Endless Knots

Ben Taylor's Vietnam Rising

As a reporter, my friend Ben Taylor traveled around the world, picking up on the nuances of geopolitics, among other heady pursuits. Now he's written an insightful piece about Vietnam, to which he recently traveled. He took very good notes and his article in this morning's Boston Globe, "Vietnam Rising," is a must read for all of us who lived through what the Vietnamese call "the American War." I first heard that reference from a Vietnamese ex-pat some years ago and that alone tells its own story. When I visited Laos 15 years ago on a "mission" for the UN Development Program, we went to a cafe along the Mekong River. I couldn't reconcile sitting along its banks without expecting strafe bombing and "Viet Cong" to rise from its waters, this after the war had been over for more than two decades. Vietnam's indelible mark on all of us from that era remains -- thank you, Ben, for bringing it into focus in a new way.

Occupying leadership #occupy

Without making the media the story here since the media has this recursive, repetitive pattern when it can't make sense of a story... a few words about leadership and Occupy.

Google "leadership occupy Wall Street" and you'll find thousands (6814 as of this moment) of articles like this pretty good one in the Washington Post, attempting to describe a phenomenon where something elusive is wrongly explained by its opposite.

If it's not in the article's headline, it's in its lede--and if not there, it's certainly not more than a few grafs down: The Occupy movement is leaderless ((e.g., the Post story, "What is Occupy Wall Street? The history of leaderless movements").

Many articles have grabbed this quote: "We are all leaders." And from there goes the faulty logic that if everyone's a leader, then no one is. Or, its converse by implication: Without a designated, authoritative single leader, then it's just a messy group with... and here we go: no clear purpose, no mission, confusing demands, etc and so on.

Is the Occupy movement leaderless?

Leaderless?

Absolutely not.

It's leaderful.

Many leaders, not none.

Many leaders, not one.

Years ago, University of Minnesota anthropologists Luther Gerlach and Virginia Hine (see People, Power, Change: Movements of Social Transformation) studied the social movements of the Sixties, which many writers in the past month have used as the explanatory vehicle for the leadership structure of this current global phenomenon. Most have gotten the interpretation of the Sixties wrong too, rehashing the old saw that there was no leadership in the anti-Vietnam War, women's, civil rights, gay liberation, and suchnot movements in which my generation grew up.

What Gerlach and Hine discovered (and supported with extensive research) is that social movements are networks. And networks have polycephalous--many headed--leadership structures.

Given our prevailing structures where one leader sits atop a stack holding yes/no power, we have a really hard time comprehending organizations where many people are making decisions. In Gautney's Post piece, she describes a completely different way of arriving at action: 

Occupy Wall Street’s organizational presence is the New York General Assembly or “GA,” which convenes numbers in the high hundreds at its squat-site in Zuccotti Park. Daily GA meetings are led by facilitators who rotate on a regular basis, and facilitation training is open to all. Specific issues, such as food, medical, legal, outreach, security and others are handled by working groups—also open and inclusive—that periodically report back to the GA. Instead of issuing top-down directives, Occupy groups use a consensus process in which anyone can join in the decision-making and propose an idea. Proposers must field questions, justify the hows and whys of their ideas, and engage a large-scale group discussion. Votes are then cast via an innovative system of hand signals, and proposals are revised until a nine-tenths majority approves.

How did this unelected, unhired, uncredentialed revolving band of disaffiliated thousands arrive at such a structure?

By dozens, if not hundreds, of articulate people stepping forward at different moments with good ideas about how to engage the commitment and intelligence of their peers. There is only one word for such people: LEADERS.

In the early 1990s, Andy Campbell, then an employee of the CIA who was working on the Clinton Administration's Reinventing Government program, said something to me that I've used in virtually every presentation since:

        "We can't solve 21st-century problems with 19th-century organizations."

Having studied and written about new organizational structures for the past 30 years with Jeff Stamps, I've attached a corollary to this:

    "Nor can we guide 21st-century organizations with 20th-century leaders."

"Solving" the "Wall Street problem" will not happen through traditional bureaucracy or hierarchy. As many a pundit has already said, the bureaucracies charged with curbing the abuses of greed are so tied up in their own knots (and such the beneficiaries either directly or indirectly of that greed) that they cannot disentangle themselves enough to even see solutions, never mind execute them.

We need to grow up. We need to recognize that networks--flexible, constantly-morphing, ever-linking organizations--are the structures we need to solve the phenomenal dilemmas in front of us.

Networks have many leaders. Some networks encase more formal organizations, like the ones we're all familiar with where people have recognizeable titles and clearly understood power structures, i.e. some organized groups are also showing up to "occupy."

Just a few ideas tend to link networks. As is the case with Occupy, a few simple phrases bubble up, even without the help of branding specialists: 99% for example.

