Dan Riley's Blog, page 44

My Damn Three Sons

Let me indulge in a little role-playing here. I’m Fred McMurray (aka Steve Douglas). I have three sons—Mike, Robbie, and Chip. They’re a handful.
Last spring I had to go to the East Coast on business and Uncle Charlie had to do some community service, so Mike was left in charge of the house and his brothers. He turned the place into a casino with Robbie as a blackjack dealer and Chip as a croupier. The police got wind of the operation, busted it, and I had to suspend the boys’ allowances to settle all the claims and fines.
Then one summer night Robbie took the VW microbus out with a bunch of friends and due to his recklessness rolled it on the Coast Highway, sending two of his pals to emergency, one into a year-long rehab, and our insurance premiums through the roof. As a dutiful dad with Hollywood writers and directors available to show me how to handle these things, I took Robbie’s driving privileges away for a year.
And in the fall Chip, the little devil, was supposed be starting roller-skating classes after school. Come to find out, he was skipping the classes and using the money I gave him for his lessons to buy airplane glue.  As soon as I found out about it, I had Uncle Charley take down the boy’s pants and put the belt to his bottom. Spare the rod and you spoil the child, I say.
And now a year has come and gone. Mike said he was sorry about the casino thing and that he had learned his lesson. Robbie said he was a new man since the car crash and asked for a second chance. And Chip begged to go back to roller skating class because he knew how important it was to me. So I gave Mike the keys to the house and I gave Robbie the keys to the car and I gave Chip back the key to his skates. And before you know it, Mike was running a craps game down in the basement, Robbie rolled the new bus and killed his girlfriend, and Chip was sniffing glue again.
Every parent comes to the point where they realize their kids are either responsive to discipline or they’re not. If they are, then you know you’re well on your way to raising a reasonably responsible adult. If they are unresponsive, then you know—or should know—that the road ahead is going to be full of trouble or therapy. In either case, the hard lessons will remain to be learned.
And thus it is when the kids grow up, and they become, say, politicians. Let’s say that instead of Mike, Robbie, and Chip, we’re talking about Gary (Hart), Bill (Clinton), and Anthony (Weiner). Strip the sex out of their various misbehaviors, and we’re talking about the exact same dynamic—a risk taken, a trust betrayed, a second chance abused.
I go all the way back to Gary Hart in 1988 because that seems to mark the beginning of time when seemingly smart, attractive candidates started to get their cocks caught in sex scandals. Up until that point, Hart prototypes like the FDR and JFK pretty much operated with immunity. Only bumblers like Wilbur Mills (aka Chairman of the Powerful House Ways and Means Committee) ever got caught. I also go back to Hart because every time he appears in public my mom and I have the same debate as to whether he should’ve been president. She has remained a stalwart supporter ever since his dalliance with Donna Rice on the Monkey Business cost him his frontrunner status for the Democratic nomination and quite likely the presidency. I say that for all his abilities--which were and are considerable--he was an arrogant fool and deserved to get derailed on his way to the White House. Every time we get into this Mom and Son debate, I walk away wondering: Is Mom really more liberal than moi? 
And here’s where that question takes me—acceptance of a candidate’s sexual peccadilloes really is not a litmus test of one’s liberalism.  It’s simply a measure of how much you support a particular candidate. If he’s your guy (and until we get all the dirt on Niki Haley, this is not a distaff issue), you want the discussion to be about sex because it’s a win-win for you. You get to show off how tolerant and enlightened you are on the subject of sex and you get to expose what a priss your opponent is. If the subject of the scandal is not your guy, you don’t want the debate to be about sex because (a) you don’t want to be exposed as a priss and (b) you really believe the issue is something bigger, or at least less embarrassing. As the Clinton impeachment brigade would proclaim over and over again, It’s not about the sex; it’s about the lie.
Although I’m loath to throw in my lot with a bunch of craven hypocrites like Newt Gingrich, Mark Sanford, Bob Livingston, Larry Craig, Pete Domenici, Strom Thurmond they were closer to right. It wasn’t about the sex. Though it wasn’t much about the lie either--a charge which only serves to heighten the hypocrisy factor and really, really should be out of bounds for any politician to level at another.
The wrong with all these guys was no different than the wrong done by the Douglas boys. It was a betrayal of trust, but not the first trust…the second trust. The first screw-up by the boys…from Chip to Anthony…deserves a Mulligan. We are all children of the New Testament in that we have evolved to the point where we believe that everyone deserves a second chance. If the operative metaphor of the Old Testament is the story of Genesis where it’s one strike and you’re out for Adam and Eve, then the operative metaphor for the New Testament is the crucifixion, which, if I recall my Catechism correctly, is a downpayment on second chances for everybody.
Except for the fundamentalists, most of us get the importance, the reasonableness, the fairness, the humanity of giving second chances. It is a sign of our moral sophistication. It is hard to imagine running a family, a classroom, or a community without generous application of second chances.
The dilemma comes when the recipient of the second chance blows it. That’s where the real problem is for the political supporters of recidivistic bad boys. The sex is a distraction. The offending proclivity could just as easily be for drink or gambling, and the core issue would still be the same. He fucked up, was forgiven, and fucked up again, and in doing so basically said, Fuck you. That’s a troubling profile whether it’s your kid or your candidate.

