Throwback Thursday: The power to move the world

Lately, I've been spending a good amount of time in the year 1968. Several of the TV Guides I've written about in the last few weeks have been from the 1967-68 period, and I've been studying some media coverage of the news events of that year, in particular the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

I've never been a fan of the Kennedys politically, but I have often admired their style if not their substance. John was in a class by himself, and Ted had a long life, which means that Robert has been caught somewhere in the middle. To be honest, I'd never given a great deal of thought to his impact on history, despite the fact I have clearer (if still limited) memories of his death than I do of John's.

Quite by accident, I happened to stumble onto a website that proved a treasure trove of radio coverage about RFK's assassination and funeral, which I wrote about over at the TV blog. In listening to the broadcasts, and investing some money in the accompanying television broadcasts, I came to a bit more of an appreciation of Bobby Kennedy's style, and some of the convulsive reaction to his death. There is much that is hyperbole about his life and death; for example, I don't think he would have won the Democratic nomination, much less been elected president; Hubert Humphrey was already quite close to the number of delegates needed to win, and RFK's victory over Gene McCarthy in the California primary (which Kennedy had been celebrating when he was shot) was in fact much narrower than it should have been. Many of Kennedy's most astute advisors (Lawrence O'Brien, for example) felt that he never really had a chance of winning. At most, he might have assumed the position that wound up residing with George McGovern, and in that light one can contemplate whether or not Kennedy would have given Richard Nixon a run for his money in 1972.

Kennedy speaking at the University of Cape Town, 1966

But I digress. One of the benefits of being plunged into the Kennedy phenomenon is that it's given me exposure to some quite remarkable things. Whereas Jack's gift was his charming demeanor, and Ted's was his debauchery, Bobby's appears to have been his eloquence in the written word. In 1964, introducing the JFK memorial film at the Democratic convention, he quoted Shakespeare, which was perhaps the last time anyone spoke that literately at any political convention. I excerpted one of his most famous speeches last week, one that he'd given in South Africa in 1966, and I'm going to present another, longer excerpt here in a moment. I've recordings of Kennedy giving this speech, and I'll admit it comes across with a bit more power on paper than in his delivery, which at the time was more halting, more self-conscious than it would be later on. This portion of his speech was read by Ted at Bobby's funeral, and for all the grief I've given Ted Kennedy over the years for his bloviating style, in this particular case he nailed it. The words themselves, and the phrases, carry such power that Ted's flat, emotionless delivery stays out of the way and allows one to ponder their true force. If you want to hear either Bobby or Ted delivering it, you can easily find clips on YouTube; I prefer to look at them on the page. Some comments will follow.

"There is," said an Italian philosopher, "nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." Yet this is the measure of the task of your generation and the road is strewn with many dangers.

[M]any of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. "Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the world." These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation.

[…] It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that the belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. […]

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change the world which yields most painfully to change. […] I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the world.

[There is] the temptation to follow the easy and familiar path of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who have the privilege of an education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. There is a Chinese curse which says "May he live in interesting times." Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged -- will ultimately judge himself -- on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.

These are timeless words, more stunning because of how applicable they are to our times. For as we've experienced the collapse of confidence in government, the contempt (most of it justified) in which politics is seen, the decay of institutions formerly held in esteem, we realize that much that is important in life has been reduced to a bare essential.

There are many ways to, as Kennedy put it, "enter the conflict." It is not necessary for us to do everything, but imperative that we do something. For one man to stand up and fight the machine, whatever that machine happens to be, may seem a futile act; it is when others see and follow that man that change becomes a possibility. But, as Kennedy says, it takes the courage to stand up - despite threats, despite ridicule, despite the loneliness and isolation that often comes from being the first one to stand up.

And the change that will happen, the change that must happen, cannot come from institutions, but must come from people acting together. When I retired from competitive politics I remarked on the single most important lesson I'd learned: you can't change the world by passing a law; you can only change it by converting hearts and minds. And it isn't done in Washington, or in some state capital; it comes in your interactions with your family, your friends and loved ones, your neighbors, your co-workers, those in your wider community. It comes in the church you attend, the organizations to which you belong, the places you spend your spare time. And all the money, all the power, all the prestige in the world doesn't mean a damn otherwise.  You can't let the standards of the world determine your definition of success, of happiness, of making a difference.

