by Dr. Jeffrey Lant .

Author’s program note.  I wrote this article because of the appalling news emanating from one of the greatest institutions of the Great Republic, namely the American  Academy  of Arts and Sciences. Founded in 1780 by three of the titans of the American Revolution, scholar-patriots John Adams, John Hancock, and James Bowdoin, its purpose was laudatory, important, visionary… nothing less than the dedicated uplifting of the new nation so that it would direct, inspire, and improve itself and all the world.

Over the years, over 10,000 fellows have been inducted, men and women whose dedicated commitment and unremitting labor have changed the world — and your life — over and over again. Thus have we all been the beneficiaries and should know it, the better to extoll its undeniable virtues and signal achievements.

Sadly, scandal now rocks this venerable institution in many ways, but all these ways, every single one, point to one person, the Academy’s 45th President, the woman who called herself “Dr. Leslie Berlowitz,” a prestigious title she bestowed on herself, when her desire for advancement subdued her integrity, judgement and the loyalty she should have felt towards the Academy which raised her high and rained riches, respect, deference and trust upon her, only to be repaid with deceits, prevarications, misrepresentations, and shame.

This lamentable result was the product of two breathtaking, supremely arrogant decisions made by “Dr.” Berlowicz; first, that she would forge her professional credentials, including the all important doctoral degree and, second, once that bogus degree (and exaggerated employment history) had worked their dark purpose, securing her the lucrative plum job she desired (with its 2012 compensation package yielding $598,000), immediately set about the business of threatening, cowing and controlling her staff, thereby creating an atmosphere of fear, angst, perniciousness, and menace.

Thus what should have been the most liberal, progressive and humane institution of the Great Republic became instead the very symbol of hypocrisy, cant, insincerity and dissembling, the corroding antithesis of what its august founders and generations of lofty members desired and worked assiduously to achieve. What’s more, aided by the somnolence of her Board of Trustees and an incurious world, this rogue made awesome progress from the moment in 1996 when she became the Academy’s president until just the other day in June, 2013 when her web of lies and shoddy practices unraveled on the front page of The Boston Globe, her treatment of the staff ensuring maximum indignation, ribald comments and fascination about how she had gotten away with it all for so very many years.

All bad things come to an end.

Then one day “Dr.” Berlowicz woke up happy as a lark, the world her oyster, another day of proven chicaneries ahead, opened The Boston Globe and… ran smack dab into Nemesis, the goddess of “what goes around, comes around.” And she stood there in her luxurious robe and bunny slippers discovering that God indeed moves in mysterious ways… and now He had come for Leslie. Her jig was well and truly up and no amount of self deception could disguise that crucial fact. And so she became a candidate for that amazing grace that “”saves a wretch like me.”

How had this happened, after so many years of bountiful misrepresentation? Who blew the whistle on Leslie? I can’t tell you for sure, but I’ll put my money on a member or members of the Academy’s long suffering staff, people who had endured the slings and arrows of the lady’s outrageous fortune. They had suffered in silence, but that silence was now broken and on the front page of The Boston Globe no less.

The rage of the “little people” had begun at last and over the next days these folks tumbled over each other with their personal stories of how Madame Leslie, now naked before the world, had humiliated them, shouted at them over trifles, belittled them, demeaned them, denigrated them, so making their lives just as miserable as possible. In such ways, she had established an environment as dark and fearful as any gulag. It was in fact just about as bad as it could be. All because Miss Berlowicz had forgotten one little word… a word Aretha Franklin knew was key for successful staff relations, indeed for any human relationship… and that word was respect.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

A 1967 hit that changed America, the anthem of uncompromising righteousness and determined purpose.

On February 14, 1967 Aretha Franklin, about to become a household name and a symbol of the “new woman”, got up and sang her way into history…. telling men and reminding women in sharp words that could not possibly be misunderstood, “What you want, baby, I got it/ What you need. You know I got it.” This song radiated confidence, clarity about the objective, a determination to stop taking it… and to fight back. It flew high, it was adamant, it was insistent, it was pure energy and unflinching determination… Thrilling! Magnificent! Empowering!

Go now to any search engine and listen to it carefully. Its potent magic has the undeniable power to turn back the clock to days when you were young and still finding your way… but you knew upon hearing it, even for the first time, that you would succeed… seizing the respect to which you were entitled but had to be always vigilant to ensure and enjoy.

“Yes, respect, all I need is respect.”

Like all business executives, owners, and managers “Dr.” Berlowicz had a choice to make, to treat her staff with decency, courtesy, and, yes, kindness… or not. She chose the dark side of the force, in the process outraging one past and present staff member after another. It worked for a time, a long time, because no one wanted to get on Leslie’s notoriously unpredictable and abusive bad side, which might well result in embarrassing chastisement before their peers or even instant dismissal.

Thus she got away with one unacceptable behavior after another, her irresponsible board acting like Rip Van Winkle; perhaps unsurprising since Washington Irving was a fellow of the Academy at one time.

However, every time she dressed a staff member down, engaged in caustic commentary at their expense, or otherwise belittled and demeaned a staff member she was planting Satan’s teeth, in due course to become a minefield of destruction and woe, destroying all of “Dr.” Berlowicz’ carefully contrived schemes of flagrant and unremitting selfishness.

Do not make her mistakes. Instead do the following, all of which comes under that crucial category of R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

Honor thy staff. Recognize that you and your staff are two crucial aspects of the same team. Each of you has a distinct but related function. You are not master but leader. Your staff is not composed of so many servants but that many necessary and vital supporters. Only on this basis can there be sustained success.

Know thy staff. Each has his strengths and weaknesses. Your job is to learn these, understand these and, where possible, minimizing weaknesses while maximizing strengths through timely, pertinent education and instruction.

Listen to thy staff. Each member of your staff, even the most junior has an opinion about how to make your organization run better and more efficiently. You are not now and will never be the sole repository of information that improves your operation. And never pretend that you are. Instead keep all means of beneficial communication open with the staff, solicit their ideas, consider them carefully, and reward such participation and ideas lavishly.

Critique thy staff softly. Praise thy staff loudly. To build the best of teams, the team that deliver success soon and bountifully, you must identify problems and their perpetrators… critiquing them thoroughly but always gently. Remember, you want to improve not demean, enhance not dismay. This process guarantees success. To achieve this success earlier and more thoroughly praise more often and more widely. Always accompany such praise with tangible rewards ranging from free cinema tickets to a free trip to Paris. You are the fountain of honour. Act like it.

“Dr.” Berlowicz’ outrages.

We now know from voluminous media reports that Miss Berlowicz outraged each and every one of these crucial points and is, therefore, suffering public disgrace, obloquy, and anger accordingly. She is a marked woman and will be for the rest of her life, her very name a by-word for cruel and hurtful exhibitions, misuse of her high position, and remarks always calculated for maximum pain. In  this way, she is a veritable model of what not to do and when not to do it. How different so many lives would have been had she lived by the points listed above.

Had she, she would have earned the trust, admiration, and even love of the staff, to each and every one of whom she could say along with Aretha,

“I ain’t gonna do you wrong because I don’t wanna/ All I’m askin’ is for a little respect…”

And she would have got it, deservedly, for when you treat your staff with R.E.S.P.E.C.T “thy staff, they comfort me.” (Psalms 23 verse 4) and so goodness and mercy shall follow thee…. and you will find true success.

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of several print books, ebooks and over one thousand articles on a variety of topics.

“Dr.” Leslie Berlowicz

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.

Author’s program note. Remember Leona Helmsley (1920-2007), widely known as “the Queen of Mean”? She had the great good fortune to marry one of the Great Republic’s richest men, hotelier Harry Helmsley… which she thought conferred on her God’s permission to belittle, disdain, demean, denigrate all the “little people” of her big bath towel empire; oh, and skip taxes, too, a point of view with which the IRS did not concur…

… and so sent her to the pokey where she tried to bribe her cell-mate to do her prescribed tasks. She vowed not repentance (that was definitely for the “little people”) but revenge. And so she left her dog Trouble a twelve million dollar fortune (later reduced as excessive by the court to a mere two million), and so burnished her well-earned reputation as the unchallenged sovereign of gratuitous nastiness, “unchallenged” that is until now, for “Dr.” Leslie Berlowitz, (born 1944), gives even Leona a run for the money and that really is saying something given Madame Helmsley’s mastery of the stinging put-down and designed-to-hurt insult. But even here “Dr.” Berlowitz excels.

The scene of hurtful outrage.

Appalling though this is, you have probably lived every one of your days in complete and total ignorance about the august American Academy of Arts and Sciences, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a comfortable walk from where I am writing you today. It occupies spacious digs on five leafy acres in one of the most desirable areas on Earth, hard by Harvard and its unparalleled ability to lift the hitherto obscure to universal prominence and acclaim. Once there, and not a minute sooner, your invitation to membership in the Academy was sure to be in the next post and so it had gone on since this pantheon of certified worthies was established in 1780 by three of the American Revolution’s greatest leaders, scholar-patriots John Adams, John Hancock, and James Bowdoin.