Fetus in the Sky

Last week I got suckered into playing that desert island game again. I wonder if this is just a Boomer thing. I can’t ever recall my parents talking about what things they would take to a desert island--you know, like 10 favorite Burma Shave billboards or Amos ‘n Andy episodes. It has to be pop culture items of course. The game is not for nerds. No one ever asks what 10 flora and fauna you’d bring or what 10 chemical elements. It’s always movies and songs (and books, at least until the last of the readers dies). 
My Facebook friend who posted the question last week tried to make it Desert Island X-TREME by limiting us to only two movies. It still should’ve been a snap for me since I’d already gone public with my 10, and all I’d have to do is pick 2 of my original 10. As it turns out, one of my two picks was just a back-up on my top 10 list of no more than two months ago—Groundhog Day. That’s the way it goes with these things. Sometimes it’s so damn hard just to up with yourself. The other choice not so ephemeral: 2001: A Space Odyssey has occupied a secure spot in my top 10 since I first viewed it under the unusual circumstances described in my earlier post. Still, I surprised myself by making it one of my two for this go-round, and realized it had been the second Nobby Works reference to the film in recent months. With newly enhanced and expanded time now on my hands, I decided to pop the DVD in and view it again—again being for approximately the 100thtime. And call me crazy, but it was better than ever.
Two nights later I watched Imax: Hubble about the launch and in-space rescue and repair of the Hubble telescope, a terrific film in its own right. But here’s the thing, Hubble played like a sequel to 2001. The slow, lyrical movement of the space vehicles; the brilliant, infinite palette of the cosmos; even the reserve of the astronaut personalities—all are of a piece with 2001. Whatever one wants to say in praise of the Star Wars movies or the Star Trek movies, you cannot watch them and then watch the Hubble drama unfold and feel at all as if you’re in the same cosmos. Kubrick totally anticipated that cosmos without benefit of the breakthroughs in space exploration which have happened since he made his masterpiece in 1968.      
And it’s a masterpiece not just for its verisimilitude, but for its stunning cinematic qualities as well. First, let’s dispense with questions of length and pace. There are people who like their pleasures long and slow, and there are people who prefer things short and quick…premature as it were. As a lifelong baseball fan (and Pointer Sisters fan), I count myself among the former. And I admire great art that unfolds in its own sweet time. (Bad art that unfolds in its own sweet time is another matter, and almost every movie made nowadays—good or bad-- is too long by a fourth because they make them to fit a time slot rather than an artistic vision.) What makes 2001 great is that it always knows where it’s going; it never rambles, though it may appear to do so to viewers with limited attention spans. Every sequence of scenes ends with a plot point that pushes the story forward, and once you accept the film’s pace, it has as much tempo as any Lucas or Spielberg film.  
Then there's the sine qua non of great filmmaking--telling the story with sound and pictures rather the dialog. 2001 is almost as short on dialog as the cosmos is on oxygen, and yet it manages to stir the visual and aural senses from beginning to end.
It stirs the senses while challenging the mind. Like the best creative works of the Sixties, it makes the audience part of the creation. At that critical point in all movie plots where all seems lost for the hero, a voice-over narration intones: 

"Except for a single, very powerful radio emission, aimed at Jupiter, the four-million-year-old black monolith has remained completely inert, its origin — and purpose — still a total mystery."

That’s aimed right at the audience, and every member of that audience—at least the first timers—know that it’s still a mystery to them as well. They’ve paid their money, they’ve sat there attentively, they’ve tried to pull together the few dull clues offered, and still they don’t know what the hell that monolith is supposed to be (or the meaning of life for no small matter). They are as mystified as the crew of the Discovery space ship that’s now embarked on a journey into deepest space to solve the mystery.
Inside an effete bedroom at the farthest end of the galaxy, the mystery falls away to reveal the enigma inside the riddle that is human existence. A man grows old before his very own eyes...and then dies...and then is reborn. Nothing more. Nothing less. The fetus--more commonly and comfortably referred to as the star child—that dominates the final scene was, at the time, a powerful symbol of humanity’s place in the cosmos...as well as our ability to renew and expand our place in it.
Nowadays, unfortunately, that symbol would be freighted with political weight and probably draw picketers outside the theaters from the ranks of those who insist on judging art according to their own parochial views. They would try to shrink Kubrick’s grand, profound vision to another debate topic for cable TV and talk radio. 
Except on my desert island, where all the inhabitants would prefer art to politics. 

The N-word

This week someone sent me one of those Internet jokes that gets passed around the world a few thousand times in an afternoon. Here it is:

Heaven's Clerk All arrivals in heaven have to go through a bureaucratic examination to determine whether admission will be granted. One room has a clerk who inputs computerized records of what each applicant did on his or her last day of life.The first applicant of the day explained that his last day was not a good one. "I came home early and found my wife lying nak*d in bed.She claimed she had just gotten out of the shower."Well, her hair was dry, so I checked the shower and it was completely dry too. I knew she was into some hanky-panky, and I began to look for her lover. I went onto the balcony of our 9th floor apartment and found the SOB clinging to the rail by his finger tips. I was so angry that I began bashing his fingers with a flower pot. He let go and fell, but his fall was broken by some awnings and bushes.On seeing he was still alive I found super human strength to drag our antique cedar chest to the balcony and throw it over. It hit the man and killed him. At this point the stress got to me, and I suffered a massive heart attack and died."The clerk thanked him and sent him on to the next office.The second applicant said that his last day was his worst. "I was on the roof of an apartment building working on the AC equipment. I stumbled over my tools and toppled off the building. I managed to grab onto the balcony rail of a 9th floor apartment, but some idiot came rushing out on the balcony and bashed my hands with a flower pot. I fell but hit some awnings and bushes and survived, but as I looked up I saw a huge chest falling toward me. I tried to crawl out of the way but failed and was hit and killed by the chest."The clerk couldn't help but chuckle as he directed the man to the next room.He was still giggling when his third customer of the day entered. He apologized and said, "I doubt that your last day was as interesting as the fellow in here just before you.""I don't know," replied the man, "picture this, I'm buck nak*d hiding' in this cedar chest.................................."