Underneath it all is the thing that money can't buy (hello, Wall Street): commitment. Shared commitment was the energy field that Gerlach and Hine wrote about lo those many years ago. It's the gossamer thread that links all the Occupy sites, heaved from one to another by many many many many...

        LEADERS

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 51

Page 51, “The Persuasion”

It was Christmas dinner (four courses) at Papa and Babi’s apartment on West 86th. I was nervous about which spoon was for soup, which knife for fish, whether everyone could see my lip quivering when I spoke. This was my first holiday with his family (I’d gone to Shelter Island with Aunt Julia and Uncle Irving for Thanksgiving) and I hoped our relationship wouldn’t come up.

Announce may not be the proper verb to describe what Tonin did. “You guys will have to come for dinner,” he said when his grandmother was ladling cream of parsnip soup into my bowl. “We’d like to show you what we’ve done with the place.”

We? What we had done with the place? I bit the inside of my cheek.

“Well, then, Mariana,” Janos said. “I think we need to have a meeting.”

We, now meaning Tonin's father? A meeting? And we weren’t even at the salad course. “I think it’s just wonderful that you and Tonin are living together. We need to give you a proper room of your own. Isn’t that what Virginia Wolfe said women need? I think we should convert the guest room into your study. Just say what you want and we’ll make it like that. Think of it as a down payment on your graduation present.”

Tonin’s father made it sound so simple. A room known as mine in Tonin’s apartment was permanent—and elaborate. Since my mother’s death, I’d been making do with meager surroundings and I liked it. Confined space left less room for sadness to take up residence.

When I moved into the maid’s room off the kitchen in my aunt and uncle’s apartment, I’d compacted my belongings into one trunk, three boxes, and a suitcase. Everything—meaning my childhood and most else associated with my parents—went into storage. A whole room for me, big enough for a desk, books, and some belongings I really wanted to have near me? Disturbing. I reached for the water and knocked over my glass.

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Page 50, “The Persuasion”

“Don’t tell me you built the fireplace. You’re a mason too?”

Tonin grabbed under my arms and tickled. “No, Bill Burt’s brother. But, I should let you think that. I want you in a constant state of wonder about me.”

“I wonder how many people can sleep here.” I walked into the room next to the kitchen--two sets of bunk beds along the walls, drawers built into the closets.

“Eight. You, me, the kids, and maybe Babi and Papa.”

“The kids?”

“You’ll see.”

“Forget the kids,” I said, “I want to move here immediately.” I could see the pages burning up under my hand.

“Patience, Beauteous. You gotta finish college, I gotta figure out what I’m doing with my life.”

“And we can’t do that here?”

“Selfish, selfish. It’s not the time to move to the dome or finish T-ville. We’ve got important things to do.”

But neither of us knew what those important things were. And so we spent the remainder of my senior year going back and forth to Pale Brook, becoming adepts at interpreting the small quirks in each other’s personalities, and continuing a confusing conversation about the future, which he referred to as ours. Mine, I corrected.

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 49

Page 49, “The Persuasion”

Life was different with Tonin, more amplified, even the way he loved me. He threw anchors far into the future then held fast to the rope that would pull him there, even if it took years of putting one hand in front of the next. With all the other side projects he had going on already at Pale Brook, it had taken him nearly half his young life to transport his dome from imagination to construction, but, by the time he left for The Sorbonne in the Fall of 1965, T-dome was enclosed. Over the next two summers, he came back for a few weeks to finish the interior work with the help of his father and grandmother, who, it turned out, was skilled with power saws (“It’s a sewing machine with a blade instead of a needle,” she explained).

By the time I first saw it, the dome was a real home. Its interior was a honeycomb, five “rooms,” including the entrance way that opened into the large central area, big enough for a comfortable dozen for dinner and a kitchen with soapstone counters, a double porcelain sink, and an old Viking from his grandparents’ farm in Pennsylvania that they’d replaced in a kitchen remodeling there. A standing bar separated the eating prep from the dining area, which opened to the sitting room furnished with two low Danish modern sofas upholstered in Marimekko prints framing a fireplace of granite quarried in the park.

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Page 48, “The Persuasion”

“It’s my grandparents’ fault, you know. They gave me my own toolbox when I was six and were always encouraging me to build things. Obviously.” He swept his arm around the field. When he was in fourth grade, he said, he read an article in The Times about “Bucky,” as he called him, with a picture of Fuller standing by a cardboard geodesic dome at the Milan Triennale. “That did it. I had to build one.”

Tonin had been talking about Bucky since the day we’d met but this was the first time I’d seen any of the constructions that so excited him.

“You know what he said about the dome in the Montreal?”

To be honest, I’d never really heard of Fuller before meeting Tonin, and just vaguely remembered that there'd been a World’s Fair the prior year. While I worked hard to keep up with areas that interested me—books, the theatre, politics—I also blocked out a lot. Architecture, at that point, was not on the list.

