The French Mentality

An atheist group in North Carolina was surprised to find that the billboard that they set up on the Rev. Billy Graham Parkway in the weeks leading up to the Fourth of July was vandalized.

“It was done by one or two people off on their own who decided their only recourse was vandalism rather than having a conversation,” Charlotte Atheists & Agnostics spokesman William Warren said. “It does show how needed our message is. As atheists, we want to let people know we exist and that there’s a community here.” Warren told the Observer when the sign first went up that its location wasn’t intended as a rebuke to the Rev. Graham.

Of course it wasn’t;  I’m sure that there was no insensitivity intended, and the ad rates on the Billy Graham Parkway were just too good to pass up.  And hey, the Fourth of July is as good a time as any, right? Yeah… sounds like the Charlotte Atheists and Agnostics are just a bunch of level headed, reasonable “good ol’ boys” looking to “have a conversation”.

Just imagine the hoopla and outrage if the Minutemen decided to put a billboard up along Cesar Chavez Parkway* in Arizona or the Knights of Columbus put a pro-life billboard up along Planned Parenthood Reproductive Rights Tollway* in Pelosi County*, California in order to “encourage conversation”.

*I know they don’t really exist.  Just sayin’.

Big news on the military circuit is Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Rollling Stone profile and the portrayal of his blatant insubordination, which reportedly has resulted in Gen. McChrystal’s tendering his resignation.

The article is a very good read – insight into the collective mind of the group running the war in Afghanistan during their most unguarded moments.  This is clearly a portrait of a group that is very well bonded and loyal to each other; a group whose fraternal bond is both their strength and their biggest weakness.  The weakness comes in the hubris common with high-achieving “type A” personalities; the folly is not that their belief they at the top of their game and so far beyond average that you’d need to book a flight to get there – that’s arrogant, but it’s true and serves them well.  The Achilles heel that’s exposed here is the belief that anybody that is allowed to hang with them is either at the same pinnacle, or will be so awed, wowed and enamored by the group that they’ll be instantly taken in and exhibit the same loyalty and feel the same bond.  It seems that they expected the writer to like them and portray them in a flattering light, and I’d guess they expected that he’d use what he heard as either background or context for the article.  He didn’t – he reported it all.

The take-away for me was that Gen. McChrystal and the group around him are dangerous; not because they are steely-eyed, self-assured killers and professionals, but because this article is showing a portrait of a management team that is on the brink of exhibiting groupthink in the most classic sense.  You get a whiff of it in their almost religious, self-assured fervor for COIN and the John Paul Vann – Bright Shining Lie undertones, but more importantly, in the fact that they were disrespectful and certainly openly subordinate to the national command authority in front of a reporter.  Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone writer, makes it clear in a Newsweek follow-up that at no time portrayed himself as anything other than a journalist.

One of the most vivid scenes in the stories comes when you are out with the general, his wife, and his team for a night on the town in Paris. His team is entirely forthright with you, did that surprise you?

Well, they were getting hammered, I don’t know at that moment if they were being the most forthright. Of course it was surprising. A lot of the reporting that is getting most of the attention happened right away in the first few days in Paris. So I was surprised—because they didn’t know me.

It was always clear that you were a reporter and you were, in essence, on the record? And more, the entire article was thoroughly fact-checked, yes?

Yes. It was crystal clear to me, and I was walking around with a tape recorder and a notepad in my hand three-quarters of the time. I didn’t have the Matt Drudge press hat on, but everything short of that it was pretty obvious I was a reporter writing a profile of the general for Rolling Stone. It was always very clear.

I’ve served as a company-grade Army officer, I’m nearly fifty, and admittedly have some pretty rigid ideas about how an officer should act and behave.  I’m not talking about ideology or convention; I mean basic leadership – tenets that serve you well no matter whether you’re commanding an Army bakery or a Special Forces command.  Among the first and most basic is that an Army officer is not insubordinate in from of his men or in public.  An officer has an obligation to confront a superior that in his opinion is ineffective or endangering his men, but he owes his superiors the same respect he should command from his men.  Makes no difference if his boss is Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, Dwight D. Eisenhower or George W. Bush.  At the end of the day, the Army looks to its officers to set and bear standards.  If the officer corps acts like dogs, it’s not long before the whole Army is barking.

In a previous post, I talked about the drilling moratorium and the effect it would have on the Gulf Coast economy.  What I didn’t mention was that the report that he based the moratorium on was “peer-reviewed” by seven prominent scientists.  Didn’t think it was necessary – we’ve seen what peer-review buys you now days; scientists are human and have divergent opinions – some of which are scientifically based, and some are which are a priori long held emotionally crazed, ideologically charged bat-shit-crazy hokum.  I figured he’d either tapped into his reserve of climate change ideologues, posted an ad on the back page of the Free Press in every university town right next to the school girl masseuse ads, or bought off some lonely  professors with the promise of invitations to the State of the Union after-party.

But it turns out that the scientists were seven engineers recommended by the National Academy of Engineering.  Engineers live at the corner of pure science and the real world – their charter is the application of technology to real world problems.  Not to generalize, but it seems to help them keep one foot in the real world.  Again, as in the real world, you’re going to have a normal curve with wackos at both tails, but we normally don’t read about engineers in those light-hearted comic-relief “you’re never going to believe what those scientists are doing now” news dispatches.

So seven engineers recommended by the National Academy of Engineering were quoted as the technical cover for the drilling moratorium, and the Wall Street Journal reports that they’re not happy.

(Continued)