Veteran's Day

I attended a Veteran’s Day celebration the other night sponsored by Wintrust Bank in Chicago.  The host of the ceremony introduced each of about a dozen veterans and told a little story about each one, what branch they served in, what they did during the conflict and how they re-integrated into civilian life afterwards.   I was transfixed by these tales.   One medic heroically administered to wounded Afghan soldiers during a firefight with the Taliban in Afghanistan after he himself had been wounded.  One African American bravely fought at Guadalcanal despite the fact that he was the first black man in his unit and his white comrades wouldn’t speak to him.  One soldier fought in the Korean war in 40 below zero conditions, got separated from his unit, was presumed to be MIA, and trekked miles in the snow on frozen feet.  From the Pacific Theater in WWII to Iraq and Afghanistan, each story told of fierce determination under some of the most trying conditions imaginable.

I was struck by a number of common themes.   Each person was quoted as having great pride in his or her branch of service.  Each eschewed being referred to as a hero.  Each felt that they were “just doing their job.”   All of them came home to very little, if any fanfare, and within a few weeks, quietly moved on to the next phase of life.  I was most taken by the fact that many of the WWII veterans were still gainfully employed late in life.  One gentleman still works at Northwestern Mutual at age 93.  I was simply in awe of these great men and women, and had an opportunity to shake hands with many of them and thank them for what they did.

This experience underscores the importance of storytelling.  It is fine to hear about important events through film or books, but they do not have the same impact as hearing them first hand or  through a person connected to the people that were actually there.  I noted in my film review of Austerlitz that the young people showed less reverence and solemnity at the concentration camp museum than the older visitors.  As time passes, things become more remote and less real, less tangible.   My own visceral hatred of Communism came from hearing the first hand stories of those that escaped.  Being chased by guards and dogs through the woods at night.  Seeing a teenage friend shot to death in front of you.  Those images and events gain texture and meaning through the telling.  Otherwise they become as remote as mummies in a museum.  We need to find ways and platforms to keep these stories alive as long as possible.  Otherwise, we risk that evil ideologies like Communism, Fascism, or Nazism become less tangible, less real to us, and we become susceptible to their return in some form.

On my way out, I introduced myself to the bank’s chairman, Ed Wehmer.   I said, “Ed, this was a phenomenal event.  I am so humbled by these great people and the things they did.”

He looked at me and said, “What do WE do?  Nothing, really.”

He is right.  Few of us do things that really matter, at least not in the way that these veterans did.

Veteran’s Day became real to me this year.

Jane

Stitched together with recently discovered film of her Gombe encampment and personal interviews with Jane Goodall, Brett Morgen’s documentary, Jane gives us an intimate portrait of one of the 20^th century’s most fascinating women.

With no scientific training or education, the young, single and beautiful Jane Goodall dispatched to Africa in 1957 to observe chimpanzees in the wild, and to live among them- something no human being had ever done before.   Leakey chose her because he was looking for someone with an open mind, a love of animals and unending patience.  He found it all and more in Goodall.  With her mother in tow as support personnel, Goodall began her great adventure to attempt to study these great apes and attempt to identify genetic antecedents to human behavior from our closest primate cousins.

The film clips were fascinating as this pretty young woman marched up and down the Gombe valleys alone, hoping to catch glimpses of these creatures.  Goodall’s incredible fearlessness is striking as she disregarded the poisonous snakes that abounded in the territory.  For months, the chimps simply ran away at the sight of her.  But she persisted, and with patience, over time, the chimpanzees accepted her presence and permitted her to have intimate interactions among them, and participate in grooming, playing, and even allowing her to play with their young.  The possibility that one of these powerful beasts could turn on her at any moment and kill her never seemed to cross her mind. 

Goodall’s undeterred passion gave us incredible insights into both chimpanzees and our own condition.  She famously discovered that chimps not only used tools but were able to make them (stripping leaves off sticks to use to harvest termites), a skill thought only to belong to humans.   She observed and documented their deep emotional life.   Chimpanzees had distinct personalities; they mourned their dead, experienced jealousy, displayed affection.   She also had insights into their darker side-  chimps, like humans, were capable of horrendous acts - making war and killing each other in brutal fashion.

