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The First Law of Business

You know you’ve made it when a theorem or scientific law gets named after you…Fermat’s Last Theorem, the Pareto Principle, the Doppler Effect, etc. So how great must it have been to be Sir Isaac Newton? Not only did the 17th century mathematician create Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation but he is also credited with not one, not two, but three laws of motion, including the Newton’s famous Third Law: “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”.

So now, to create my own small legacy, I humbly introduce Dupree’s First Law of Business: “For every business rule there is an equal and opposite business rule”.

Virtually every business cliché has some countervailing platitude. For every coffee mug that says A Satisfied Customer is Our #1 Goal, there is a break room poster shouting A Happy Employee is Our Top Priority. So which is it? For every pep talk on Pivoting there is another one on Staying the Course. Think Strategically says one book, It’s All in the Detail says another.  Lead, no, Serve, scream LinkedIn memes. It’s confounding. Delegate but control, scale but customize, grow quickly but build profit, move at Internet speed but don’t act too quickly.

The consequences of the First Law of Business are so befuddling, in fact, that they demand a separate proposition devoted to what it means for good management, Dupree’s Second Law: “In the absence of reliable business absolutes, the single most important professional attribute is sound judgement”.

Individuals who can evaluate competing inputs and render good, thoughtful, business decisions are simply the best colleagues. This expresses itself most powerfully when those inputs conflict or when competing options seem equally desirable. It is vital when the information is unclear or when the decision is not between good and evil but between the greater of two goods or the lesser of two (or more) evils. It is brought to bear as often in deciding on inaction as it is action. It may not be the showiest of management qualities but it is the most potent. Workers with sound judgement are like athletes who may rarely make the individual highlight reels but somehow always seem associated with championship teams.

They are not swayed by passion or the buzzwords of the day. But with the information at hand, however imperfect, they consistently make reasonable choices based on the whole picture, not merely their direct self-interest. They constantly groom their business judgement through their own experience, good and bad, as well as their keen observation of colleagues.

Of course, the First Law tends to overstate things. Customer attention is not exactly the opposite of employee focus, nor is growth inconsistent with profitability. But commercial life routinely presents business people genuine discordance in priorities which they must learn to synthesize as best as circumstances allow. It takes double helpings of both energy and brains.

Almost 80 years ago F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Today, after two world wars, multiple global financial crises, the creation of the Internet, the information age, and postmodernism, it still comes down to that.

Keep your charismatic showmen; your showy iconoclasts, your radical innovators. Give me the team of men and women who can thrive in uncertainty and still lead with sound judgement day in and day out.

Still Goodbye Football for Me

It is football season again and several folks have asked me whether I am continuing my position regarding not watching NFL games live or on television.

For those interested, here is last year’s post in which I outlined my reasons:

Were I to re-write for 2015 I don’t think I would change anything except possibly to be a little harsher on the vast corporatism represented by the National Football League. Sadly, little else has changed for the good. I also might expand my tiny boycott where it would hurt the most…not simply abstaining from viewing the games but compiling a list of all the official NFL sponsors and deliberately committing to move a meaningful portion of my own purchasing to a non-sponsoring competitor. Look out Papa John’s and Dannon. You too, Nationwide and Hyundai.

Because it is still “goodbye football” for me.

“Do not go gentle, Jimmy”

isMy first foray into door to door grassroots campaigning came in the fall of 1980 when I boarded a bus full of other students in Boston and rode to Nashua, New Hampshire to walk leafy neighborhoods on behalf of Jimmy Carter’s unsuccessful presidential re-election campaign. Had I been more experienced in campaigning I might have noticed that there were far too few of us and we were far too uninspired for that point in an election year. Of course, Carter lost resoundingly to Ronald Reagan.

I suspect that historians will one day admit that Carter was neither quite as bad a president, nor Reagan quite as good, as is popularly held today, but I cannot contend that Jimmy Carter will go down as one of our great Chief Executives. The office seemed big and even in his best moments he seemed small and ill at ease in it. I have only had that feeling again once since, and that was with George W. Bush for whom the presidency always seemed like a man’s hat on a boy’s head.

No, Carter certainly wasn’t a great president. But as he announced this week, at age 90, that he has cancer, I experienced a surprising swell of admiration for him and I know why.

Jimmy Carter is a terrific retiree.

I know a little about this as I grow older myself and my professional efforts have morphed…if not into retirement, at least into something unconstrained by the conventional demands of my former corporate life. I’m moving on and as I do so several characteristics of Carter’s post-presidential career influence my own journey through the second half.

Exercise of Faith

Carter was a very public evangelical Christian as president and has been unembarrassed in suggesting that his personal spiritual convictions have shaped his views on public policy issues of all stripes. But at a time of life when many faithful are content simply to reinforce and protect our comfortable spiritual bias Carter demands that his faith and the messy world around him interact. It hasn’t always been pretty and he has created many detractors to his right and left but his faith clearly is something more than a mild palliative taken once each Sunday morning.

Intellectual Curiosity

Thinking is an adventure. There are many retirees whose world has become smaller with age but one gets the sense that Jimmy Carter’s world has continued to enlarge. Virtually every president, Democrat and Republican has been on the receiving end of Carter’s thoughtful, if unsolicited, insights whether on the War on Drugs, Guantanamo, Iraq, drone use, privacy, women’s rights, etc. and his personal involvement in the Carter Center has yielded results from North Korea to Cuba, from rigged elections to Guinea worm disease. It is an amazing testimony to mental acuity and the willingness to engage intellectually.

Breadth of Conviction

But mental acuity and strong opinions alone can simply produce curmudgeons and they just annoy rather than inspire. What generates affection for Carter is not the depth of his convictions but rather their breadth, by which I mean that his passion for purpose manifests itself across a broad range of activity and isn’t restricted to what is seemly and elevated.

If most Americans are asked to describe Carter’s post-presidential life, they likely remember him in a denim shirt with a hammer at some Habitat for Humanity construction site. While many celebrities restrict their good works to appearances at tony fund-raisers, Carter got dirty and modeled to America that sometimes as citizens it is simply about showing up on a volunteer workday.

It is a powerful image that speaks to us all. I may well not found a world-renowned peace center or win the Nobel Peace Prize, but I can lift a hammer or mow some grass…just like the President. For the things that make him a beloved ex-president are precisely those things that are accessible to all the rest of us semi-retirees: making the small efforts purely for the benefit of someone else.

So good for you, President Carter. I am glad I was there back in 1980. I hope you recover and on behalf of all of us semi-retirees, please keep it up.

            Do not go gentle into that good night

            Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

            Rage, rage against the dying of the light

Burn and rave, Jimmy, burn and rave.

The Three Secret Words

Having been married for well over thirty years I sometimes get asked what accounts for the longevity of a relationship. Of course there are so many factors that it is impossible to highlight any one or two things that insure matrimonial happiness. But I often use the opportunity to give people the three simple “secret words” which, if said often, with sincerity, while gazing into your spouse’s eyes, will 100% guarantee a long and loving marriage. The three words?

“I’m paying attention.”

Okay, one of the words is a contraction.

The point is that my wife knows I love her but what she doesn’t know is whether, at any given moment, I am actually paying attention to her. How, you might ask, could you ever be inattentive to someone you truly loved? I honestly don’t know but it happens, trust me.

And if it happens in your most intimate human relationship, it is likely common in interaction with schoolmates, friendships, work colleagues and other associates. In a world of relentless multi-tasking and uninterrupted connectivity to electronic media, the temptation to tune people out, to half-engage, is constant. But precisely because of that, we also have the opportunity to profoundly impress, because simply being mindful of others and truly present when interacting sends a message of respect which, over time, generates regard, even affection.  Because of our distraction-infested environment, even small investments of undivided attention yield huge returns.

Decades ago corporate bureaucracy, simple scale, and process-obsession were commonly blamed for workplace disaffection. Now, that sense of irrelevance has been democratized by inattentiveness in individual relationship. If you are a manager, a team leader, a member of a family, you know this. We declare our intentions to that colleague, friend or even spouse (“to love and to cherish, til death do us part”) and then we demean that intention by taking that call in the middle of a conversation, or constantly peeking over a shoulder to see who else has entered the room, or carrying on a conversation while looking at the computer screen.

I know because I’m the worst.

While most of us recognize this in ourselves, who among us is going to go cold turkey on our multi-tasking? It is simply unrealistic. But we do not have to toss away our cellphone or embark on a wholesale denial of distraction in order to make a change. Rather we simply commit to finding steadily increasing opportunities to surrender a potential distraction in service of a higher good, whether it’s turning your cellphone off during an important meeting, turning away from the computer screen to talk to a child, whatever. The discipline of attentiveness is not forfeiting distractions altogether; but it is conscientiously accumulating opportunities to narrow your field of attention if only for a limited amount of time. Even that is a challenge, but it helps to find somewhere to start.

