Date of publication: January 14, 1999
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Get your signed copy of The NEW Why Teams Don't Work by Mike & Harvey Robbins from Berrett-Koehler Publishers Just click on the book cover! A fully revised second edition of this award-winning classic by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley Paperback
Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995
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Comments on this column:
Click here for John Morrison's reply, "Democracy by the Ton" -- an essay unto itself.
It begins:
My friend and neighbor, Mike Finley recently wrote a column in which he decried the fact that the heart-felt contents of 100,000 e-mails in a congressman's mailbox were reduced to a summary indicating that about 60% were against the impeachment of Bill Clinton. He lamented, "The quality of the reasoning was never a factor. Nor the sincerity. Just the raw statistics. Democracy by the aggregate ton."
He went on to discuss the dominance of partisanship in the congressional debate and decision on impeachment, comparing it to the division between the supporters of the Union and Confederacy in border states during the Civil War. . . "each side demonizing the other."
He concluded: "And how, unless we find the courage to express our opinions again, and to
listen to the opinions of one another, as if they truly matter -- as if we
matter -- will we ever come together again?"
I found myself at first in agreement with almost everything Mike said, but somehow I also felt unease with my own agreement. So I decided to think about it.
- Al V.
Hang in there,
R. B.
The longer they push on this issue (the Steele indictment that just came
down springs immediately to mind), and the more they work to circumvent
the law and justice regarding liberal reforms (refusing to allocate funds
to allow DC to count the votes on their medical marijuana initiative,
Darwinian welfare reforms, etc.), the more I want to see these jerks
punished.
A strong, mature person would forgive once it is all over, but I hope I do
not. Our parents generation may have won World War II, but in almost every
other regard they screwed up every chance they had to improve the quality
of life for the little people. The G.I. Bill was an accident, Civil Rights
came because our S.O.B. LBJ was badder than their Congressional
footdraggers, and the entire cultural revolution was meanspiritedly
rescinded by the Reaganistas.
Say it again: Screw the right and to hell with their followers. Their
children will turn on them as well, and their sunset years will be bitter
with the fruit of their hatreds.
Mark Gislelson
I believe all of this is the result of ahem, southern influence. They
became outright Maoists with Lee Atwater. [Politics is war without
shooting. Mao Zedong]. If you use war as a metaphor for politics, then
people who disagree with you are enemies to be destroyed, rather than, as
in the more civil British system, loyal opposition who deserved to be
heard and respected.
Charles Potts
Wouldn't it be nice if, by removal from office--the most severe punishment
we have to offer up--we sent a clear message that elected officials lying
to their constitutents for personal gain simply will not be tolerated, no
matter what other good they might be accomplishing?
And, incidentally, I have a hard time calling this "overturning an
election." That would only be the case were Bob Dole to be put in
Clinton's place.
But I enjoy reading your thoughts, even if I disagree with, oh, some 1% of
what you have to say!
R. W.
A.W.
Democracy by the Ton
I empathize with you. I too voted for Clinton even though I never liked
him or cared for him. Southern Democrats always court and use Labor before
elections and then turn their back on it after they are in office. Truman
did, Carter did, Clinton did, Gore will. What is amazing to me, and
unprecedented in my lifetime, is the vehemence in which Clinton is
attacked. Outside my office is an odd collection of engineers, draftsmen
and tool designers. Their voices and conversations waft over the cubicle
walls like a dense fog each morning. These are white males who listen to
Rush on the radio and Donny & Marie on TV. They exhibit the usual racist
and antisemetic foibles but for Bill and Hillery Clinton they have pure
hatred. It's scarry. I'm reading the "Rape of Nanking" and if these guys
were Japanesse soldiers I have no doubt of what they would do. But I
understand hatred and evil. They exist in the world and I can accept that.
