They just dropped the price by a third.

Had I bought one three months ago — as several of my friends and colleagues did — I would be pretty pissed right now.

With reference to this post:

This morning I received an email from some leadership institute. I chortled when I read this, which seems written with a current occupant of the White House in mind:

The Leadership Minefield!

As part of developing yourself as a leader, you want to explore some of the “land mines” that are hidden in the landscape of leadership. It is very useful for a leader to watch for what robs them of power. Understanding the dynamic of what NOT to do is just as critical as knowing what TO do.  I say it is more powerful to discover what something is Not than what it Is.

The point of this conversation is to introduce you to the some of the most critical and dangerous “mines” that lie ahead so that you will be able to navigate your way effectively. The hard knock (the reality) of leadership is that followers sometimes enjoy seeing a leader go down in flames.  It keeps them in their comfort zone, hiding as a spectators, watching – you.

What rob a leader of her/his power?

1. Being a legend in your own mind.  Ego, the mighty killer of effective leadership. Ego to leadership is like gas to a fire.  Remember – there is a distinct difference between arrogance and confidence!
2. Believing in your own assumptions.  The source of all screw ups. Maybe, just maybe, other people have different (and valid) interpretations.  Leadership lives in the community, out in the world, not in a vacuum.  If for some mysterious reason your assumptions are wrong, change your mind!
3. Driving an “Agenda”.  It is not about what you want; it is about what is needed. Your “plan”, as glorious it might seem to you at the time, may not always be the best one.  Leadership is designed to serve a purpose that is bigger than just you.  Do what is right, and not the right thing!
4. Being defensive and upset.  If you are on defense, who’s on offense?  Defense is the way to lose the battle.  It temporarily assigns the circumstances to be the guardians of your power.  So you are upset.  Who cares?  Compose yourself, the world is watching!
5. Lack of Integrity.  You do not do what you say, they do not do what they say, no one does what they say.  Integrity to leadership is like water to the fish.  Honoring your word is all that you’ve got.  You can’t hold anyone to their integrity if you do not hold to yours!
6. Putting trust first.  Putting too much emphasis on trust can get you in trouble. You want to consider that trust takes time to build, and you may not have it (time, that is). Focus on workability and integrity, not trust. Trust is overrated.  You can be effective without it
7. Speaking no possibility.  The people that “vote” for you want hope, or as I say, to be enrolled into that which is possible. They want you to tell them that everything will be all right, and if you lose sight of the future, what do you think happens to them?  People have their own doubts; they do not need yours!
8. Being serious and significant.  Leadership is serious business, but no one said that you have to be significant about it. We are living in a serious world.  It doesn’t mean that you need to be a comedian, but a bit of lightness never hurt anyone, and it can ease the pain!
9. Lack of communication.  In the absence of communication, people’s minds go places you do not want to know about. They need to know – otherwise they will make things up as they go.  It is much easier to face reality than to clean up the mess of the alternative!
10. Pushing too far.  You can push as far as the safety net will allow you to. Fear can be a great motivator, but it cuts both ways. You can get extraordinary results – or paralyze a nation. You need to provide a safe environment for people to take risks. They will do something because they can see it, not because you say so!
11. If you make mistakes as a leader (and trust me, you will), make sure you make “worthy” ones.  Do not sweat the small stuff.  It is a waste of a life. Make the kind of mistakes that will be impossible to hide or sweep under the rug.  That way, you will have to deal with what it takes to tackle it head on, publicly, taking the world on with no fear, as if your life is depending on it (because it really is).
12. Don’t commit “petty crimes”. If you are going to go down or be judged on your leadership sins, at least be judged for something worthy of your life, for what you stand for and are willing to die for, in glorious flames that will not be forgotten for generations to come!

Hm. Numbers 1 through 6 and 9 through 11 certainly seem immediately relevant.  Not number 12, though; none of these crimes has been petty.

In our graduate writing program at USC, one of the things taught is creative non-fiction. Every so often I’ll have to explain to a lay person what “creative non-fiction” is, because it sounds oxymoronic. In essence, it’s a novelistic approach to factual events. (For an example, read Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” Or anything coming out of the White House.)