There is much lamenting within the conservative movement that the culture war is lost, that Hollywood and the media have combined to freeze out the conservative voice. There are those on all sides who decry the corruption of Big Business, of the multimillionaires that often worship at no higher altar than the bottom line; and of Big Government, and those politicians who seek only to preserve their own power and line their own pockets. And here we must exhibit the courage of which Kennedy speaks, to turn away from the wealth and power which the modern world offers, in order to take the road less traveled, one which may contain hardship and heartache but ultimately emerges triumphant.

As I said, this is a remarkable speech, and whether or not RFK was responsible in toto for writing the words, he undoubtedly believed in what they meant. One of Kennedy's contemporaries, Ronald Reagan, was even more gifted at it - unparalleled, in my opinion.  Is there anyone today who uses such words to appeal to man's higher nature with an essentially optimistic message? And if not, why not? And what does that say about us?

On November 22

One of my first jobs upon moving to Dallas was at a company whose offices were on Stemmons Freeway, just across the street from Parkland Hospital. As a matter of fact, I could see it every day outside the window facing my desk.

On days when I had to drive downtown, my route back to the office would take me down Main Street and then onto Elm, with a turn past the Sixth Floor Museum on the way to the Triple Underpass before getting onto the freeway. The Sixth Floor Museum is housed in the former Texas School Book Depository, and as I passed the building I would drive over two white "X"s that had been painted on the pavement.  (They've since been paved over by the city.)

Dallas is a city full of history, and historical landmarks.  Last Monday night I attended a premier of a documentary on the police capture of Lee Harvey Oswald.  The screening was held in the Texas Theatre in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, the theater where Oswald was apprehended after murdering police officer J.D. Tippet.  Several retired DPD officers took part in a panel discussion afterward, including men who knew Tippet personally.  One of them, Jim Leavelle, would be familiar to anyone who's seen the iconic picture of Oswald at the moment of his murder by Jack Ruby - he's the policeman in the light-colored suit who's handcuffed to Oswald.  His granddaughter, Kate Griendling, was the director of the documentary.

The city in which we live, Irving, is home to Ruth Paine's house.  She was the Quaker housewife who befriended Marina Oswald and took her in after she left her husband.  It is the house where Oswald slept on November 21, the night before the assassination.  It's now a museum.  A street en route to the Texas Theater, Beckley, is where the rooming house was in which Oswald lived.

The Sixth Floor itself is a remarkable experience. The actual window from which Oswald fired his shots is glassed off, preserved as a diorama of sorts, frozen in time to look as it did on November 22, 1963. However, a guest to the Museum can stand at a nearby window and get the sense of just how close Elm Street is to the building; a trip to the seventh floor allows the visitor to stand in the window directly below the sniper's nest.  A walk outside the building reveals the Xs painted on the street - the point at which the bullets struck Kennedy.  Farther down the sidewalk is a grassy knoll, known forever after as The Grassy Knoll.

As my words suggest, I believe that Oswald was the one and only assassin of John Kennedy.  Even if you don't believe that, however, there can be no denying the power of standing in some of the most iconic locations in American history.  Though I do not consider myself particularly well-traveled, I have visited the homes of Washington, Adams and Jefferson; I've stood on the ground where the first shot was fired at the final battle of the Revolutionary War at Yorktown.  I've seen where the tattered American flag flew as Francis Scott Key composed the words to the Star-Spangled Banner, and I've dipped my hands in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  Texas, home to the presidential libraries of both Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, offer future glimpses of additional historical artifacts.



Someone - I don't know who - once wrote that in Dealey Plaza, it is always November 22.  In all the times I've driven downtown, and driven past Dealey Plaza on the way to the Triple Underpass, I've never failed to see a crowd.  Some of them look at the Xs in the street, some stand on the Grassy Knoll (helpfully identified by a banner reading "Grassy Knoll"), some look up at the window where Oswald stood.  Last weekend we were downtown for the official lighting of the Christmas tree, and with all the festivities going on, lights and bands and face painting and vendors, there was still a crowd at Dealey Plaza.  It is a place, not so much frozen in time, but where time stands still.

And yet there's something about standing in the Book Depository (let's call it that for what it represents), on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Kennedy, an event that occurred (unlike those other events I mentioned) within my lifetime.  I don't have any memories of that time save the vague hint of a hazy recollection of a fleeting image which a three-year-old might have glimpsed as he was waiting impatiently for his cartoons.  That, I suspect, is what makes this different.

