Monday, May 30, 2011

Memorial Day Memories

My son, Peter, sent me this picture a few weeks ago. The naval officer with the big, black, bushy beard in the foreground is yours truly. It was taken at the change of command ceremony of the USS Alacrity (MSO-520) in 1972. He found it while going through a shoebox of old photos at his H.S. reunion. I didn’t even know the picture existed.
I was the Chief Engineer of the Alacrity at the time. I was 23 years old. By the time I was 24, I would be the ship’s second in command -- its Executive Officer (the XO in naval parlance). Although I didn’t enjoy shipboard life (it wasn’t exactly Carnival Cruise Lines) and hated being away from home, I still think of it as the best job I ever had.

I was an east coast sailor during the wind up of the war in Vietnam. I never saw any combat and never won any medals. However, the military was the experience of my formative years. While others were going to parties or going to business school, I was going to sea.

Think about how those first years out of school have formed who you are. Can you imagine how fortunate I was to learn life lessons from Vice Admiral Al Konetzni (he was only a Lieutenant when he was my Company Officer at the Naval Academy) and Rear Admiral Joseph Barth (he was a Captain when I served under him).

Who are our heroes?

The military gets good press these days. I view it as a positive that the names of Petraeus, Powell and Schwarzkopf are spoken in heroic phrases. Societies need heroes. It is part of the glue that holds us together.

Every experience in my life, both good and bad, has taught me something. From the military, I learned lessons of leadership. It was the culture we lived in. Its constructs were well defined and spoken out loud. First in classes at the Naval Academy; later embedded in the daily routine discussions about how we carried out our responsibilities.

Recently, a friend asked me over dinner when I thought our nation had lost its way. “It’s a bit self-serving,” I replied. “But, I think it was the day the draft ended.” The lessons of the “Greatest Generation”, the WW II generation, were about shared sacrifice, a sense of civic responsibility and the possibilities of human endeavor. They knew how lucky they were to be Americans and had a sense of responsibility to the larger society. It was best expressed by JFK in his famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”.

The Baby Boomers who followed seem to me to have lost that sense. If the 1970’s were the Me Decade, it was because, in the aftermath of the 60’s none of the old rules applied. We got MBA’s and law degrees and pursued self-interest rather than the national interest.

The results are now well documented. The best and brightest among us are funneled into Wall Street jobs and learn to embrace a culture of avarice. Our media celebrates the misdeeds of professional athletes and movie stars. Journalism is focused more on profitable enterprise than the responsibility to inform our citizens.

Leadership Defined

In the midst of it all, I was struck by the words of Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense who gave the commencement address at my alma mater yesterday. He defined leadership in terms of conviction, self-confidence and courage. But he didn’t stop there. He went on to discuss the personal attributes of common decency and integrity. These are just words, right? We have heard this speech a million times in our lives. However, at a time when our economy is still reeling from the aftermath of Wall Street’s misdeeds, I ask you to listen carefully to Gates’ words which I quote here:

“Nowadays, it seems like integrity — or honor or character — is kind of quaint, a curious, old-fashioned notion. We read of too many successful and intelligent people in and out of government who succumb to the easy wrong rather than the hard right — whether from inattention or a sense of entitlement, the notion that rules are not for them. But for a real leader, personal virtues — self-reliance, self-control, honor, truthfulness, morality — are absolute. These are the building blocks of character, of integrity — and only on that foundation can real leadership be built.”

From my mother, I learned the difference between right and wrong. From my father, the value of hard work. But, it was the military that taught me how to make it work in my daily life. The lessons of leadership were there for me to learn. Have I always been perfect? No, I haven’t. But, belief in those lessons continues to guide me and I am grateful for having learned them.



Monday, May 2, 2011

The Next Mayor of Blowhardville

“I am pleased to announce that I am running to be the next mayor of Blowhardville.”
 John Calia, April 30, 2011

Yes, that’s right, friends. I am running for office. I figure now that Trump has vacated his post as mayor of Blowhardville to run for President the field is wide open. I admit he’ll be a hard act to follow. Why am I so confident that I can win? Because it’s not just Trump who has vacated the little burg of Blowhardville. It seems that blowhards of all political stripes have hit the highways.

My first campaign promise is to create jobs by making a strategic investment in a shovel ready project to build a Blowhard Hall of Fame.

The charter inductees will include both Republicans and Democrats. It was tough to narrow the field but there are a few standouts.

This is Obama from the 2008 campaign: “In ten years, we can reduce our dependence so that we no longer have to import oil from the Middle East or Venezuela. Number one, we need to expand domestic production and that means telling the oil companies the 68 million acres that they currently have leased that they’re not drilling, use them or lose them.”

Wow. We’ve made so much progress in the last three years; I can hardly believe we’ll need another seven.

Or, how about this? During the same campaign, the current Secretary of State referred to her visit to Bosnia in 1996, thusly: “"I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

That doesn’t sound bad other than the fact that it isn’t true. Later, she admitted that she “did misspeak”. Misspeak? That might qualify as the understatement of the decade.

Newt Gingrich is a really smart guy. Everybody says so. After all, we are told he reads two books a week which is two more than Sarah Palin. I knew he was getting ready to run for President last fall when he started saying really stupid things. Yet nothing he has said recently compares to this quote from his days as Speaker of the House: “The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.”

A Socialist argument? Really, Newt? Really?

My favorite quote from the 2008 campaign came from Dennis Kucinich, once the youngest mayor of Cleveland and now the Mental Midget of the Left. Ready? Drum roll, please: “I am running for President of the United States to enable the Goddess of Peace to encircle within her arms all the children of this country and all the children of the world.”

The Goddess of Peace? What church does this guy go to?

Some blowhards have a style that belies their status as a blowhard. We expect blowhards to be loud like Trump. However, my all-time favorite blowhard is the former Vice President of the United States, the avuncular Dick Cheney. He can deliver a line so calmly in that you hardly notice how ridiculous he sounds. Here are few examples:

“There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction”. That was in October, 2002.

Or, how about this one: “I believe we will be greeted as liberators”. That was three days before we started the Iraq War. How’s he doing so far?

And, my favorite Dick Cheney quote: “Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”. That was during the 2004 re-election campaign.

Now that all the blowhards have left for Washington, I am almost certain to win election for mayor of Blowhardville. The only question that remains is:

WHO WILL LEAD?