Opinion-Columns.com

The Fallacy of the 80 Hour Week

Larry Summers famously stated that tenure-track at Harvard requires eighty hour weeks and that’s part of the reason women are not competitive in mathematics disciplines. We hear a lot about it, but does it really mean anything, this spectre of eleven hours a day, seven days a week with an extra hour or two thrown in?

I know it’s the in thing to be over-extended, to complain about never enough time and an office schedule that just won’t quit. With apologies to the few who are actually victims . . .

• Those working their way through college while carrying a full credit load
• The poor, working days at McDonald’s and cleaning Wal-Mart at night
• Single moms with full time jobs and no home help (120 hr. weeks?)

. . . the majority of complaints out there are due more to ‘flying the flag’ than necessity. Those tenure-trackers at Harvard are likely to be watching each other, wandering the halls to see who’s light is on, bullshitting in small clusters and doing most anything except actually working a double schedule. It’s a guy thing . . . women don’t actually do much of this because they’ve always been too time stressed culturally and could be that’s why women aren’t filling their numbers in math tenures . . . but that’s another subject.

Guys are wary of not being there. It’s a throw-back to our pre-civilized history.  The cave-man who wasn’t there likely lost his mating rights, was tapped as the guy to stick the first spear into the mammoth and got the really burned parts of the meat to eat. In other words, a culturally intact replica of today’s office environment.

Check out any major law firm and you’ll see the lights on late into the night with one or two guys working their butts off and twenty others afraid to go home at five, no matter that their work is done. So, they soon learn to not get done at five . . . to stretch it out and fiddle with the work until they too can go home (complaining) at eleven.  Many large firms (legal and otherwise) are run by a genuine workaholic at the top of the food chain that keeps virtually everyone dithering around their desk, frantically getting nothing done until it’s corporately acceptable to go home.

Children grow up not knowing their fathers, mothers (and fathers) tinker around with having affairs, the truly lonely argue and bicker with the untruly busy and everyone drinks too much . . . all because of the terror of not being seen around the communal campfire and the communal campfire has moved from the home to the office.

Our inability to get it done (whatever it may be) in an eight-hour day is merely another example of the bargain we’ve made with our business associates to waste time. Decision-making isn't allowed to happen because of the labyrinthine approval processes designed to keep us in the game with the lights on. Making the fucking decision would send us all home to wife and family, lover and theatre, husband and kids in thirty-five hours with an empty out-box and all the pencils neatly aligned.

But then it would look easy. Then the people in who’s awe we hope to be held would know that our jobs were relatively simple and that the major responsibility of those jobs was to get out of the way of the process and let the bolts be machined, the contracts negotiated, the container ships loaded and the meetings adjourned.

You heard it here first---the next new wave of business acumen to hit the best-seller lists will be variously titled “Getting Out of the Way and Letting _________ Happen.”  Larry Summers guys aren't likely to write it, but they might benefit.  Nah, they all like it that way.

What Is It With the Clothes?

When Vladimir Putin strode out to his press conference with George Bush today, his two-button suitcoat flared in the wind, revealing a scarlet silk lining. Putin, boldly eschewing the power tie and pinstripes chosen by powerful leaders on world stage, opted instead for the swashbuckling style of the sexually at ease.  Putin challenges expectations and assumptions. There is undeniable authority in his lift heels and understated lizard skin suspenders . . . essays and books have been written about the erotic nature of high heels.  The sexual frisson in Putin’s look also comes from the tension of a man dressed in vaguely feminine attire.

Putin’s jacket and boots speak of sex and power. When looking at the image of Putin in Bratislava, the mind searches for ways to put it all into context. It turns to fiction, to caricature, to shadowy daydreams. It is as though sex and power can only coexist in a fantasy. When a man combines them in the real world, stubborn stereotypes have his power devolving into a form that is purely sexual.

If you’ve read this far, you’re no doubt wondering where the hell this is going. It’s lifted phrasing comes directly from a Robin Givhan article in the Washington Post that made me angry. Robin critiqued Condoleezza Rice’s choice of clothing at her Wiesbaden Army Airfield tour on Wednesday and (apparently) found it soaked in sexual meaning. I’m not a great fan of Ms. Rice, but Givhan’s take on the Secretary of State’s attire was so far off base that it smacked more of Monty Python than the Post.

Apologies to Vladimir Putin, who I used for shock value, but who is always dressed appropriately and shuns the gold braid and idiot-uniforms that (dis)grace so many of the world’s lesser known president-dictators.