This morning’s newspapers had me thinking about creative non-fiction, or fictionalized reporting, or something akin, as I studied two rather different versions of the same story.

From today’s Los Angeles Daily News, I learned “Heat wave blamed in 12 deaths.” (That’s the headline.) That sounds pretty bad. Except the front of today’s LA Times reports, “Heat blamed in the deaths of at least 16.” So it’s either 12, or it’s at least 16. I don’t know which is true, and their mutual placement on my breakfast table casts doubt on both. It also leaves me wondering if there isn’t another verb except “blamed.” How about “Heat wave claims 16 lives”?

Reading further, I discover that “one of the deaths is a Pasadena woman in her 80s whose body was discovered in her apartment, where the temperature was 115 degrees.” (LA Times)

Except the Daily News reports “82-year-old Lugassi Max Menahem and his wife… were among a dozen residents believed to have died from the weeklong heat wave. … Their apartment window was open, letting the 110-degree air in, and their working air conditioner was turned off.”

I applaud the Daily News for the vivid irony in its reporting (a dead couple found lying beside a working air conditioner that would have saved them). I don’t find the dead spouse in Times. Even more troubling, the Daily News says it was 110, the LA Times says it was 115, and I suspect that both are reporting from an official report rather than stationing journalists outside with thermometers to personally check the temperature. If that’s so, why does the official quoted, or the official report quoted, disagree in these two stories?

Apply this sort of thinking toward the war in Iraq. Or any other news reporting. This is not an arena where one wants creative non-fiction.

Some years ago I wrote an absurdist play entitled “Uncle Hem” in which a family’s reality comes unglued because they can’t agree on basic facts, including what they read in the newspaper. The following exchange is based on coverage of the day, in which every major newspaper save one reported the dire consequences of a passenger jet. The sole holdout, the relentlessly positive USA Today, rejoiced in the miracle of  survivors. (By this logic, more than 220 million Americans have survived the war in Iraq.)

MUM
But is that yesterday’s paper? You’ve read everything in it?

DAD
I just finished the legals.

MUM
Then it’s at least yesterday’s. But you read one newspaper, it says
“Plane crash disaster: 39 killed!” You read the other, it says, “Plane
crash miracle: 61 survive!” That could be last weekend’s
newspaper, with the wrong date. Or we could have the wrong
weekend in mind for Uncle Hem’s visit. Or that could be last year’s
newspaper and you’re a very slow reader.

DAD
When the new one comes I’ll compare them. I’ll compare the dates.

MUM
Claude, I already compared two newspapers! Two liars! Don’t
trust either one of them!

DAD
I don’t know what to think.

MUM
Oh, you’re like a bit of fluff in a hurricane.

Just in case you were part of the 19% of the country who don’t think the quote unquote president is dangerously naive, read this brief excerpt from “Dead Certain,” the much-talked-about new biography of Bush. You’ll get a close look at his “leadership” style, as when he tries through the sheer power of his own personality to wish Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki into doing a better job. This is a style often associated with little girls and boys. In separate news coverage, Bush admits he “cries a lot.”

In this piece, Bush also says that if he decides that Maliki is “deceptive,” then we’ll change course, because deception is an unfit characteristic for leaders. (Clearly, Dick Cheney missed this lesson.) Deception, by the way, is the hallmark of leadership according to Sun Tzu and Macchiavelli. To Bush, who operates from the heart and can scry an opponent’s full character simply by looking in his eyes, a la Vladimir Putin, such things are demonic.

It’s distressing to be ruled by a naif, especially when he’s doing it so badly.

Same way as the last two times — by stealing it.

Here’s the latest scheme: a ballot measure that would shift California’s electoral votes into “proportional representation,” which would have had the effect in recent elections of shifting 22 votes to the Republicans. This measure is entirely funded by Republicans for the benefit of Republicans. The name of the “committee” behind this? “Californians for Equal Representation.” It would be laughable if its goals weren’t so potentially achievable.

If we really wanted “Equal Representation,” we would either abolish the Electoral College — something I note that the GOP is not clamoring for, given their result in 2000 — or we would enact this reform across the country rather than simply one state.