Standing inside that building, looking down on the street, hearkens back to a time that is 1963, and yet not 1963.  It is, in fact, my time, an era in which my first impressions were formed and first memories were captured.  It causes other memories, associated not by place or event but by era, to come to the fore.  It is not 1963 in Dallas, but the Sears store on Lake Street in Minneapolis, the building where I attended grade school, the sense of riding in my grandmother's car at night in the city of my birth, Minneapolis, as the neon lights marked out used car lots and Christmas decorations hung over intersections.  The 1965 World Series featuring our Minnesota Twins, the Texas tower shooting in 1966, MLK, RFK, the first Super Bowl, the moon landing - that's what I see standing at the window on the sixth floor.

It all sounds quite romantic, and there's really nothing romantic about it.  The Sixties were a crummy decade, full of violence and unrest, rebellion and license.  And yet, to paraphrase Charles Schulz' Linus, it was a good decade too, because it was the decade in which I was born.  At least that made it good for me.

What it is, is history.  Not just the history of John Kennedy's death, or for that matter his life.  Not even the history of this country, although it's certainly a major part of it.  It is the history of me, the history of us, of all those who posses the power to see that lifetime in the memories generated by a moment, a place, an event. It calls for reflection, the type lost to those who don't have much interest in anything that happened before their birth, or more than 15 minutes ago.



There are many who complain that too much attention is paid to JFK and his assassination, that it's a symptom of the narcissism of the baby boomer generation.  There's probably more than a little truth to this. Reading some of the things written in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy's death are, to be kind, a little embarrassing, full of purple prose and overemoting.*  Knowing what we do now about Kennedy's personal life underlines the situation, but the fact remains that even had Kennedy been a saint, the words written about him would have been overdoing it.

*Variously, a "great Christian," "one of our greatest presidents ever," "a kind, decent man," "a brilliant genius," and more.

But as Rick Brookhiser wrote at NRO earlier this week, those alive at the time of William McKinley's assassination in 1901 had only to remember back 20 years to the assassination of James Garfield in 1881. Many of  them might have lived in 1865, when Lincoln had been assassinated.  That made three American Presidents to experience violent death over the span of 36 years.  By the time of Kennedy's death in 1963, it had been 62 years since such an assassination, and very few remembered McKinley as anyone other than a figure in the history books.  Despite the Second World War, despite Korea, it was a generation ill prepared for the shock of a presidential assassination, especially one of a man who appeared as young and vital as JFK.  As Marc Ryan put it to me in our recent interview, while those past disasters might have belonged to other generations, the death of John Kennedy was that generation's disaster.  Just as there would be another generation scarred by Challenger and Columbia, and 9/11, and events we haven't even imagined yet. So I think we have to be gentle in thinking about that generation's apparent obsession.  As Brookhiser writes, "it will not be real to you until you have watched it yourself."

That doesn't mean that one has to subscribe to the more melodramatic, emotional assessments of it.  We don't know that Kennedy would have kept us from greater involvement in Vietnam.  There's quite a lot to suggest that civil rights legislation, passed as a tribute to Kennedy, might not have been as successful in a second Kennedy term generation of 1963.  In fact, as author Jeff Greenfield and others have suggested, Kennedy's scandals might well have come to light in a second term, and in that case we'd have an entirely different impression of Camelot.

Speaking of Camelot, I've written before about James Pierson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, which attempts to explain how the generation most wounded by Kennedy's death would up embracing the very causes which his killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, espoused.  Pierson thinks that Kennedy's death, and the adoption of the "Camelot" legend encouraged by Jackie Kennedy, was the defining moment in the collapse of the world as we knew it.  I've only lived in Dallas for six months, but it's been long enough for me to have formed a protectiveness about this city; while there were extremists among the right-wing elements in Dallas, there is no evidence that this atmosphere was measurably worse than some other Southern states - an atmosphere that cannot be understood out of context of the historical times - and had no influence on a Communist who hated America and sought to assassinate the Cold Warrior whose policies he opposed.

Dallas is not to blame, nor is America.  The Rolling Stones were wrong; we didn't kill John Kennedy.  It was Lee Harvey Oswald.



Idon't apologize for my interest in the death of John F. Kennedy, or some of the other news events of the past that have the ability to transfix me.  I don't consider myself a sentimentalist, or a wishful thinker, I don't whitewash the past or try to rewrite history.  I liked John Kennedy's style, and some of his policies, but I don't have much time for John Kennedy the man, and I have no time whatsoever for the attempts to sanctify him.