“He said, Marie-Jeanne, that he built the dome as a symbol of his love for his wife so large that you could see it from space.” He stepped behind me, put his hands on my shoulders, and turned me around the seven peaks that circled the field. “What I didn’t know when I started was that it was love for you.”

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 47

Page 47, “The Persuasion”

“Then came this.” A wooden lean-to: a platform, a slanted roof, and an open side with a half-moon cut into the roof. “High enough off the ground that no creepie-crawlies can get you if you bring your sleeping bag.” He ran his fingers up my back.

“Next...” He nodded ahead toward a log cabin with two dormers and windows all around. “The foundation was my tenth birthday present from Papa and Babi.

"And then that.” He lifted his chin toward the chicken coop and I remembered a story he’d told in Paris, about how he and Janos had bought the long narrow cabin from a farmer outside Elizabethtown. They’d moved it up to the field, board by board, on one of the flatbeds from the sawmill, and a dozen people from nearby Elizabethtown had joined to raise it.

“And then….” Tonin brought his hands in front of his chest, palm against palm, and bowed to the edifice in the field’s center.

A geodesic dome, the invention of Buckminster Fuller. “T-dome.”  Sacred words to him, he bowed again. No right angles, no proper sides, no four walls, just half a globe of invention. A good twenty or so feet across and at least as high, an intricate jigsaw of interlocking steel struts supporting green and yellow wooden triangles, each fit against the three abutting it.

It looked like an upside-down bowl that had captured a very happy thought, an imagination of design that Tonin had begun building when he was only nine.

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Page 46, “The Persuasion”

Not long after we’d said goodbye to Bill Burt, unloaded our gear, and I’d had a chance to marvel at the surroundings, Tonin was ready to go again. “Hop in the Jeep. Hurry up. I want to show you my Pale Brook.”

We headed down the other side of the mountain, deeper into the park, jostling up and down on the bumpy path. Suddenly, Tonin turned sharply into a stand of birch with just enough room between the trees for the Jeep. He hitched the emergency brake, clicked off the ignition, and jumped out of the car all in one movement. He put his finger to his lips as if we were approaching a holy place and waved for me to follow.

I picked my way through a tangle of branches that he held aside (“M’lady,” he whispered with a bow); I stepped over fallen trunks camouflaged with colonies of mushrooms, avoided tripping over viney roots until we came to a low stone wall. In front of us, a clearing in the middle of many peaks. A spectacular sunny field on which was built an odd assortment of constructions. Sheds, lean-tos, cabins, and something I’d never seen up close before.

“T’ville. Built that when I was seven for Beatnik.” Tonin pointed to a shingled doghouse, big enough for his long-dead and much talked about Beagle—as well as a few of Tonin’s friends, should they have chosen to bunk there.

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Page 45, “The Persuasion”

It was like a hotel, all in order for our stay: The white linen hand towels, monogrammed in red with “Pale Brook Park,” were starched, ironed, and hung on maple dowels; the gas-fired refrigerator was cooled and supplied with milk, eggs, butter, and a loaf of bread; fires had been laid in the stone fireplace and the wood stove. Even the generator was primed for use if we wanted electricity (normally, Tonin had explained, lighting was by candle). Bill apologized for the low trout stock in the streams. “Your grandparents fished it out something awful this summer.”

The main cabin was a study in Adirondack design, each piece a family member I came to know well over the years—the gleaming Garland from the Michigan Stove Company, the twelve-foot-long dining table hewn from an old cherry tree that had gone down near the cabins in the Hurricane of 1938, the claw-foot soapstone tub brought down from a Montreal auction.

Built at the turn of the century as a hunting retreat for the Hardee family of Indiana, Pale Brook came to life when they traveled east by train each summer to take up residence. Tonin’s grandfather had bought the land on speculation in 1931, when he’d first set up business operations in the U.S., long before he’d ever thought about having to become a Czech exile.

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Page 44, “The Persuasion”

Chapter 7

Visits to Tonin’s family’s retreat in the Adirondacks were steps out of time and into a world of grandeur and elegance that I had read about, maybe seen in movies, but had yet to live. He borrowed Janos’s green Borgward for that first weekend at Pale Brook Park and for many more thereafter.

Bill Burt was outside the office smiling when we drove up. He opened Tonin’s door and shook his hand the way men do when they’ve watched a little boy grow up, hardy, beefy, and with a little pat at the end with the other hand.

Bill managed the woodcutting operation, the reason the family owned the twelve thousand acres. He helped us transfer our belongings to a waiting Jeep (with him and Tonin arguing over who should pick up each piece, waving me off entirely). When everything was just so, we climbed into the jeep, Tonin and Bill upfront, me in the back and we started the rutty, rocky two-mile drive up the mountain.

Set on a ridge at the crest of the park, the log cabins—eight in all, six for sleeping, one for dining, and one for laundry—were a species apart from the musty August bungalow my mother rented in Provincetown.