Without knowing it, President Bush has learned that Sells’ Law should be given serious consideration before making policy decisions. Sells’ Law is more universally valid than Murphy’s Law or Parkinson’s Law.
In the summer of 1959 I took an introductory course in psychology at Texas Christian University, taught by Dr. Saul B. Sells. I’m sure I learned much more than I am aware of, but I am conscious of remembering only two things from the course: Miss Texas and Sell’s Law.
Miss Texas sat in the desk to my right. When she was there. It seems the title carries with it responsibilities that override academia. She missed class a lot. Once when she showed up, she was surprised to find we were having a test. I noticed that she was looking at my answers, so, using my right forearm, I covered my paper.
She was the queen of Texas--rank has its privileges--so she asked me to move my arm so she could see the answers. I didn’t, but I was amazed at her audacity. I judge that there is no ethical component in beauty contests.
Much more importantly, I remember Sell’s Law. For almost fifty years my wife and have observed it at work, and have seen it fail only a handful of times. One day in class, Dr. Sells gave us his law to put in our toolbox along with Murphy’s and Parkinson’s.
Sells’ Law: “It is easier to get into things than to get out of them.”
Observe and judge for yourself. It rarely fails. The President–the Commander-in-Chief–and all his armed forces, his staff, and our national legislators are finding that Professor Sells was not passing out ideas that were merely academic.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
The "Paul Harvey" of War
I have a good imagination; it serves me quite well. When someone says to me, “You can’t imagine . . . ,” I say within myself, “You have no idea of what all I can imagine. Yes, I can imagine what you suggest is beyond my ability to envision.”
But there is something I can scarcely imagine: what it would be like to be living in Baghdad, as an ordinary citizen, across these last two or three years, trying to find a way to go on about living, as much as possible (impossible), a normal kind of life. That horror is, for me, unimaginable.
I was born in 1934 and have lived in the United States through WW II, the Korean, Vietnamese, Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars. I have never missed a meal, have lived in a comfortable home, walked the streets without fear, and heard the sound of guns only when I went hunting.
Wislawa Szymborska was born in 1923 and has lived in Poland through WWII, and a continuing series of warlike violence throughout the years that have followed. Belligerent Russia and menacing Germany have kept Polish life unstable and unpredictable.
In 1996, Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The following poem is rooted in her lived reality, not her imagination, although she gave it its imaginative form. The story of war has been told many times by historians, novelists, and movie producers. Szymborska tells “the rest of the story.”
_____________
“THE END AND THE BEGINNING”
After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.
Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.
Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags
Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall.
Someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.
No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.
The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.
Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.
But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who’ll find all that
a little boring.
From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.
Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little,
And less than that,
And at last nothing less than nothing.
Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.
But there is something I can scarcely imagine: what it would be like to be living in Baghdad, as an ordinary citizen, across these last two or three years, trying to find a way to go on about living, as much as possible (impossible), a normal kind of life. That horror is, for me, unimaginable.
I was born in 1934 and have lived in the United States through WW II, the Korean, Vietnamese, Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars. I have never missed a meal, have lived in a comfortable home, walked the streets without fear, and heard the sound of guns only when I went hunting.
Wislawa Szymborska was born in 1923 and has lived in Poland through WWII, and a continuing series of warlike violence throughout the years that have followed. Belligerent Russia and menacing Germany have kept Polish life unstable and unpredictable.
In 1996, Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The following poem is rooted in her lived reality, not her imagination, although she gave it its imaginative form. The story of war has been told many times by historians, novelists, and movie producers. Szymborska tells “the rest of the story.”
_____________
“THE END AND THE BEGINNING”
After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.
Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.
Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags
Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall.
Someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.
No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.
The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.
Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.
But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who’ll find all that
a little boring.
From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.
Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little,
And less than that,
And at last nothing less than nothing.
Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.
Friday, August 3, 2007
Turning Sand into Ice Cream
Michael Kinsley, a tough, hard-nosed neo-conservative, writing in Time 11-20-06, said: "I'm in favor of toppling dictators, establishing democracy and watching it spread painlessly throughout every region where there is no experience of it. Not only that, I am in favor of turning sand into ice cream and guaranteeing a cone to every child in the Middle East."
Only blind ignorance and arrogance believe this can be accomplished by demolishing these children’s homes, striking them with the shrapnel of “collateral damage,” and soaking their soil with blood, both ours and theirs. This abuse goes beyond child and spouse abuse; it proceeds on to the ultimate in physical abuse.
The alchemy of converting sand into ice cream will be possible once we have killed all of those who don’t want peace.
There are many recipes for ice cream. There are old-fashioned, wooden, hand-cranked ice cream freezers, plastic electric freezers, and other kinds of ice cream making machines. Nonetheless, there are definite parameters that must be accepted, both in recipes and in the freezing process.
Ice cream cannot be made with granite, sawdust, and nitric acid, nor can it be frozen in a blast furnace. Neither lasting peace nor worry-free security can be coerced.
Only blind ignorance and arrogance believe this can be accomplished by demolishing these children’s homes, striking them with the shrapnel of “collateral damage,” and soaking their soil with blood, both ours and theirs. This abuse goes beyond child and spouse abuse; it proceeds on to the ultimate in physical abuse.
The alchemy of converting sand into ice cream will be possible once we have killed all of those who don’t want peace.
There are many recipes for ice cream. There are old-fashioned, wooden, hand-cranked ice cream freezers, plastic electric freezers, and other kinds of ice cream making machines. Nonetheless, there are definite parameters that must be accepted, both in recipes and in the freezing process.
Ice cream cannot be made with granite, sawdust, and nitric acid, nor can it be frozen in a blast furnace. Neither lasting peace nor worry-free security can be coerced.
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