But I understand something of that need, the desire of people to attach a significance to his life and death. Because it's a way of giving our own lives and deaths a significance; if the death of a great man such as the President of the United States lacks meaning, what chance to any of us have?

Shortsighted perhaps, but also human.  So as we look back on these two days, November 22, 1963 and November 22, 2013, we look back at much more than what happened that day, and this one.  In remembering this anniversary, as with September 11, we remember the drama of human life and our part in it.  Thus has it been, thus will it always be. ◙

The power to move the world

Lately, I've been spending a good amount of time in the year 1968. Several of the TV Guides I've written about in the last few weeks have been from the 1967-68 period, and I've been studying some media coverage of the news events of that year, in particular the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

I've never been a fan of the Kennedys politically, but I have often admired their style if not their substance. John was in a class by himself, and Ted had a long life, which means that Robert has been caught somewhere in the middle. To be honest, I'd never given a great deal of thought to his impact on history, despite the fact I have clearer (if still limited) memories of his death than I do of John's.

Quite by accident, I happened to stumble onto a website that proved a treasure trove of radio coverage about RFK's assassination and funeral, which I wrote about over at the TV blog. In listening to the broadcasts, and investing some money in the accompanying television broadcasts, I came to a bit more of an appreciation of Bobby Kennedy's style, and some of the convulsive reaction to his death. There is much that is hyperbole about his life and death; for example, I don't think he would have won the Democratic nomination, much less been elected president; Hubert Humphrey was already quite close to the number of delegates needed to win, and RFK's victory over Gene McCarthy in the California primary (which Kennedy had been celebrating when he was shot) was in fact much narrower than it should have been. Many of Kennedy's most astute advisors (Lawrence O'Brien, for example) felt that he never really had a chance of winning. At most, he might have assumed the position that wound up residing with George McGovern, and in that light one can contemplate whether or not Kennedy would have given Richard Nixon a run for his money in 1972.

Kennedy speaking at the University of Cape Town, 1966

But I digress. One of the benefits of being plunged into the Kennedy phenomenon is that it's given me exposure to some quite remarkable things. Whereas Jack's gift was his charming demeanor, and Ted's was his debauchery, Bobby's appears to have been his eloquence in the written word. In 1964, introducing the JFK memorial film at the Democratic convention, he quoted Shakespeare, which was perhaps the last time anyone spoke that literately at any political convention. I excerpted one of his most famous speeches last week, one that he'd given in South Africa in 1966, and I'm going to present another, longer excerpt here in a moment. I've recordings of Kennedy giving this speech, and I'll admit it comes across with a bit more power on paper than in his delivery, which at the time was more halting, more self-conscious than it would be later on. This portion of his speech was read by Ted at Bobby's funeral, and for all the grief I've given Ted Kennedy over the years for his bloviating style, in this particular case he nailed it. The words themselves, and the phrases, carry such power that Ted's flat, emotionless delivery stays out of the way and allows one to ponder their true force. If you want to hear either Bobby or Ted delivering it, you can easily find clips on YouTube; I prefer to look at them on the page. Some comments will follow.

"There is," said an Italian philosopher, "nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." Yet this is the measure of the task of your generation and the road is strewn with many dangers.

[M]any of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. "Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the world." These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation.

[…] It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that the belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. […]

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change the world which yields most painfully to change. […] I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the world.

[There is] the temptation to follow the easy and familiar path of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who have the privilege of an education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. There is a Chinese curse which says "May he live in interesting times." Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged -- will ultimately judge himself -- on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.

These are timeless words, more stunning because of how applicable they are to our times. For as we've experienced the collapse of confidence in government, the contempt (most of it justified) in which politics is seen, the decay of institutions formerly held in esteem, we realize that much that is important in life has been reduced to a bare essential.

There are many ways to, as Kennedy put it, "enter the conflict." It is not necessary for us to do everything, but imperative that we do something. For one man to stand up and fight the machine, whatever that machine happens to be, may seem a futile act; it is when others see and follow that man that change becomes a possibility. But, as Kennedy says, it takes the courage to stand up - despite threats, despite ridicule, despite the loneliness and isolation that often comes from being the first one to stand up.