Many years ago I had a much taller mentor. I used to think that part of my admiration for him was associated with his stature, but as I think back I realize that it wasn’t that at all. What affected me about him was not the fact that he was so tall, but that, because of his height, whenever he spoke he would very slightly incline toward me. In that little move I was made aware, if only subconsciously, that I was the recipient of a great voluntary gift: his undivided attention. Parents of small children do the same thing instinctively.

So try this very small little exercise: whenever you are standing around having a conversation with a family member, friend or co-worker, particularly if it is in a crowded room or another place where potential distractions exist, lean toward them ever so slightly, almost as if you were attempting to hear better. A very small change in body posture alerts you that your intention is to focus solely on the person with whom you are speaking, and doing so faintly reduces your field of peripheral vision which also reinforces to your brain that this interaction is an important one.

Over time those with whom you relate will get the sense that they always have your undivided attention, something increasingly rare in their daily experiences. And for you, this little practice also becomes a reminder to find opportunities to build a discipline of attentiveness in other parts of your life as well.

But don’t get creepy and invade your companion’s personal space. The posture change should be very small, natural, and almost unnoticeable. After all, it is not some grand gesture meant to persuade your companion that you are paying attention.

It’s a small gesture meant to persuade yourself.

The Commons Problem (or the Real Case For Culture)

08vespaEveryone likes the guy who figures out how to get things done: the fixers, the innovators, the Radar O’Reilly’s who develop the informal network of favors to cut through the bureaucratic silos and “make things happen”. When I was running a large sales organization I had plenty of those folks and they were often my most successful producers. They had figured out how to grease the system, who to call for an expedited approval, how to divert disproportionate corporate resources toward their pet accounts. By way of full disclosure, as a young salesperson I was probably one of those people myself.

I admired those teammates but to be honest, they scared me as well because I could not shake the thought that if everyone behaved in that same way, the company would inevitably collapse into chaos. The license to self-organize, to collaborate across boundaries and to innovate processes depends on a tight alignment between the self-interests of the individuals and the goals of the organization to which they belonged. We often take that alignment for granted but I knew full well that was a mistake to do so.

In 1833 William Forster Lloyd, an English economist, wrote a paper in which he described the behavior of herders who are all grazing their cattle on the same parcel of common land. An individual herder could make the independent decision that it is in his self-interest to add cattle to his grazing herd even though it would contribute to the quicker depletion of the commons grasses. He makes that choice rationally since the short-term benefit of his additional animal accrued to him alone while the negative long-term impact on the commons was shared across the entire group.

But if all the herders were independently making the same rational self-interested decision regarding individual gain and collectivized loss, then the commons would deteriorate at a far faster rate and everyone would suffer. This metaphor has come to be known as the “tragedy of the commons” and was later popularized in 1968 in an article by Gareth Hardin which set off a decades-long debate on exactly what this meant for ecology, population, pollution, political philosophy, social welfare, sustainability and on and on.

The “commons problem” is one of our most profound challenges for businesses, indeed all organizations. We want people who figure out better ways to do things, not simply people who do more of the same thing. Yet when self-interest is the compelling motivation those successes may simply reflect cutting corners which create more work for others, or engaging too many resources thereby depriving them from their peers. Their short term individual motivation may stunt rather than enhance the ability of the organization itself to grow. Modern collaboration tools may indeed allow new interactions among colleagues but if those interactions merely quicken the ability to exploit self-interested behavior, we haven’t really done much good.

“Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all” Hardin suggested. In modern business terms we might replace “freedom” with collaboration, delegation, innovation or any number of buzzwords to describe colleagues solving problems in more kinetic, boundary-busting ways. And for those of us raised on the extrapolations of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, the idea that self-interested motivation could be anything but good is disquieting. But every sales leader knows the salesman who would enthusiastically sacrifice company profit if it helped him overachieve his personal sales quota. Most managers have encountered score-carding problems where cross-divisional programs benefiting the entire organization would be rejected solely because individual executives could not agree on which departments would get to report the financial gain, a perverse restatement of the commons problem in which executives may rationally choose not to engage in the common good unless it maximizes his or her short term position.

A sea of thinkers since Hardin’s article have suggested numerous ways to minimize the impact of the commons problem. Hardin’s own conclusion was simply either regulating commons land or privatizing them altogether. However, within business organizations we have a secret weapon: our corporate culture.

Too often a company culture initiative is a managerial afterthought or an ineptly executed HR distraction. When it is managed poorly it is fair game to be ridiculed and derided. But our delight in pointing out poor execution should not trick us into dismissing the need for culture itself. A healthy common culture is the greatest tonic to unreserved self-interest. The governor against poor individual decision-making is the shared sense of belonging to a bigger enterprise with shared goals and long term values. Aligning the interests of the individual as tightly, passionately and genuinely to the interests of the firm is both the essential ingredient to real innovation and the preeminent responsibility of corporate culture.

How nice it would be if organizations adapted as fluidly and gracefully as the murmuration of a flock of starlings but that just doesn’t naturally happen. We require innovators at all levels pushing the boundaries of our bureaucracies and discovering quicker and better ways of doing things. But they must do so on behalf of the common welfare not just their own. Company cultures are built precisely to remind individual innovators of the corporate community to which they belong, and to provide the sure footing from which to channel their energies toward the common aspirations of the organization.

In an age where working across corporate silos is all the rage, don’t be fooled: the true leader’s job is not to knock down walls but rather to pour firm foundations.

Book and Poem

This week I finished one of the most arresting books I have read in some time, A New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s meticulously researched indictment of the racial caste system created in America as a result of the law enforcement, prosecutorial and sentencing changes brought about by the War on Drugs. I felt angry and ashamed that, as a citizen and voter, all this had happened during my watch. Ferguson, Staten Island and North Charleston surprise me now not so much at the violence and anger, but rather at the level of restraint shown by communities of color who have been so profoundly and systematically alienated from society and civil protections.

It was with this peculiar perspective that I recently reread an old favorite poem from William Butler Yeats. Written in 1918, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” is a tribute to Major Robert Gregory, an Irish aviator shot down while fighting alongside the United Kingdom even as Ireland was attempting to wrest its own independence from England. It is a brief, first-person reflection on the surprising motivations of an Irish airman as he faces certain death. It is not love of country, nor duty, nor personal gain, nor glory that drives him; he does not hate his enemy, he suspects the conflict he is a part of is essentially futile in any case. It is only a “lonely impulse of delight” that sends him skyward. He has done the math and nothing he has experienced or will experience, is worth altering his course.

Any Irishman who fought alongside the English in World War I was considered a traitor to Irish republicanism. To defend the brutal English institutions that kept Ireland in subjugation was inexcusable to nationalists. Thus the perspective of the poem’s Irish narrator is all the more highly charged, so much so that Yeats waited until 1920 to publish it in consideration of its political implications.

But now, as I reread it fresh from finishing Michelle Alexander’s powerful critique, I no longer hear in it the voice of a 20th century Irish airman fighting someone else’s war, but instead that of a 21st century African American police officer guarding someone else’s peace. Choosing to serve and protect the public, he guards those very institutions that produce the disaffected classes who no longer believe that citizenship extends to them.

The poem is a statement of profit and loss, weighing continued life against imminent death and choosing death. Like so many others I had been preoccupied with comprehending the narrator’s “lonely impulse of delight” when I first read the poem several years ago. What could draw one so powerfully to his own destruction? But perhaps the key to the poem is understanding instead what has made the accounting of a man’s past and future so cheap. It has all of the sudden become to me a profoundly sad poem, an upsetting one. Society endangers itself when entire classes of citizens do their own accounting and reason that there is little to live for, that circumstances will never change, and that the deck is too rigidly stacked against them.

In our history there have been those times in which the fraying of the social fabric has been enough to bring about reform and renewal. Let’s hope that this election cycle brings these big hard issues to public attention. For until we create a grassroots affection for real justice, we should not wonder at those for whom citizenship, the social order, possibly even life itself, are merely a “waste of breath”.

The poem:

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

William Butler Yeats

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

A Business Skill For Politicians

good_sorting (2) Years ago in Mississippi where I grew up, I heard a story about the backwoods fellow who had just been hired at his local post office. His first day on the job the postmaster saw the man sorting letters and parcels into alphabetical slots at blistering speed. As the postmaster watched the mail seemed to fly from his new employee’s hands. Amazed, the boss complimented the worker on his remarkable sorting prowess.

“You think I’m fast now,” the bumpkin cheerfully replied, “just wait until I learn to read!”

It’s an old joke, of course, but there is a tinge of reality in it. It is easy to be fast and decisive if you do not have to balance it with accuracy. And it reminds me of what I wish my politicians would learn from business people.

