Jane Collins said:
>On top of the heresy of disagreeing with Deming, here is the blasphemy of
>questioning the idea of absolute accountability. If the ship runs
>aground, the Captain is relieved of his command, even if he was asleep in
>his stateroom when it happened. Why? Because he is held accountable for
>everything that happens on the ship; or, in other words, he is totally
>responsible for the system. Should he be blamed?
Dear Jane,
My own experience from the 1960s when I was at Ft. Myer, Va. where the
Pentagon is located, was:
My best friend was head of logistics for the Army and at one point he
described a briefing for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His
one comment was that he went over the entire logistics program for the
Army and that the General was brilliant in his analysis of very discreet
problems that had not been mentioned. The complexity of the job and the
issue of responsibility were non-issues on that level. I found that some
of the best, most honest, hard nosed discussions on the Arts that I have
ever encountered were during those two enlistments. The discussions were
not with Artists either, but with high ranking military personnel. (I
also met some ignorant AHMs as well, but the level of sophistication was
admirable.) My passion for discussion and love of my work is often
off-putting and even frightening to many of the non-military people that I
meet today. I was taught to use metaphor because poetry was the only
respectful way to describe an indescribable universe. It was the
quintessential human language, fiendishly specific (Dylan Thomas's
"heron-priested shores on his thirtieth year to heaven") balanced with
humility at the lack of ability to do more than hint at the whole of
existence. Today's "technicians of the bottom line" use even that
magnificence as a way of hiding their anger from one another. Maybe
that's happening in the professional military today as well. We Cherokees
have a word that is the primary word for power, it also means "has the
ability to be ultimately responsible to the Creator". There is no
correlative word for that in English. It has been my experience that your
teacher has to die before you understand that one.
-- Ray Evans Harrell mcore@soho.ios.com