Her personal journey is as interesting as her work.  She began her life’s work by utterly rejecting the roles of motherhood and wife as life goals and very early on developed a love of animals.  Her father apparently was largely absent from her life and Goodall got her determination and spirit from a very encouraging mother, and her mother’s emotional support remained important to her throughout her life.

Later, however, she did fall in love and marry the nature photographer, Hugo van Lawick.   The two had a child together, and the film devotes a substantial portion to the interweaving of her marriage and motherhood with her work on the Gombe encampment.  The arrangement raises interesting issues of marriage and child rearing.  Goodall spoke of the parallels between her own motherhood and the motherhood of her subjects.  

Eventually, Goodall chooses.  She sends her young son back to Great Britain to be schooled as her concerns about a lack of socialization in the jungle began to worry her.  Similarly, when the funding to keep Hugo at Gombe runs out, Hugo is forced to ply his trade on the Serengeti.  Again, she chooses.  The separation becomes too much for the marriage to bear.  Neither is willing to compromise and Jane and Hugo eventually divorce.  In both cases, motherhood and marriage remained subordinated to her primary love---her work.   

Jane Goodall belongs in the pantheon of fearless, passionate women that found their life’s work and threw themselves at it, women like Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, and Babe Didrikson Zacharias (for a great read on Didrikson, read Wonder Girl by Don Van Natta).  Each of these women have a fascinating story to tell as each rejected societal norms.

Goodall is a captivating figure, mostly because of her sheer fearlessness and defiance.  She defied the conventional role of a woman in the 60’s.  She defied the traditional paths of the scientific establishment.  She defied traditional views of marriage and motherhood.  Because of her unwillingness to be bound by these things, she was able to do something spectacular - redefine and recast our definition of what it means to be human.  

Jane is a wonderful film about a fascinating person.

A Touch of Optimism

This was an interesting week, supplying enough material for a month’s worth of blog posts.   The challenge is to make sense of it all and synthesize things into a single blog post that carries a message.

By George, I think I’ve got it!

The week was bookended by two events—co-lecturing an Entrepreneurial Finance class with Elatia Abate, a dynamic, enthusiastic, and optimistic thinker who is doing great work on the future of work (see her enlightening and inspiring Ted talk at _https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBRlUzzYfLc).   I tried to serve as the set-up man, delivering my stark message on the Four Horsemen of the Career Apocalypse (Debt and Demographics/Technology/China/Politics and Regulatory State) that will combine to create a world that will create career upheaval and dislocation in ways that are fundamentally different than the one that my generation had to face.  Elatia’s message is that this set of conditions and risks requires an entirely different mindset to survive, and, indeed, a different way of thinking will create opportunities out of this environment.  She presented the antidote to my darker vision of challenges that younger people face entering the workforce.  While I think our presentation needs to be tweaked a little--it was more the first dress rehearsal of a play where bridges and connections need to be smoothed out a bit.  The underlying message is an important one.   The careers of this generation will be more different than mine than mine was to my grandfather’s, and people will need to be much more entrepreneurial and resilient  than in the past in order to have satisfying and prosperous careers.  

On Friday, I had the opportunity to meet and speak with Austan Goolsbee, Booth School of Business economist and economic advisor to Barack Obama.  We had an engaging conversation, and while I certainly had views that were different than Goolsbee (more than one business executive has referred to Goolsbee as Booth’s “token socialist”), I found him to be very personable, witty and sometimes uproariously funny.   In his remarks, Goolsbee said that there is a deep flaw in the model of the Federal Reserve—that is a reversion to the mean.   The Fed models out a large increase in home prices as portending an increase in consumer spending, and that simply has not occurred.   We will have slow and steady growth, not a reversion to the 2006 days.   Goolsbee asserts that 2006 was NOT normal and that the Fed is way overconfident about reversion to the mean (the 2006 mean).   We will have growth in which exports and innovation lead growth, and will be less reliant on consumer spending and housing.  His brief forecast played it safe and said that the near term future would look more or less like the recent past--- 2 to 2.5% growth.  