I do not think corporate executives automatically make good politicians. In fact, when I hear corporate leaders promote their business experience as they campaign for political office, I am skeptical. Running a government is quite different from running a company or deploying a product. In a business a good manager constantly redeploys resources from under-performing assets and moves them to higher return activities; they target the most efficient processes and most profitable customers. In a modern democracy, however, we expect the government to attempt to provide a basic set of rights and services to every citizen, something that is difficult, inefficient, and expensive, but fundamental to our social contract.

Yet commercial experience does promote one skill policymakers from both parties desperately require: the ability to understand and balance competing principles and facts. Each time a price is lowered a businessperson makes a calculation that he can acquire enough new customers to offset the loss of profit from the unit price reduction. He asks the question, what am I putting at risk with this price action and is it wise? Whenever a businessperson invests in a new product or service she balances the potential return on that investment against other opportunities which remain unfunded because of it. She asks, what am I putting at risk in making this investment and is it wise? Business people learn to balance the real world priorities of shareholders, employees and customers, recognizing that each affects the others.

In contrast we too often hear politicians venerate their principles as if they are religious absolutes existing independent of worldly contamination or contradiction. Principles should mark the beginning, not the end of debate and should never be used to justify concluding consideration when their proper role is to enable it in the first place. In reality political values are a set of propositions that help us work through the grubby process of governance and citizenship. Often those propositions compete: security vs. liberty, personal freedom vs. common good, justice vs. mercy, market forces vs. regulatory oversight, and so on.

These principles are not necessarily contradictions, but they are contestants for citizen attention at every given decision. It is not up to government to resolve them but rather to balance them over time and trust that successor generations will attend to the same. It is why we need leaders who are thoughtful and willing to compromise. In fact, it is why we need flesh and blood representatives at all: not because new problems keep popping up but because old problems are never truly solved, they are merely recalibrated to the demands of the current age. Every businessperson learns this; few politicians appear to have.

To the extent that a politician hides behind principle to forego real debate and genuine consideration of opposing views, we become, in Whitman’s words “large masses of men following the lead of those who do not believe in men.” For to eschew compromise solely on the basis of principle alone is not to trust the judgment of men to think, to consider, and to balance the competing imperatives of their age.

When I watch witless candidates today grinning at the ovation from some hackneyed applause line I often think back to that postmaster bumpkin of the old joke. I half imagine the politician to grin, raise his hands and shout to the crowd, “you think I’m a policy-maker now, just wait until I learn to think!”

Lose It To Use It

Empty-Giants-Stadium-New-Jersey Last August I wrote a blog post in which I declared I was embarking on a tiny one man boycott of professional football for the upcoming season ( My reasons for doing so seem almost quaint now given the parade of bad news and missteps that have continued to define the NFL’s football-industrial complex in subsequent months. My boycott took the form of a simple pledge not to watch any professional games this last season, live or on television, including those of my beloved Cowboys who made my pledge slightly more sacrificial by having a wonderful season in my absence.

Since then I have answered many questions about my little act of defiance. Some revolve around the boycott itself. Did I see it through? (Yes) Was it hard? (No) Did I miss football much? (Not really) The effort itself was about what I expected. But what I hadn’t anticipated was the surprisingly congenial set of ancillary personal benefits I experienced. I discovered what those who practice austerity have known for ages: value accrues when we intentionally change our routine and deprive ourselves.

This week is the beginning of the Lenten season of self-denial. For those who adhere to Christianity or, for that matter, any number of faith and ascetic traditions, abstinence, fasting, and austerity have long been powerful aids to the penitence, prayer and self-examination critical in the nurture of spiritual discipline. But for all of us, even for those who are secular, not spiritual, pilgrims there are less hallowed but still very important lessons in depriving ourselves every so often.

At best diminishing old distractions (like Sunday afternoon football) can make space for more important life passions or at least for the excitement of fresh new distractions. Investing a few found hours in something or someone is a profound statement.  We may find that making even minor changes in our routine generates an intentionality that is infectious. Mindfully considering deselection of one activity brings a healthy new willingness to consider lots of other things you do. Of course some intentionality, particularly in self-denial, can slip into an unhealthy obsession if our goal is to exert complete control of circumstance. But most of us suffer from a different ailment: we wonder if we can have any lasting direction at all in our jobs, families, communities. We need a reminder that though control may be out of our reach, influence is not, and one way to practice influence is to deliberately change small routines, reinvest bits of time and remain sensitive to the lessons we learn.

One of the comments I heard often during the season was that my boycott was hypocritical. I had stated that though I would refrain from watching professional games, I made exception for the Super Bowl and would continue to follow the season, even avidly, through sports news. For some this was a symbol of moral inconsistency; if I was going cold turkey on football it should be all football: games, reporting video clips, whatever. And certainly no Super Bowl.

While there are absolute moral positions (I don’t aspire to murder less, I aspire not to murder at all), I expect that in practice quite a larger number may be of degree. I cannot easily use no energy or non-renewable packaging or processed sugar but over the years I have pledged to use less and I (and the planet) have benefited as a result. For some moral crusades purity is demanded, but for many others, the first step needs to be just that, a first step. If we all want to save the planet we are not required to consume nothing, we simply all consume less.

How often in my own life is nothing at all attempted because everything cannot be accomplished? I don’t believe that the NFL is very worried about my little act of defiance. Perhaps they should be. Maybe next year I will pick 5 NFL sponsors and deliberately purchase their competitors’ products. And maybe ten or ten thousand or ten million others will do the same. But what I learned last season was that the very act of deliberate change in my routine was in and of itself a potent exercise for my life.

So go do something different.

Find something to change in your routine; an activity or circumstance to adjust for a defined period of time. Perhaps you give up vending machine snacks, or designer coffee for a month and give the savings to a local food bank or take your spouse or significant other out to a special meal with the proceeds. You decide.

Coworkers or Friends? 4 Criteria

the-office-entire-castYou and your coworkers are sitting in some bar in a business hotel in Cincinnati, Cleveland, or Chicago, unwinding after a long day of activities. As you find yourself enjoying the easy ambience, inside jokes, and shared experiences built up through the years you realize that you much prefer sitting here with them than watching Monday Night Football alone up in your room. Then the question hits you.

Are these my coworkers or my friends?

The conventional notion is that there are healthy boundaries between work, home and social life. The fear of spending too much time at work so makes some of us uncomfortable even speaking of work friendships as if it underscores our lack of personal balance. So, do coworkers only become friends if I choose to engage with them outside of a work setting? Should I feel guilty having relationships not shared by my spouse or the rest of my family? As men and women become broadly accepted as workplace peers can the emotional complications of a “work wife” or “work husband” be managed with teammates of the opposite sex?

And really, aren’t most of my coworkers just that…coworkers? Sure, but some work relationships will rise to such a level of familiarity as to demand a more thoughtful place within our emotional furnishings. How do you know which ones? As I think back on the colleagues that have built themselves into my life four recurring features come to mind:

Wishes you well for your sake

Many individuals may wish you well but, to borrow from Aristotle, the real friend is the person that “when he wishes a person good, wishes it for that person’s own sake.” A colleague is interested in my well-being not for whatever good it might do for him or the firm, but simply because he wants the best for me. The rules of fiduciary responsibility are not waived among colleagues. They must be hired, promoted, terminated, managed and followed as circumstances require, just like any other individual. But the true colleague exerts the effort to mind the inevitable tensions responsibly on behalf of both the firm and the friend’s well-being.

Takes you seriously

My work-friends respect me both as a professional and as a person. That means my contributions and opinions are appreciated but not patronized. Colleagues can and do disagree. After all, the old maxim is largely true, if two business people always agree one of them is unnecessary. But my perspective is requested, evaluated, supported when deserving and rejected when not. Mark Twain joked “the proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right.”

Not colleagues. Since they truly wish me well they both compliment and correct, encourage and dissuade as business reality demands. But all is done with an eye to building me up.

Is honest, but not necessarily blunt

We must always count on workplace honesty, but a work-friend will add to truth-telling a sense of candor and timing. A colleague never tells us an untruth, but neither does she feel obligated to tell us every true thing she thinks at the moment she thinks it. However valuable a golf tip, few of us would want it shouted out during our backswing. So it is with work colleagues who, by virtue of the fact that they spend so much time with us, can engage the right moments for the right discussions.

My son is a poet and he describes workshops in which new poems are shared among other writers. The first reading is always done by someone other than the author of the poem. It allows the poet to hear his work presented back to him in someone else’s voice. It is a beautiful description of the work of a colleague. He takes your own story and speaks it back to you at the time when you are ready and able to hear and discern it. Because he is your colleague he, better than anyone, knows when those moments are likely to present themselves.

Enjoys company, respects boundaries

Work-friendships are usually bounded by the workday at the office, factory, or shop. It makes being colleagues complicated and hard because those boundaries are real and important to home and family life. Work-friendships should be celebrated but never to the point that they diminish family relationships and responsibilities. Workplace friendships are also naturally burdened by organizational hierarchy, company fiduciary responsibility or departmental boxes which must be respected. It is not surprising, then, that among our many co-workers only a few rise to true work-friends.