And the change that will happen, the change that must happen, cannot come from institutions, but must come from people acting together. When I retired from competitive politics I remarked on the single most important lesson I'd learned: you can't change the world by passing a law; you can only change it by converting hearts and minds. And it isn't done in Washington, or in some state capital; it comes in your interactions with your family, your friends and loved ones, your neighbors, your co-workers, those in your wider community. It comes in the church you attend, the organizations to which you belong, the places you spend your spare time. And all the money, all the power, all the prestige in the world doesn't mean a damn otherwise.  You can't let the standards of the world determine your definition of success, of happiness, of making a difference.

There is much lamenting within the conservative movement that the culture war is lost, that Hollywood and the media have combined to freeze out the conservative voice. There are those on all sides who decry the corruption of Big Business, of the multimillionaires that often worship at no higher altar than the bottom line; and of Big Government, and those politicians who seek only to preserve their own power and line their own pockets. And here we must exhibit the courage of which Kennedy speaks, to turn away from the wealth and power which the modern world offers, in order to take the road less traveled, one which may contain hardship and heartache but ultimately emerges triumphant.

As I said, this is a remarkable speech, and whether or not RFK was responsible in toto for writing the words, he undoubtedly believed in what they meant. One of Kennedy's contemporaries, Ronald Reagan, was even more gifted at it - unparalleled, in my opinion.  Is there anyone today who uses such words to appeal to man's higher nature with an essentially optimistic message? And if not, why not? And what does that say about us? ◙

This cheese has holes in it

Classic Our Word

Fulton J. Sheen once wrote that "Knowledge of the moral life is conditioned upon the removal of all prejudice.  Not everything that is novel is true, and what is called modern, may be only a new label for an old error."  That quote put me in mind of a piece I wrote back in 2005, in the first months of this blog.  Many things have changed since then, but my feelings on this banal book have, if anything, intensified over the years.  An oldie, but I think it's still a goodie.


Every once in a while you stumble on something that perfectly fits the mood you're in. It's even better when you find this completely by accident, without even looking for it.

Such is the pleasant coincidence I had looking through Eve Tushnet's blog this evening, wanting something to write about. (It's not that I don't lack for subject matter; it's Friday and I'm tired - I lack for energy!) I followed her link to Doublethink, where she'd had a piece published recently. And here, in the table of contents, I came upon this article: "Who Moved My Cheese? and the Meaning of Life," by Peter J. Hansen. With a subtitle reading, "How business bestsellers help impoverish our souls," it was irrestible.

I read Who Moved My Cheese? once, and considered myself both richer and poorer for it. Poorer, in that I was exposed to thinking and writing so banal that I could easily have become depressed at my own lack of success in getting published. Richer, in the sense that I was both encouraged ("Hey, if he can get published, anyone can!") and in knowing that I'd never run out of things to write about, thanks to the unlimited pablum in Spencer Johnson's "book".*

*Richer also in that I was given the book at the job I had at the time, which means I didn't have to pay for it.  As the man said, "free is good."

Ever since the birth of this blog almost a year ago, I'd intended to write about Cheese. I'd gotten as far as doing a first draft of a fairly lengthy, if sloppy, post. There wasn't a month gone by that I hadn't meant to get back to work on it. But other things would always come up, often pieces that I found easier to compose, and Cheese remained on the back burner. Thanks to Peter Hansen, it's time to move it to the front.

Hansen only tangentially touches on Johnson's magnum awful, concentrating on the business book world in general. And what he sees isn't pretty:

In general, the business book genre reflects and reinforces our desire to make careers fill a place in our souls that they cannot truly fill. As human beings we want more out of life than jobs can provide - and thank God for that - but many or most of us don't know where else to turn. The business book genre as we know it is born of that emptiness; and it issues in emptiness as well. The lonely hunger of atomized individuals invites the empty promises of (mostly unwitting) false prophets. Whatever faults Americans had in the generations before we acquired a taste for these books (and no doubt we had many), we do not seem to have gained in self-understanding or happiness.

One of the reasons I never finished my piece on Cheese was that I knew I'd have to go back and read it again in order to get my facts straight, and I figured I'd wait for a really, really bad sin to pop up in confession so that I might suggest to the priest that I read Cheese as a penance.

But I don't think I need to reread this cheesy book to know that the central premise is a dangerous one: the idea that nobody is in control. Sure, as Christians we understand that the strength that lives in us comes from the reality that God, not us, is in charge. So there is a benefit to understanding that we can't control everything. But Cheese goes one step further, suggesting a nihilistic world in which an unseen hand maliciously manipulates our actions, moving the cheese around the maze like a deranged scientist experimenting on rats.