This was their noble mission, “To cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Since then, and upon this laudable basis, over 10,000 fellows have been inducted, including Thomas Jefferson, John James Audubon, Washington Irving, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Willa Cather, T.S. Eliot, Edward R. Murrow, Jonas Salk, Eudora Welty, Duke Ellington… whilst among the distinguished foreign Honorary Members you find M. le marquis de Lafayette, Charles Darwin and Alec Guinness. It was an unmatched constellation of the legendary, the immortal, and the merely great and celebrated.

In 1996, “Dr.” Leslie Berlowitz became the Academy’s 45th president, with an endowed chair, the William T. Golden Chair, granted to give the lady a suitably comfortable place to ensconce her embonpoint. Only problem was… as reported by The Boston Globe, June 3, 2013, she had falsely claimed — on documents submitted to federal authorities on grant applications and elsewhere — that she had an earned doctorate in English from New York University, which she certainly did not, according to NYU sources.

But “Dr.” Berlowitz was a woman in a hurry, and she wasn’t about to let lack of a simple sheepskin hold her back. No way! So… she invented a character called “Dr.” Leslie Berlowitz. Here was a woman of consequence who put the actual woman with her comparatively meager credentials in the shade. These included a master’s degree from Columbia University and her duties as an administrator at NYU. There are questions about both of these.

Her master’s from Columbia, absent any subsequent doctorate, suggests what is known in the trade as a “terminal master’s”. Here people who are told they are not doctoral material are given the distinctly inferior consolation prize of the Master of Arts degree and advised to go back to Dog Patch whilst their more favored classmates advance to the eminence of the earned Ph.D. Odds are this is what happened to “Dr.” Berlowitz.

As for her work experience at NYU, it too is questionable and under scrutiny. NYU sources said that what “Dr.” Berlowitz claimed on her resume and the facts do not add up. NYU employment records show that she held a different, lesser job title in one case and held another job for far fewer years than stated in another. It was, in short, a pattern of prevarications, misrepresentations, and deliberate deceits.

On this basis she presented herself as a candidate for President of the Academy and was selected. Incredibly, no one on the selection committee seemed to ask about that all-important doctoral dissertation. She was now “Dr.”  Icarus, with her own Daedalus (the Academy’s quarterly journal since 1955), and she flew high… for 17 increasingly dazzling, opulent years.

Item.  Her total compensation package for 2012 was $598,000, 3 times what her peers in similar organizations were paid; far more than most college presidents.

Item: She always dined first class as a matter of course, and of course always flew first class, economy being a word she never countenanced.

Item: Her staff kow-towed and catered to her, picking her up at her superb residence overlooking the scenic Charles River, returning her thither of an evening.

It was exactly the life fictional “Dr.” Berlowitz would have had. OK, she must have constantly rationalized to herself, I lied. But I deserve everything I got. I earned everything. This must have been her constant belief, refrain, and creed. As such it certainly trumped the petty fact that she was every single day living a lie. Results, after all, were more important than mere honesty and integrity. And it must be said, she was a titanic worker, the ultimate micro-manager.

As such she had two key constituencies crucial to her success: her board of directors and her staff. She succeeded brilliantly with the first and miserably with the second… and herein lies the crux of the matter, the reason “Dr.” Icarus has fallen and will fall further.

The Board of Directors, seduced, enfeebled, hobbled, clueless.

In theory the designated CEO of any nonprofit organization is subservient to the Board of Directors. In practice, however, every CEO works overtime to ensure that the Board of Directors is subservient to her. This ensures her power, her position and, most important, her pay and perqs. Here “Dr.” Berlowitz excelled as we can easily see. When, for instance, a “palace revolution” brought on by staff complaints of her abusive and abrasive treatment almost brought her down just about one year after her appointment, the Board sustained her… and “Dr.” Berlowitz got the message: romance the Board morning, noon, and night. It worked.

So did doing everything possible to ensure her board candidates were elected… Thus when the current scandal broke, the Board was her poodle… immediately issuing a statement of unqualified support; only very slowly and with obvious reluctance distancing themselves from the “Dr.” who had catered to their every wish and whim… something the Board had valued above all, including the humane values they were in business to promote.

“Dr.” Berlowitz would take care of everything, and if a few of the “little people” complained, well, you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs. And so we arrive at the “little people”, the Academy’s staff, in constant turnover humiliated, ignored, angry, aggrieved., resentful, smoldering. Their moment in the drama has now arrived…

Right from the time when The Boston Globe broke the first news it was obvious that Academy staff past and present, with their appalling stories of how mauled and mistreated they were, would be a factor as important and influential as her misuse of a non-existent doctoral degree. And here “Dr.” Berlowitz did herself in, treating the staff with constant disrespect, no day complete without its hurtful quota of abuse, snide commentary and disparagements, all public, all played out before their colleagues. Thus did the malice and contempt of “Dr.” Berlowitz turn the ancient Academy into a snake pit of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear.

In this pernicious environment, “Dr.” Berlowitz, micro-manager, ruled all. Not a paper left her office that she had not seen. Thus, when she claimed that her negligent staff was responsible for the misuse and misstatement of her bogus credentials, there was a gasp of disbelief at the Academy; the “doctor” had brass, no doubt about it. She had spent decades lying; if one more lie, more or less, was necessary to prevail at this crucial moment in her dissembling career, so be it.

This time, however, the lady is sore beset on all sides… by past and present staff who have bided their time and are tumbling over themselves to tell the now attending media about their particular woes… by Board members who begin to see how to get peace and quiet they enabled their creature to outrage their core values and the clear mission of the Founders… and by state and federal authorities set to discover whether and how “Dr.” Berlowitz broke the law and may be deserving of a punishment long days coming. All that will come out in the wash as further details emerge.

For now her petted directors have put her on leave, whether with her bloated stipend or not was not announced. “Dr.” Berlowitz, of course, will fight, and pertinaciously, too, for every penny and privilege until her effete Board says, “basta”,  whereupon Miss Berlowitz, as the world will then know her, will no doubt take a copy of her book on management and climb the great steps of Harvard’s Widener Library, there to read from her business insights found in her deliciously titled tome ,”Restoring Trust in American  Business”: Then to belt out Sophie Tucker’s anthem for brassy dames everywhere, dames who will do anything, absolutely anything to prevail.

It’s “Some of These Days”, first recorded in 1911. Go now to any search engine and listen to these acid lyrics, perfect for Miss Berlowitz and her affecting case of chagrin and rue :

“Some of these days/ You’ll miss me, honey/Some of these days/ You’re gonna be so lonely.

You’ll miss my hugging/ You’ll  gonna miss my kisses/ You’ll gonna miss me, honey/When I’m far away…

Gonna miss your big fat mamma, yo’ mamma/ some of these days.”  It might even work…

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of over 20 print books, 2 ebooks, and over one thousand online articles on a variety of topics.

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.

Author’s program note. I was thinking of the Honorable Barack today and of how chagrined and irritated he must be these days. After all, having enjoyed the good fortune of drawing the hapless and terminally awkward Mitt-ster for his presidential opponent in 2012 and so walzing into a second term, he has been stymied by events, unable to spend quality time on his Most Important Project, the creation of a suitably grand and gaudy (immediately outmoded white elephant) library and museum which presents him to posterity as a figure of cosmic reverence and importance, a bloated evaluation most of his fellow Americans discarded as excessive and even ludicrous months ago. He doesn’t care about that very much, of course. A giant foot print  in indelible eternity is what he’s got in mind. Sadly, he is having oodles of trouble getting it.

Three scandals roiling His Excellency’s serene self-absorption.

It is said that bad news comes in threes, and I imagine Himself would agree about now. First, there’s the nasty business of how we let down our envoy and all our embassy personnel and other nationals in Libya, thereby awakening to the sickening photo of Ambassador Stevens, one of the best and the brightest, dead, overcome not just by smoke inhalation but by sloth, inefficiency and breathtaking irresponsibility.

This incident makes us indignant; it also makes us ashamed, for we all suspect that we were not ready for the kind of purposeful malice and destructive mayhem our common sense told us was inevitable against our embassies. And herein lies the crux of this matter. Who was responsible? What did they do? And why did it so fail leaving the flower of our diplomatic corps at such naked exposure and deadly risk?

Riddle me this,  Batperson.

You will recall that when the attack on the Bengazi consulate took place, September 11, 2012,  the first reaction from the administration was that it was anything other than what it actually was, a calculated act of terrorism to further satanize that date of infamy, September 11. Ambassador Stevens knew it… and his last message, by cell phone, was “We are under attack!” But the president and his top diplomatic team deemed this outrage merely a spontaneous “demonstration” and acted accordingly pooh poohing its significance… taking their own sweet time to act… our people dying because those charged with their protection didn’t give it…. then lied to cover up their torpid, lethargic, entirely inadequate response.