But arrayed against those complications is the powerful fuel of shared experience. Business teammates often speak of having “been in the trenches” with each other and while it is trite to compare work with combat, the battle tempering of friendships is real. Some of the most powerful words spoken into my life have been from colleagues, and those words came out of an abiding affection for me built from common purpose. How sad if I had avoided, rather than pursued those work relationships.

It is this very peculiar nature of work friendships that should make them important and intentional. But most of all, the potential power of work-friendships should also cause us to communicate them to our spouse and family so that in our transparency we can reduce the mystery of the office and connect the emotional dots in a way that helps us all understand and enjoy each other.

Write down the names of the first two or three people that come to mind when you think about “work-friendships”. Then run through the four criteria and see how many fit. Are there other characteristics of a work-friend you would add to the list?

Does your spouse or significant other know the names of your work-friends and the important role they play in your life? If not, why?

Marfa Lights

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About 20 miles outside the small far west Texas town of Alpine there is the even smaller town of Marfa, Texas. For a place of roughly two thousand residents, Marfa has much with which to recommend itself: it’s the Presidio County seat; notable movies such as No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood have been made in and around Marfa; in the old Hotel Paisano you can still see where Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor stayed during the 1956 filming of Giant. Donald Judd, the great minimalist artist moved to Marfa from New York City in 1971 and the Chinati Foundation still oversees its expansive local collection of works from Judd and his contemporaries.

All well and good. But to most people Marfa is best known for one thing and one thing only: the mysterious Marfa Lights.

For over a hundred years local residents have claimed on clear evenings to see shimmering balls of light on the distant desert horizon southeast of town, flickering, darting, floating, sometime splitting into twos and threes. The lights are unpredictable but persistent and have become such a tourist attraction that Presidio County has shrewdly built the Marfa Lights View Park, a modern viewing pavilion on the highway nine miles outside of town.

Late one recent frosty evening at that very View Park my family and I peered into the desert in search of the mystery. Sure enough, out in the distance: a single orange pinpoint of light.

“There! It moved. Did you see it?”

Several were certain that the light was moving from side to side but in the largely moonless night it was impossible to determine any reference point in the distant darkness with which to confirm it. I chose skepticism instead, partially just to be contrary but also the glowing dot appeared to me more like the fixed porch light from some far remote ranch house.

But as the believers in the group expressed their conviction with more and more excitement I gradually began to think I saw some movement as well. Having come many miles into the middle of nowhere and several hours toward the middle of the night, I felt a genuine longing to forfeit my incredulity and experience the fabled Marfa Lights.

In the end I can’t be certain what it is I saw. I still think it was an isolated porch light in the vastness of the desert dark. Any perceived movement was likely just the result of collective confirmation bias brought on by a suggestively placed “viewing station”. But I do know this, there was something exciting and special to be all together as a family in that place peering into the black and encouraging each other to see something mysterious, unexplained and a little scary.

It is no great thing, of course, to see what you’ve been encouraged by others to see. We often count that as a vice not a virtue. But if there is a time when it is acceptable, then it is surely at the passing into a New Year. Marfa reminded me that it invigorates and ennobles us to stand together staring into the unknown and New Year’s Day is our annual “viewing station”. Each January 1 just for a moment we allow ourselves to gaze into the darkness of a yet unlit pathway with family, friends and colleagues, expectant and wondering together what awaits its traversing.

Maybe I saw the Marfa Lights and maybe I didn’t. All I know is that I was nourished by the shared experience with the people I love. As we navigate 2015 here’s hoping that we all have occasional roadside viewing stations within which to wonder and hope. It is how we move forward.

Happy New Year from The Stubborn Glebe.


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I Just Want Your Extra Time
Where strategy meets style
marketing, strategy, personal branding, stylist, cincinnati, fashion, photography, midwest, creative
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I Just Want Your Extra Time

Prince Image via Wondering Sound

I knew this would happen someday. After the too-soon deaths of Michael, Whitney, Amy, and so many others, I knew I would lose my favorite at some point. But I was totally unprepared for Prince’s death, news of which came yesterday via TMZ (how do they always know?). I was on a photo shoot and just happened to be browsing Twitter when the questions started popping up. Was it true? Was it a hoax? My knees were weak as I scrolled through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, desperately looking for proof that it was all a misunderstanding. My heart started pounding, then stopped completely when I read that his agent had confirmed the news: he was gone.

Anyone who has known me for more than five minutes knows Prince is my fave. My social media profiles accurately describe me as a Purple Rain aficionado. My ringtone has been “Kiss” ever since I figured out how to make “Kiss” my ringtone. I’ve dressed up as Prince for Halloween – and other occasions – multiple times. I have a playlist exclusively dedicated to the music of Prince and his many protégés. In kindergarten, I claimed purple as my favorite color because that’s what he wore. I made him a part of my identity.

If you asked me why, exactly, I couldn’t tell you. I admired his immense talent, his boldness, his style, his IDGAF attitude, his hair (I mean, come ON), his masterful side-eye, his endless creativity, his sense of humor, his prolificness. It seemed unfair, really. Who can play that many instruments? Write that many songs? Wear that much lace and lamé and make it look that damn GOOD? Who else has that kind of swag?

When the news of his death hit, family and friends texted me to ask if I was okay. Exes came out of the woodwork to check on me. My co-workers kindly allowed me to grieve in silence while I tried to digest the news. I had an ugly cry moment – inconveniently – in the car, while singing along to “Kiss” during a radio station tribute.

My musical genius of choice left behind a legacy that won’t soon be forgotten. It’s comforting to think that a piece of him lives on in all of his fans, and not least of all, in me.

1 Comment
  • Lisa

    April 24, 2016at11:13 am Reply

    It still seems surreal that he is no longer here. I still have the Hits 1 and 2 on cassette. Even after I digitize them, I will not get rid of them.

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Clubhouse Flooring Upgrades

We are pleased to announce the completion of the flooring upgrades in our Clubhouse Lobby and Main Banquet Room.  The custom carpet and luxury planking by J&J Flooring Group was installed by Giant Floor of Wilkes-Barre.  We look forward to hosting the next wedding or other special event in our new venues.

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Meganuera monyi, by Richard Stevenson

Well, I ain’t no chopper, baby.

Didn’t come to mist your crops.

I just got the drop on this lamb.

Gonna drop ‘im on those rocks.

Yeah, I’m gonna drop in for dinner,

get right at his innards. Gonna daub

my masticating mouth bits with his

Soft little fleece suit. Little fleece suit.

Got here through a wormhole, babe.

Ain’t May 2004 where I’m from, hon!

Sorry to cause so much trouble.

Sorry to bust your time/space bubble.

I’m just an eight-foot dragonfly.

Relax. Yer too skinny to scarf.

Don’t do cotton burritos in bikinis,

even itsy bitsy teeny weeny polka-dotted ones.

Fifties caught up with you, babe.

Cold war fantasies of giant radioactive

ants had you freaked.   I just decided

to visit, spin a few platters from the past..

Cop some fast food, cruise the valley

with my top down, so to speak.

Grab a sheep. Go on the lam

before heading back to my Cretaceous crib.

G-g-g giant d-d-dragonfly!

Don’t go flub flub flub

When I’m in flyin’mode. Just hover, hon.

Suck back a few sanguine shakes.

Meganuera monyi, Cretacious cutie.

Gonna sock it to you, babe,

in psychedelic moire colours,

all four wings ablaze!

Leda only had a Don Juan

gone-by-dawn swan, sweetheart –

a smooth talker, great lover maybe –

but he knocked you up, didn’t he?

I may be more mechanical,

But I can dance on a dime,

hover, feint left or right

better than your best boxer.

Hey! I’ve got compound eyes.

I see you comin’ and goin’.

Know all three of my right feet

from my left. Am totally tubular!

Fast shuffle, fox tot, waltz –

I got ‘em covered. Flap flap.

Don’t need a gat, pork pie,

Zoot suit, or any flim flam scam.

Zzz Zzzz Zzz. C’mon, honey,

Shake your money maker!

I’m the dude who can take you

to another era. Fly with me!

Richard Stevenson recently retired from a thirty-year teaching gig at Lethbridge College .  His most recent books are Rock, Scissors, Paper: The Clifford Olson Murders, a long poem sequence (Dreaming Big Publications, USA, 2017), and A Gaggle of Geese, haikai poems and sequences, ( Alba Publications, UK,2017 )

Posted on July 30, 2017, in Issue 20: The Mythos Planet and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.

