On January 7th Roy Winkler said:
> To communicate downwards is natural.
>To communicate upwards may bring retribution.
HIERARCHY VS. FLAT
I was in basic infantry training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, had just
graduated from a five year intensive course in pedagogy, and felt very
comfortable with practical educational principles. I was in the
uncomfortable position of being someone who understood what was being done
and knowing that it was not being done very well. I was also a young
"smart ass" with none of the experiences of the people controlling the
situation.
In the seventh week they brought in the Inspector General to hear any
complaints from the "cruits" that might be willing to be voiced. I
brought out the same charts and evaluations that I had been taught to use
in college with my colleagues and even the professors who considered
criticism and evaluation to be a marker of our learning as well as a
stimulant for discussion. The issue for me, personally, was that I felt
totally unprepared to protect my life if I might have to do that. I set
about asking what I felt I would need to do to accomplish that and much of
what I needed was only done once during the training.
In University there was never an issue of "authority" with the professors,
however that was an issue with the Drill Instructors in our company. My
blithe arrogance was essentially correct, for they evidently had planned
to change the program making it less drill and more practical, due to the
coming Vietnam conflict, in the next rotation. Being "correct" was not to
be correct for I spent the last nights of the final week of basic
training, polishing the latrine with my toothbrush, on KP and painting the
new company Orderly Room while the rest of the company finished the
training or slept. Many of those who slept, slept permanently in the
coming year.
>To communicate upwards may bring retribution.
The retribution could have been deadly for me but wasn't. I went to
Washington to sing in the White House and rub shoulders with the Captains
of government and industry. The other members of my basic training unit
went to Vietnam.
I wonder if those managers downsizing AT&T have any sense of the
deadliness of what they do and whether my redneck DIs weren't more honest
in their desire for revenge. A manager who does not believe that he was
suckled at the breast of Mother America, nurtured by her riches and that
his company owes a "give-back" for what they have been allowed to do, is
at the very least irresponsible and untrustworthy. I wouldn't have gone
up a mountain with any of them. Merely "making money" for the party (read
stockholders) shows little humanity and a compromising mind worthy of the
best quiz show cheat. Those people who teach our work forces that they
will be better off for having their lives "blown away" are the worst kinds
of thieves for they steal the potency and rage of the ravaged.
MIXED METAPHORS
As for the hierarchal vs. the flat, I always wondered why the "corrupt"
municipal transit authority could be fixed by "privatizing" and breaking
it up for a few years until it was "democratically reformed" by
municipalizing the "greedy privateers" for a few years until the
"municipal corruption" was fixed by the "Great White Italian?" business
hope in "private enterprise" for a few years until the "young charismatic
Irish Catholic?" reformer surprised the world with his "democratic"
takeover of the corrupt...
"The 'soothing system,' you know, was then in operation, and the patients
were at large. They behaved remarkably well--especially so,--any one of
sense might have known that some devilish scheme was brewing from that
particular fact, that the fellows behaved so remarkably well. And, sure
enough, one fine morning the keepers found themselves pinioned hand and
foot, and thrown into the cells, where they were attended, as if they were
the lunatics, by the lunatics themselves, who had usurped the offices of
the keepers."
Edgar Allan Poe "The System of Dr. Tarr
and Professor Fether."
-- Ray Evans Harrell mcore@soho.ios.com