This is why the Benghazi matter is a scandal… and why the Republicans in Congress smell blood…. and why they’ll continue until they get it. And right they are.

Yet another email scandal… with many more to come.

Let’s get something straight from the start. Email by its very nature can never be entirely secure… can never be entirely private… yours to share with and only with the people you wish to share it with. We are just beginning to understand that email can never be just yours, sacrosanct and that, therefore, anything you use email to transmit is, from the moment you hit the send key, an object which others can access for good… or (temptingly) for anything but. Which brings us to the latest email scandal. It goes like this…

The Honorable Barack pledges that his will be the most transparent administration in history, that all will be clear and plain, open to the good people of the Great Republic, blah, blah, blah. That was Barack #1. At the same time, Barack #2 was urging his friends, neighbors and political appointees to set up at least two email accounts, one suitable for the front page of The New York Times… the other, far more interesting and revealing, packed with the dynamite that makes Americans even more cynical about the government and its wayward ways and gives commentators like me our bread and butter.

Enter two of the most important and potent letters on Earth, AP, the Associated Press.

AP is arguably the most important news gathering service in the world, the people who do the hard work, the grunt work, the work that must be done to get the facts, ma’am, just the facts. People like me rely on them as the oxygen for keeping people up-to-date. Thus, when the Obama people decided to end run AP by setting up multiple email accounts they were not merely thwarting AP, they were thwarting you and me. But the folks at AP, the hero of this drama, are as tenacious and focused as they come. And  when they got word that Obama appointees were being anything but transparent, they went to work with a will, using the Freedom of Information laws to open the secret accounts and bring accountability to all the poobahs who would only divulge under pressure. For of course when asked to open up, they hunkered down. After all, saying one thing and doing quite another is la specialite’ of the (White) House.

Why are the Obama people being so difficult, so obdurate? Not because evidence of any wrong doing has yet been found, for it hasn’t. Rather, it’s the principle of the thing: no one in the capital wants to be above board and honest; whatever they say. They come to win, not to get scout merit badges.

Thus they reserve their God-given right to chicanery, skullduggery, and tergiversations great and small, in the process making a point of doing everything in their power to block the AP, the shining sword of a truth that is so often embarrassing to office holders who have very different agendas.

That is why the Labor Department quoted AP a price of a cool million to research their records and turn over all email accounts of their senior officials. Stay tuned… there is much more to come in this matter… and as for the bomb shells to come from emails already written, I’m licking my chops for they will be rich and plentiful. You’ll never get transparency from this or any other administration, but you can rest assured there will be one delightful email scandal after another, all cheap at a penny a dozen except the one blossoming at the Internal Revenue Service. And that’ll set you back $50 million, give or take a buck.

“So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999.”

It must be fun to work at the IRS. At the Cincinnati office, for instance, you get to function like a petty tyrant, determining whether by ineptitude or political point of view, which organizations get crucial 501(c)3 tax-exempt status and which ones (strangely enough mostly conservative, Tea Party related,) don’t. Ah, there’s nothing like power to enliven even the dullest job.

This is part 1 of the hanky-panky currently under investigation by a committee of the House of Representatives. Part 2 are those IRS party animals who between 2010-2012 managed to burn through $50 million at what must have been the best parties on Earth!

And for this, we need music. We need party music. We need Prince and his strident, pulsating anthem, “1999″. It came out in 1982 and the world was soon dancing to its insistent beat and acid lyrics now so apropos to the current IRS fiasco. “People, let me tell you somethin’/ If you didn’t come to party/ Don’t bother knockin’ on my door.” Find it in any search engine. Then let ‘er rip to just the right music for this delicious indiscretion. Let’s take a look at how well they treated themselves, particularly at one incredible bash held in Anaheim, California in August, 2010. While the Great Recession was hitting hard, these guys were lavishing gilded TLC on themselves, to the tune of $4 million with nothing but the best the order of the day. Here are the facts as exhumed by Representative Darrell Issa’s (R-California) committee.

Item: The IRS didn’t negotiate lower room rates, though that is government policy. But why bother to save? That’s so middle class, dear.

Item: Some of the 2,600 attendees received benefits, including basketball tickets and stays in presidential suites that normally cost $1,500 to $3,500 per night.

Item: 15 outside speakers were paid a total of $135,000 in fees, with one paid $17,000 to talk about “leadership through art”. One might well wonder what that was all about.

Of course the muckety-mucks that made these decisions are long gone; the current muckety-mucks have pledged “never again”. But we the people know better, don’t we? We know that the next scandal will be deju vu all over again. “But life is just a party/ And parties weren’t made to last.” Except, of course, at the IRS.

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is an author, consultant, marketer and has written over one thousand articles on a variety of topics.

by  Dr. Jeffrey Lant.

Author’s program note. Oh, my, she was angry, angry to the point of bursting, to the point of indiscretion, even scandal. And so she let fly a cascade of hot words, each one hotter and less controlled than the last. It was a bravura performance… a rip snorter of a complaint months in the making, starting with this memorable opening, “Your servant, your servant? Indeed, I’m not your servant”.

Can you recall this cinematographic moment of choler, rage and unbridled anger? It was, of course, from Rodger and Hammerstein’s brilliant production “The King and I”, the film version (1956) starring Deborah Kerr as royal Siamese governess and Yul Brynner role perfect as His Arrogant, Condescending Majesty, life-and-death master of all; one “civilized”, the other a jewel-encrusted, half-naked “barbarian”.

Mrs. Anna (as her charges called her) was Welch, plain spoken, clean living, a woman who understood what was right and what wasn’t, as she made perfectly clear in her memoir “The English Governess at the Siamese Court” (1870). As such her path to acute irritation and the strongest possible disapproval of her capricious, exacting employer was inevitable…. her outburst one of the greatest complaints ever. Go to any search engine now and find this tune, “Shall I Tell You What I Think Of You?”  There could scarcely be a finer tune for an article on complaining, don’t you think?

Something we do every day, without thought, with often acute consequences.

Let us start at the beginning, the way a good governess like Anna Leonowens would certainly do.

Complaint: A statement of  wrong, grievance, or injury. From the  French “complaindre”. The word also has a legal dimension, “the first paper setting forth the plaintiff’s cause of action,” and a medical angle, too: “A physical ailment, disease.” As such complaints, problems to be solved are at the very root of our civilization and knowing how to handle them is crucial to your well being.

What level of complainer are you?

Before we deal with the matter of how to handle complaints, it is useful to see how much of your time and energy is bound up in complaining. All people complain of course; it is the most constant and human of activities. But what level are you at? Someone whose complaints are mild and occasional, or someone who sees grounds for complaint in every matter or incident, big or small?  First, then, recall to memory the last day or two. What happened that caused complaint? And what did you do to complain; keep the complaint(s) to yourself, share with friends and co-workers, contact the establishment where the complaint was generated, or what? You will know immediately, if you do not already know, whether you are an infrequent complainer or someone with a cosmic axe to grind, complaining as frequent as breathing.

Turning complaints into improvements.

A complaint properly handled is a device for improvement, not a means for showing off your superior intelligence and bosom buddy friendship with God. In other words, a complaint can be used to ameliorate or belittle. It all depends on how you handle it. For example a few days ago an argumentative acquaintance of mine managed to get himself into the most common of bar room altercations.

The matter at issue could easily have been dealt with if there had been any mutual desire to solve it. But liquor and morality were in this lethal mix. Thus, in just a minute or two my sanctimonious, always right, never wrong friend lay on the floor, writhing in pain, three front teeth at his feet, When he called me, as he was sure to do, he expected tea and sympathy from me. After all I was “his” friend, the right to speaking truth waived for the duration.

However, what he got instead of soothing acquiescence was another version of the “truth” — mine…. And it went something like this. You’re nearly 60! Your bar room brawl days are long over. “But they were trying to take advantage of me.” So now we had dueling complaints. His about the rightness of his tawdry cause…  mine about his unarguable and abashing propensity to “pop off” whenever truth, justice and the American way were in his corner, as they always were. His dentist told him the final replacement work would be done — “No, sir, I am not exaggerating” — in about a year. And that, of course, generated additional, full, rich, resonant complaints, which he immediately began to lay on friends everywhere, for he was assuredly a man of righteous grievances… “didn’t I agree”?   My (justifiable) complaint, irrefutable, unassailable, totally veracious, long overdue.

No, I did not agree, and so here, now I intend to take this matter in hand giving an ample piece of my mind to every non-stop complainer in the land. You’ve had this coming for a very long time. For openers, the only reason I ever listened to your unending litany of “I’m right, I am never, ever wrong” complaints is so that I can force you to listen in turn to mine.

