Deep Throat Returns:
Duty, Honor and Avoiding Grammatical
Pitfalls
9 December 2002
Tom Rick’s and Vernon Loeb’s
article in Sunday’s Washington Post on the managerially challenged Under
Secretary for Policy, Mr. Doug Feith, is fun reading.
Monday’s Post picks up the
theme with a hard-hitting Al Kamen piece on Feith’s editing practices, specifically
discussing Feith’s intense and visceral dislike of
the dangerous split infinitive.
I find it hard to always
remember what a split infinitive is.
Oops! I guess they’re like
appointed neo-conservatives policy-makers in general. They kind of sneak up on you, and then all of
a sudden, there you are, face to face with a warmongering chickenhawk,
feathers fluffed at the ready. Going to
change the world and make a lot of money if only you will do what you are told
without asking questions, checking the constitution, or calling in the law.
Management would probably be
more effective if they paid less attention to grammar and more to actual facts,
but what do I know?
Ricks, Loeb and Kamen provide pretty accurate snapshots of daily life in
OSD policy corridors. Al’s examples seem
to be from last year. Lucky for his
reputation as a journalist, flows of administrative guidance, followed by
quick-turn changes and clarification and retractions to that guidance, have
continued unabated in 2002, matching 2001’s vigor and querulous petulance. But it’s better now, because people don’t
react as much as they used to.
Working here is like living
in a Stanley Milgram experiment. Milgram is famous
for his experiments about learning and memory, and by extension, obedience to
authority.
Milgram’s 1970’s experiments are relevant in the
Pentagon today.
Milgram placed teachers and students in an artificial
environment where the “teacher” has an authoritative supervisor, and the
“student” is strapped to an electric chair.
The teacher must teach a maximum number of word pairs to the student,
and is encouraged by the supervisor to give students electric shocks of
increasing intensity whenever the student makes a mistake in reciting these
word pairs.
The results are
fascinating. Milgram’s
team expected to find humanity and humane actions, but instead they found that
most people just want to please authority figures, and will do almost anything
towards this end. While the “students”
in Milgram’s experiments were actually faking their
responses to higher and higher voltage, in fact, the “teachers” were quickly
and surprisingly administering what would have been deadly shocks to students
slumped inanimate in their straps, already unconscious from previously
administered electrical shocks.
Milgram’s students were memorizing word pairs. This approach might work well for Feith’s split infinitive problem and perhaps, increasing
general support for Pentagon foreign policy positions.
Milgram’s study sheds light on the human desire to obey and
gain rewards from authority figures. His
results, and those of other Milgram-inspired
experiments, show that when accountability for the “act” and the “consequence”
is fragmented or disconnected, you get both acts and consequences that are
inhuman, inhumane and plain wrong. Milgram sought to explain how some of the atrocities
committed by normal people in World War II.
To try to explain the
Human psychology may explain
the apparent inability of most people in the Pentagon and defense establishment
to deal honestly with some of our more aggressive authority figures. Specifically policy-makers who say war in
War against Al Qaeda of course, is another matter. Like split infinitives,
strategies for war against Al Qaeda and hunting down Osama are annoying, sometimes hard to pin down, and if
present in a paper or EXORD, apparently make it difficult to get it
signed out.
Our foreign policy-makers,
at least those working in the Pentagon, may be as intellectually and
strategically bereft as the Emperor
in the famous children’s story was naked.
The end result will be just as embarrassing for the new emperors of
Imperial America and a lot more expensive in treasure and honor for all the
citizens watching the parade.
It is actually still legal to
split infinitives, if “you want to really emphasize
something.”
We should all be thinking
about whether we want to -- honestly, with strength of character and hearts
full of patriotism -- assess the logic and motives of our political leadership,
and to -- consistently and boldly -- question the assumptions upon which these
policy-makers base their strategy.
If you don’t like those
split infinitives, there’s always the