I found the joke far more curious than funny because either the person who originated it or one of its readers as it passed through, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia, was so offended at the word naked that he or she decided to neuter the word with an asterisk. Of course, we at The Nobby Works (and here I indulge the papal we) love our nakedness. There’s no love’s body without it, so I take great offense at the other end of the outrage scale that someone would f*ck around with the word naked like that.
And my outrage isn’t limited to someone messing with the word naked. I sometimes find myself in Internet threads on religion with people who insist on writing God as G-d. (Godspell, dammit!) And then in threads of quite another nature, you often come across that deliciously pungent Anglo vulgarism cunt accessorized as c*nt. I’m not much of a believer in that mythical war on Christmas (or Xmas, as it were), but I am beginning to think there’s a war on vowels afoot.
Then of course there’s the granddaddy of N-words—nigger. And it’s been all over the place these days in the wake of the major c*ck-up in the Florida justice system. Any time you turn on TV, you’re likely to hear attorneys, politicians, reporters, pundits, academics and a few actual comedians all sounding like grade-schoolers using this juvenile n-word construction.
If the country is divided between First Amendment zealots and Second Amendment zealots, as I believe it is, this is where I find common ground with my pistol packin’ fellow citizens…though I want to stress for safety’s sake that finding common ground is not to be confused with standing your ground. Especially as a writer, I guess I regard words like nigger and cunt much like Ted Nugent regards his Bushmaster. If you want those words, you’re going to have to pry my Urban Dictionary from my cold dead hands.
Literate man that I am, I totally reject the notion that any use of such words renders one a bigot—a misogynist or racist for instance. There is art and there is bigotry, and if a fool can’t tell the difference, that’s no reason for the artist to suffer. From D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover:

I knew it with the men. I had to be in touch with them, physically, and not go back on it. I had to be bodily aware of them and a bit tender to them, even if I put 'em through hell. It's a question of awareness, as Buddha said. But even he fought shy of the bodily awareness, and that natural physical tenderness, which is the best, even between men; in a proper manly way. Makes 'em really manly, not so monkeyish. Ay! it's tenderness, really; it's cunt-awareness. Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it's touch we're afraid of. We're only half-conscious, and half alive. We've got to come alive and aware.

Yes, for the sake of the delicate sensibilities how about a little edit there, Mr Lawrence? C-word awareness, perhaps. Or maybe vagina awareness? Or wait, no, how about private parts awareness. 
And this passage from my literary hero:

“And then think of me! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide, it ain’t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this, the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm…” (Huckleberry Finn)

G-d save us all from the PC police who would scramble one of the great ironic turns in all American literature into incomprehensible balderdash: It would get all around that Huck Finn helped an n-word to get his freedom???? (And, no, black man or African American doesn’t cut it there either if you’re a writer and not a school marm.)
The first job I ever went for that didn’t involve working the Connecticut tobacco fields or being a soda jerk at Friendly Ice Cream Company was at The Hartford Courant (or as they like to call it, the oldest newspaper in continuous circulation in America). This was just after the landmark Civil Rights Bill had been passed, and when I walked into HR for my interview, there was a large wall poster announcing to all comers that racial equality was now the law of the land. As the head of HR scanned my application at the very top where I’d put my address, he looked up at me and said, “Sterling Street? That’s where the niggers live, isn’t it?”
You cannot tell that story with the full impact of not just the irony, but the history behind that poster on the wall. I wouldn’t even try.  

The Swiss

Let’s begin with the toilets. This is the Nobby Works after all, and our main man Norman O. Brown wrote about “Excremental Visions” in his seminal Life Against Death. According to Nobby:

“The Yahoo’s filthiness is manifested primarily in excremental aggression: psychoanalytic theory stresses the interconnection between anal organization and human aggression to the point of labeling this phase of infantile sexuality the anal-sadistic phase.” 

You don’t hear talk like that on NPR or Hardball, folks. Yet it’s not a bad assessment of the current state of affairs in the USA where one can reasonably argue that anal sadists have taken over our political life.
One can also argue that all the chest-thumping about American Exceptionalism aside, other countries really do quite well for themselves—not Afghanistan or Somalia perhaps, but surely the Swiss. And it starts with the toilets. No, really. I don’t want to sound too…hmmm, what’s the word I want here? Oh yeah, anal. But on our recent trip there, as much as I loved the cheese and the chocolate, it was Switzerland’s toilets that made the most profound impression on me. First off, the toilet paper…forget about squeezing the Charmin…this was stuff you could spread out on your bed and lie down in like fine linen. And not just in the homes, but the public toilets as well. I walked into one at a train station…train station! I can still recall my visit to the men’s room at a Penn Central restroom where a slick-haired, leather-jacketed, Jersey Boys-looking reject jerked off while frenetically looking from the guy at the urinal to his left to the guy at the urinal to his right…who was me! (And, yes, I've had my share of traumatic restroom encounters.) 

