20 May 2007
Playing for Keeps
There ought to be a Safety Center for politicians, wouldn't you agree? There is for the people who fly airplanes. It would be a place where records of all the peccadilloes could be kept, and a newsletter issued to office holders, just like there is for pilots. There could be a comic character to soften the blow of commonsense advice to stop acting like idiots at the public trough.
It pained me to tip over the rock of the Wolfowitz matter. At its root, of course, the scandal was not about him, but about power politics in the global arena.
Of course there is a component of America-bashing in the scandal; that is a given. It is also one of the reasons I feel a sense of betrayal about the whole thing. Doctor Wolfowtiz's enemies were playing for keeps, and he was not even on the same page with them.
I had to question whether I was playing into the hands of those that manage the spin. Being a practitioner of this art once removed, I rely, in large part on others for sources and methods to filter through the lens of experience. I spent more than a moment thinking about what I had written, in that moment of contemplation that comes after the button has been mashed to send it into the ether.
Had I accepted at face value the version of the story as reported, based largely on the accusations of those who wished to destroy the good Doctor?
On consideration, I think I waited and listened long enough to assure myself that I did not.
Maureen Dowd savages Doctor Wolfowitz's reputation in her morning screed in the New York Times. Contained in her rant is the story from the point of view of The Girlfriend, Ms. Saha ali Riza. She is characterized in a most unfavorable light. Yet despite the bile poured upon her, the story she asserts has the ring of truth in it. It is the assertion of systemic discrimination against women and Muslim women in particular.
I could take her part, for despite Ms Dowd's imputations, there is nothing inherently wrong with the redress of injury. Certainly making more money than some of our elected officials is not crime, else why would election to a Congressional seat cost millions of dollars? The $197,000 Ms Riza was paid is in line with industry standards for hacks like me. Hardly unforgivable.
What is unforgivable in the line of power politics, and that after all is what the Bank is about, is that Dr. Wolfowitz was not smart enough to recuse himself from the matter. He offered himself up to the enemies of our nation through his misjudgment, and weakened the office he held.
Learned as he is, he lacked the basic street-smarts to ensure his own survival, much less the interests of the nation he served.
Oh well. One should remember that one is playing for keeps in these things, and must not be lulled into the illusion of safety in one's fine oak-paneled office.
Having a moment to breath yesterday, I was scanning some old pictures as part of some future project. I came across an old pamphlet that Dad brought back from his Navy, circa 1943.
It was one of the picture books that helped to teach me to read, which was hardly the intent of the Bureau of Aeronautics who had commissioned it in the darkest days of the war. The work is not credited to the artist, but there was something familiar about the hand that created the pictures.
I found him in the annals of the Aviation Safety Center. His name was Robert Osborn, an artist and Naval reserve Lieutenant called to active duty. I am pleased to give him belated credit here, though I blush to say that there is at least one stereotype in the pamphlet that could be construed as insensitive to Asians, and another to blockheaded fascist Germans. Still, I thought it was worth scanning into digits, and manipulating the pictures back into something like their pristine state to make the yellow of age disappear.
The images were not drawn to our more sensitive standards, and are from a time when people took what they were doing very seriously indeed. They thought they were playing for keeps.
It wound up as a Microsoft presentation, since I am by training a Pentagon Powerpoint Warrior. I have posted it to the website, www.vicsocotra.com, should you wish to see it in sequence and context.
That, in turn, led me to a fascinating little voyage of discovery to determine something about Robert Osborn, whose niche in history was secured by the creation of caricature of an irascible ancient Navy flier named Grampaw Pettibone in the same year he penned Playing for Keeps.
There are many old maxims about aviation. They are normally framed as puns or couplets to make them memorable. For example, “There are old pilots, and bold pilots. But there are no old, bold pilots.” The point is simple: flying, like high-stakes politics, is not inherently dangerous, but it is absolutely unforgiving of mistakes.
The Navy was losing young pilots at an alarming rate in the training command in those days. My father tells me it was nearly one casualty per day at Pensacola's outlying fields. The young men were plowing themselves into the ground at the rate of hundreds a year. The powers in the Training Command decided the grim humor was the most effective means by which they could get the young men to pay attention to safety, and take things seriously.
The old aviator is the baleful voice of experience who used the tragic results of documented accidents to inform young airmen of the importance of keeping their wits about them.
The creator of Grampaw Pettibone drew something like 15,000 cartoons to help save pilot's lives, and motivate the ones who lived to win the war. In that enterprise, an entire nation was playing an extremely high-stakes game, one that was for keeps.
He was an astute man, though he agreed to hold his tongue for the duration of the struggle. It is a pity we don't have a Grampaw figure for the politicians, someone to sternly admonish them when they are doing something spectacularly stupid. It would not be limited to situations into which Doctor Wolfowitz stumbled, or the venality of Congress or the Oval Office antics that almost felled previous Presidents.
Robert Osborn only checked his acerbic wit at the recruiting station. He picked it up immediately upon demobilization, and released a book of cartoons called “War is No Damn Good.” He lambasted the senior leadership of the military for its culture of cozy mutual reward.
We could use him now, since he also had a prescient eye. In 1946 he created a mushroom cloud cartoon, heavy with menace. He was the first to describe graphically the genie that was abroad in the world in a time when everyone was using applying the “atomic” designation to anything new, and convenient. That included cleaning services and chicken restaurants.
Osborn slyly quoted Mr. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms of the just-concluded struggle when he did it, the four things we were fighting never to have to worry about again. He called the mushroom: "Fear."
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com