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Writing, Organizing or Procrastinating

Hello from the Fog and Flame,

I am in the Fog and Flame working on getting organized for the coming week. It is always a hope that I have my ducks-in-a-row, but to be honest, as my students will surely confirm, there are times I am more on top of things than other moments. While my intent is always good (or at least, I think it is), those best intentions are not always realized. This past week I met with three of my four sections of this semester (I still have my capstone course of sorts) that will meet tomorrow evening. First, I must commend the #FogandFlame for the great work they do every time I come in here. If you have not been here yet, you are missing a real gem here in Bloomsburg. They are working hard to make their little stop on Main Street a premier meeting place. I have my office hours here on Thursday afternoons and evenings from 3:00-7:00 p.m.. In the meanwhile, check this out (www.fogandflame.com or @FogandFlame).

Today as noted, I am merely trying to get things organized for the time up to Spring break. If I can have all my work into BOLT for my students up through the third week of March by the end of the week, I feel I can focus on other things. I am working on the “flipped” concept of teaching for my Technical Writing course this semester. While I have been aware of the concept up until now, I have not taken the time to really implement it. Because my Technical Writing course is a smaller course, I think it could be the ideal venue in which to implement this pedagogy. It reminds me that I should try to catch up with a curriculum coordinator for whom I have a great deal of respect. It has been too long. She and I have spoken about flipped classes on a few occasions.

If I accomplish what I hope to accomplish, then it will be on to reading and writing and trying to finish up a book review by tomorrow evening or Tuesday morning at the latest. The issue of writing, ironically, in spite of all I do that involves writing, has become more of a difficulty for me. I am not sure if it is I feel incapable or frightened. It is a bit weird to me, but for whatever reason, much like my students, I am struggling to get started. So I have found all sorts of ways to work with it and about it without doing it. That is a problem for a number of reasons. Some of them obvious and some not so obvious. The main issue is that I have to publish. I have so much actually written, but I am petrified to send it out. Rejection happens, but R and R is not a bad thing. I also am fortunate to have some people work with me, so I merely need to do it. I need to listen to Nike I guess.

Actually, I am very excited about all of the classes this semester. I think the changes I have made in texts for my Foundations classes will work with the memoir paper more effectively. I am going to try to do some different things with The Cider House Rules this semester. I think the question about Prochoice versus Prolife is such a complex societal issue and many are not willing to look at the complexity of this issue. I am always reminded of a person, one who was both a friend and a floormate when I first went to college. He borrowed money twice to “take care of an issue” with his girlfriend. The first time I did not think much about it; the second time, I remember asking pointedly, “wouldn’t a condom be cheaper?” I realized I was not comfortable nor was I supportive of those who used abortion as a form of birth control. As I have worked with Irving’s book now, off-and-on, for 10 years, I have been continually amazed how he lays out this controversial topic in very different ways in the book and the movie (he wrote the screen play for which he received an Academy Award). In addition, I am doing some more technological things for their learning outcomes. It will be interesting to see how this happens as I am still formulating that assignment.

In my Writing for Multiple Media class, I am fortunate to have some returning students from the fall Writing for the Internet class. That was one of my best group three classes (part of the Professional Writing minor) and I am hoping to build on that this semester. Because I have two client groups that are the same as well as a template for the other three groups from something a group did last semester, I am hoping that this can be one of my best semesters at Bloom. While it will involve some work, I am hoping that it will be certainly worth the time and effort.

Well, while this has been part of what I need to do, it has also been a way to do the very thing I noted in my title. Back to writing and organizing.

Thanks to all who have read.

Dr. Martin (aka: Michael)

Published by thewritingprofessor55

I am a professor at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania and the director of and Professional and Technical Writing minor, a 24 credit certificate for non-degree seeking people, and now a concentration in Professional Writing and Digital Rhetoric. We work closely to move students into a 4+1 Masters Program with Instructional Technology. I love my work and I am content with what life has handed me. I merely try to make a difference for others by what I share, write, or ponder through my words.

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Example Color Tweak

One of our couples, Arlene and KJ, fell in love with our Ani L’Dodi Ketubah. But they wanted a slight color change, so that the Ketubah would have without blue nor purple. Here is the original:

Ani L'Dodi Ketubah

And here it is, with without blue nor purple, for Arlene and KJ:

Ani L'Dodi - Changed Colors

Back to the Main Ketubah Gallery!

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Tag Archives: 1877

“The Equal of Persons (?) Gibson and Loomis” 1877

Equal persons 18 November 1877

The Wasp’s first anti-Chinese cartoon, The Equal of Persons Gibson and Loomis, appeared on November 18, 1877, six months after the paper opened for business. It was a “caustic response” to Reverends Gibson and Loomis who offered positive testimony to the “good character” of the Chinese immigrant in April 1876 before the Committee of the Senate of the State of California. The committee was a legislative body that held hearings on the social, moral and political effect of Chinese immigration[1] (West 128: Internet Archive). They were part of a San Francisco press that “lambasted pro-immigration ministers as hypocrites” (Paddison 527).

The month-long hearing’s purpose debated the effects of Chinese immigration and sought to determine if the Chinese “advanced or hindered “Christian civilization.”” Most of the testimony was stacked against the Chinese.  Foregone conclusions were accepted as fact. The Rev. Otis Gibson, along with Presbyterian Augustus W. Loomis and a few other Protestant ministers testified on behalf of the Chinese asserting that the Chinese “would pose no danger.” The reverends staunchly believed that the anti-Chinese agitation in the community was stoked not by race, but by religion and blamed Irish Catholics [2] as the active agents in the unrest (Paddison 524).

The Reverend Otis Gibson, in particular, was well known as  San Francisco’s “most outspoken white defender of the Chinese” (Paddison 522).

Keller’s four-part drawing confronts the witnesses’ pro-Chinese testimony with images of Chinese engaged in unseemly activities.  In the top left panel, Keller includes a Chinese male with an ax who chases after a female –  a scene of violence to counter the assertion that “they are peaceful.”  Top right, three malnourished Chinese men dine in squalid, decrepit living conditions – an exception to the statement “they are clean.” Bottom left, to disavow the claim “they are honest” a  Chinese man flees with two birds he has stolen. A gun-toting white man is in pursuit. In the bottom right panel, The Wasp lampoons the Chinese immigrant’s attempt to assimilate as ridiculous, and attempts to “raise the specter of miscegenation.” The panel shows “white woman with a Chinese husband and Chinese children” (Paddison 528). Keller refers to Reverends Gibson and Loomis in his captions as “charlatanical [sic] divines” (West 129).

There are contradictions in the image, however.  The male chasing the woman is not dressed in the same dirty, tattered clothing seen at top right. The three gaunt men eat from bowls while rodents scamper on the floor, presumably their next meal, but the immigrant thief shown bottom left is stealing chickens. Why pilfer poultry when a free, plentiful supply of rats and mice were available?  This first attempt falls short in consistency compared to the anti-Chinese messages that would be finessed in later Keller images.

[1] The entire testimony can be found at Internet Archive.org

[2] Joshua Paddison provides a thorough examination of anti-Irish Catholic tensions between Protestant nativism in San Francisco, similar to the tensions among Protestants, Republicans, and Democrats in New York City.  Paddison examines early anti-Irish racism in California and how the Irish exploited the Chinese to counteract that racism –  capitalizing on labor competition as a means to unite and to assert their place as white men alongside the vast majority of Christian Caucasians who wanted the Chinese driven out.

“The First Blow at the Chinese Question” 1877

Cartoon showing white worker punching a Chinese man
“The First Blow at the Chinese Question” – 5 December 1877 by George Frederick Keller for The San Francisco Illustrated Wasp

Readers of the San Francisco satire magazine The San Francisco Illustrated Wasp did not receive a balanced view of the Chinese in their cartoons or accompanying articles. The readership of the magazine lived with and believed in the terror of white unemployment caused by cheap Chinese labor. They expected and received a press that was sympathetic to their concerns.

“No variety of anti-European sentiment has ever approached the violent extremes to which anti-Chinese agitation went in the 1870’s and 1880’s. Despite laws and treaties promising federal protection, “lynchings, boycotts and mass expulsions still harassed the Chinese after the federal government yielded to the clamor for their exclusion in 1882” (Higham 25).

Steadily, the Democratic Party, fueled by an infusion of “southern exports” and white “Workingmen’s Party” members merged into a powerful force to treat the Chinese and other minorities in the West with “similar brutality in legislation, in land policy, and in labor practices” (Pfaelzer 58-60).

It was easier to justify the violence, the driving out, the boycotts and mistreatment of the Chinese when they could be turned into something less than human. The labor issue, one of the six categories Richard S. West showcases in his book, was the focus of The Wasp’s first anti-Chinese, pro-white labor cover, The First Blow at the Chinese Question.  West prefaces the image by acknowledging that 15,000 men out of work in San Francisco alone, added to the white labor agitation. The Chinese immigrant was made to be the scapegoat (West 156).

A sturdy-looking white man wearing a trade apron, and two other laborers behind him have entered Chinatown. They encounter a Chinse man on the sidewalk. In one hand, the lead worker carries a sign, “Working Men’s Procession.”  With his right arm, the lead workingman lands a punch directly into the face of the Chinese immigrant. The blow knocks his victim off balance. The Chinese man’s long queue spirals outward from the impact.  His oversized tunic extends past his arms, covering his hands. The Chinese man does not curl his fists in to strike back. Keller has neutralized this victim.

