been proven to be so by so many wars and jihads that to misunderstand those learnings is a conscious choice to embrace the only dark side available to us: ignorance and superstition that’s been proven wrong.

Like our own Vietnam vets who’ve gone back and had tea with their former enemies and shared family photos and wept together, we too will some day sit down with former terrorists and meet the humans within. As will they. It has happened every time, with all the Gooks, Nips, Huns, Slopes and Ragheads that we’ve ever railed against as we firebombed their homes for no apparent military gain.

What does this fear of death morphed into hatred get us? Every one of us is going to die. Most of us are fated to die stupidly, slowly and expensively, like Terry Schiavo, rather than quickly and messily, like James Dean. I’d much rather live hard, die young and have a good looking corpse.

10:04:24 AM    

Well, that was interesting. I wrote last time about how AV123 is doing just about everything right to ship the highest quality Chinese-made loudspeaker systems and electronics to the most possible customers at the lowest possible cost. That led to some interesting conversation online and off regarding what the AV123 model means for other companies with similar aspirations. It also led to an interesting lunch with Steve Ozmai, who, I found out, has just become General Manager for the company. 

First, though, I enjoyed a long-delayed listening session at the Main Listening Facility adjacent to AV123’s World Headquarters. Steve had stressed that there were critical technical requirements to facilitate the listening session: “auditioning speakers just doesn’t work without pizza and cheap American beer.”

Note the cheap American beer support technology

I had learned that AV123 is so virtual that they’ve never had a listening room, so I accepted Steve Ozmai’s invitation to stop by his home for some old-fashioned listening. In many audio shops, this is a perfunctory experience, limited to the personally-owned CD or two that the commissioned sales guy carries in his pocket. Instead Steve hauls out a massive portfolio of disks and we settle in his third bedroom for some real listening. “Long-delayed listening session”, indeed! About 20 years, in fact.

Steve started off with a CD I hadn’t even heard of, a 1996 release by Patricia Barber called Café Blue. Stereophile magazine rated it as one of the Records to Die For from that year:

Café Blue has seduced everyone for whom I have ever played it—jazz people, rock people, Medicare people, even computer people. Some call from record stores, sounding slightly desperate: “That album you played for me the other night! What was her name again?” If you have a voice that’s a dark pure whisper straight up from the soul, and if you’ve lived it yourself, you can sing to people of their innermost anxieties and they will not only love it, they will need it.

She sings an amazingly slow and anguished Ode to Billy Joe and, surprisingly, an impactful A Taste of Honey.

He played another CD I hadn’t heard (what planet have I been on?): Roger Waters’ 1992 Amused to Death. Waters was a founder and chief lyricist for Pink Floyd, so I shoulda known what I was in for. The album treats the effect of TV on an ape, trying to tease some sense out of the pixellated world on the tube, mind growing more numb and jaw more slack. The sound on this 2-track CD was beyond belief. “Soundstage” is an overused audio term for how a stereo creates its illusion, laying out the instruments in front of you, usually between the speakers and not just from the two point sources, where logic says the sound should come from. On great systems, the soundstage grows outside of the speakers, which I still don’t understand. I thought that was as good as it could get.

On Perfect Sense, played on the Onix SP3 amp and two bookshelf-size Reference 1‘s, the sound filled the room but came from different spots all over it. The track literally forces you to get up out of your chair to see if any other speakers are playing. The album was playing as the above picture was taken, and the pic proves that I had not over-applied the cheap American beer support tech: you can see that the support solution is still above the label. Listen to this album. It’s an amazing mental excursion, even played on iTunes over SoundSticks, but on the SP3-Ref 1 combo, the sound is a sensory delight, as the reviewer says.

So it is still possible to get a great listening session from an audio retailer, though it seems to take a 21st Century, customer-driven, Net-buzzword compliant company to attract you—a stranger from 2300 miles away—even if it lacks a showroom.

Servicing Customers, not Screwing Consumers

The next day at lunch, Steve filled me in on the fine points of running a fast-growing company online. The obvious limitation is ears-on system tuning. Audio gear can be touchy, and each customer’s listening room affects the sound. This has inspired Mark and his people to constantly monitor their customer forum. As with so many online communities, the forum has had the effect of “deputizing” many of AV123’s customers who are especially knowledgeable and helpful. That seems to solve most complaints. Then there’s the heavy artillery approach I mentioned last time, which puts Mark Schifter on a plane to visit the unhappy customer and setting things right and reporting back to the tribe how it went. That’s certainly on the far end of the high tech-high touch scale that John Naisbitt first described in Megatrends.

Modern CEOs, the plastic ones whose description Doc liked last time, cannot even parse the logic behind such an action. Mark Schifter is dumb like a fox. His Massaging By Exception (cf.) approach is the occasional small price paid for skipping the expensive part of marketing: The marketing.

Mark’s got no MBAs, no agency,  no ads, no distributors, no inventory sitting in warehouses and showrooms, except for the nominal 2-3 week’s worth of JIT gear flowing through the Broomfield facility. His “sales” staff readily admit to being order takers—an admission that people in sales never make. So the community forum and enthusiastic reviews keep the flow of orders coming.

But Mark is driven to such responses by his heart as much as his head. He seems to really need the constant feedback from his chosen community: customers. Would that every CEO was dependent on customer feedback. His community forum is really a group blog with Mark as the chief blogger: 4530 posts since Dec, 2002. Last Friday afternoon, there
had been 138,879 posts to the forum. As I write, another 1,300 have been added, to 140,269. Interestingly, 2,290 members contribute to the forum, or 59 posts on average by people who aren’t the CEO.

Mark crashed for a few hours after landing in Hong Kong Saturday night and woke at 3 to commune with his peeps on a new thread, The Masters Live in Hong Kong. So a little conversation evolved, about golf, and hangin’ out together across the globe and nothing at all about audio gear. Then, on the 12th reply in the thread, a forum member named A&B’s Dad, from Ellicott City, MD, posts a comment that any company would kill for:

“I was standing in the kitchen with the Masters on in the family room, when I heard this thwack coming from my 2 pairs of 250’s. It was Tiger’s tee shot. Incredible power and even more incredible sound. Whoever thought I would be crowing about my Rockets because of a golf shot.”

Steve and I discussed their discovery that doing business in public can be really scary, since customers are not always delighted and amazed, no matter how good you are. My friend and trusted mentor, Micah Sifry, likens online openness to the rock star diving into the mosh pit. It takes more trust than most of us can muster.

Customers can be very vocal about easily solved issues, and some make a career of it. But fixing a problem for an unhappy customer is worth ten reports from customers who start happy and remain so, because the audience is listening, as the THX slogan says, and not just to their gear. The AV123 community sees these complaints pop up, they participate in the problem solving, and witness the company doing whatever it takes to resolve them. Are Mark and his folks better managers and more conscientious than the rest of us? Unlikely. But they have put themselves into an environment, of their own design, where they are forced to be better than the rest of us.

And AV123 is teaching all of us how to put ourselves into an environment where we are forced to be better than we are.

12:53:55 PM