I got out of there as quick as my drip-dry would allow, and as I’m telling my wife about it, Mr. Not Frankie Valli walks out, makes a U-Turn and heads back in...for more of the cheapest of thrills I guess. This would not have happened in Switzerland…at least not in the particular train station toilette I entered, feeling very much like Dr. Dave Bowman aboard Discovery One in 2001—wrap-around stainless steel, push buttons for every imaginable function, a grated floor for easy elimination of the previous occupant's misfirings, and an elevated toilet seat. Not a toilet seat that must be lifted, mind you, and is often used for target practice by drunks. But a toilet seat that must be pressed down into place and sat upon or else it quickly vanishes out of harm’s way. As I sat on it, I fully expected the Hal 9000 computer to start serenading me with a lilting version of Daisy--Daisy, Daisy / Give me your answer, do. / I'm half crazy / all for the love of you...
To use a crude Americanism, the Swiss really seem to have their shit together—as well as most everything else. The country fully lives up to its reputation as a model of efficiency. And what can you say about a military that manages to avoid wars, while drawing the most plum overseas assignment in the world—“Here you go, troops, off to Vatican City with ya. See that no one steals the communion wafers or sneaks boys in after dark.” (Oops) 
Not to put too fine a point it, but perhaps the legendary Swiss neutrality is due to the fact that they really do have superior anal organization. I saw not a hint of excremental aggression in my travels. Quite the contrary...and for a glimpse I invite you to view the video below.   

John Coltrane, A Few of My Favorite Things

Your Boyfriend's Back

As expected, The Nobs returns from another vacation to find murder and betrayal and loss have undone the Boston sporting scene. It seems I just can’t leave home any more. The bitter turns with the Celtics and Bruins are run-of-the mill sports atrocities, of course, but the Aaron Hernandez murder indictment is a piece of its own…for the very short time being, at least--though the police blotter for NFL players seems to be growing faster than the one for brown people in Texas. Hernandez’s flameout from an NFL career at age 23 seems as spectacular as his rare football talent. Though I should be careful to treat him as an innocent until proven guilty. After all, there is still a defense to be mounted. Perhaps the man he allegedly killed was walking through his neighborhood wearing a hoodie and chewing Bubblicious—pop a bubble of that stuff and tell me you don’t hear the sound of a .45 Glock ringing in your ears. And, hey, the victim, Odin Lloyd, played for a team called the Bandits…so you never know.  I see all the makings of a “stand your ground" defense.
But, D’oh! Wrong state. Wrong part of the country. Wrong reality.
So it is quite possible that Aaron Hernandez will live out the time (and then some) he would’ve spent collecting $40 million from the New England Patriots and basking in the adoration of crazy football fans--me included--in a jail cell. (Say it ain’t so, A-hole.)
The sports world wasn’t the only one turned on its head in my ill-timed absence. The least Supreme Court in American history overturned the Voting Rights Act because four privileged white guys and their lawn ornament just couldn’t imagine an America where the milk and honey doesn’t run free for everybody down the middle of the city streets. And the ongoing clown show that is the United States Senate voted to spend billions to fence out American ideals and fence in our national paranoia…all in order to keep the meter running on the national security state.
As I think on it this July 4 weekend, Aaron Hernandez may no longer be a Patriot, but he may be the perfect embodiment of our current All-American profile—armed and dangerous and spoiled rotten to the core by much too much good fortune.
On the other hand, the vacation itself was grand…have a look...


Song by Bob Dylan, rendition by Natasha Bedingfield

Summerwind

Maddalena, Italy, with the Parodis, 2005
A little something for The Nob's loyal readers (and Frank fans) while Nobby is off refreshing the body and gathering inspiration for the heart and mind. 

Joker

An Irishman walks into a bar (badda boom…on with it, Dan). And he says, "When I die, here's how I imagine heaven will be: All the cops will be Scots, all the mechanics will be German, all the cooks will be French, all the lovers will be Italian, and it'll all be organized by the Swiss.” The John Bull bartender looks at him and says, “You can go to hell where all the cooks are Scots, all the mechanics are French, all the cops are German, all the lovers are Swiss, and it's all organized by the Italians."
I bring up this old chestnut because we're about to head for Switzerland to confront one of these stereotypes. After two decades of fairly regular travel to Italy, will Swiss orderliness prove to be the perfect antidote for a recent streak of stress-filled weeks, or will it leave us craving Italy's comforting chaos? Travel, of course, is the best way to breakdown stereotypes...or confirm them.
On our first trip to South Africa we were greeted at the door of a restaurant by an extremely tall Zulu security guard, dressed in a long dark trench coat and armed with an AK-47. Name of the restaurant? The Carnivore. Decor? Mounted animal heads, spears and tribal shields. Step into my stereotype.
First trip to Naples, a gang of young thugs tried to steal our luggage; the concierge at our hotel tried to sell us a cab ride to the ferry landing directly across the street; the line for  ferry tickets pretty much resembled a stampede of headless chickens. Step into my stereotype.
As we were about to leave Sicily after two halcyon weeks, we were told at the Palermo airport that our flight home had been cancelled due to a new policy from Lufthansa (our carrier) that if you did not arrive on your scheduled flight, your subsequent flights would be automatically cancelled. We did not arrive on schedule because we missed our connecting flight in Newark because airspace there had been closed to accommodate a presidential visit to view hurricane damage. The Sicilians told us with evident glee that Lufthansa’s policy had been causing chaos for months, and they took great obvious delight in straightening out the Aryan screw-up. Then we flew off to Paris, one of the most civilized cities on earth, where I had my pocket picked.  As Chuck Berry says, "C'est la vie, it goes to show you never can tell...."
Anyway, I'm now more concerned about the stereotypes I'm leaving behind than the ones I'm about to encounter. As I pack my bags, Aaron Hernandez, star tight end of my New England Patriots, is embroiled in a nasty homicide investigation. In hell, all the Americans are crazy for football and carry guns.
In 1986, we went to Hawaii where I indulged my usual travel habit of a news blackout. When I got home, I learned that Boston Celtics number one draft pick Len Bias had died of a drug overdose. In 2011, we made the aforementioned trip to Sicily, only to learn upon returning that the Boston Red Sox had coughed up a commanding 9 game lead and a 99.6% chance of making the playoffs...never to recover. It's quite possible that when I return from this trip Aaron Hernandez will be catching passes...or rather dodging them...from his new cellmate Whitey Bulger. It's enough to make a guy think about staying home.
One alligator…two alligators…three alligators...
There...I thought about it. Auf weirdersehen, everyone. 

