Jivin' with Jeff
I like Jeff Jarvis.
A lot. He introduced me to Spirit of
America, which allowed me to
take the Dean Design Principles to the next level, and that directly
led to the formation of our new company, Open Resource Group, LLC. So I
owe Jeff a lot, and I'll never forget it.
But Jeff and I have a
fundamental disagreement on a core principle. I believe that you can be
a warrior and put yourself in harm's way without hating your enemy, but
he seems committed to hate and revenge as a result of his near-death
experience on 9/11. Every time he touches on his personal experience
that day, the bile spills onto the page and, to my gentle
sensibilities, poisons the dialogue that is the core of the
give-and-take of blogging. Jeff seems to seek out opportunities to pick
the scab of his near-death experience. Today's example is his "dread"
(Jeff's word) of Brian Grazer's NBC mini-series on 9/11, presenting the
viewpoint of the perps, whereby Grazer hopes to portray the Muslims in
the way that Das Boot
humanized the German U-Boat crews.
In case you might have any
doubt about Where Jeff is coming from on this, he titles his rant, Next:
The Chuck Manson You Never Knew:
I had to read it three
times, not believing that even a Hollywood executive could say
something so awfully insensitive and idiotic and so much of a
self-parody of show biz PC. But in a story about the 9/11 movies and
miniseries in the making, he said it:
Brian Grazer, co-chairman
of Imagine Television, which is producing the NBC mini-series - and
which has hired The Times as a consultant - said he hoped it would do
for Muslims what Wolfgang Petersen's film "Das Boot" did for World War
II-era Germans.
"Every
approach prior to that was, the Germans were horrible," he said. "He
humanized them, because they are human. That's what I'm hoping we do,
that we don't demonize, that we humanize all the different sides, and
so we see the seeds, and we get an understanding from each culture's
point of view as to how they got to such a horrible place."
He wants to "humanize all
the different sides." How the hell do you humanize the evil bastards
who killed 3,000 innocent fellow Americans, Glazer?
What
seeds are there that make mass murder understandable or justifiable?
What
point of view do you need to see that these men are evil?
And
if you try to say that you're talking about the larger world of Islam,
then it's Muslim bloggers who should be flaming your ass right now for
presuming that these murderers are in any way representative of them as
a people.
Explain
yourself, Mr. Glazer.
Jeff, you got the shit scared
out of you. It happens. Get over yourself. Please.
9/11 isn't about you, and it's
beneath your dignity to take it so personally and viscerally. By
over-personalizing your experience, you deprive us of the best of your
wonderful gifts, which you bestow so freely when you treat every other
subject. We get it that it affected you so personally and strongly.
Hatred is a drug that's addictive, energizing and pervasive. The
problem with all that testosterone and adrenaline coursing through your
system is that you can't fly your plane as well. There are very good
reasons that military aviators affect the archetypal sangfroid
that has become their stereotype. To be effective at the controls of a
plane, every experience must be dismissed as nothing but a minor
inconvenience. Coolness at the controls of an aircraft is a metaphor
for how we live our lives.
The first place that emotion is
distilled out of military aviators is in the area called radio
discipline, and you're graded on it in flight school. In our world, it would be called blogging discipline. Radio discipline
is the most visible indicator of the self-control that the aviators'
guild imposes on its members. In Tom Wolfe's The
Right Stuff, the essence of
mental discipline in combat is revealed by an anecdote from the Korean
war:
Combat
had its own infinite series of tests, and one of the greatest sins was
"chattering" or "jabbering" on the radio. The combat frequency was to
be kept clear of all but strategically essential messages, and all
unenlightening comments were regarded as evidence of funk, of the wrong
stuff.
A Navy pilot (in legend, at any rate) began shouting, "I've
got a MIG at zero! A MIG at zero!" – meaning that it
had maneuvered in behind him and was locked in on his tail. An
irritated voice cut in and said, "Shut up and die like an aviator."
Now it's time for We the People
to control our fear and face the music.
If there is such a thing as right action, it places a demand on our
resources whether or not our intellect or gut buys into it. That's the
essence of trusting our instruments rather than our inner ear. It also
suggests that, when we must do things that seem threatening to our
survival, it's OK to keep our perspective.
In fact, it will improve the odds of survival.
Better a Cool Response than a
Cool Engine
The Grumman aircraft that the
scared young pilot was flying was built before the hydro-mechanical
fuel control, a kind of intelligent fuel injection for jet engines. In
those days, the throttle was connected directly to a valve that dumped
raw fuel into the engine, which was, essentially, a blowtorch. Dump too
much fuel and the fire goes out.
Suddenly it's quiet. Ruins your whole day.
Today, an F-18 pilot slams the throttle to max power and starts jiving.
In those days, if you moved the throttle from cruise to afterburner
faster than about 5 seconds, your fighter became an expensive glider.
Think about it: you've just been jumped by a faster, more agile MIG 15.
Your job now is to tame your reptile brain and count slowly while
advancing the throttle and jinking like a mothafucka (technical pilot
talk for turning fast while under duress):
one thousand and one, one
thousand and two, one thousand and three, one thousand and four, one
thousand and five.
Such suppression of one's
reptile brain requires behavioral modification at an early age. Now we,
the front line combatants in the politically powerful War on A Noun,
without the benefit of such training, need to keep our heads on
straight and learn to fear only Fear Itself.
Are we Airborne?
The question we need to ask
ourselves is whether we should model our behavior on poorly-trained,
superstitious Muslim terrorists or on our own highly trained military
aviators? Because hatred and revenge are the M.O. of terrorists, not
cool-headed warriors, we lower ourselves to their standards by relying
on their fuels of choice: hatred and revenge. I submit that the work we
must do is too important to rely on passion as our fuel. Rather, we
must adopt the smart attitudes that are effective, rather than the
compelling, visceral passions that feel so good.
9/11 was a wake up call to a
reality that we've been living in for forty years but have been unable
to face. Devolving into ritualized, repetitious rants about how the
enemy is evil and that there are no good enemies and no bad friendlies
is worse than sophomoric. It's simply ill-informed and stupid and has
been proven to be so by so many wars and jihads that to misunderstand
those learnings is a conscious choice to embrace the only dark side
available to us: ignorance and superstition that's been proven wrong.
Like our own Vietnam vets
who've gone back and had tea with their former enemies and shared
family photos and wept together, we too will some day sit down with
former terrorists and meet the humans within. As will they. It has
happened every time, with all the Gooks, Nips, Huns, Slopes and
Ragheads that we've ever railed against as we firebombed
their homes for no apparent military gain.
What does this fear of death
morphed into hatred get us? Every one of us is going to die. Most of us
are fated to die stupidly, slowly and expensively, like Terry Schiavo,
rather than quickly and messily, like James Dean. I'd much rather live
hard, die young
and have a good looking corpse.
10:04:24 AM 
|
|
