Tag: Watergate

Male vulnerability

Behind the tatoo, the tobacco and the toughness, lies male vulnerability.

I read about how the Watergate break-in was just one among a list of outrageous proposals such as kidnapping, wiretapping and high-priced hookers blackmail etc…

You can’t find tougher looking bunch than those “plumbers” and their Archille’s heels.

Yes, there is also female vulnerability. But male’s vulnerability turns everything upside down: how can he be…..?

Males are wired (no punt intended) to conquer. His logic flows one way: hunt, see, conquer. Nothing gets in the way.

He likes closure, trophies and the declaration of victory.

Like a book with many short chapters, a male life consists of many failed attempts (often edited out).

You are lucky if you landed a few by lines on the New York Times’ obituary page.

Male with high EQ are rare: flexible, creative, sensitive and intuitive.

I am surrounded by male who smoke, swear and swindle. So I am forced to decode quickly. everybody has his or her vulnerable spot.

Call it blind spot. Some has a larger “spot” than others.

When cultures collide, there is a huge gap:

attitude towards the opposite sex, family, society and war invalids.

Men went to war. Men got hosed down. But not stay down.

Yes. Male vulnerability is not much different from human vulnerability at large.

Only when he attempts to gloss it over,  to live in denial and with the illusion of grandeur, that it’s laughable

Momento morir (You will die, your Majesty).

Be mindful, be restless.

As I did. When woke up to the sound of funeral music.

Someone in the neighborhood was buried very early this morning.

The music might as well have been for me. For whom the bell tolls!

Yes, I am vulnerable. Always have.  No sense to deny it.

My 70’s

Needless to say, my hair was long, my pants were bell-bottom and my shirt shiny.

I spent half of that decade in Vietnam, the other half in America.

But the youth culture helped bridge the cultural gap: we had already listened to James Talor, Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young, Elton John before I jumped on to Year of the Cat and If by Bread (in the US).

In between the two worlds, I got stranded one whole summer in Wake Island,

listening to armed force radio station (Loving you, Theme from Mahogany, Band on the Run).  “Where are you going to, do you know?”

Towards the end of the decade, we watched a bunch of movies whose statures haven’t been surpassed since: Midnight Cowboys, Taxi, Deer Hunter.

The disco craze was well underway, with John Travolta and the Abba.

Dancing Queen.

American couldn’t stand the look of anything that reminded them of Vietnam (negative pair-association).

Cat Stevens was still OK then. George Harrison still had some staying power with “Here comes the sun”.

I was into media (post-Watergate hip major).

Journalism was cool, while computer science was a new field (my friend Al T. was quite nerdy and he belonged more to Bill Gates clan ).

America came across as weak after Watergate, Vietnam and the Iranian hostage crisis. Reagan landslide election was the reincarnation of John Wayne‘s shoot from the hip style (he himself got assasinated by Hinckley in 1981, but reemerged stronger for the line “tear down that wall”).

As of this edit, people are still protesting about sectioning it to build upscale high rises in E Berlin.

Meanwhile, Vietnam in the early 70’s lived life on the fast lane with the last PX supplies, napalm. Plenty of Agent Orange.

A large percentage of US enlisted men was into drugs (facts on file).

A repeated theme from “Last Men Out” was “how can this be”.

But this was how. We breathed our last breaths. Band on the Run.

Celebrating my last Tet (1975) here, I knew we were on oxygen mask. I shaved my head, trying to hit the books instead of  the night clubs. But still, the rumor and rumble or war had gotten near.

It’s like the Angel of Death was breathing down our necks.

You could feel your back hair stand up.

That’s how tense life was in my early 70’s.  Even today, many people are still living in denial, albeit with flashbacks. I forgot to mention  the Carpenters somehow managed to sneak into our consciousness even though by all measures, they look like a bunch of Mormons (unlike the Mamas and the Papas).

But we knew then that “We’ve only just begun”. Their cut of “SuperStar” still engages me today (but it’s just the radio….)