But was more interesting to me, and where we have agreement, is his rejection of the position of the "secular stagnationists."  Despite the post-crash struggles, he believes it is a mistake to extrapolate the last eight years into the future.   The United States has a growing population (it would be a mistake to unduly restrict immigration), and the most productive workforce in the world.  We have a deeply ingrained entrepreneurial and innovative culture that reaches beyond Silicon Valley.  More than any other advanced economy, U.S. businesses are more likely to adopt innovative products and methods.  He stated flatly that given these realities, it is impossible to be a pessimist and think like the secular stagnationists.

My week began and ended with personal interaction with two very bright, energetic and exuberant people.   Between my professional work, which often involves working with organizations that did not adapt to change rapidly enough, and the continuous drumbeat of political strife by the MSM, it is easy to overweight the negative.  It is vital be be around people that constantly remind us that change is not straight line, that disruption is normal, and that growth is sometimes painful.  

And that a sense of humor lubricates it all, which both Ms. Abate and Mr. Goolsbee have in spades.

I'm grateful to have had my week bracketed by the opportunity to have time with these two important thought leaders.

ISIS visits NY

Yet another vehicular terror attack was visited upon the West, this time in New York City.

A radical Uzbekitani here on a "Diversity Visa" rented a truck and plowed through pedestrians and cyclists in lower Manhattan, killing 8 and injuring 15 while exclaiming "Allahu Akbar."

The attack provoked the usual empty words from leaders like New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio, "Our spirit will never be moved by an act of violence."  Some see this as inspirational.   I see it as tepid and hackneyed and precisely the opposite of what should be said.  Our spirit SHOULD be moved by an act of violence.  A wanton act of violence DEMANDS that it be moved.  We should be roused to anger and firmness of purpose to do what needs to be done to protect our citizens from this savagery.  

President Donald Trump at least tweeted out his response which called for the stepping up of extreme vetting, to which foreign policy expert Richard Haas responded, "Potus call for extreme vetting irrelevant to radicalization via Internet; worse, his policies could add to likelihood of radicalization."

I take issue with Dr. Haass on two fronts.  First, while his first statement is technically true, we do not know how this terrorist was radicalized (in person or via Internet).  Second, his assertion that Trump's policies could add to the likelihood of radicalization has absolutely no empirical evidence to support it.  This is the same rationalization that led Obama to conclude that the closing of Gitmo was required because it led to increased radicalization.  That thinking ultimately led to the release of unreformed terrorists and the ill-conceived Bowie Bergdahl swap.  As between the views of Dr. Haass (which contemplates no action) and President Trump (which responds with action), I come down on the side of action.  

But the reality is that Islamic terror remains a very, very difficult problem to solve.   Even my old professor, the usual clear eyed Daniel Pipes struggles with it.  He once stated that we need to permit Muslims to immigrate to the U.S. but not Islamists.  That is not a very helpful statement because it leaves unanswered the obvious question, "How do you tell the difference?"  And, to Dr. Haass's point, it does not address the issue of radicalization once they are here.

Unfortunately, the debate on social media seems to be binary; that is, between those that favor severely restricting or banning Muslim immigration, or the European model, which is a nearly free flow of Muslim immigrants, and accepting as London mayor Khan, that terror is now "part and parcel of daily life." 

Neither choice is a good one.   As with North Korea, we don't have good choices available to us at the moment.   A Muslim ban (which Trump has not suggested) is inconsistent with our core values of religious freedom and freedom from religious bigotry.  An open policy leaves us vulnerable to the kind of terror and social problems Muslim immigration has created in Europe.  The undeniable fact is that while we may wish to tolerate Islam, there are parts of Islam that are not yet fully prepared to reciprocate.

During his campaign, Donald Trump promised to put together a commission of experts to address the problem.  That is one campaign promise that he has yet to fulfill.  We need to create realistic and concrete policy choices that help us reduce the risk of these attacks.   And accepting these attacks as "part and parcel" of modern life can't be one of them.

