Tom Glenn's Blog, page 50

Ronald Regan

In the category of “now it can be told” is the tale of President Ronald Regan’s attack on me in 1988. I was at the time on special assignment from the National Security Agency (NSA) to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to work on the national intelligence budget. President Regan submitted for funding a highly classified clandestine operation. Because the proposed venture violated U.S. law and treaties we held with other countries, I refused to fund it. Regan was furious. He stripped me of my clearances and assigned me to an abandoned warehouse in the Anacostia slums with no work to do. His purpose was to get me to resign—if he fired me outright, I could sue since he had no legal cause.

But I refused to resign. Instead, I brought in a space heater (after the managers turned off the heat) and a typewriter and worked on my stories and novels.

Regan’s term in office ended in January, 1989 when George H. W. Bush replaced him. The new administration immediately ended my banishment, restored my clearances, and returned me to my parent agency, the NSA. Once there, I resumed my career and, as reported in recent blog posts, went on to be promoted to the highest levels of the Senior Executive Service. Though nothing was ever said, I got the distinct impression that both the Bush administration and NSA were embarrassed by Regan’s actions.

More next time.

Affording My Lifestyle (2)

My job in Vietnam was, for the most part, supporting friendly forces on the battlefield with signals intelligence, the intercept and exploitation of enemy radio communications. I was able to tip off U.S. Army and Marine Corps, as well as South Vietnamese army troops, about the North Vietnamese, what units were close by, their exact location, and what their intent was. I was so good at my job that between 1962 and 1975, I spent more time in Vietnam that I did in the U.S. And I was more rapidly promoted than my contemporaries, in part because I was willing to put my life on the line to support our troops in combat.  In 1974, I was named chief of the clandestine NSA operation in Vietnam. When Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in April 1975, I escaped under fire.

Where I went and what I did after April 1975 is still classified. Competent in six languages and skilled at combat support, I operated in a number of different locations. While working at NSA headquarters, I was assigned management jobs because I had been promoted to the top of the GS (government service) ranks. From my experience on the battlefield, I knew that leading worked far better than managing. A manager seeks to control his subordinates, but being a successful leader requires humility. A leader’s job is to lift up his subordinates, encourage them to be all they can be, to outdo themselves.

My subordinates achieved remarkable results. I was soon promoted to the Senior Executive Service, the SES. By the time I reached retirement age, I had reached the top of the SES ranks, outranked only by the NSA’s civilian Deputy Director (the Director was always military, a general or admiral). I was then able to retire with a substantial pension that has allowed me to write without financial concerns.

Through it all, I never once tried to get promoted or took on a job that promised more money. Instead, I did what I loved or knew was urgent. The end result is that I am the luckiest of men, free of all money concerns and able to spend all my time writing.

How lucky can you get?

Affording My Lifestyle

After I posted yesterday’s blog on my experience with medical practitioners, a reader asked how I could afford the lifestyle I described, replete with time for sleep and exercise. The answer is that I retired as early as I could thirty years ago so I could write fulltime. Because I had been promoted to the highest levels of the federal government’s Senior Executive Service (SES), I was able to retire with a generous annuity. I now have six books and seventeen short stories in print as a result. That begs the question: what did I do to gain all that income? The answer is: nothing. I just did what I wanted to do and enjoyed.

At the beginning of my career, the government hired me as a linguist. Languages come easily to me, and I enjoy them. As a child, I taught myself French and Italian. In high school I took four years of Latin. In college, I took courses in German. When I graduated from college, I wanted to study Chinese, a language so difficult that I knew I couldn’t teach it to myself. The best language school in the world was at the time (and probably still is today) the Army Language School, now called the Defense Language Institute (DLI), in Monterey, California. So I enlisted in the army to go to DLI for Chinese. But when I got there, the army told me that I was to study Vietnamese. I had to follow orders, so I spent the next year in intensive study of a language I had never heard of—back then (1959) we called that part of the world French Indochina. The chance decision to teach me Vietnamese reshaped the rest of my life.

When I graduated from DLI, I asked the army to send me to Vietnam. But the U.S. had no interest in Vietnam back then. Instead, the army assigned me to the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade, Maryland, not far from Washington, D.C. I found out that Georgetown University offered courses in Chinese, so I enrolled as a part-time graduate student. As a result, by the time my army enlistment ended in late 1961, I was comfortable in Vietnamese, Chinese, and French, the three languages of Vietnam. NSA hired me as a civilian linguist as a GS-11, six levels higher than the normal starting salary (GS-5), and in 1962 sent me to Vietnam for the first time.