What is it with the clothing issue?  Madeleine Albright was ‘dowdy’ and Condoleezza is ‘Dominatrix!’ in Givhan’s estimate. “When looking at the image of Rice in Weisbaden, the mind searches for ways to put it all in context,” she writes.

Let me give you a hand, Robin. The context is the U.S. Secretary of State visiting Germany.  You got a problem with that?

No Finger’s Gonna Save This Dike

Hollywood and the music industry keep trying to stick a finger in the hole in the downloading dike and it’s not going to work, but it is going to mess very heavily with public access until they give it up. The history is, what people can do without a whole lot of moralizing, they will.

We stop at red lights in the middle of the night when there’s no cross traffic because it’s the right thing to do and it contributes to social order and we don’t feel right flashing through. Most of us return a wallet found in the street for pretty much the same reasons.

But hardly anyone thinks twice about downloading a song or a video for (I think) a couple of reasons. First, they’re put off by paying sixteen bucks for a CD that costs twelve cents and only pays (maybe) a buck to the artist. They’re further put off by the horror stories told by every artist, film or music, of the heavy handedness on the part of the studios. Second, they don’t really see purchase as an option, don’t look at it personally as an either-or. There’s just no compelling social contract with the film or music industries to stop at their red light in the middle of the night.

Film and music is art until you put it in a plastic case and then it becomes commodity. Promoters can (and do) get $50-$60 for good seats at a concert because there’s the star power of art right up there on stage. Even though that’s an outrageous ticket price, it’s set by the market and as soon as the market objects (by not showing up) the prices are sure to fall. That’s a social contract of the most elemental type, what I’m willing to pay for what you have to sell.

Sixteen bucks is an equally outrageous price for a CD and the market out there is telling the film-music industry it’s no longer interested now that there's an alternative. Film-music’s response is not to drop prices to fill the metaphorically empty stadiums, their answer is to sue their customers and they think that makes sense. Wake up guys, downloading is here. The technology exists and isn’t going away. The answer is re-pricing and repackaging the product.

The artists know that and make their dough on tour.

Jimmy Thudpucker knows and, as usual, Doonesbury is out ahead of the pack.

Sometimes You Just Gotta Laugh . . .

. . . because otherwise it hurts too much to read what’s actually going on inside what passes for Homeland Security. The airports are ticked off because of the ban on lighters and matches on planes, due to some demented would-be bomber who tried to light his shoe and . . . oh, god . . . now they can’t light the little candle-thingies in the airport lounges.

Does anyone know where Monty Python is buried? Is the ground strangely disturbed, as in the old rotating-coffin syndrome?

We all just line up like sheep, actually taking our shoes off to get on an airplane and think not very much of it. Standing there in our socks, not even blushing. Meanwhile, Homeland Security blinks different colors at us as if there was anything we could personally do about the difference between flashing-red and pulsating-puce and we accept it!  What on earth are they doing? Is this charade just a cover-their-ass in case a major city goes up? . . . a sort of well, we told you it was flashing-red, what the hell did you expect?

Only our beloved congress could actually vote to prohibit matches and lighters onboard aircraft because some Brit tried to light off his shoe. One’s imagination entirely fogs over with possibility, had this fellow been caught repeatedly pulling a string on his jock-strap.

In the meantime, all this silliness not only deprives us of our constitutionally guaranteed access to flickering tea-candles in red, net-covered hurricane lamps on our airport lounge tables, it soaks up so much funding that there’s virtually no dough left to spend on checking incoming cargo containers. That makes sense, to keep Uncle Al from carrying matches while they let 10,000 sealed and unchecked cargo containers a week (month?) into our major ports.

Meanwhile (chuckle), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) suggests airports install wall-mounted lighters. Try to light a table-candle or your shoe with that!

Two Guys Who Need to Lose a Star

It’s only right . . . do the right stuff and get promoted, screw up and get pulled a grade or two . . . works for enlisted men and (presumably) officers as well. But maybe not for those officers up there in the stratosphere of rank and a couple of Lt. Generals (three-star) come to mind.