Another Chinese immigrant stands behind a storefront door or window and reacts in horror. He is distorted and ethereal. His whole body is aquiver, as if he is being vaporized, like a genie returning to a lamp. His fluid contours suggest he is fading away. This second Chinese figure is startled and his queue reacts in the same manner as the man under attack. He holds a gun by his side, but he makes no attempt to raise the weapon in defense. He is unable to protect his territory, his placement inside the rectangular border limits his power.  The frame suggests he is reduced to one dimension, a poster or piece of wall art.

As Lenore Metrick-Chen suggests, it was fashionable for Americans to collect  Chinese art, but acceptable to exclude the Chinese people.  The Wasp suggests that the Chinese belong on walls, but not in the streets.

Unlike Nast’s portrayals of the Workingmen’s Party, Keller’s representation of Causacian labor are generic and do not possess brutish features. Their behavior says otherwise.


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At the national party congress of the governing populist right-wing Progress Party in Norway in May, the assembled party delegates adopted resolutions calling for state control of Norwegian mosques in the name of preventing “radicalization into violent extremism.” The Progress Party (FrP) also adopted resolutions calling for the Norwegian state to introduce compulsory Christian prayers in public schools, for a national ban on the wearing of the Islamic headscarf (the hijab) for pupils under the age of sixteen in public schools, and for a national ban on circumcision of male children. In other words, the run-up to the Norwegian parliamentary elections in September 2017, which will make it clear whether the right-wing coalition government of the Conservative Party and the populist right-wing Progress Party will fall or be returned to power, is in full swing. And as it has since the mid-1980s, the FrP will run this parliamentary election campaign on a platform of a politics of fear and division—targeting immigrants, in general, and Muslim minorities, in particular.

It has long been known that Muslims constitute the proverbial public enemy number one for right-wing populists across the Western world. What is new and relatively unprecedented in the Norwegian context, however, is the active embrace and instrumentalization of what Rogers Brubaker has referred to as “Christianist secularism” by Norwegian populist right-wingers in government.

Given that Norway happens to be among the most secularized countries on earth by any standard measure developed by classical secularization theory (with steadily declining Christian church membership, attendance, and baptism), what Norwegian populist right-wingers offer is, of course, a culturalized Christianity largely devoid of any substantive content relating to faith. In addition, they offer a nationalized Christianity said to embody all liberal virtues relating to gender equality, LGBT rights, secularism, freedom of expression, and children’s rights, which particular marked minorities are constitutively rendered as embodying opposition to.

The logic of securitization of Islam

We fool ourselves if we think that the governmental logic at work here is exclusive to populist right-wingers in our age. Scholars have long noted the centrality and ubiquity of the “securitization of Islam” that accompanied the onset of the disastrous Global War on Terror (GWOT) from 2001 to 2008. We live in the long shadow of that disastrous war.

Across Europe and the United States, the securitization of Islam has unleashed what Arun Kudnani has insightfully referred to as a generalized “radicalization optic.” In the present times, fraught with fears and anxieties relating to the neoliberal state’s seemingly decreasing ability to offer everything from material to existential security, the securitization of Islam and radicalization optic fixate the suspecting state and its disciplinary apparatuses on the threatening figure of the potential “radicalized Muslim.” The radicalized Muslim is most often male, but has increasingly also come to include females.

Given the lack of a stable and coherent profile of the terrorist, the net of suspect communities is often cast wide and far. In Norway, as elsewhere, the suspecting state now currently funds a plethora of initiatives at national, regional, municipal, and civil society levels designed to counter “radicalization.” Though experts would still be hard pressed to offer any conceptual or definitional clarity about what exactly radicalization entails, a significant industry of security and counter-radicalization consultants, terrorism researchers, and the proverbial courageous Muslims “standing up against extremists” have emerged with extensive funding from the state and national research foundations. In Norway, there is a particular paradox in all of this, given that the only recent terrorist attack on Norwegian soil resulting in mass casualties was perpetrated by a Norwegian right-wing extremist by the name of Anders Behring Breivik in 2011.

Though not by any means erased from national memory, these attacks have effectively been rendered inconsequential for Norwegian society through a process of selective erasure of the far-right and Islamophobic ideas that inspired Breivik. It is arguably this process of erasure and selective remembrance which led the Norwegian Police Security Services (PST) to the absurd assertion to the effect that, “so far, Norway has not suffered from violence and terrorism by Islamist groups or right-wing extremists [sic] in the same way as some other countries in Europe” (from the preamble to its latest Annual Open Threat Assessment, 2017).

Norway has seen no less than two Government Action Plans against Radicalization and Violent Extremism (2010 and 2014). It is in this context worth noting that it was salafi-jihadist extremism and not right-wing extremism which provided the impetus for both Action Plans. Since 2012, the main concern of the suspecting state and its security apparatuses has been the recruitment of Norwegian “foreign fighters” to salafi-jihadist terrorist organizations, such as ISIS, and the al-Qaida-linked Jabhat an-Nusra (now, Jabhat Fateh al-Shams) in the bloodlands of Iraq and Syria, unleashed by the onset of the war in Syria in 2011. According to current estimates from the Norwegian Police Security Services (PST), some ninety Norwegian Muslims have travelled to Syria and Iraq as foreign fighters since 2012. The PST believes eighteen have been killed in action. The per capita numbers place Norway in the medium range among Western European countries.

The specter of salafi-jihadist “foreign fighter”- recruitment since 2012, not the actual right-wing extremist terrorist attacks in 2011, led to the government-initiated introduction of parliamentary amendments to the Norwegian General Penal Code §147c and d in 2013. These amendments criminalize incitement or recruitment to a terrorist act, training for the purpose of executing a terrorist act, and financing a terrorist act, with a penalty of up to six years.

Framing radicalization

In the cross-ministerial 2014 Government Action Plan against Radicalization and Violent Extremism, radicalization is understood as “a process whereby a person to an increasing extent accepts the use of violence as a means to achieve political, ideological or religious aims.”

The definitions of radicalization adopted by the Norwegian government seem to predispose one to read and interpret radicalization in general, but particularly regarding people of Muslim background, in and through an analytical framework which emphasizes ideological rather than social and psychological factors. In my ethnographic research on cooperation between state authorities and Muslim civil society actors in Norway in the field of counter-radicalization (which I conducted under the auspices of a Norwegian Research Council (NRC)-funded international project on “Muslim diversity and Governance of Islam” through 2012), I found that coordinators in this field at both regional and municipal levels, among Muslim civil society partners and the Norwegian police, were mindful of its problematic connotations and potential for stigmatizing perfectly democratic and legitimate ideas and activities. They deliberately and consciously avoid the very term “radicalization.” In so doing, they engage in what one may refer to as a “practical refusal” of a now ubiquitous term in government and media circles in Norway.

Senior Norwegian police officials working in this field have also gone on record pointing to the present government’s greater interest in pursuing work against potential “Muslim” extremism than right-wing extremism.

With a few notable exceptions, Norwegian terrorism researchers have not had access to Norwegian salafi-jihadists as primary sources. But if the available data on the social backgrounds of individuals attracted to salafi-jihadism in Norway in recent years is anything to go by, a much stronger emphasis on processes of social marginalization, exclusion, and a criminal-jihadist nexus as vectors in radicalization seems warranted.

Counter-radicalization and the populist right-wing politics of fear

If you ask the hordes of communication advisors employed by the current Norwegian government, Norwegian counter-radicalization has been a success. Recruitment of foreign fighters reached a saturation point in 2014, and is now down to practically zero. The small salafi-jihadist nucleus which once existed in Norway in the form of the salafi-jihadi group the Prophet’s Ummah has practically disappeared from the map as a result of a series of criminal prosecutions, police surveillance operations, and Muslim civil society counter-mobilizations. To date, there has not been a terrorist attack perpetrated by salafi-jihadists in Norway. It does not detract from these achievements of those who worked systematically to counter violent extremism in Norway to note that there is, of course, no way of knowing what would have happened in the absence of the full weight of the disciplinary apparatuses of the suspecting state being brought to bear on Norwegian salafi-jihadists and their limited number of sympathizers.

The recent resolution adopted at the governing populist right-wing Progress Party’s congress, calling for increased “control” of Norwegian mosques, speaks to the illiberalism that authors have identified as an essential feature of right-wing populism in our time. It ignores the simple and by now reasonably well-documented fact that recruitment to salafi-jihadism and foreign-fighter activities in Norway has by and large happened outside of mosques. (There are many reports of salafi-jihadis having been kicked out of Norwegian mosques.) There is every reason to think that Norwegian mosques have already for quite some time been closely monitored by the state’s intelligence apparatuses, and that Norwegian mosques and Muslim civil society organizations have by and large willingly cooperated with the state on counter-radicalization.