A Surveillance State Father's Day

This year Father’s Day is nicely timed to come along as the nation is in hysterics over the spread of the national security state. After all, as Daughter Gillian’s Father Day’s card for me nearly 20 years ago shows surveillance and dads go together like hot dogs and baseball. As you can see from her drawing, I prepared her well to live in a paranoid’s paradise—there’s the barbed wire fence, the guard dog, the light tower…even a black helicopter, showing really how precocious my little girl was.  
I’m not sure of the exact year of this card, but she was spelling her name with a J at the time, so it was definitely in her rebellious stage, which would have been right around the time she was under house arrest…I mean getting home schooled. I blogged about those days here. They were not easy days. At the end of the book I wrote chronicling them, I described Gillian this way:

...Gillian's love...was a workout. She doesn't fill me up so much as she makes me sweat it out--the fats, the flab, the toxins. She makes me dig deep down inside myself to see how much love I've got and how much I'm willing to give. There's no such thing as being lazy in love with Gillian. I knew that so well after the home schooling. I'd put in so much with her--seeking to communicate, understand, and trust. It was hard, sometimes frustrating work that I would have walked away from a dozen different times except Gillian was my flesh and blood, and you don't walk away from that.

The daughter who was a workout; the dad who was a prison guard. Next week we're off for  a hiking holiday with our respective loved ones in Switzerland--at her invitation...at my pleasure. Sometimes these things work out. 

Look Before You Lean!