Consider Lt. General Kevin C. Kiley, who is surgeon general of the Army. That’s the top guy in the medical field, where I once served as a medic and never even saw anyone higher than full colonel. Army National Guard and Reserve soldiers have been called up, sent to Afghanistan or Iraq and (surprise!) are coming home wounded. The story by Ann Scott Tyson of the Washington Post is absolutely chilling, as more than a third of these wounded soldiers are ‘removed’ from active duty by bureaucratic snarl on the part of the Army. Lost benefits, lost wages, lost medical care and appointments . . .  “thanks for getting wounded, you’re on your own.” Under General Kiley, the Army doesn’t even track reservists suffering gaps in pay, benefits and medical care.

“The numbers just exploded on us,” says the dysfunctional Surgeon General. Well gosh, general, we seem to have gone to war in two Middle East nations and the number one thing in your charge is to see that medical care is given. My verdict? Loss of a star and early retirement.

The main source of the problem is an Army program called Active Duty Medical Extension, acronym ADME, although its main affect on the wounded has been to SUBTRACTME. Lt. General Franklin L. Hagenbeck (another three-star), the Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel said, “the ADME program was not staffed to accommodate a large number of mobilized Reserve Component soldiers.”

Excuse me? Was not staffed?  Deputy chief for personnel didn’t see a large number of mobilized soldiers coming?  My verdict? Loss of a star and early retirement.

The horrors of going to war are not all that well documented on a continuing basis for American consumption, but take my word that they are akin to no other distresses that come one’s way in life. They are shared by families and leave a lifetime mark. That these predictable and known consequences could be so badly administered by two generals at the three-star level is beyond belief. Had these lapses occurred under battlefield conditions in the stress of constant bombardment, they would be understandable, if still not permissible. That they occurred under the command of desk-duty officers with no other overriding concerns is dereliction of duty at the highest levels.

Turn your face to the wall, soldier . . . this story will run its course and nothing will change.  Generals Kiley and Hagenbeck, how do you guys sleep at night?

W's Willing Deficits

A doctor friend of mine says that the first thing they teach you in medical school is that all bleeding stops eventually. Perhaps it’s the same with deficit spending. Will the last guy out please turn off the money.

Reagan’s Star Wars, in its scaled-down Rumsfeld-Lite version has been deployed; the Donald insisted on that and so we now have a missile defense system that can’t hit a bull’s ass with a manure shovel. Third miss in a row, although it can’t technically be called a miss because two out of those three times the interceptor missile simply failed to deploy, sulking on its finned haunches. It was also a deployment by appointment, which is not the likely way that an enemy would launch a missile if an enemy could be found capable of launching a missile, if our enemies were dumb enough to go through all that when they could just fill a U-Haul with fertilizer, if . . . you get my drift . . . whatever . . .

$50 billion earmarked over the next five years for this foolishness and so far they can’t coax this defender off the ground. How apropos, just in time to defend against the missiles North Korea has yet to develop, so our insanity increasingly matches theirs. What was it Lyndon Johnson used to say about dogs that won’t hunt?

Oh and in case I forget, please remember for me that W wants to be back on the moon in a few years, for reasons he can’t seem to name other than national pride.  So NASA’s diverting any and all monies that would keep the Hubble telescope delivering mind-boggling science and assigning it to that questionable project.

Now why would he do that? And why would Rummy keep lighting off duds at $85 million a pop? It makes no sense unless you understand that Rummy’s dream is for the United States to dominate space and thus to dominate (in Strangelovian fashion) the world immediately below that space. Our Secretary of Defense thinks this century’s wars will be fought from space (he may be right) and that America is only vulnerable in space (maybe right again) with its dependence on satellite technology for everything from the power-grid to the family Chrysler. 

And the world that is to be dominated by this flight-into-fancy by the most dangerous administration in memory, continues to fund our breakneck dash into unprecedented national debt. The chickens in this case are actually paying the fox to dismantle the fence around the coop.

Excuse me, Asia and Europe, for calling you chickens.

But space must be there for China and India, Australia and Bolivia, France and Canada as well as a couple hundred other sovereign nations who will depend upon a technological world. They’re not likely to act kindly to having to ask us for permission to put up a needed communications satellite. I know it’s very American to think of ourselves as benign protectors of freedom, the safe harbor for any and all worldly expectations, but our recent international involvements make that premise more than a little suspect. 

If I were the rest of the world, I’d be scared shitless.