Thus, I want to go on the record, once for all, to tell you what I think of you and the grievances you expect me to listen to and agree with.

Now hear this:

Your unending stream of complaints has alienated every single person who, through courtesy and for no other reason, has listened to your trivial chronicles of woe; each less important and more boring than the last. By now you surely must be the Guinness Book of Records Cosmic Complainer Award winner… for you have achieved the enviable distinction of turning absolutely everything in your life (including the hideous tattoos which deform your aging bulk, each a reminder of outrages past) into the basis for complaint and moral indignation.

And thus, began my epic flight as a complainer, a flight recalled to this very day as a matter of the great possible impact and interest. Once begun, I couldn’t help myself. I had waited a lifetime to unload the burden of my silence. Now I intended to let every grievance out and allow it to breathe, prosper and expand, to the wonder of all.

In just a minute, my cause picking up speed and momentum as I went, I had advanced into the ranks of senior complainers everywhere, deft, thorough, awing the world with practised skill and wondrous delivery. I discovered I had a knack, even a genius for complaining. And so I began to understand why everyone and his brother complains so… not to air grievances… not to correct gnawing injustices of every kind… no, indeed.

… but for one reason and one reason only: because the delightful selfishness of complaining enables you to gather every eye, engage every brain and turn your unending rodomontade into glorious selfishness, and what a joy that is! But I must not let this selfishness get out of hand…. and neither must you….. Thus, this great, this overdue, this public-spirited way to handle the insufferable business of non-stop, universal complaining.

We have, you well know, a universal energy crisis. Complaining, or to be quite specific, the hot air it engenders can solve the problem in record time. Here’s how.

Each person on earth even those who claim never to complain will be assigned a hose by a grateful government. Instead of complaining in the usual way, hot air generated but uselessly expended into the air; this time we will voluntarily agree to blow the hot air effusions directly into a tube that connects with a central processing facility, built just so to generate heat, light, electricity, power and energy. My science  team says the idea is not only feasible but certain to win the Nobel Prize. I shall be the saviour of the planet.

Broken reverie.

“What do you mean my idea stinks? That you haven’t heard anything so daft for a coon’s age? That it can’t’ be done, won’t be done, and shouldn’t be done? Are you trying to be a smart ass? Then hear this… I’m glad those punks nailed you; you had it coming. they should have punched out all your teeth and kept going. You twittified, arrogant, bloody jerk!” A moment more and we were both on the floor, Mrs. Anna singing in the background “Shall I Tell You  What I Think Of You?” There was already one tooth on the bloodied floor… “you conceited, self-indulgent….”

About the Author:

Dr. Jeffrey Lant is a 15 time print author, with 3 ebooks, and over 1,000 articles on a variety of topics available at http://www.JeffreyLantArticles.com

The author with Mercedes Joseph and Harvard President Faust.

Author’s program note. I knew I would go to Harvard Commencement this year after I read a disconcerting article in The Boston Globe some months ago. It cited the opposition of certain alumni to having Miss Oprah Winfrey as this year’s principal speaker and honorary degree recipient, Harvard’s chief honor. Their argument went something like this, some of it overt, some (the ugliest) not.

She wasn’t up to Harvard standards, she was not a woman of education, not a woman of merit, and most important, NOKD, “Not our kind, dear.” As these words, written and implied, rolled out, I knew in my bones that come hell or high water, I would be present, in full regalia, to honor the lady and what I knew would be her message of hope, inspiration and empowerment.

And so yesterday, on the unexpectedly hottest day of the year, I went back to Harvard, on the day of my own 43rd graduation anniversary… to show solidarity, support, good manners and discerning judgement. And no one cheered her more loudly and with greater sincerity than I did… for I recognized that this was not merely an event to honor a single woman, no matter how deserving of such honor. But far more important to honor the sisterhood and their gentle revolution, an epochal event that changed the world and liberated not just women but men, too, for the liberation of women has certainly meant the liberation of men, though not all such have recognized this yet.

Dramatis personae.

Before I go on I want to take this opportunity to introduce you to the principal players in yesterday’s production. First, there is Mr. Aime’ and Mrs. Mercedes Joseph, born in Haiti, two of the principal reasons why my life works so well and smoothly. I took them to Commencement to thank them, to show them an aspect of Americana they would not otherwise see, and, frankly, because it is easy to trip and fall amidst the undulations of such a huge crowd… and their support was very useful indeed.

Drew Gilpin Faust, President of Harvard University, Lincoln Professor of History.

Sandra Demson, ’58, distinguished attorney in Canada, veteran of the revolution.

Oprah.

Diane Neal Emmons, Ed.M., an old friend rediscovered, another soldier for the cause, her weapons of choice her wit, ebullience, and an optimism that will not waver, despite the provocations life throws at each of us, delighting to see what we will make of them.

Fate.

As a social scientist, student of the material world in all its manifestations, I should not believe in such matters as destiny, providence, or kismet. Should not. But when a day arranges itself as felicitously as yesterday’s did, the right things happening in just the right order, one is forced to consider the inconvenient notion that something other than random chance is present, “inconvenient” because unpredictable, though that doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Yesterday’s serendipities were anything but…

Security.

Since I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1969, I have passed through the great Class of 1877 Gate thousands of times. But when I passed through it yesterday I was patted down by a female security officer. It is a sign of our times, a blip that tells us the world has changed, and not for the better. Once inside a recollection from “Gone With The Wind”  came to mind. It was at the beginning of the film, where the newly engaged couple, Ashley and Melanie, stand on the balcony of Twelve Oaks and look out at their world of grace, luxury and privilege, a world they love, threatened with destruction whether the South wins or not.

I stood for a moment, just next to the president’s office in Massachusetts Hall and looked at the vibrant scene before me. It, too, is challenged, roiled by even positive change…  I was determined to see, determined to remember what I saw this day and what was part of me: class marshals in top hat and cut-away; their female counterparts wearing bright red rosettes with bright smiles to match; academic gowns from every renowned and prestigious university on Earth; new graduates wearing the most desirable costume of all, their unflinching youth. They would shortly sing “Gaudeamus igitur, Juvenes dum sumus” (Let us rejoice while we are young.) They would not understand… but the alumni before them would… for the words, once just lyrics of a well-known song, gather their profound meaning with every passing year in an exercise we call wisdom and which we cannot approach unmoved.

Rubbing for luck.

Every alumnus becomes perforce a guide when escorting guests to Commencement, and so, hobbling, I lead the Josephs to the statue of John Harvard, the Founder. Only it isn’t. There are no extant images of the man whose gift of books, lavish as all gifts to Harvard should be, launched the greatest educational establishment on Earth (1636).

What to do? Improvise! And thus a suitably attractive young man of noble countenance from the class of 1884 was invited to pose for the famous statue by Daniel Chester French. It stands in the center of the Yard, the faceless Founder facing eternity in the body of flawless youth. Both have thereby been immortalized, and this is perhaps why one is advised to rub the shoe for luck… for seizing eternity is certainly worth the doing. This is something every Harvard student knows.

The President!

When you talk of The President in Cambridge, you mean the President of Harvard. It was my privilege to share a few minutes conversation with the current occupant yesterday, Drew Gilpin Faust, president since 2007. An historian herself, she is a person of history; the first woman to lead Harvard. Let me tell you this: she is well and truly on her way to becoming one of the most respected and beloved leaders of this historic institution and thus one of the great benefactors of the Great Republic and the wider world beyond, for Harvard is universal now and forever more.

When you think of President Faust think of what has happened to and in the world since her historic appointment. You will then understand she has presided over six turbulent years, years when even Fortress Harvard knew anxiety. If she never did another thing, she would find an honorable place in Harvard’s story. But at just 65, she is in her prime… ready to do battle for the light. What will she do? Here’s a clue to one of her projects…

In her remarks yesterday she drove home one essential point; that the impending massive cuts in federal research funding are short sighted, self destructive, ill advised in every way.  Research is what gives us the improvements we desire; slicing any part of it gives us less. Does this make sense?

President Faust will ensure Harvard’s clout is used to avoid this folly. And she has my support in doing so. Just as she will always have my support in any and all endeavors to strengthen the liberal arts and humanities, always the great beating heart of Harvard.

“Is this seat taken?”

There were just three seats left in about the fourth row, and I knew we should grab them. But first I needed a positive response to the question asked through the ages: Is this seat taken? And so I came to meet a new friend, Sandra Demson, Class of ’58. She had come to participate in the 55th Reunion of the Harvard and Radcliffe Classes of 1958. I introduced myself and in just a minute or two we were chatting like a house afire, discovering one person after another we knew and had in common. Harvard meetings are like that.