This week The Nobby Works gives over its valuable cyberspace to a dear friend who has just finished a book to be published this August, titled Look before You Lean: How a Lean Transformation Goes Bad--A Cautionary Tale. I trust loyal readers won't find the topic too terribly esoteric since they have stood by the blog when it has ventured far afield in the past to ruminate, say, on the essence of the Speedo and the sex lives of alligators. Lean, for the blessedly uninitiated, is a business methodology that rose up from factory floor of Toyota in the 1950s and has been rapidly spreading out of the manufacturing environment and West for the past 20 years. It is not without its valid points, its skilled practitioners, and its true believers. Those positive aspects combined with some stunning results in certain work environments have continued to lure more and more companies to embark on what are called lean transformations. Yet, by the lean community's own admission, the number of companies that quit on their "lean journey" is over 90%. In his book, my friend, who has written under the pen name Employee X, chronicles the imminent collapse of one such journey. Each chapter in the book pivots off a children's story. The first story being Hansel and Gretel where the reader is introduced to Employee X's company and the company hired to lead its lean transformation. Thereafter, Employee X's company becomes known as Woodcutter Enterprises (WE) and the lean company is Witches and Tyrants Federated (WTF). This excerpt is from chapter five, "Magic Beans."
Magic Beans Let it not be said that WTF came to the grand party WE insisted on throwing for it empty-handed. Its bag was chock full ‘o tricks that, if not exactly useful, would create for our executives at least the illusion that one day a giant beanstalk would sprout in our parking lot and rise upward into the sky where a pot of corporate gold would be waiting--ours for the taking.
Speaking of that parking lot, the first visible sign to staff that WTF had arrived was when we received notice that there would no longer be executive parking spaces…that, in the democratizing spirit of Lean, all parking spots would be equal. This fanfare for the common man was echoed when the first RIEs began to roll out and we were told that a key feature of them would be that titles are left at the door. Inside the RIE all men and women would be created equal.
In both instances, the implied nobility was undeniable. But as I’ve said before, much put forth by WTF did not hold up well to closer scrutiny. The first-come, first-serve parking directive struck many employees as trivial. The assigned executive spaces opened up by the new policy did not positively impact enough spaces or distance to make it at all recognizable as a benefit to employees. Nor were employees in any measurable number harboring resentment toward executives who had earned their reserved spots through their positions and needed those spots due to their often busy travel schedules.
As to leaving titles at the door, well WTF was not the first to try that stunt. Titles do not get left at the door just like that. Most companies live by org charts…highly paid people have a great deal invested in their place in the pecking order. Employees instinctively understand their place, even those employees who believe they deserve a higher place...or don't like the people in higher places. The very idea that you might break down this fundamental aspect of corporate culture with a mere announcement of “Please leave titles at the door” was naïve at best and willfully deceptive at worst.
Because over time I came to believe the worst of WTF, I’m inclined to believe that deception was the intent…and deception not just aimed at staff to make them believe that for the hours spent in RIEs their bosses were really their peers, but deception aimed at the executives as well, to keep them humbled in the presence not of their staff, but their sensei.
If these democratizing gestures had been reinforced and expanded through the course of our Lean transformation, I may very well have come to a more favorable conclusion about WTF’s intent. But quite the opposite happened as WTF increasingly warned against dissenting voices—“change the people or change the people” entered our company lexicon for the first time--and the democratic trappings proved to be a sham.
By the second year of our Lean transformation, trust the process had replaced change is hard as the all-purpose conversation stopper and answer to any difficult question. The “process” seemingly was a shape-shifting creature of myriad appendages and faculties. Its constant movement and metamorphoses made it difficult enough to track let alone trust.
There were the RIEs of mostly 5-days’ duration with detailed plans for each day, Thursdays being the most ambitious:1.    Observe and document new conditions2.    Brainstorm solutions to problems identified on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday3.    Implement solutions4.    List actions to be taken within 30 days of RIE5.    Define system to sustain the changes implemented6.    Verify changes to be made to the process7.    Prepare current and future skits and slide presentation for Friday report out
Then there was A3 thinking, the process of getting all your thinking down on one piece of metric-sized paper called an A3 (similar to an 11” x 17” piece of paper…which raises the question for all those let’s go Japanese Leaniacs out there, how’s that metric system translating to the US of A?) The A3 is divided into 9 steps:1.    State the problem2.    Measure the initial state3.    Set the target state4.    Find the root cause5.    Develop a solution6.    Test the hypothesis 7.    Create the plan8.    Track the benefits 9.    Share the knowledge
The A3 should capture the logic of solving a problem on a single sheet and be able to stand on its own without explanation, or so we were told.
Early in year two, the X-Matrix appeared. Our Lean leadership spent a week in an RIE with a sensei learning its seeming lightsaber-like powers. When our leaders emerged for their Report Out, they could tell us how hard the X-Matrix had been to master and how wonderful it was once you did, but they could not explain it to staff and admitted as much, nor could they adequately demonstrate its usefulness to us…or in Lean terminology: WIIFM (what’s in it for me). 
After X-Matrix came POP and Sprint (and their offspring the agile POP Sprint board). In between, Standard of Work reared its ugly little head. This is what WTF prescribed as “typical standard work elements:”•       Monitor your area managers’ standard work daily•       Monitor takt attainment (every value stream) daily•       Gemba walk with operations managers daily•       6s audit—one area per day, randomly & in rotation—follow-up action items from last audit, daily•       Daily monitor standard of work of all team members--area manager, team leader, lead, operator--randomly and in rotation•       Gemba walk with at least two team leaders weekly•       Weekly monitor MDI metrics.
Oh, yes, almost forgot: MDI—Metric for Daily Improvement. Somewhere along the line you would have created an MDI board with your daily improvement metrics spelled out in particulate detail.
And WTF would tolerate no slackers, warning our top people:“•Leader’s (sic) disciplined adherence to process makes lean management work (or not)--Leaders at all levels must be the most disciplined, from Cell Leader to top executive--Consistent disregard of abnormal situations cause them to ‘look’ normal•Leader results are ‘core’ to develop an effective lean culture--Insist on adherence to standard work•LEAD BY EXAMPLE!!”
Well, one person’s discipline is another person’s anality. I’m rather happy to report that in a year and a half I never saw one of our leaders adhere to that standard of work…not even come close. I really do look upon this as a good thing. The atmosphere WTF managed to create at our company was oppressive enough without having top executives wander through the work areas on a regular basis checking to see how well we were all doing at sorting, straightening and scrubbing our workstations. And even if our top people didn’t have the good sense to ignore most of the anal retentive aspects of the Lean process, the nonstop carousel of RIEs they were required to attend made it impossible to perform their standard of work to WTF’s specifications. 
I don’t want to come off as some kind of troglodyte here. I’m all for change that makes life and work better. For years I started my writing projects…or any complex project…with a legal pad. I’d outline what I wanted to write about or make columns for pros and cons and deadlines on whatever other project I was about to undertake. I also started each and every day with a Post-it of my "things to do." But then along came writers’ software to help with my outlines; “thinking” software to help with brainstorming, organizing, and charting; and a smartphone to replace my need for Post-it notes with both writing and vocal functionality. Lean’s affinity for Post-its and wall charts is quaint at best, but at worst it is that highest of Lean crimes: wasteful. For months on end we watched as long strips of butcher paper lined our company walls to become populated with different color Post-its with hand scribbled ideas, directions, insights, and answers to questions no one but WTF ever thought to ask…or needed to ask. The strips would later be photographed and carefully moved room to room to be transcribed for reports and archived, leaving those of us working in the Information Age rather than the Industrial Age to wonder: Hasn’t anybody here heard of digitizing? Web connecting? Mobile devices?
The reliance on Post-its and handmade charts seems more a matter of Lean branding than Lean efficiency. These are artifacts passed on from Lean’s roots in factory settings where computerized tools were nonexistent. Lean practitioners, or at least WTF, appear reluctant to modernize their practices for fear of losing their Lean identity even as they attempt to modernize their portfolios with more Information Age clients.
But this isn’t just a matter of style. In fact there are more serious issues of substance. On the matter of A3 thinking, for instance, I would argue that the A3 is much more a tool for organizing thinking than thinking itself. It really isn’t much different than a simple pluses and minuses sheet, except it asks for more product or detail from your thinking. But for getting at the actual thinking process, it is immaterial.
We are on the new frontier of neuroscience. This discipline abounds with data as to how we think—or, as they say, what makes us tick. There is enough information out there in the early stages of neuroscience to tell us how certain people are likely to fill out an A3, which people are likely to make the most use of an A3, which the least likely.
Daniel Kahneman breaks our thinking process down into two types—fast and slow.  Fast is what psychologists call System 1; slow is what they call System 2. Writes Kahneman:

 “When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do. Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero…effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main source of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. The automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps.” 