A Poem for a Change

Follow the Money

If you want to find an answer
to Medicare
or the Internet
Why homeless occupy our streets
the neighbor leaves his grass unmowed
tomatoes have no flavor
universities are out of reach
dogs run loose
terrorists terrorize
and we are all so confused
Then follow the money

I talk with friends in endless
circular conversations
Listening to this or that
opinion
on how and where we've gone wrong
Intellectualizing, our mental equal
of putting out the dog
But never once have I heard suggested
the closing of computers
and shoving back of educated chairs
to simply follow the money

We choke on the heavy breath of cash
in cities jammed with cars
suburbs slammed with drugs
prisons crammed with kids
and hope for something to be done
Like hounds following the wrong scent
There could be profit in clean air
and drug free youth
with education
Compounding interest, renegotiating
Learning to lead with the money

Bob Samuelson’s Column

I hope the link to Bob’s column, Cut My Benefits, stays active at the Washington Post archives for a while, because we all ought to read it.

Bob’s point is that he’s due to go on the dole in six short years himself and he’s built for himself an estate sufficient to get along, tottering off into the sunset quite comfortably. He thinks his benefits ought to be cut, along with Bill Gates and a huge swath of the middle class who have, in one way or another, provided for their retirement.

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are safety-net-programs, designed for that specific purpose during the Great Depression, when a whole hell of a lot of people desperately needed a net. Bob Samuelson makes the point that these FDR era entitlements have morphed into retirement subsidies . . . something that was never intended.

I paid into it and I’m damned well going to collect has become the predominant attitude and attempts by the Social Security Administration and Congress to set “taxable income” levels above which payments are reduced have proven to be a hard sell.

It shouldn’t be. Those of us who sail into retirement with a decent wind behind our sails ought to be happy to give up any benefit at all and wriggling with pleasure that we’re financially okay.

Welfare is an entitlement as well, but you don’t see middle class earners grasping for food stamps, even though they paid for them.

Privatizing? Maybe Not All Bad.

Very interesting story a couple of days ago about Lockheed getting the contract for providing flight services that were the territory of the FAA. Almost $2 billion over ten years, not exactly chump-change.

There’s a knee-jerk reaction on most of our parts about privatizing governmental services. Either we’re for or against, but the track record has been mixed. Most Brits think Margaret Thatcher ruined the service industries in England and much of what Reagan spun off turned to spun straw instead of spun gold.

But President Bush’s competitive sourcing initiative has a different focus. Encouraging federal agencies to determine whether some of their more commercialized activities could be better and more cheaply bought in the private sector, the initiative allows the agency to bid on the services in-house as well as taking outside proposals.

Hard to find fault with that. An agency bidding on work it has traditionally done brings fresh thinking to the process; in all likelihood weeds out the unnecessary and lops off some of the bureaucratic fat that might have accumulated over the years. Congress has shown itself incapable of reducing almost anything and who would know better than the agency itself the refinements that might lower costs? It has an elegance about it, this initiative, a sort of reinventing government feel. I like it. Further, I am a fan of the many-small-experiments theory of bureaucratic change. This process fits that definition beautifully and is the antithesis of ‘top down’ management.

Thus far, during 2003 and 2004, agency employees have been able to ‘win’ nine out of ten contracts and that’s heartening as well.  No wholesale firings, no anti-bureaucratic mobs running the halls of agencyland, cutting without knowing anything else but the desire to cut. You can bet that the 90% who survived this process have come away from the experiment knowing more about their jobs and how to do them efficiently. The classic Japanese management circle, encouraged by the classic American bidding process.

There will be screw-ups, occasional unfairnesses and a scandal or two along the way, no doubt. The unions will be unhappy as unions are always unhappy. But it seems a very positive move and long overdue.

My Gut Seldom Lies

Not to say it’s never been wrong, but over a number of decades my gut has a pretty good track record judging people, places, things and stuff. It doesn’t like the President’s budget proposal at all. On the gut-o-meter, the budget is way below par for budgets.

The reason is not partisan. It has nothing to do with right or left, except perhaps as ancillary comment on the right of presidents to decide who gets left out of luck. And the reason it’s a gut issue is that it doesn’t feel right to continue to insist on huge tax windfalls to the already-rich and at the same time starve the processes necessary for governing.

As an example, I’ll use the budgetary treatment of Hubble.  A diversion of the funds it would take to save the telescope has been neatly diverted into a new priority to return astronauts to the moon by 2010. My gut says that’s junking the best scientific equipment ever put into space for the nebulous purpose of a forty-year leap backward to revisit our nearby inert hunk of orbiting rock.

More later, as the folded, spindled and mutilated data unfolds.