However, the most important aspect of our conversation concerned my questions to Sandra about the differences she discerned in the situation of Radcliffe students in 1958 and the position of women undergraduates today. And here a pleasant afternoon’s smooth conversation became more than chat, an insight into history, something she wanted to tell… and I very much wanted to hear.

You see, Sandra Demson, smart, attractive, charming, was part of the generation which placed every aspect and feature at the foot of Man… and lived to regret it, like so many other women who not only discovered father didn’t know best; they discovered that father knew hardly anything at all… and this made for many problems, ructions, and difficulties, especially when Man continued to insist upon a superiority he clearly did not possess.

And so Sandra, like every “good woman” of her age and outlook learned to carry on, bite her tongue, and somehow keep the faith alive, that better days, and lasting love, too, would come to her. And, in due course, “this too shall pass” passed… And God granted her marital love, peace, and the easy, “woman of the world” manners which we have all erred in not insisting our young successors should have and which she graciously shared with me on this sweltering day.

Oprah!

It was Sandra Demson who looked at Oprah and said, “She’s nervous. She’s trembling”… No wonder. A poor black girl from the Deep South,had by dint of unceasing work, determination and an attitude of “must” not just “can” do had scaled the heights into the very citadel of American prestige. There she was, physically smaller than her outsized television presence, quivering just a bit but the crowed roared for her… and so the lady of embracements, hugs and love, was soon awash in the huzzas which must have been heard blocks away. In a very real sense, Oprah Winfrey had come home, and she was greeted accordingly.

The music.

When the tumult ebbed a bit, Oprah began. Soon, just in passing, she mentioned a tune she loved. I looked it up when I got home and immediately understood her better as well as why she’d referenced it, holding it close, a security blanket. It is “We’ll understand it better bye and bye”. Written by Charles Albert Tindley (1851- 1933), an ex-slave and “the Father of Gospel Music”, it is a rousing, barn stormer of a song, the lyrical equivalent of Oprah herself. Go now to any search engine and listen carefully…”We are tossed and driven/ on the restless sea of time… We will understand it better bye and bye.” I prefer the inimitable version by Mahalia Jackson. Listening to this mistress of godly soul, you can believe, deep in your heart, that better times will come as they came to Oprah Winfrey.

Then Oprah told us how they came to her, what she learned, what she had to do… and what she had to share with others. She spoke, like a female Polonius, of being true to thyself, of living your own life, not the life assigned to you or allowed by others. She spoke of the commitment one must make, the unceasing focus one must maintain. And she spoke of what must be done in the inevitable days when troubles come and one faces the reality of dread and defeat. This was not mere eloquence, though the lady excels at eloquence. It was not mere rhetoric, though the lady’s rhetoric is notable… no, indeed. Instead she was speaking from what the world knows as her great heart… so motivational, so inspirational, so uplifting that along with her massive crowd of the eminent, learned and well connected, I was on my feet, not just cheering, but shouting approbation and encouragement… yes, Oprah had come home…. and for the lady who loves there was ample love indeed.

Dee-On.

My day was, I thought, over and completely successful. Aime’ and Mercedes Joseph had given support. President Faust impressed and reassured. Sandra Demson gave charm and friendship. Oprah gave the formula not merely for success, but how to conquer failure. It was enough, more than enough, but there was more….

Leaving the Tercentenary Theatre, Oprah whisked away by the omnipresent security, I saw a face I knew so well… and it was Diane (always pronounced Dee-On), Diane Neal Emmons. And so serendipity continued, unpredictability its metier, for here was a long-lost friend, benefactor when I was a penurious graduate student, forty years ago, success in the future, but when? Diane and her legendary hospitality helped make waiting bearable. This time she invited me to her home for the 4th of July celebrations when the known world gathers in her front yard  to extol the Great Republic. I may even go… for there is a story there… and I want to be the one who tells it, for only thus will we “understand it better bye and bye…”

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc. at www.worldprofit.com,
providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses.

To see Dr. Lant’s blog go to www.jeffreylantarticles.com Dr. Lant is happy to give all readers 50,000 free guaranteed visitors for attending his live webcast today. Visit Worldprofit
for details.

Your response to this article is requested. What do you think? Let Dr. Lant know by posting your comments below.

memorial day

Author’s program note. It is 5:35 a.m. here in Cambridge and the day threatens to be gray, overcast and wet (at least so far), not up to the radiant holiday standard we’re used to on a plu-perfect springtime day.

But the scene outside my window is evocative and even solemn, the light filtered, the trees outfitted in pristine green, every new leaf touched by dew present and accounted for. It is beautiful, rivaling any bucolic scene anywhere on Earth, any painting by John Constable. One is always surprised by this, so much so unlikely in the ordinarily bustling city round about.

It is quiet, peaceful, serene on the Common now, but only now. We will in a few hours host a very mixed bag of parents of Harvard graduates, their families, claques and followers in from anywhere and everywhere. Commencement activities, you see, start today and culminate on Thursday in the iconic Yard across Massachusetts Avenue so close I can almost lean out the window to touch it.

Why are the festivities so long?  My bet is that it takes so long to shake down all the graduating seniors, their parents and, of course, every alumnus still on this side of the grim reaper. I’m sure you understand that you cannot just tap Mr. Big Bucks, Class of ’68, on the shoulder and say “Hey, bub! Pony up, you old windbag!” That is not recommended procedure.

Instead, you must have the president herself offer him a most amicable greeting, get him to down a few glasses of cordial spirits and listen with exquisitely feigned nearly angelic sincerity to his interminable, inexhaustible, self-congratulatory tales; the proven, practised pounce following as a matter of course… a whopping donation following that and the Mr. Big Bucks wing of a suitable edifice which could now proceed, the space already designated for chiseling the old bugger’s name for posterity. No wonder Harvard presidents have to take a holiday after this week… it would be astonishing if they didn’t.

Oprah is speaking this year, and I’ll be going to this single event, carefully eschewing every opportunity (and there are many) to find my pockets lightened in the manner above mentioned. It is like going to Las Vegas and not gambling, difficult but by no means impossible. So cash donation or not, attending is my privilege as an alumnus, but I have not made any use of it for years.

But this year, for Oprah, I intend to be present and cheer her and her many achievements to the echo. I shall probably attempt to shake her hand and look her in the eye, uttering my sincere compliments. However my balance is not all it once was and what a kaffafle there would be if I fell into her arms and came to a soft landing on her much exposed poitrine.

She would be surprised, of course, who wouldn’t be? However, she might well like it; 66 I may be, but I still have my charms and shreds of an ardor once notable. One of my other so far unused Harvard privileges is the right to be married in the chapel of University Church. I assure you I am still young and green enough to make use of it … and confound lesser men as well as my heirs whose response to such news would surely come straight out of Charles Dickens where those who wait in certainty at the end find their great expectations crushed and overawed by the sap which still runneth even when the tree is gnarled and scarred by the business of staying alive.

But this is still not my subject for today or the reason why grown men from down the road apiece will appear in their (not very accurate) togs purporting to look like the blue and buff uniforms and tricorne hats worn hereabouts in 1775 by lads who came not to commemorate a successful revolution but to stake all on forging one, an event anything but certain, the stuff of treason, the noose, and the lash — until their side won and they got to call the shots, including what was righteous “history” and what wasn’t.

Those who come today come to re-enact, not to act. And, I feel sad to tell, had the originals done such a trifling job we’d all be singing “God Save The Queen” this Memorial Day. Cambridge, what with Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and so many other fine collegiate institutions (though these are always overshadowed by the two biggest guys) has opportunities to burn.

Thus instead of regretting the loss of so many “might have beens” spoiled Cantabridgians continue year to year happily wasting what for most any other city in the Great Republic would be the basis for enhanced civic pride, enthusiastic endeavor, and strenuous outreach to maximize such a benefit.

I think, for instance, of one of my several alma maters (there are twelve such), the University of St. Andrews. It is Scotland’s oldest university (founded 1413), far, far older than Harvard (founded 1636). It has in its long life undergone many seasons of want and penury.

These would have undone lesser folk and their objectives, but not in Scotland where blood can indeed be squeezed from a stone. I am of Scottish heritage myself and I write of this often necessary skill with consummate pride…  an example which has helped me continue and overcome more challenging times and troubles than I can recall.

Thus, the Solons of St. Andrews turned the mere fact of their longevity into coin of the realm. How? By creating a colorful parade that includes its tradition-mad students dressing up (and as accurately as possible, too) like the great figures of history associated with the university. These include the woebegone Royal Stuarts, high aristocrats, word slingers, military potentates, statesmen and plutocrats. Each has added his measure and so helped create the great university which has, often against all odds, grown old and respected despite its infelicitous location hard by the unforgiving and inhospitable North Sea which has over immemorial time perfected its climactic torments.