It needs to focus squarely on risk assessment and tolerance and empirical evidence and not brush it away with meaningless labels like Islamophobia.  No one, for instance, would decry a Catholic for having reservations about sending their 10 year old boy away on a woodlands religious retreat staffed with only Catholic priests and no other supervision.   No one would dismiss it by claiming, "Well, only a minority of priests engage in unseemly behavior."   Radical Islamic terrorism needs to be addressed in the same cold, sober light, without using labels such as "lone wolf," "Islamophobia," "Xenophobia" which serve generally only to cut off real factual analysis and risk assessment.

Fake News

A few weeks ago, liberals had a meltdown when Donald Trump tweeted the following:

"With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License?  Bad for the country!"

Liberals interpreted this tweet as affirmation that Trump was about to shut down the free press and eras the First Amendment with an Executive Order, putting a chill on the opposition.

The FCC itself immediately shot down this suggestion, stating only that the FCC believes in the 1st Amendment.

This is the last we've heard of this nonsense.  Trump took no action whatsoever to follow up on this tweet.

There are a couple of ways to interpret Trump's tweet.  Of course, the MSM interpreted it as a challenge to the First Amendment and as direct evidence of Trump's fascist inclinations.

I took it a little differently.  Yes, it was a little too close to challenging free speech for my comfort.  But tweets without action are meaningless.   They are just tweets --petulant rantings.  This tweet is nothing more than that of the guy at the end of the bar that exclaims, "there oughta be a law!"  Trump was, however, correct to call out NBC and the Networks for propagation of unsubstantiated narratives, many of which were initiated with the support only of anonymous sources.  He was wrong, however, to do so while making a statement that could be read to be an implied threat to their license.  If a remark can be read two ways, it will ALWAYS be cast in the least favorable light by the MSM.

And this is the most confounding characteristic of Donald Trump.   He is often right and wrong at the same time.

Meanwhile, while the press and social media were hyperventilating over this tweet, real threats to free speech continue to mount on university grounds across the country.   Those threats have been sometimes backed by actual violence as at Berkeley or Middlebury.  Threats of violence and disruptions have also become more common.

Just in the past week, a Princeton student published an opinion piece that asserted that conservatives have no 1st Amendment right to free speech.  It is troublesome that Princeton actually admitted such an ignoramus, worse yet that The Daily Princetonian chose to print his absurd assertion.  At UC Santa Cruz, protesters crashed a college Republican meeting, claiming that "fascists don't have a right to free speech."  Incidents like these are now all too common across college campuses, the training ground for the next generation of our citizenry.

No, I don't like the way Trump expressed his frustration with the MSM, which often acts straightaway as a public advocacy arm of the DNC.  But without follow up executive action by Trump, I am much less concerned about his misguided tweet than I am about the actual suffocation of free speech in our universities.

Pushback

There seems to be an unending stream of bad news assaulting us.   North Korean nukes.  Threatened pullout of the U.S. from JCPOA with Iran.   The Las Vegas massacre.  Burning controversies over Columbus Day, the National Anthem, and now the Boy Scouts. Trump fighting with Democrats AND Republicans and maybe his own State Department.  Tom Petty gone, pronounced dead prematurely but sadly, he is really dead.  I don’t believe I’ve experienced a more tumultuous time in my lifetime; the 60’s are beginning to look like child’s play.   Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, when the End of History was announced, it appears that the American Experiment, and the notions of individual liberty and the Enlightenment are on the ropes.   State power and supranational power (here and abroad seems to have made great advances. 

Across the West and elsewhere, progressives and globalists have largely been successful since the end of the Cold War in taking power, decision making and accountability away from localized sovereign states and placing it in the hands of an unaccountable body.  Multiculturalism goes hand in glove with this trend—that is denying local culture and social norms, and in particular, denying any claim that the locals have that they like their culture more and putting everyone on the same plane.  Nowhere is this more prevalent than in Europe.  In Europe, the global elitists sometimes go so far as to blatantly deny their own culture, as Emmanual Macron did during his campaign in France, when he asserted that “there is no such thing as French culture.”   That kind of absurd thinking exists only in the minds of the global elite.  There most certainly is a decidedly French culture, just as there is an American culture (and even within America there are certainly regional subcultures).   And politically, separate cultures tend to want the right of self determination----they don’t want to be governed by a far-off group.   