More next time.

Medicine and Glenn

On the whole, I have not been served well by the medical practitioners. Early in 2017, I hurt my right knee while running—I’d been a regular runner for years, running up to ten miles a day. That resulted in knee replacement surgery. The day of the operation and several that followed it, I suffered more pain that I had ever experienced. The surgeon finally prescribed a pain killer. As I found out later, the surgeon botched the job, leaving me unable to fully straighten my leg and with a slight limp. I finally consulted another surgeon who diagnosed improper surgery and recommended that I have it redone. Because the pain had been so great, I refused to have it redone. I still walk with a slight limp. I can no longer run.

The same year, when I coughed up blood, my regular doctor told me it was nothing and not to worry. When it happened again months later, he sent me for a lung x-ray. I had a large tumor in my right lung. Months of chemotherapy and radiation followed. Then a surgeon removed the upper lobe of my right lung. Only later did I realize how close I had come to death. I replaced my regular doctor with one more competent.

Full recovery from the lung surgery literally took years. But because of self-discipline in diet, exercise, sleep, and water consumption, I am today a model of health. I only allow myself two meals a day, and I limit myself in what I eat, stressing vegetables and fruits, very little meat, and no sweets. Every other day, partly because I can’t run any more, I lift weights in a routine that lasts more than two hours. I sleep ten hours a day on average, including a nap every afternoon. I drink eight ounces of water every morning when I wake up and again after my nap.

The result is that these days, my doctors are impressed with how healthy I am. I am the healthiest man my age that I know of. I fully intend to live to be a hundred. Current evidence suggests that I’ll make it with time to spare.

Affirmative Action Under Attack (2)

The decision by the Supreme Court to hear cases attacking affirmative action offers opponents a chance to reverse not only the Harvard and UNC decisions but many others that have upheld the use of affirmative action. The decision comes at a time when the composition of the Supreme Court differs significantly from the last time it upheld the use of affirmative action in college admissions, in 2016, in a case involving the University of Texas at Austin.

In other words, the Trump-created Supreme Court, dominated by White supremacist Republicans, will hear cases attacking affirmative action. My expectation is that they will rule against it, thereby weakening protection against bias across the land. Trump will once again triumph over the rest of us.

Affirmative Action Under Attack

In my younger years, affirmative action, defined by Britannica as “an active effort to improve employment or educational opportunities for members of minority groups and for women,” was universally accepted as good policy. The only people opposed to it were those who, openly or secretly, supported segregation or White supremacy. The administration of President Lyndon Johnson (1963–69) worked to improve opportunities for African Americans while civil rights legislation was dismantling the legal basis for discrimination. The federal government instituted affirmative action policies under the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and an executive order in 1965. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) monitored affirmative action programs. Subsequently, affirmative action was broadened to cover women and Native Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities and was extended to colleges and universities and state and federal agencies.

Then came President Donald Trump. His Department of Justice moved against universities and colleges using affirmative action arguing that they were prejudiced against Asian Americans. Employing a maneuver used successfully for years, Trump and his administration pitted Blacks and Asian Americans against each other as a means of favoring Whites over all others.

Even before he took office, President Biden fought to restore affirmative action. In December 2021, he urged the U.S. Supreme Court to decline to hear a case against Harvard University challenging the ability of it and other schools to consider race as a factor in student admissions to boost diversity. On the last day of 2021, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, an appeal of a decision that Harvard University’s use of affirmative action in college admissions is legal. The court will also hear an appeal of a ruling that the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill’s use of affirmative action was legal.

More next time.

U.S. Inequality (2)

I wasn’t planning to do another post on the injustice of the American income distribution, but yesterday morning Robert Reich posted his report titled “The Week Ahead: The Four Horsemen of the Neoliberal Apocalypse.” In it, he reported data new to me about our deeply rooted monetary unfairness.

Among Reich’s findings is that even before the pandemic, three economic factors shaped us: first, more than one out of every six America children was impoverished, often without enough food or adequate shelter. Second, the typical American family was living precariously from paycheck to paycheck. And third, a record high share of national wealth was already surging to the top.

Exemplary of our national dilemma was the effect of the American Rescue Plan Act signed into law by President Joe Biden on March 11, 2021. Child poverty instantly dropped by at least a third, and the typical family gained some breathing space.