There is nothing on Cambridge’s civic calendar, nothing on Harvard’s, like the Kate Kennedy parade through the streets of St. Andrews. You may say, so  what, and perhaps dismiss the matter by singing a few bars of “Ca sera sera” (though I hope not quite as over sugared as Doris Day’s rendition). But (perhaps because of my Scottish descent) I like to derive all the benefits from any situation. Some call this niggardly. I say it’s merely superior husbandry of scarce resources.

Take the Common itself. For years during my long tenure here the Common was treated as scarcely more than open air urinal (no less pungent for all that) and doss house where the homeless and drifters marked their living place by flattened card board boxes, handed down amongst the lost and just passing through like so many tattered and odoriferous heirlooms.

In short, for years what should have been the verdant heart of a great city was a noisome menace, smelled rather than visited. And this continued until I, who reside parkside, said “basta!” and called the slothful, uncaring civic officials who were responsible but did nothing. In the face of their massive indifference even my needle sharp messages were not immediately successful.

It is for such exasperating, challenging moments that the word “persistence” was created. And so day after day after day after day at precisely the same time I called mayor, councillors, police and park authorities. Each of them came to know me well; “Yes, Dr. Lant” soon became their mantra… and progress, glacial at first, lead to success although even to this day, many irritants removed, the whole cannot be regarded as “finished” for many details, small and large, remain to be attended to. However, one needs a greater objective and inspiration than these odds and ends can provide…

… mine is the desire to see better Memorial and Independence Day parades marching down the streets bordering the Common… Waterhouse Street, then Garden Street, then Massachusetts Avenue through Harvard Square, a place every educated person in the world visits once in her life, a place pulsating with the combined energy of the young who aspire and adults who have already left their mark and done their bit to make the world a better place.

Right now these parades are harum scarem, not merely amateurish but an embarrassment.There’s absolutely none of that eclat, efficiency, organization, panache and spit-and-polish that a place as famous as Cambridge should have in every endeavor, but so often doesn’t. And as for those re-enactors and their popguns… the less said  the better.

Well now I’ve worked myself into what my grandmother called a “state”. Far worse than that, I realize that if I want better parades, polished and proud, the best Americana,  I may be forced to do more than complain, may be forced indeed to interject myself into whatever organizations are responsible for these eye-sores… and the people running the petty fiefdoms that produce them. These worthies, of course, will be ecstatic to see me and hear what I’ve got to say… not.

Hopefully I can learn to live with this mediocrity that ambles rather than marches past my door, but I doubt it. I can’t fool myself. Every notable idea starts in the mind of one soul who realizes if you want it done right, you must do it yourself; my grannie taught me that, too…..

Very well, but if I must volunteer myself as I did in the matter of the Cambridge Common, I shall insist on three things: that the genius of John Philip Sousa, America’s bandmaster, be the rousing standard to which we dedicate ourselves, that “The Stars and Stripes Forever” (1897) be played to indicate the parades have commenced, and that a washed and highly polished convertible be made available for my place… prominently identified as “”The Nudge of Cambridge.” Modesty prevents me from asking for anything else.

“”Hurrah for the flag of the free! May it wave as our standard forever…” especially in Cambridge.

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc. at
www.worldprofit.com,  providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses.

To see Dr. Lant’s blog go to www.jeffreylantarticles.com

Dr. Lant is happy to give all readers 50,000 free guaranteed visitors for attending his live webcast today. Visit Worldprofit
for details.

Your response to this article is requested. What do you think?

Let Dr. Lant know by posting your comments below.

hungarian imperial crown of st-stephen

Author’s program note. These are troubling days in the heart of what was  once one of the grandest and most civilized of kingdoms… for Hungary was  all that and more, a people of the highest culture, sophisticated, masters of  every refined nuance of the art of living; a life-enhancing people, exuberant, with  a zest all their own and a profound patriotism exceeded by no other nation,  forged from ardent and ineradicable memories of a glorious past and ensuing  generations of crushing defeat and tragedy.

Now Hungary is again moving towards the precipice and her many friends  around the globe must urge restraint and so save the nation at a crucial  moment  in her checkered history, so full of pain, sorrow, miscalculation, punishment, anguish,  adamant willfulness, and crippling arrogance.

For the musical accompaniment to this article I have selected “Hungarian Rhapsody  No. 2″ by one of Hungary’s most renowned sons, Franz Liszt (1811-1886). This is not  merely brilliant music. No, it soars beyond that. It is magic, an excruciating technical  challenge that divides pianists who dare attempt it into two sharp categories: the wizards  who render the astonishing notes with the requisite virtuosity… and the merely excellent,  unable to rise to such demanding proficiency.

Go now to any search engine and listen to at least two of its versions. First, the piano  solo. This was composed in 1847 and published in 1851. Liszt dedicated it to his fellow countryman Count La’szlo’ Teleki, a nobleman who lives in history because he had the  good fortune to befriend a genius. Its immediate success and popularity on the concert  stage led to an orchestrated version, arranged by the composer in collaboration with  Franz Doppler. Later, in 1874, the composer arranged a piano duet version that was  published the following year.

Each version of this masterpiece reminded the dominant Magyars (who considered  themselves the only “true” Hungarians) what their great people could achieve if  they would but focus on the key elements of the well lived life, rather than the  chimera of power and military glory. But too often these feckless Magyars  were seduced from the constructive path by those who saw greatness only  in terms of how many others they could subjugate, over what expanded acreage.

Thus the great resources of the nation were squandered by men of noble pedigree  in tight-fitting uniforms of wondrous panache; men intent on seeing their Hungary  rise higher and higher, instead bringing her low, to desolation, to destruction, to  degradation, master of despicable behaviors and disgusting deeds, heinous and  shameful.

For you see, the Magyars are an unlucky people, once desiring to join the Great  Powers, but achieving only the position of Great Obstacle, a nation without the  wisdom and necessary resources to reach their desired eminence, instead settling  for blocking others from achieving theirs.

Thus Hungary and its perennially discontented Magyars, too few to achieve what  they wanted, too many and too determined to ignore, became the greatest negative  factor in European politics after the Dual Monarchy with Austria was established in  1867. Indeed, they were so obstinate and stubborn, so selfish and sanctimonious,  so purblind and self-congratulatory that even their Habsburg rulers could not abide  them.

Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir apparent to the crown of Hungary, disliked his  future Magyar subjects to the point where he could not stand being in the same room  with them, “moustachioed gypsies” being one of his few printable descriptions. When  he was assassinated in Sarajevo in July, 1914, there was glee in Budapest. Their  greatest nemesis was dead… their finest hour surely now at hand. They knew that  Austria could not wage successful war without them… and so they drove the hardest  of bargains with the doddering Emperor Francis Joseph (reigned 1848-1916) and his  hapless successor, the last reigning Emperor and Apostolic King of Hungary,  Charles I (reigned 1916-1918).

Thus the Dual  Monarchy faced its dwindling future hobbled, divided, antiquated,  ready for history’s scrapheap… which duly arrived for the Magyars at the Treaty of  Trianon (1920) where the victorious Allies had their vengeful way for generations of  Hungarian hubris and condescension. Each paragraph of the precise protocols was  designed to hurt the erring heirs of Attila the Hun, not least removing 77% of their carefully  acquired patrimony, raising the nations and peoples they despised (Romanians, Slovaks  and South Slavs) to a superiority they loathed and vowed to destroy… and so Satan’s  seeds were well and truly planted, ensuring years of calumny, catastrophe and calamity  far, far worse than those which went before. At its center was one man, Admiral Miklo’s  Horthy de Nagyba’nya, “His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary”.

>From March 1,1920 to October 15, 1944 Miklo’s Horthy spun his webs and played the  difficult game that constituted Eastern European politics in those turbulent years. I warn  you; it is a game as complicated as any on Earth, and Horthy was a past master of its  intricate maneuvers… to the extent that whist hundreds of thousands of Hungarians  (including a half million Jews, Roma, and homosexuals) were exterminated during his  tumultuous regime, he survived… finally savoring the sunset of his life in Estoril, in  Portugal where he enjoyed the ultimate revenge of the once powerful, now in exile.  He wrote his autobiography….

Horthy’s anecdotage.

He published his memoirs in German in 1953, the English translation, “A Life for Hungary”  in 1956, the year Hungary rose against her Communist overlords in a revolt that tugged at  our hearts as we watched the valiant patriots of this ancient land killed in their own streets.  I was just nine at the time and the searing images of this glorious but futile endeavor  constitute my earliest recollection of what people will do to be free.

As for Horthy, having done all that a wily man might do to save his skin, he then had  the good sense to die (1957), aged 88. He is the ultimate example of this profound  observation, “Living well is the best revenge.”

Horthy’s ghost.