But what I don't understand is the GOP. They have jumped in Clinton's lap
and pulled the pin on the grenade. And they aren't even members of Moslem
Jihad! The relevations of Hyde, Livingston and Barr are one thing but they
lost big time in the last election. In California they lost in the
govenor, Senate and state assembly races. Now the Democrats control the
biggest state going into the year 2000 with control of the state census
and redistricting, plus 20% of the Federal electoral votes!? I never liked
the GOP but I always respected their "real politik" pragmatism (Nixon
going to Red China, running Regan a Californian). But now they're like the
Blues Brothers on a "mission from God". Where's their pragmatism when they
need it?
The tone of your message is that what the President did was not that bad.
I voted for him twice. too. I find that Clinton attacks women when it is
convenient for him. I think he lied about Paula Jones, too. If he had not,
she would not have won the right to sue the President in civil court, and
Monica Lewinski would never have been heard of. This matter is deeper than
a right ring conspiracy. Remember, Newt Gingrich is gone. The designated
replacement is gone. George W. Bush may not run because he knows his moral
problems may kill him. Senator Packwood is long gone and for good cause.
He was a "good friend of women too" so the women political movement only
reluctantly came to realize that they did not need friends like him.
Politically, the Republicans are hurt if the President resigns early (even
six months early) and the Vice-President ascends. They know this. This
goes deeper than conventional politics.
Concerning email volume, you may get quite a bit, too. Are you able to
actually read your incoming mail?
"The answer is that we don't come together again. The rightwing
fundamentalists are talking themselves right out of power, and there is no
conceivable reason for letting them back in after they get booted out in
the next election cycle. Progress and the future wait for no one, and
those who can't deal with the future will be left isolated and
increasingly out of touch with mainstream America.
I am with you on the Clinton Matter. There was a great editorial in the
TriCity Herald this morning, about the Starr indictment of the woman named
Steele, who has said Wiley asked her to lie and is sticking to her story.
Somewhere the harrassment has to stop.
Well, gotta disagree with you, Michael. To me the greatest wrong he
committed was lying, not in his depostion or to the grand jury, but
directly to us, his constituents. Naturally, I'm aware that many other
presidents have lied publicly. But I can sympathize with, e.g., Eisenhower
gambling that Gary Powers had not been captured and denying that we were
doing flyovers of Soviet territory. The difference is that Clinton's lies
were purely to cover his own personal misdeeds, not for any even grasping
pretense of the national interest. I can think of only one other president
who has done that in this century, and he resigned.
Good one, Michael. I'd like to by a bumpersticker from somebody that
says, "Spank Clinton/Impeach Starr," but by now people would wonder,
"Who's Starr?" I sometimes wonder if what's happening is the logical
outcome of the past twenty years the Republicans have spent devaluing the
Federal Government. I heard Buckley say this at one point, congratulate
the American people for their sophistication in not expecting anything of
the government anymore. But what happens when this insane economy blows up
in our faces? What kind of comity will we have to fall back on, what kind
of expectations of ourselves as citizens? I got the blues too.
"Lots of us find it a very helpful, human, sometimes humorous, always interesting, often surprising column that has no peer on the freelance market, And, yes, you can use that as a
testimonial if it helps."
-- Bill Dowd, Albany Times Union
"No one talks about the ups and downs of technology like Michael Finley. See his columns online at www.mfinley.com/. -- James S. Derk, Evansville (IN) Courier
![[IMAGE]](http://mfinley.com/gif/finley.gif)
I just got my author's copies of a new book from Financial Times Management (London), MASTERS OF THE WIRED WORLD: Cyberspace Speaks Out.What's remarkable is that this collection of manifestos about the new age a'dawning contains proclamations by Tony Blair, Al Gore, Charles Handy, Nicholas Negroponte, Arthur C. Clarke, Alvin Toffler ... and me.
But I'm afraid if I don't write it, I'll lose it, and an opportunity will be lost forever.
It is about impeachment, democracy, and the Internet.