 I am all for that System 2 construction of thoughts into orderly steps. And I truly believe that is a genuine plus of what its proponents like to call Lean thinking. And I’m happy to report that I saw an example of this process in practice when I was on that Lean tour I mentioned earlier. At one of the companies on the tour, we were shown their proprietary problem-solving matrix, which they used to get at the root cause of a bottleneck in account receivables. On completion, the matrix revealed that the conventional wisdom that held that the company’s credit department was the source of the bottleneck was wrong. The credit department played a minor role compared to two other departments, which were largely responsible for the bottleneck. And in the best of Lean fashion, these results led to fixing the problem, rather than fixing blame.
To be fair, through its efforts WTF actually had a few qualitative breakthroughs like this at WE. Unfortunately these quality wins were buried under an avalanche of quantitative data. Rather than taking the few, small victories and leveraging them throughout the company in a way dedicated to showing employees what was in it for them, WTF chose to trumpet its vast collection of numbers…how much staff put through how many RIEs in how little time; how many tons of material discarded during 6S; how many new tools introduced to company leadership.
The last was the most damaging to our entire Lean transformation. Our leaders didn’t so much get a tool chest opened up to them as they had it dumped on their heads. One top-level person—and one of our company’s savviest--confided to me one day that even though he (or she) had participated in numerous RIEs and had achieved WTF’s proprietary second level of Lean expertise, she (or he) still couldn’t say with any certainty what Lean was.
Such refreshing bits of skepticism, however, were counteracted by others in management positions who were possessed of an unseemly degree of certainty about where the company was going and what their role was in getting it there. The new manager of my department was one such booster. She was installed because upper management believed she had an eye and appetite for enforcing the Lean ideal of visual management, which was all about being able to manage by scanning the work area and all that it entailed: were the workers in their places, were tools at the ready, were daily maintenance boards visible and current, were any abnormalities on the horizon ("race to red"). “The Night’s Watch” standing lookout for invasions of “Others” in Game of Thrones had a less daunting task. But our new manager had a zest for the job, which earned her the nickname Little Miss Horner for her self-satisfied vigilance from her desk in the far corner of the department.
After an intensive week learning about standard of work as a key component of visual management, Little Miss Horner announced that the entire department would go on what she termed standard company hours, 8-5, five days a week. Not to quibble, but the company had never held to any standard work hours. There was a passing reference to 8-5 in the company handbook, but that was pretty much neutralized by a directive that each department would set its hours according to its needs. In fact, the needs of the department that was the company's main income generator required work hours from 7-4. Our department was a hot bed of flex scheduling. Some of us arrived as early as 6 a.m.; some as late as 10 a.m. Some worked four-day weeks with Mondays off; some four-day weeks with Fridays off. Some schedules were due to the need to care for children; some in order to care for elderly parents; some because some folks preferred to put in long 4-day weeks in order to have long 3-day weekends. It was all very employee-friendly...and had been for the 13 years I was employed there.
I realize how this may all seem disturbing to an outsider, especially an outsider peddling something called visual management, but it all pretty much worked for a long time. Our department met most deadlines, produced high quality work, which drew glowing praise from upper management and outsiders, and had our fair share of Staff of the Year award winners, including those who had some of the most unorthodox schedules. 
Historically, this change in our hours came down shortly after Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced a ban on telecommuting at her company. I don't think WTF needed such encouragement to push standard work hours at WE. That's pretty much part of their stated agenda. Yet I have little doubt that the Yahoo news was used to push our management to decide that our entire department would now be held to standard hours, five days a week. (I also have little doubt that Mayer's decision will eventually backfire on Yahoo in ways perhaps different in kind, but not effect, from how Little Miss Horner's decision will eventually blowback on WE.)
Under the regime of standard work, within the purview of visual management, under the ever watchful eye of Little Miss Horner (and with my own executive-approved project suggestions for the company idling somewhere in somebody’s queue), I commenced serious work on this book. At my work-station. In plain-sight. All during the newly imposed standard work hours. With WTF placing mind-numbing emphasis on tracking every working hour, with charts galore tracking every employee with a dizzying array of arrows and stars and bars, with a pervasive and oppressive company push to get everyone on the Lean transformation bus, I sat undisturbed documenting all that was going wrong with the process.
According to the standard of work elements detailed for each of our leaders up the chain of command, in the time I spent writing this book I should have been visited hundreds of times to be asked what I was working on, how I was progressing, was I having any problems. Just one Gemba walk should have raised the question of why I was busily working on my personal iPad while my company iMac with its 16-inch monitor sat on my desk mostly idle. Ironically, in the three months I spent writing this book, only one person in a management position came by to look over my shoulder. He looked at my iMac and said, "You can't be reading that on company time." This was remarkable because this was the man who was replaced as our department manager by Little Miss Horner because upper management doubted his ability to see us through our Lean transformation. In my 10 years of working for the man, he had never once come to look over my shoulder and question my work--and I should add, I had never failed to deliver on any assignment he gave me. This history made an embarrassing pass between us at that moment of him calling me on my activity. I said, "Scotty, this is the Lean material they've uploaded on our intranet and asked us to read. I can't very well read it at home."
His sheepishness gave way to bemusement. He rolled his eyes, shook his head, and muttered, "This process is making fools of us all."
In the period I spent writing this book on company time, I had a total of 48 assigned hours of work and a grand total of 525 hours of unassigned work. Occasionally I would look up from the writing of this book to peer into the adjoining meeting room where yet another WTF sensei would unveil yet another chart that promised to take WE to the promised land. Our managers and directors and cell leaders would gather around it in awe, reaching out to touch it and chattering deliriously among themselves, resembling nothing less than the hairy humanoids in 2001: A Space Odyssey when they found themselves in the presence of a big, black, totally baffling monolith. 