Hungary, like all the ancient kingdoms and domains of Mittel Europa and the Balkans,  is a land of ghosts and eerie reminders, no less potent for their dotage, of benighted  policies that destroyed lives for reasons no one but arcane specialists can now recall.  In these lands such lurid ghosts can live again whenever the witches brew ferments  just so.Thus the hobgoblins of the past may arise at any time in the great capitals  of Eastern Europe, no more so than in Hungary, land of so much promise but far  more bitterness and rue.

These pernicious spirits are now apparent in Hungary… and the world is right to be  concerned, even appalled by their early reappearance after the great havoc they  brought so often before. Each Magyar needs a sprig of rosemary, “that’s for  remembrance”, for now above all they need to remember all that went before;  that which they would oh so much rather forget.

The revival of Hungarian fascism.

Autocracy, monarchy, fascism, nazism, communism. These are the inauspicious  modes of governance known to Hungary and the Hungarians for a millennium and  more. Arguably there was no democracy until 1989 and this fragile plant so long  coming needed longer to take root and grow; time it did not get. Thus when the  European economy began to deteriorate (2011), the fragile Hungarian experiment  with democracy started to deteriorate, too, each quarter’s more dismal economic  news yet another opportunity for reviving the tried and failed shibboleths of the  unhappy past.

And so the tired old bogeymen were trotted out, hatred of Jews, detestation of’  ethnic Roma, hostility to homosexuals; all the malignities of the past revived, never  mind that each of these had already proven to be toxic to the nation and its people.  This included the creation and rise of neo-fascists, particularly in the Jobbik Party,  now Hungary’s third largest (and fastest growing) political party with 17 percent  of the vote in the last national elections (2010).  Local experts agree that Jobbik  is even stronger today.

The current Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban seems to agree. His own party,  Fidesz, is sympathetic to Jobbik’s divisive goals and cannot disregard its growing  importance. Equally he must pay close attention to the concerns of his European  Union colleagues, unsettled by the growing instabilities in Budapest. In short, it is  “deja vu all over again,” Yogi Berra’s famous redundancy.

But is the worrisome situation in Hungary today, neo-fascism clearly on the rise,  a reincarnation of the first fascists and their baneful regime? Gladly, things are  very different in Hungary now from the grim days of the resplendent Regent  Horthy. The World Jewish Congress is closely monitoring anti-Semitism, to  the extent that they held their assembly (usually held in Jerusalem) in Budapest  this year. No Jew could be outraged or seized today without universal outrage and  instant WJC action.

Equally, ethnic Roma, once fair game for every humiliation and injury, today  enjoy a level of acceptance and understanding never seen before in their long  history of injustice and acute malevalence. They, too, no longer face peril  without protection, the EU will see to that.

As for Hungary’s gay population, it, too, has advanced marvelously, no longer  forced to live desperate lives and lies, previously unthinkable same-sex marriage  is now a commonplace; their rights, too, protected by the EU.

Why then should we worry about the situation in Budapest and the obnoxious  practices of a few fanatics? Because without constant monitoring and prompt  intervention the few fanatics of today can become a dangerous movement tomorrow, polished jackboots crushing democracy as well as any chance for  a peace and harmony this storm-tossed nation and its contumacious Magyars  have never had. Helping that democracy survive and flourish is mandatory,  Hungary’s last chance to be the nation all Hungarians deserve, of the people, by  the people, for the people, all the people. We must all be clear on that.

Author’s program note. I was sitting in the barber shop the other day  when I
saw two beautiful television anchors discussing the little faux pas made by
Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Michael S. Jeffries an acknowledged  powerhouse
in the business of making people, but only certain people, the cynosure  of every
eye. It is a scandal of international dimensions, with denizens of every catwalk
and modeling agency following the story with the closest possible  attention, since
it is a story about them, and isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be,  for a thing of
beauty is a joy to everyone, right?

For the musical accompaniment to this story, I have chosen a catchy tune entitled
“I’m Too Sexy” recorded in 1991 by a group curiously named Right Said  Fred. Its
gentle ribbing of the fashion industry was a superb dance number and  topped the
charts in 32 countries, including the USA.  It made the group worldwide  celebrities
and garnered the prestigious Ivor Novello award.

Go now to any search engine and be sure to be your most chic when  listening;
you never know who might be watching you… and you want to be  absolutely picture
perfect when you’re discovered.  From that moment on, after all, you’re  “so sexy it
hurts…”

“We go after the cool kids…”

In 2006, Salon magazine ran one of its celebrated interviews this time  with CEO
Jeffries. These interviews almost always make for fun reading because  the
interviewer, while always purporting to be scrupulously fair and  perfectly
professional, actually aims to make news by getting the person being  interviewed
to be as indiscrete and unguarded as possible. Then, hey presto, Salon  has what it
wants… which is the subject’s head… and hitherto unblemished reputation. Jeffries
did his duty, by saying exactly what he thought about the mission of A & F,
thereby planting a land mine for later explosion and shrapnel all  around.

This explosion has now taken place. Here, no doubt from the vestiges of  what
was once a heart, are the words he put forward with that unflinching  conviction
that insists the chips fall where they may.

“In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-
so-cool kids. Candidly we go after the cool kids. We go after the  attractive
all-American kids with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of  people don’t
belong /in our clothes/, and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary?  Absolutely.”

Well, no one can clam that Jeffries wasn’t clear and crisp in his  bombastic remarks,
he said what he meant and meant what he said. Or at least he appeared to do so.
Since they appeared on the Internet, they have gone viral. Jeffries did  what the rich
and famous so often do when they blunder.

They develop a bad case of amnesia and always and forever claim they  were
misquoted and that the damning comments were taken out of context. Now
Jeffries may know a lot about beautiful folks, a veritable arbiter  elegantiae,
and what they should wear to accentuate the positive. By contrast, his
relationship with the truth and accuracy of his statement is nodding at  best.

Thus, as his toxic sentiments took wing undoubtedly aided by a legion of the
uncool kids of any age whose smoldering resentment toward cocksure  Jeffries
and A & F in general has now boiled over and become a very ugly  problem, his
ceo-ship did what those who only look like corporate leaders do…

He hunkered down in his beautiful office (the inner sanctum of beautiful ideas
and captivating notions) and… hid out… for days… saying nothing… relying on
his many advisors to make it all better… a few winsome ganymedes at  the ready
to waft incense and soothing platitudes to their injured ruler and  fashion high priest.
Delicious… No doubt despite the tsunami of criticism, hurtful comments and hilarious
quips, Jeffries continued to look splendid. It’s what beautiful people  do, whatever
the circumstances…

No plus sizes a corporate negative for A & F?

Then worse struck! The “fat is beautiful” crowd decided to jump on this  band
wagon while the getting was good and chastise Jeffries for deliberately  excluding
women’s XL and XXL sizes, eschewing the imperfect majority, to cater  only and
solely to the perfect (and fiercely aspiring) minority. Parbleu… the  peasants were
well and truly at the gate… ill proportioned and no doubt unwashed,  barbarous in
face and feature, bumptious and aggravating. NOKD, “Not our kind, dear!”

Of course this adamant position cost A & F money but it preserved  its high,
exclusionary standards…. so important in our infuriating, slovenly  days. Sadly,
Jeffries has now learned just how costly these standards and their  maintenance
can be… and it hurts, as every no doubt carefully considered word in  his most recent
statement makes clear.

“A & F is an asirational brand that, like most specialty brands,  targets its marketing at
a particular segment of customers. However, we care about the broader  communities
in which we operate and are strongly committed to diversity and  inclusion.” Excuse me
if I appear a tad cynical about Mr. Jeffries and his carefully parsed  rhetoric, but his
remarks seem to smell of the lamp and endless corporate meetings with  hot-shot
consultants, decidedly lacking in credibility, much less a scintilla of  sincerity. CEO
Jeffries has a posse of full-figured gals at his perfectly proportioned  heels. His words
represent his handlers best efforts to shake ‘em off. But these girls  are serious.
Witness the remarks of America’s favorite (ex) barmaid, Kirstie Alley.

Kirstie’s Kommentary

We all know Kirstie. Now 62, Kirstie’s career, whether at the studio or  at home, has
centered on men, getting them, losing them… and fat, putting it on,  taking it off, putting
it on again. But Kirstie’s also got a social conscience and it was  roused to this eloquence
by Jeffries’ exclusionary policy…. “Abercrombie clothes are for people who are cool and
look a certain way and are beautiful and are thin and blah, blah, blah,  blah. That would
make me never buy anything from Abercrombie.” But there’s more… “I’ve  got two
kids in that bracket, but they will never walk in those doors because of his view of
people — forget women, his view of just people.” And here Kirstie put  her finger on
the real issue and cast a raking light on CEO Jeffries and his  priorities. Let’s look
at the record.

As reported in the Wikipedia, whose entry on A & F is well worth the read, since
1997 “the company  has consistently kept a high-profile in the public  eye, due to its
involvement in legal conflicts over branding, clothing style and  employment practices.
The company has been accused of the sexualization of pre-teen girls by
marketing thongs to 10-year-olds and padded bikini tops to 7-year-olds.”