First, a confession. I voted for President Clinton twice. I liked his energy and his talent. He had a pure head for politics. I could see that what President Bush was saying, that Clinton was on the slick side, and had character issues, was probably true. But as character was the only issue Bush advanced in that election, I discounted it.
Clinton was hardly elected before the GOP began investigating him, for things he had been involved in a decade before in Arkansas. This was not new; politics from the Reagan era on was largely a process of legal harrassment. Both sides drew blood.
But the vehemence of these investigations was new. Congress was willing to look at anything, and suggest anything, including the murder of the President's friend, Vince Foster. Not surprisingly, a few extremists began bucking for impeachment. When the Monica Lewinsky story unfolded, the cries for removal accelerated.
My view of Clinton's behavior was that it was appalling and sick. Shame on Bill Clinton for not having more control of himself, and then for misleading everyone about it. At the same time, I saw his dilemma. How exactly does a politician with a compulsive kissing disorder seek help for that, without also kissing his career goodbye?
But impeachment, to me, was an effort to intercede constitutionally and overthrow an election, for offenses that had no particular effect on the nation's prospects and that could easily be remedied in a civil court.
The House Judiciary Committee chair assured everyone that the outcome had to be bipartisan or it would not work. But instead of becoming bipartisan, the two sides dug in. Much was said on both sides, some of it eloquent, some of it despicable. But there was little listening.
Three nights before Christmas I had a dark night of the soul. I felt I had to speak my mind on this, or the issue would slip away, and I would have done nothing. So I sat down at my PC to write e-mails to every member in Congress explaining my belief that this affair did not warrant trashing an election.
I expected the House web site would contain e-mail addresses for the representatives. But only about half of the GOP representatives had listed addresses -- and scores of the addresses listed came back as unusable. Worse yet, the e-mail servers for the House computers were overloaded with letters like mine. Mail that was getting through was taking days to do so.
Citizens on both sides of this issue were tremendously active. E-mail costs nothing and is easy as pie to send. If the average Congressional office gets about 500 messages daily, the average during this period must have shot up to 100,000 messages per day, per Congressperson. The boxes of Judiciary members may have topped 2 million per day, apiece. That's a lot.
Think of the passion wrapped up in all those messages. Now ask, what happened to all of them? The answer is that the lowest possible level of office worker made the most perfunctory possible level of assessment (100,000 messages, running approximately 60% against impeachment), and this assessment occupied one line on that Representative's daily news digest.
The quality of the reasoning was never a factor. Nor the sincerity. Just the raw statistics. Democracy by the aggregate ton.
As a business/tech writer, I have maintained that electoral four-year democracy has been superseded in this country by an hourly form of consumer democracy. When we switch channels on the TV, or click to a new link, or eat leftovers instead of ordering out, we are voting.
Now it registers on me that our national outrage was merely a trend to our leaders. Trends, and the 24-hour news cycle, are what drive our government now. Voting booths are a quaint anachronism. As former GOP Sen. Alan Simpson said after the vote to impeach, "The attention span of the American people is what the latest movies are."
In this version, we aren't individual people, the way Jefferson envisioned. We're more like a wave of electrons, consuming and voting with the shifts in the magnetic field. E-mail is just an incidental spray of particles, easily digested and deleted.
By Christmas I couldn't talk about the subject any more. No one mattered any more. No one was thinking, or listening. The lines were drawn, and no one was crossing them. This hurt me more than the issue at hand.
This must be what the people of the United States felt like, at the onset of the Civil War, each side demonizing the other. In the border states in that war, brother fought against brother.
This impeachment war is a cold one. But border states are all there is. What family, what workplace, what neighborhood is not torn down the middle by it?
And how, unless we find the courage to express our opinions again, and to listen to the opinions of one another, as if they truly matter -- as if we matter -- will we ever come together again?
|
Get your signed copy of The NEW Why Teams Don't Work by Mike & Harvey Robbins from Berrett-Koehler Publishers Just click on the book cover! A fully revised second edition of this award-winning classic by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley Paperback
Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995
|
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