Why do I use the word nihlistic? Because in Johnson's world, no one has the answers. The fact that the book has become popular with CEOs everywhere (including, as Hansen dryly points out, some of the most unsuccessful companies in business today) indicates that the lesson applies to them as well: even a billionaire CEO has to react to circumstances beyond his control. And while there's something levelling in this (the idea that your boss, no matter how glib he or she might be, could just as easily be steamrolled as you), there's also something disturbing, at least to my mind.

For where, in the world that Johnson describes, is the motive in living? Free will would seem to be a farce; your only choice is to adapt or die. There's no suggestion that your decisions can play a an active role in shaping your future, that God has an interactive plan for us all. No, the message is that change happens, there's nothing you can do about it, get used to it. No wonder we look for refuge in sex, drugs and rock 'n roll - or in the increasingly impersonal Internet. Having already discovered the dehumanizing world of Corporate America, which breeds cynicism and despair the same way mosquitos breed disease, why bother to have any human interaction at all?

Hansen does cite business books that seem, however imperfectly, to recognize this. In Now, Discover Your Strengths, authors Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton "argue that it is generally more important to develop one's strengths or talents than to overcome one's weaknesses. 'Without underlying talent, learning a skill is a survival technique, not a path to glory.'" However, Hansen adds, the book is flawed by the "apparent absence of the thought that there is something higher than being an effective cog in the economic wheel":

The problem isn't merely that the authors are looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. One subtle effect of books like this is to redefine human strengths as the ones that productive organizations in fact need. The authors encourage us to discover our strengths so that we can put them to use in our careers. Thus empathy makes one suited for sales (rather than, say, friendship or raising children); imagination makes one suited for formulating business strategy (rather than art or, if allied with other abilities, philosophy or science); and so forth. There is no suggestion that our strengths or virtues point to anything higher than our careers. The book implies, or at least encourages the reader to feel, that one should either redirect or neglect those strengths that have no economic application.

Hansen explains that "[s]mall organizations (including families) can experiment with giving their members a high level of autonomy; but this is much more difficult for large organizations." This would have come as no surprise to G.K. Chesterton, who raised precisely this point in arguing against the dangers of Big Business. Although Hansen doesn't use the term, the employes he describes - those for whom "[s]ubordination and drudgery are inevitably part of the job" - are living, breathing examples of Chesterton's "wage slaves."

The modern company in Corporate America does recognize the existence of human beings, and the necessity of satisfying their needs. However, the humans they serve are not the employees, but the stockholders; and the needs are not spiritual, but material - the bottom line is, indeed, the bottom line.
Hansen makes a telling observation about the change in the relationship between our work lives and, for lack of a better word, our "real" lives:

As late as the 1950s, most men saw their jobs primarily as a means of supporting their families, the most important thing in their lives. As the success of books like Now, Discover Your Strengths attests, many men and women now look to their careers to provide the central satisfaction or meaning in their lives.

Corporate America not only reflects this change in our priorities, it's been the agent of the new reality. And they expect us to put up with it, indeed to thrive in its toxic atmosphere. As Johnson says, when your cheese is moved you don't stand around wondering what happened; you accept and adapt to change, because there's nothing else you can do.

But that's where corporate martinets are wrong, for there is something we can do about it. There always is. For starters, we can reject the world painted by Johnson and his like-minded cronies. We can fight back against the idea that we're only puppets in a deist world, that we've been left alone to bob up and down in the cruel seas of life, buffeted by these incessent winds of change. By applying logic, reason and critical thought we can use our minds - our God-given minds, infused by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit - to determine the proper response to a new idea. And we can realize that there is a place to go for answers, and Someone Who can and will give us the straight scoop, unlike the impotent CEOs that live an implied existence in Johnson's maze.

Sometimes change must be embraced, or even championed (the civil rights struggle, let's say), but sometimes it must be fought - to the death if necessary (the heresy of the Reformation, to cite just one example). The past, just because it's old, doesn't always deserve to be swept under the rug every time something new comes along; the new, just because it's new, shouldn't automatically be seen as preferable. That might be the way Elizabeth Taylor treated her husbands, but human dignity deserves and demands more.

And you're not going to get it by eating cheese that's been left out in the open for too long. ◙