When you had a bunch of young people wearing tight jeans and tight shirts, on campus,

and all they wanted was to wait for Saturday Night to come (Fever), you know it’s peace time. The disco ball was our cross, and the DJ, our priest.

Today’s version of nightclub is version 3.0, with synthesized techno music, and a few easy refrains (suicidal…). In the 70’s you sat and watched the “Soul Train” with black folks doing the dancing, and the Huxtables doing the laughing.

Welcome to America. Now could you help push the car (Oil crisis).

Transparent trail

I saved up my visual history in 3/4 inch, VHS, slides, prints, CDs, hard-drive, flashdrive and cloud.

Not so much for me, but for my daughters .

That collage documented my fits and starts.

Each person is a narrative whose ending remains a mystery ( ‘in my end, is my beginning”).

In the Year of Magical Thinking, the widow-writer kept wishing that her husband would return (hence, magical ),

and refused to give his stuffs away.

The hard part about closure is to get through denial.

We have come a long way, since Watergate (White House secret taping) to Wikileaks.

The best way to avoid having some thing bad traced back to you is not to leave one in the first place.

What is whispered shall be announced from the roof top.

I blogged about de-clutterization. But this time, it’s not about our hoarding habit (fax machine?).

It’s about using whatever format or latest update (Adobe) as tool and transparency as policy.

Companies spent enormous amount of time, energy and money to whip up great-looking “About us”.

Until prospective customers detected incongruity and inconsistency  (reputational lag).

We live our digital lives one day at a time in open-source mode, with myriads of combinations to collaborate and co-create (the sharing economy).  We will have to relearn TRUST as online currency before Web 3.0 can happen (co-create).

The twin brother-in-law of Congress woman Giffords said on CBS: “from space, I saw this beautiful planet and I wouldn’t guess there were so much – bad things such as random shooting – going on . We can do better “.

Out in open space, with no one watching, one presumes, like Nixon, that misspoken words are not coming back to haunt.

But in cyberspace, the opposite is true. We do live our virtual lives with more-real-than-real-life ramifications. We leave behind our digital fingerprints and carbon footprints, together form a narrative, to be mined years from now by “bots”. Faint-of-hearts need not apply! (as of this edit, Apple just purchased a company whose software can pinpoint where we have been i.e. GPS plus past footprints to predict our next likely frequent stops).

Deer facing headlights

WSJ most read article is “Why people can’t make decision” (see my other blog, “buy-in behaviors”).

I also found another article that reinforces this period of indecision: companies are saving the money they borrowed at bank’s low rates, thus fail to spur the economy.

Why would people borrow money at low rates, then sit on them? Companies need leadership (i.e. doing the right thing as opposed to “doing the thing right”). They forgot a biblical story about stewardship.

The post- WW generation are now in leadership position. Ambivalence is the norm (don’t blame them, after Vietnam and Watergate).

Right now, both parties are blaming each other for the ailing and failing economy.

And we in turn blame ourselves.

Self-recrimination paralyzes us, resulting in indecision. In short, deer facing approaching headlights.

Charlie Rose series on how the brain works, shows the frontal part of the brain, when damaged, causes moral lapses.

Our economic system got injured and is now in recovery (not as desired, but to be expected).

Any movement helps.

As long as the deer starts moving, and wakes up from its trance.

The stats indicated that it was a 18-month long recession. But it feels like decades.

The last recession, coincided with the dot.com burst, gave rise to Web 2.0 (whose contributors had a lot of time in their hand for Wikipedia and YouTube).

This time,  it shouldn’t be an exception. Something good will come out.

If you saw the recent front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines.

With help from emergency crew (near SF), she was cut loose, and immediately swam in circle to show gratitude and joy. Very moving story of giving and receiving.

We can learn a lesson from the animal kingdom to enhance our humanity. We should wake up sooner than a deer facing oncoming traffic! Go against our natural reflex to survive and thrive. Keep moving. Let not gravity and inertia win the day.