Financial inequity is rampant in the U.S. Billionaires in the U.S., for example, pay only 8.2 percent of their income in taxes, whereas the rest of us pay 25.4 percent. The top 1 percent of earners in the United States account for about 20 percent of the country’s total income annually. Meanwhile, the lowest-earning quarter of Americans account for just 3.7 percent of income every year.

As I said earlier in this blog, the U.S. is the greatest nation that has ever existed on the face of the earth, but it is marred by glaring flaws. One of them is the flagrant inequities that shape our lives. The time for us to address the unfairness of income has long since passed. Let’s get to it.

Mike Pence

Mike Pence

The press these days is full of reports on former Vice President Mike Pence. When Donald Trump recently berated Pence for failing to overturn the 2020 election, Pence responded with a public statement that he didn’t have the power to alter the election results. Then yesterday Mike Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, together with several senior Republicans rallied to defend Pence in his escalating feud with Donald Trump over the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Short, and Republican senators John Barrasso, Lisa Murkowski, and Marco Rubio, “were among senior party figures who backed Pence’s position, adding their voices to a backlash by other prominent Republican figures apparently growing weary of Trump’s continued obsession with his election defeat and subversion of democracy.”

But other Republicans expressed support for Trump. Florida Republican Representative Matt Gaetz said he was “quite disappointed” that former Vice President Mike Pence did not overturn the 2020 election.

So on it goes with Trump’s easily refuted false claims. It will be some years before we comprehend the full extent of Trump’s damage to our country.

I’ll be curious to see if Trump avoids prison.

Masculinity: Who Cares?

We men quietly, and sometimes secretly, cherish our masculine traits. We yearn to be admired for our strength, courage, independence, leadership, and assertiveness. To call a man “feminine” is the worst insult. Why do we care?

Women, as far as I can tell, do not admire hypermasculine men. What they seem to want from men is love and responsibility. So men’s craving to be seen as manly doesn’t originate in the opinion of women. It’s somehow built into us: to be a man is to crave masculinity.

Worst of all is machismo, a form of masculinity that emphasizes power and is often associated with a disregard for consequences and responsibility. In this way of thinking, the only admirable trait in a man is his ability to dominate, by brute strength if necessary.

What we men need to learn is that real masculinity is defined by how much the women in our lives can depend on us to be there for them when they need us. As an unattributed text on the internet puts it, “A man who is truly masculine embraces responsibility and loves, honours, protects and provides for his family and loved ones. He lives with integrity, motivated by conviction, not comfort or convenience. True masculinity is not determined by how much physical strength a man has but rather the strength of his character.” Another quote puts it succinctly: “Real men choose love over power.”

Morality and virtue, it turns out, are key elements in being an admirable man. One of the most irritating discoveries of my life is that it is women, not men, who define masculinity. Love and accountability are the traits women admire and define as the core of virility. Those of us men who measure our manliness by brute strength and supremacy won’t make the grade.

So annoying: How come women are more powerful than men when it comes to defining masculinity?

The Sneeze

I’m sneezing more these days than I have in the past. I suspect it’s because my chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is becoming more pronounced as I age. Or maybe there’s just more pollen in the air—but that seems unlikely in the dead of winter. Whatever the reason, the increase got me to thinking about the sneeze. What is it and do I need to worry?

On the internet, I found a wealth of information on the sneeze. It’s defined as “a sudden involuntary expulsion of air from the nose and mouth due to irritation of one’s nostrils . . . Sneezing is a mechanism your body uses to clear the nose. When foreign matter such as dirt, pollen, smoke, or dust enters the nostrils, the nose may become irritated or tickled. When this happens, your body does what it needs to do to clear the nose—it causes a sneeze. A sneeze is one of your body’s first defenses against invading bacteria and bugs.”

So what happens when we sneeze? “When a foreign particle enters your nose, it may interact with the tiny hairs and delicate skin that line your nasal passage. These particles and contaminants range from smoke, pollution, and perfume to bacteria, mold, and dander.

“When the delicate lining of your nose experiences the first tinge of a foreign substance, it sends an electric signal to your brain. This signal tells your brain that the nose needs to clear itself. The brain signals your body that it’s time for a sneeze, and your body responds by preparing itself for the impending contraction. In most cases, the eyes are forced shut, the tongue moves to the roof of the mouth, and the muscles brace for the sneeze. All of this happens in just a few seconds.”

So sneezing is healthy.  It clears my nasal passages of invading contaminants and mucus. It helps keep my breathing clear and unobstructed.

I sort of like sneezing, so now I can enjoy it knowing it is doing my body good. You can, too. You’re welcome.