What current standard and popular works on right-wing populism, such as those of Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser and Cas Mudde, fail to disturb, however, is the all-too facile complacency of liberalism itself. Right-wing populism may not necessarily be as antithetical to current varieties of liberalism as one would like to think, but actually already implied and invested in it. After all, the suspecting state and the myriad ways in which it constructs its constitutive “others” have a rich genealogy in liberalism itself. The defense of “liberal values” has long served as marching orders for right-wing populists across Western Europe.

Seen in this way, the “radicalization” of the suspecting state that right-wing populists and their politics of fear represent in our time may merely represent a further development of templates of othering provided in and by liberalism itself. After all, liberalism in and of itself did not prevent the routinization of a Carl Schmittian “state of exception” and the gradual unmaking of principles of due legal process in terrorism cases in the United States in the context of the Global War On Terror.


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From Tarmac to Trails

Some of you might have read the blog I wrote last year where I decided to give up racing and just focus on endurance riding. And focus on endurance riding I did indeed, with some pretty epic ‘wins’… and some pretty epic ‘fails’ as well. And in fact, it was after one of those ‘fails’ that this story came about… but let me back it up a little bit first.

The beginning of The Beast

Some people call their bikes such lovely names. I call mine The Beast, because it’s a suitable name for it. She’s a 15km monster hardtail which my husband and I picked up as a joint Christmas present for each other a couple years ago. The entire goal of the bike was to be able to ride trails with our kids, so we grabbed one after the Christmas sales, with little to no knowledge of mountain bikes. This one had no defining features which made it stand out, other than it didn’t cost a fortune and didn’t have bad reviews. And then after we purchased it, life got in the way and it sat in the garage until late last year.

The Beast: All 15+kg of glory

After spending five weeks riding a heavy CX bike around Copenhagen last year, I found when I jumped back on my light roadie I was stronger. Much stronger. So integrating this into Marty’s training plan for Sydney- Melbourne I rode the CX and the MTB on the gravel roads and fire trails, and saved the roadie for the much longer rides.

After Syd-Mel was over the boys decided it was time to start getting me out onto their favourite type of ride – the single track. Which meant a lot of walking for me, and a lot of them laughing at me. Turns out roadie skills are completely different from MTB skills. And given I’d never really ridden a MTB before, well, let’s just say it was pretty hysterical. And awkward. Like a baby giraffe, but on a bike.

When they name their Strava rides after you…

After that first MTB training day, I think we all realised where my skill level at: pretty much near zero. Even as a kid I only rode a ‘basket bike’, and the first bike I bought (at the tender age of 10) was a road bike, so legitimately it wasn’t ‘just like riding a bike’ for me. It was starting from ground zero.

But then one event led to another event … led to my exhaustion and endurance burnout in January. And I was off the bike for nearly a month, aside from the Audax Alpine Classic.  After not being even sure I’d make the Classic this year, I managed to get myself up the back of Falls and into what I fondly refer to as ‘the Watermelon Checkpoint’ at the top of Falls Creek. It was here I met Meg (aka: The Wholesome Athlete) who, after a number of Instagram chats, suggested we should team up and look at The Pioneer.  Mostly because, as she said, she couldn’t find anyone else crazy enough to ride with her. And she’d heard I was on the ‘crazy epic adventure let’s do it’ side of things. So I looked it up:

  • Teams of two (so far so good)
  • 6 day stage race (a bit longer than I’d done before, but do-able)
  • 430km with 15,500m of vert (erm… that seems like a lot of climbing. But hills ARE the way right?)
  • On the MTB (oh crap)

Right. So I’m going to have to actually learn to ride the MTB.

Skills. We need skills.

While I was doing okay holding my own with the guys on the fire trails, once we hit single track it was pretty much game over. And I found that trying to keep up with them was (possibly) teaching me bad habits without really having a solid understanding of handling myself on the mountain bike. So after a full recovery post Alpine Classic, I signed up with the Bendigo MTB club for the women’s skills session, run by the ex-Australian champion MTBer Jo Wall. The skills session was great, there was a heap of things I hadn’t really thought about in terms of my positioning, the bike itself, and how they combined differently than the roadie, so it was definitely worth heading up to Bendigo for some training.

Skills training day: highly recommended!!

Then on the Tuesday I had a crack at the 10km summer series race, which was heaps of fun (and gave me a chance to hit a new personal best for highest heart rate (185 average, 194 high. That HURT). Oooh, this is going to be harder than I thought!

After that I tried to get as much practice as was possible. Dan Hale and Steve Cod were my main men here, and Dan would spend most Tuesday nights ‘coaching’ me out on the Wombat MTB trails. Then Saturday’s I’d either hit up the CX for some gravel grinding, or more MTB practice with the Wombat Mountain Bike Club lads. I signed up to race the Wombat Classic, but then that was cancelled (Dan later said this worked in my favour as it would have been a hard 50 to start out with, given my still significant lack of single track skills). So I kept chipping away, trying to get out at least one time a week (ideally two) on the MTB. They nicknamed me the ‘giggling assassin’ due to, well, my hysterical laughter on the trails as I learned how to approach log rolls, jumps, drop offs, and other assorted obstacles.

Dan explaining my likely trajectory if I took the next jump wrong…

Some nights this went fantastically, and I felt like I actually was flowing through the tracks. Other nights it felt like I was exhausted just trying to stay upright, and steering into corners, knee thrust out like a roadie again, leaning my body into the corners and then nearly wiping out.

With every rough night on the trails the self doubt would creep in. That insidious voice in the back of my head telling me to give up, go back to the road, that this wasn’t for me. I was too old to start learning, who was I kidding. With this (lack of) new found confidence I went to The Pioneer info night in Richmond, and realised that it wasn’t a technical course and was designed to test endurance. I could do that!

But what I couldn’t do was afford it. Meg and I were looking at a cost of around $10,000, including flights, accommodation, and the entry fees. On top of that I’d need a new bike, as there was no way The Beast could handle this kind of event. So it stuck in the back of my head as a ‘one day that’d be amazing’… but probably not today. And we agreed we would keep looking around for other adventures we could do. Meanwhile, I’d keep learning how to ride.

During the Gippsland Gold I asked Marty about my next race idea: The Golden Triangle Epic. It was about 5 weeks away, would I be ready in time for it? He said yes, so I signed up that week. And then continued the training regime I had cooked up for myself: Tuesday with the Wombat MTB Club (giggling assassin training), Thursday climb night (where I would get my butt handed to me every climb, but managed a bag a few PBs towards the end of the season), then staying on the gravel roads as much as possible to keep up the strength training (see Jem’s blog for some of our adventures). I knew there wasn’t much of a chance I’d overtake anyone on the single track, so Marty’s suggestion was to hammer the climbs and the firetrails to make up ground there.

A few days before the race I started getting encouraging messages from friends who had seen my name on the start list. Along with advice on how to race it, which was to just have fun out there and keep smiling. During one ‘any advice?’ chat with Warren Smith (Waz) he suggested ditching the hydration pack idea and going with water bottle drops instead. I expressed concern at this as my cages weren’t tight enough and my bottle had a tendency to pop out. He said I could borrow his cages and bottles, and I jokingly said how about I just borrow your bike, save you the effort of taking the cages off.

He said yes.

My son called it the Rainbow Bike.

So the night before the race I picked up a 10.5kg proper xc racer. A quick spin on some local gravel confirmed that it was indeed amazing and that I would properly fly on this thing.

The Golden Triangle Epic

Cue race day morning. Max and the kids drove me up to Bendigo, and then had plans to hang out during the day and then see me at the finish line. A bit of confusion, stress, and a few terse moments later, and I was dropped off at registration. There were riders EVERYWHERE, and I was a bit overwhelmed. But registration was a breeze, bottle drop no problem, and the guys had sent me a text saying where they had set up. So off I went, just in time to watch Marty, D’Wayne, Adrian, and Hayden head off on the men’s 100km event.

With nearly an hour until my start time, I picked up a coffee, got my bike ready, and then tried to just chill. Soon enough it was go time, and I lined up near the start, trying to find the women who would also be racing. I looked up and spotted Jo Lythgo of the Bendigo MTB club (and who I had met at the women’s race in February) so moved up to where she was hanging with the other women. I then spotted Jo Wall (who Jo Lythgo referred to as ‘pro Jo’, she was ‘amateur Jo’) and waved at Purdie Long who was also doing her first MTB race after her mammoth achievement of riding the Indy Pac ride a few weeks earlier. A few nervous chats later it was race briefing time. I tried to take in as much as possible, but literally caught the following words: watch for the bump under the bridge, spaghetti junction, checkpoint Charlie… spaghetti, powerlines, something something, over the bridge, and you’re done. I looked at Jo, who shrugged her shoulders. She knew the course and some of those words made sense to her, but still it was a lot to take in. With that, the first wave of guys went off, with us following a little bit afterwards.