Miss Teen South Carolina answers a question. Kinda. Sorta.

(This is in marked contrast to the lecture my colleague Aram Saroyan gave last night, effortlessly discoursing on William Blake and “shapely mind” with regard to writing, but that’s a topic for another post.)

Thanks to Rich Roesberg for sending this in.

What is it? The war in Iraq. If you can stomach it, read this piece in Rolling Stone detailing the malfeasance and vast personal enrichment underlying the buildup and “rebuilding.” (In fact, please stomach it — these were our dollars, and we need to be angry.)

Compared to the profiteering on this war, the savings and loan bailout under Bush 1 is small potatoes indeed.

Arthur Miller’s play “All My Sons” now looks quaint.

As does the notion of shame.

Recently I wrote here that I’d noticed that most of my back catalog of plays have become period pieces. (That doesn’t mean they can’t be produced — dear producing gods: That doesn’t mean they can’t be produced! — that just means that some of them need to be set in recently passed time periods in order for what I hope is their trenchant wonderfulness to work.)

I’m also discovering that I’m becoming a period piece.

Last night during the welcoming ceremony for the University of Southern California MPW graduate writing program where I teach, I got a look at the incoming masters candidates. As one line that teachers share goes, “I keep getting older but my students stay the same age.” As a faculty member in our program, I’m rather young; as a member of my theatre company I have definitely become a graybeard. But what really caught me by surprise was a man roughly my age, a professor in the Marshall School of Business at USC, who came up to me and said, “Lee, I don’t know if you remember me, but my wife was in one of your plays 20 years ago.”

It took a few minutes of digging through the dusty filing cabinet of my mind, but I did remember him. And his wife.

He said, “My wife and I still really love that play. We have it on videotape and we watch it once in a while. It’s the play about the wires.”

Videotape! When was the last time I watched something on videotape! When was the last time I listened to something on cassette tape? My wife’s next preferred project for me is to digitize all our CDs and get rid of them — so who will need the CD player, either?

“The play about the wires” is my play “Guest for Dinner,” begun when I was an undergrad circa 1984. Among other things, it’s about a shrewdly intelligent man who is so consumed by his hatred of a Springsteen-like rock star with pretensions to being Joe Average that he lures said rock star to his apartment to humiliate and abuse him. “The wires,” the section that everyone who has seen this play in its various productions seems to recall with the greatest clarity, is a speech by our protagonist, “Rick” (rhymes with prick), who assembles electronic components in his day job and laments the way that the wires on the top keep pressing down on the wires on the bottom. It’s a thin metaphor for social inequality, and is just one of the things in the play that the me of almost 25 years later regrets.

When the play was done in LA, a former writing teacher of mine — ironically, from the very same program I now teach in — came to see it. I asked him what he thought, and he said blandly kind words. I then asked him what he really thought. He proceeded to tell me, taking the play apart bit by bit. (Afterward, his wife said to me, “Well, I liked it.” She was being nice; it didn’t matter.) Even at the time, his arguments were hard to refute, and over the course of 20 years I’ve grown more and more toward his opinion.

But as my dean said last night when I told her that the spouse of someone who had once starred in one of my plays came up to me to say hello, “There really is no hiding.” Certainly true, especially in an internet age (and only one reason among many that I’m sure we and our allies know exactly where Osama bin Laden is).

There’s no hiding, and there’s also no changing who you once were. We should honor the work of our younger writer selves, flaws and all, as individual steps on a long journey. Some of my old plays don’t work the way they would if I were to write them now, but most of those plays wouldn’t be written by the writer I am now. The bad science fiction stories and detective stories I started writing and sending off at age 11 haven’t improved with age either. But every one of those failed attempts carried some lesson for the future.

Prepare yourself — it’s giving way to “bacn.”

What’s bacn?

It’s email that’s not quite spam. In other words, it’s a little more permission-marketing oriented.

So I guess the Marvel Pulse email I get is bacn. That one I don’t mind. While I don’t want to help the lawyer in Nigeria receive the late king’s assets in exchange for a 10% commission, I do want to know what Dr. Strange is up to.

Disney World — been there, done that?

If you’d really like to subject your kids to something, maybe you should take them here.