Tag: Watergate scandal

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.

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).