Knives and Forks at 20 Paces

Wife Lorna is fond of telling folks about the early Spanish colonial dinner table exhibit at San Diego's Old Town where the table settings consist of crossed knives and forks. The tour guide explains that the crossed eating utensils signified to guests that there would be no talking about politics or religion at the table. Such a quaint custom may gather renewed currency today in our increasingly factionalized society. It seems that the partisan rancor that has our nation's capitol in a state of perpetual war has spilled over and turned "Guess who's coming to dinner?" into one of the great threats to domestic tranquility.
We recently attended one such ill-fated dinner. The conversation started innocently enough with lots of talk about the latest developments in the neighborhood, new movies, foreign travel. Then it got around to the travails one couple was having caring for elderly parents, and someone said how that care was costing $6,000 a month. That inspired me to lift a glass to toast, as I jokingly called it, “the socialist state of Massachusetts” where my elderly mother was receiving outstanding assistance, much to the relief of her sons living 3000 miles away. The reaction around the table was quick and fierce. “And who's paying for that?” someone asked. “We're paying for it,” someone else proclaimed. To which someone else added, “We always end up having to care for these people who didn't make plans to take care of themselves.”
I don't believe there was much time for any of the speakers to process the full implications of what they were talking about. To consider (A) the utter mathematical impossibility of most ordinary people to prepare for a future of doling out $6000 a month to care for an elderly parent. To consider (B) that the care being provided my mother was the result of considerable political effort exerted by the man most of them had voted for in the last presidential election--Mitt Romney. To consider (C) that they had just insulted a dining partner by essentially calling his 89-year old mother a parasite on society. The instant fever pitch of the conversation didn't allow time for reflection that might have mitigated such views. And thus, with my willing and eager participation, we were all suddenly plunged into a highly contentious conversation about the idea of commonwealth and whether we should be living in a society where we share certain burdens or living in one where it's every man and woman, regardless of age, for themselves.
It was clearly an unsettling turn for the hostess, who had, as gracious hostesses are like to do, put considerable thought and preparation into creating a pleasant evening for one all. As the runaway train of discourse roared down the track, she appeared helpless to stop it and regretted not listening to one of the other diners who said in the midst of the uproar, “This is why when we entertain we put up a sign saying, Leave politics at the door.”
Which they do, and that's all well and good. But the last time I was at their house to be entertained one of their guests had no sooner arrived than he was holding court in the middle of the party and brashly announcing to anyone within earshot that the problem with this country was the immigrants. As it happens, this was the same person who was my main antagonist over the subject of care for the elderly. And though this brief profile clearly indicates that he comes by his pugnacity from the right side of the political spectrum, I’m unhappy to report that I’ve known a few of my friends from the left to exhibit the same social aggressiveness. They seem compelled when walking into a gathering of old, new and just passing acquaintance to straight away put their political marker down. It’s like the gunslinger who strolls into a bar and immediately goes and knocks someone’s hat off. I call them rhetorical bullies. 
Planning a guest list to avoid political differences isn’t always the answer. One of the most heated dinner table discussions I ever witnessed was between two parties who supported the same candidate—Barack Obama. They had, in fact, just spent the day together campaigning for him. But when the discussion got around to how successful Obama had been in living up to his promises, it was indeed forks and knives at 20 paces. The Tea Party would have been humbled by the acrimony.
That experience convinced me that it isn’t a simple matter of outlawing certain topics at the table. There’s really no telling what will set people off. In growing up around my mother’s highly strung Italian brothers, I can hardly remember a family gathering that didn’t get punctuated by an explosive argument over music! Was Di Stefano better than Caruso? Was Beethoven better than Mozart? Was Toscanini just a great conductor or the greatest conductor who ever lived?
I myself have been driven from a dinner table discussion when the subject was child rearing, and I saw an argument erupt over mere semantics. A couple at the table had attributed their impressive accumulation of material possessions to the fact that they were “blessed.” Someone else at the table suggested that “luck” would be a more accurate description. There ensued an hour-long, emotional debate about whether our individual fates were divinely determined or the result of random opportunities. At one point I ventured the opinion that if hard work and prayer truly did yield material well-being, Mexican immigrants who spend half the time on their knees working and half on their knees praying would all be living in mansions. To his credit the pro-blessed protagonist thought that was a good point and admitted he’d never considered it before, which to my mind made the whole uncomfortable exercise worth it. Getting people to consider viewpoints they never heard before is about as good a party favor you can give as far as I’m concerned.
But still, getting to that positive point is hard on a hostess (or host), and my heart really does go out to someone who puts a great deal of time and detail into planning a warm evening among friends only to see it go up in smoke. I’m not sure that the crossed forks and knives is the answer, however, since politics and religion may be overrated as sources of rancor. Except under the most restrictive Miss Manners rules, a hostess is limited in how much control she has over the direction of a dinner table discussion. It’s impossible to account for all the factors that might affect a group’s dynamics—alcohol, a bad day, deeply buried psychological issues, hot-button topics. The problem is compounded if the hostess’s highest priority is to have her guests feel, as they say, “at home.” A good, heated discussion is sometimes the mark of a successful dinner party, and certainly there are hostesses who prefer fireworks at the dinner table to boredom.
So here’s my solution. When a hostess sets her table for a dinner party, she puts a sock beside her plate. Whenever the conversation gets out of hand, she passes the sock to the guest who in her considered opinion has crossed the line she wishes to maintain for the evening. She need say nothing more. The simple act says it all: Put a sock in it.