The globalist elite have managed to achieve a greater degree of political power centralization in three ways.  First, through crisis creation.  Whether it be climate change, or, in the U.S.  health care, the Statists have argued that these are big problems that require big government or even supranational solutions.   Second, they label opponents:  xenophobic, Islamophobic, sexist, populist, white nationalist, climate change deniers, and the like.   Hillary Clinton famously labelled her opponents “Deplorables.” It forces opponents to fight the label, rather than argue on the merits of any particular policy.   Third, they argue against the intelligence of the choice of the people as if it delegitimizes them.  In both the U.S. 2016 election and in the U.K. Brexit vote, the MSM took great pains to demonstrate that the people that voted for Trump or for Brexit were, on average, less educated, less informed, and more provincial—the great unwashed masses.  And, of course, the bigger the government, the more it siphons off resources from individuals. 

Across the globe, the forces of Big Government and multiculturalism have largely been prevailing as of late, there have been several notable instances of green shoots of autonomy popping up.

In the U.S. of course, was the surprise election of Donald Trump.  Yes, he is blunt, crass, impulsive, and says odd things.  But as I asserted in an earlier blog, his most significant campaign promise was, “I am your voice.”   As the Obama administration wore on, Obama turned to memos and executive orders to impose his agenda.  Nowhere was that more apparent than the transgender bathroom wars started by an Obama memo.   I don’t know what the right policy is, but I do know that the wrong policy is to have the federal government dictate what should be done by fiat, without discussion or input and impose its will on a local school system.   It was exactly acts like that that put Trump in the White House.

Brexit also was a reaction to an overbearing E.U. busily imposing lots of rules and regulations from afar without any input from the locals at all.    It was also in part, a rejection of the immigration policies of the E.U. which caused social disruption in Europe (more on this in another blog).  One British immigrant told me that the economy of her entire fishing village was nearly destroyed with picayune rules issued by Brussels.  And she further decided to leave when she got tired of working so hard to pay for the social benefits bestowed on nonworking immigrants.  

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are also pushing back.   Seeing what the open door immigration policies have done to the rest of Europe, those countries have asserted their sovereignty and are pushing back hard against the E.U.  Just last week, thousands of Poles lined up at the border to pray for their country.   Each of those countries do have definite cultures and have also had recent experience with Russians (or Nazis) trying to shove their cultures down their throats.   They are willing to withstand the labeling and perhaps the financial penalties to preserve theirs.

Most recently, both the Catalonians and Kurds actually had a vote for independence.   In both cases, the voters voted overwhelmingly to be independent.    In both cases, those peoples have distinct cultures and the yearning for independence has been brewing for some time.   The case of Catalonia was particularly obscene because we witnessed Spanish police in black disrupting and taking over polling places by force and state violence.  One couldn’t help but compare it to the thuggery of the Iranian regime when it put down the Green Revolution.  The Kurdish push for independence is also noteworthy since the resilient Kurds have fought against Saddam Hussein, ISIS, and Turkey for decades.  They continue to fight for liberation in the world’s worst neighborhood.

The genius of our Founders was that they designed a government that largely was intended to vest political power locally because they knew that the farther you get away, the less accountability and deference there is to local social norms and practices.   While we have seen a movement toward centralizing power, there are places across the globe where people are pushing back.

Even voters in Illinois pushed back.   You know there is hope when corrupt, single party Illinois repeals a tax.   In a historic vote, the ill-advised soda tax put into place in Cook County was repealed last week, in a historic vote.   A sure sign that a desire for local control, lower taxes and sanity have not been totally extinguished.

Final Thoughts

I normally don’t write successive posts on the same topic, but the furor over the NFL protests hits home because of my affinity for the game over a lifetime.  And, if you have read my prior posts, I find symbolism to be important in human affairs.  Donald Trump’s comments, like most of his positions, are both wrong and right.  He is entirely correct to call out the players and NFL for permitting kneeling during the national anthem.  No other great nation would countenance that.  He is entirely incorrect when he says that the NFL should pass a rule around standing at the national anthem.  It already has policies around that.  The State should not interfere in private company matters, and the consumers of the NFL’s product will ultimately decide whether they wish to experience public grievance as part of their ticket price.