The first part of the race is a bit of a blur, or a bit of a dust storm. It was so dusty out there, and with a stack of riders flying through it was had to see anything at all. Eventually we hit the first climb and the roads opened up, so off I went up the climb, passing riders as I flew up the hill (see this YouTube clip to get an idea of what the first 4:30 of the race was like). This was pretty consistent throughout the first 10km or so, any incline or fire trail and I was off like a shot, trying to keep Jo in my sights as she also powered up past all the guys. I got past her after the first checkpoint, but then we hit some single track. Jo yelled out behind me that it was going to get rocky, and the guy in front of me laughed as I yelled back ‘you mean rockiER?!’ as he agreed that it had been pretty bumpy so far. But she was right, and from behind me she yelled out what lines to take on the way down, and with a ‘whoop I didn’t die!’ I made it through. We traded places a few more times, and then the two of us managed to break away from the pack around 17km in. Along the firetrail, I suggested maybe we could work together, which she said was a great idea. I suggested I’d help drag us along the fire trails and climbs, then just before it hit single track she could take the lead. And off we went… until we hit “The Climb from Diamond” and the road went up, down, and then up again. Once it flatted out a few km later I glanced over my shoulder… and realised I was alone. Whoops.

So off I went again, having no idea how the rest of the race would go. I had already lost half a gel at around the 13km mark as the gel bottle had flown out of my hand, but managed to get the other gel in me just before half-way checkpoint so was doing pretty good. The biggest challenge had been trying to get water in, as I needed pretty smooth fire trail before I felt confident enough to reach down and get the bottle out… but that smooth fire trail was also my ‘attack’ section, so it was mostly sip, sip, back in, and GO!! I had put my average heart rate on the Garmin screen, and looking down noticed that I had averaged 169 for the first half of the race. That’s not too bad, I thought, and I wasn’t feeling sore, cramping, or tired, so rolling through checkpoint Charlie at 25km I changed to my full water bottle, two more gel bottles, and off I went.

I ended up behind a pack of men who were ticking along nicely, so I pulled in behind them and took it easier for a bit. And with that easing off my hot foot flared up. OH COME ON I thought, seriously I’ve only been riding for 90 minutes! But no, turns out my feet forgot that they only kicked in during long endurance riders and started burning then and there. Whatever, time to suck it up, and keep riding behind the guys.  But once they hit the hills, I found I was struggling to maintain my balance at the pace they were going (since when did I become so strong on the climbs??). The second the climb opened up to a wider track I let them know I was passing, and with a couple other guys we all took off up the hill. More downhill tracks, and then I spotted the powerlines. Now, what had the guys mentioned about powerlines? Think Tiffo think, there was something important here…

Oh yeah. Another climb. THE climb. Now I remember. Something about once you see the powerlines it starts climbing, then it just keeps going.

So up I went. And what I really loved about this event was the guys attitudes towards being ‘chicked.’ Coming from a road racer background, let’s just say that many (not all, but most) guys have a bit of an issue being overtaken by a woman, especially on a hill climb. Not these guys (or, if they did, they didn’t have the breath to say anything). More often than not on this ride they were cheering as I went past. And if I hit a tricky section (as I did later on, a few gullies leading to sharp pinches) they would yell encouragement as I battled up the short rises. When I hit my ‘snail single track’ sections, I’d hear them catch up behind me, and yell back ‘sorry, I’ll pull over as soon as I can’ to which they’d call back ‘no worries, you’re doing great!’ This more than anything made the race incredibly fun, and helped me stay very positive even when I was suffering later on.

A few kms later and I rolled through checkpoint Charlie for the last time. Only 11kms to go, and I’m feeling amazing! No cramps, no drama aside from my feet being on fire, but that’s (unfortunately) becoming my norm, so I could deal with it and keep pedalling. Rounding the corner, I spotted my first woman rider since Jo at the 17km mark.

And the chase was on.

But it wasn’t pretty.

Turns out that last 10km of the course are THE WORST 10km of the entire race. Lovely open firetrails gave way to rocky single track, pinchy climbs, windy roads, and other assorted obstacles which, in my increasingly fatigued state, became more and more difficult. And with that came back that insidious voice again. This is too hard. It’s too hard to chase her. She’s probably not even in your category, look at her, she’s young, you’ll never catch her, might as well just give up. Give up. Give up. My speed got slower, and slower, and I started making stupid mistakes. Wrong lines, ugly too slow cornering. Eventually I hit an incredibly nasty pothole on a wide open track (looked at it, said to myself do NOT ride into that… and then proceeded to hit it square on) which nearly bounced me off my bike, caused me to slam my left hand into the handlebars, and then sent the back of the bike flying up to hit me square in the butt. And knocked some sense back into me.

All right. Enough of this. Let’s finish this stupid thing.

So the chase was back on. I’d come close, then lose her again, then closer, and closer… and finally on a wide section of track I came up next to her. She looked over, face full of pain as well, and we both agreed that it would great if this was OVER RIGHT NOW please. Please let it end. So I took the lead, and off I went, with her right behind me. But fatigue was kicking in now, and the track wasn’t smooth enough for me to get my gel out, I was just hanging on at this stage. Another km or so later I saw a split in the track: A-line or B-line? Hard or easy? I chose the C-line, and stopped right between them. My heart rate hadn’t dipped below 175 for the last few kms, and I was starting to feel pretty bad. So I took a break, had a gel and some water, and expected the other woman rider to fly past me at any moment. But she didn’t, so I clipped back in and started to head down the B-line, only to see her come up behind me and hit the A-line… and get stuck!

That was all I needed, I hammered past her and on to the trail, knowing there was only a few kms left in the race. I hoped. With just over 2km left to go it was up and over the bridge, and then onto tracks that I recognised from the women’s series. I was nearly finished! I tagged onto some guys in front of me and away we went towards the finish line. “We’re nearly done!” one yelled out behind me. “I know!” I yelled back excitedly, and we hit the Sidewinder Shortie section on the way to the finish. I knew even if she was right behind me, it was all single track now and she couldn’t get past. Flying through the berm into the finish line, I was done. A little fist pump, a little woohoo… and then I rode straight to where I had put my gear so that I could rip my stupid shoes off. My kids and husband came over to hug (and then perhaps decide not to) me after the race.

Totally nailing that dusty monobrow look

The Results

One of the differences between MTB and road racing was summed up by Waz before the race:

If you can find a wheel to follow do that because unlike road racing when you are generally in a group MTB is an individual sport but having someone in front of you keeps you focussed.

And because of that individual sport thing, at the end of the race I had absolutely no idea how I did. I know I passed every woman that I saw, that that I hadn’t seen anyone else in front of me, so perhaps I did okay?

Looks like “Pro Jo” kicked my butt. Women’s 4/5 was one tough category!
Teagan: 1st place in Junior. Melissa, Tracy and Jo: 1st, 2nd, 3rd in Women’s 5/6. Ally and Rebecca: 1st/2nd in Expert. Kate and Kathryn: 1st/2nd in Women’s 1/2. Phoebe: 1st in under 17.

Well, no. Turns out the reason I hadn’t seen any other women was that they were SO far in front of me, and I wasn’t even close to a podium in my age category. And that woman I chased for eight kms and then finally overtook? She came third in her category (way to go Mel!). And Miss Viss who had been hot on my tail and ended up passing Mel just before the finish line came 2nd in her category.

So I still have a lot to learn about MTBing. But you know, I’m not too old to give this a go. And I can have a crack at this stuff. Because why the heck not?

Sharing a beer with Marty after the race: he came 1st in his category for the Men’s 100km

Was it hard work?

Will I be back next year?

Absolutely. 🙂

Free finishers beer from Bridge Road Brewers

So what about The Pioneer?

Well unfortunately unless I fall into a monster pile of cash this one is out for this year. But I hear there might be another event planning in the wings…

So stay tuned 🙂

The Stats

  • 51km with 785m elevation
  • Time: 2 hours 56 minutes and 7 seconds
  • Average speed: 17.3 km/h
  • Max speed: 45.4 km/h
  • Average heart rate: 171
  • Highest heart rate: 188
  • Average temperature: 23 degrees C

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Boat Rentals

Your time on the water…

We rent both fishing and pontoon boats. Of course, you’re welcome to bring your own boat. We offer a launch with a concrete ramp. Marina services include dockside gas and oil.

16′ AlumaCraft – 50hp Honda
Swivel seats, live well, depth finder – all included.
$150.00 per day/$800.00 per week – plus gas

24′ – 100hp Honda
$190.00 – 4 hours
$300.00 – 8 hours
$1450.00 – weekly
(rates do not include gas)All those who booked before the new pontoon boats were purchased will receive the old price.

Don’t forget! Kayaks are available to resort guests without charge.