I attended the first Chicago Bears game of the season at the invitation of a business associate.  As I left and walked through the tunnel, an older African American gentleman with an NFL jersey with the name “Stingley” on the back was navigating through the crowd just in front of me.  I couldn’t help but nudge his elbow.  “Cool jersey,” I said, “I remember watching the game on that day.  It still makes me sad.”  “Darryl was my cousin,” he said.  “I’m so sorry,” I replied.  As some of you older people may remember, Darryl Stingley was injured by a horrific hit by Jack Tatum which rendered Stingley a quadriplegic in a pre-season game in 1978.  It was a horrible thing to have witnessed on T.V.  Sadly Darryl Stingley passed away about 10 years ago at age 55 and Jack Tatum also passed away at age 61.  Stingley and Tatum never spoke after the hit and Tatum never apologized.   Neither reached his 65^th birthday.

The gentleman and I went on to have a nice conversation while we worked our way through the crowd.  We talked about football in the public league (where Stingley and I both played), the South Side of Chicago, and the Bears.  We talked about what we do for a living, our children, the City of Chicago, and a few other things on our way back to our cars.  Two strangers, from two walks of life, two different neighborhoods, one black, one white, connected by the common bond of football and a tragically memorable event.  That’s what football brings.  A chance to unify and to connect in a special way.  By letting political grievances seep in, the NFL is going to destroy these precious moments. 

The NFL has gotten out of the sports and entertainment business and has gotten into the grievance mongering business.   What is NFL football, really?   It is fun, fake inter-city tribalism.   Your guys are going to play our guys.  During the playoffs, mayors get into the act, betting each other some nominal wagers.  The cities adorn themselves in the colors and symbols of their team.   Guys talk about it in bars.  People talk about it around the water cooler on Monday morning.  But it’s all fake.  We don’t really hate the guys in Cleveland or Pittsburgh.  For Pete’s sake, the players aren’t even from that city.  It’s all fun. 

One good aspect of all this is that the reaction to Kaepernick has brought to light a number of unpleasant facts about the NFL and the crony capitalist bedrock upon which it rests.  

But now, instead of a spectacle of fake tribalism the NFL has chosen to contaminate its product with real tribalism, real social tension, and real bitterness.   Most perversely, the league has chosen to permit millionaire players to disrespect the flag, the anthem, and is following the lead of a guy that also sports emblems showing support of Castro and Che and that disrespects police officers. 

It’s disappointing and sad that the NFL has decided to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the left leaning MSM cartel – CNN, MSNBC, NYT and WaPo.  At a time  when we need more platforms and venues that promote unity, the NFL has decided to permit its players to play victim in a way that is perfectly calculated to push us farther apart—by protesting the national anthem and the American flag. 

The reality is that the NFL's business model involves a series of licenses.  In fact, your ticket to a game is actually a license granted by the team that permit you access to the stadium and the game.  TV and cable arrangements are a series of licenses.   But in reality, the licenses flow both ways.  Fans also grant the NFL a license to their time and attention.  In person, pro sports fans are willing to subject themselves to messaging by sponsors of products in a variety of ways-- ads for products and services are placed in programs, around the stadium premises, in the program and on the jumbotron.  At home, we willingly subject ourselves to advertisements and interruptions (T.V. timeouts).  These messages are claims on our time, which we are willing to license back to the NFL.   But now the NFL has begun to transmit political messages which many of us find obnoxious and annoying.  It's one thing to see an ad for beer or razor blades; it's an entirely different thing to see messages from the disciples of a guy that wears a Castro t-shirt and pig socks.  It is abusive of the implicit license on our time that we grant to the NFL.

I won’t be part of it.  It’s sad because pro football (along with college and high school) has been a common bond with many people during my lifetime.  I won’t. If I go to a game, or watch one on TV, I want fake tribalism, not the real kind.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, I didn’t leave the NFL.  The NFL left me.