On April 14, 2005, Judge Susan Illston of the the U.S. District Court  for the Northern
District of California granted final approval to a settlement of  Gonzalez v. Abercrombie
&  Fitch Stores. The settlement requires the company to pay $40  million to several
thousand minority and female plaintiffs who charged the company with  discrimination.

There’s more, lots more. Last year, for instance, former company pilot  Michael
Bustin, 55, in his age discrimination suit against A & F alleged  that Jeffries required
male crew members to wear the brand’s boxer briefs. I wonder, how did  Jeffries
know his minions were complying? “Attention! Face forward! Drop trou!”.  The suit
(now settled) also offered this telling vignette. According to the  plaintiff, Jeffries
mandated that the end squares of toilet paper be folded. Nice. No detail too small to
achieve perfection…

Jeffries’ “non-apology” apology.

Still, let’s give the man yet another chance to re-capture the high  ground. Here’s what
he said in an official statement released May 15, 2013.

“I want to address some of my comments that have been circulating from a 2006
interview. While I believe this 7 year old, resurrected quote has been  taken out of
context, I sincerely regret that my choice of words was interpreted in a manner
that has caused offense… We are completely opposed to any  discrimination,
bullying, derogatory characterizations or other anti-social behavior  based on race,
gender, body type or other individual characteristics.” Let’s be clear:  this wasn’t an
apology, an admission of any wrong doing, or even an inkling that his  ideas were
hurtful to so many. In short, the man just doesn’t get it. However at  age 68, he probably
never will.

Thus, I have this idea for expediting his (admittedly late) growth and  development.
I propose that a photographer with the genius of Bruce Weber, the man  who first shot
the iconic A & F photos of semi-nude models with perfect physiques,  be assigned to
do a photo spread of the unclad Jeffries, every wrinkle and sagging  muscle apparent; the
results to be plastered on every Abercrombie and Fitch billboard  everywhere on Earth.

Then, I imagine, he will have a good idea of what happens when you’re  not a “cool kid”,
merely an average Joe who has never bought his togs at A & F, and  after reading this
article probably never will. Then put Jeffries on the catwalk and have  him “shake his
little touche” while working it to the catchy rhythm of Right Said Fred. It’ll do him a world
of good….

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc. at
www.worldprofit.com, providing a wide range of online services for
small and-home based businesses.

To see Dr. Lant’s blog go to www.jeffreylantarticles.com

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Let Dr. Lant know by posting your comments below.

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.

Author’s program note. Let’s be clear about something right from the start: the current scandal at the Internal Revenue Service is by no means the worst the agency has endured… yet at any rate. The IRS has a scrapbook full of more abashing moments and grim memories of things they shouldn’t have done… and got caught red-handed doing.

Item: In the1930s President Franklin Roosevelt used the IRS against a grab bag of political opponents, including mega-publisher William Randolph Hearst (think “Citizen Kane”), Louisiana Governor Huey Long, and controversial radio priest Charles Coughlin.

Item: In the 1940s and 1950s corruption and bribery were rife. Hundreds of (not so) shame-faced employees were dismissed, while President Harry Truman ordered a major reorganization. Employees were put under civil service guidelines to curb political influence.

Item: During the administration of President John Kennedy, the IRS created an “Ideological Organizations Audit Project”  that investigated conservative groups and challenged their tax-exempt status. The (apple-polishing) IRS started the project after Kennedy complained during a news conference about right-wing groups getting tax-exempt status. Targets included the American Enterprise Institute and Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.

Item: In the 1960s and 70s the Nixon administration created an IRS unit called the Special Services Staff, or SSS to target activists and political dissidents. The White House drafted the notorious  “enemies list” of political opponents to be targeted for IRS audits. Here, however, common sense (the most limited of commodities in the capital) intervened in the person of Treasury Secretary Donald Alexander who said he wouldn’t audit Nixon’s political enemies and ordered the SSS dissolved.

Then there’s the current scandal which apparently started in the IRS’ Cincinnati regional office. There someone had the bright idea of making it difficult, if not impossible, for conservative groups to get tax-exempt status. It could easily be done with computerized key-word searches, including overtly ideological searches for applicants seeking to “make America a better place to live” or “criticize how the country is being run”. Other key search words and phrases included “Tea Party” and “Patriots” .

Once started the culprits (who of course regarded themselves as the real patriots, the true-blue Americans) focused on groups “involved in limiting/expanding Government” and “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.”

So, let’s review what was going on…

Some hot shot (as yet unidentified, although in due course that’ll come out in the wash) decided conservative Americans were anathema and needed to be reined in. That person recruited his best IRS buddies (the ones believing conservatives to be menaces needing curtailment and chastisement for their wrong-headed views). And they merrily started using their access to sensitive information to thwart the entirely legal activities of people who were entirely within their constitutional rights, a sobering fact which seems to have had no influence upon the nimble perpetrators who used their jobs to sabotage.

Cui bono?

To whose benefit were these shenanigans? The report by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration (released May 14, 2013) offered new, highly suggestive details.

Of the 296 applications for tax-exempt status reviewed by the inspector general, 108 were approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicants (some perhaps because of excessive IRS requests for sensitive organizational details), and 160 were still open, some pending for up to 1,138 days. This necessitates a look at the dates and a worrying scenario.

A “sensitive case report” on Tea Party targeting was sent from Cincinnati to Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS’ division for tax-exempt organizations, and to another Washington official (as yet unnamed) on April 19, 2010. This suggests the illegal activities began far earlier than otherwise known, perhaps as early as mid-2009.

Now, add 1,138 days to, say, July 4, 2009 and you might easily draw  the conclusion that certain person or persons involved meant to hurt the conservatives (while helping their competitors) until well past the 2012 presidential election, thereby materially assisting in the re-election of the prime beneficiary, The Honorable Barrack Obama.

What would, of course, strengthen this case would be knowing which organizations were so thwarted… and whether theirs was a conservative slant. That, too, should come out in the wash. It’s sure to be a busy laundramat. Representative Dave Camp will see to that.

Criminal or merely inept, incompetent and “obnoxious”?

I’m guessing that Camp is going around his office whistling a happy tune. If so, it’s no wonder. In matters such as this, there are always (sometimes hidden) winners and losers. The president and a whole lot of senior IRS officials are taking it on the chin right now as they posture at their “grin-and- bear it” best. They are clear losers. Dave Camp, by contrast, must be in hog heaven.

Camp, you see, is chairman of one of the oldest and most powerful committees of the House of Representative, Ways and Means. An 11-term veteran, a handsome, toothy Michigander from Midland, his sprawling district meanders across fifteen counties of mid-  and northern Michigan, the very heart of the Great Republic. Camp is a popular figure back home, customarily winning in excess of 60 percent of the vote.

For good behavior and exemplary party loyalty, Camp was able to move up, join the GOP House leadership team and as Ways and Means chair deal with the crucial bread-and-butter issues that are so important to average Americans, tax policy, tariff and trade laws, Medicare, Social Security, welfare and unemployment programs.

Camp is the guy who’ll be presiding over House hearings on this matter… His task is plain: to grill every senior IRS official, then even more senior people in the Treasury Department.

Heads have, of course, already begun to fall on this matter, Camp will ensure there are others. President Obama moved fast to get rid of Steven Miller, acting IRS commissioner and a lesser administrator.

It is only the beginning.

The President’s objective is to get through this mess as quickly as possible. He wants us to believe the action was of short duration involving minimum people and that he can clear it all up, including apologizing to irate conservatives who are wailing here, there and everywhere, “See, we told you so.”

Chairman Camp hopes he won’t have to buy ex-commissioner Miller’s proposition that it all happened because the IRS was overwhelmed by new applications after the Supreme Court ruled in the 2010 Citizens United case which greatly expanded the ability of corporations, unions and other organizations to participate in election spending. Miller wants America to believe the IRS is a good guy, dim, muddled but well meaning, and that “Dude, it won’t happen again.

Of course Camp wants the opposite of all this; every subpoena he authorizes, every criminal charge made is a thrill for this man who probably went home May 17, 2013 (the first day of hearings) to find his wife and three kids holding crudely made “Camp for President” posters.

There is, however, one more secret loser in the proceedings… and that’s Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Mitt Romney’s 2012 vice presidential selection. He, too, is on Ways and Means. He’s got the presidential bug and cannot afford to let Camp outmaneuver him. He’ll be working hard to ensure he doesn’t. Camp should check for trip wires and banana peels artfully positioned for maximum effect…

Meanwhile, GOP stalwarts of every kind are sending out unbelievable numbers of email, direct mail, and automated phone messages, every one alerting the good people of America, the conservative, God-fearing people to send in a few bucks… and so the stupid idea of a cell of left-leaning knuckleheads in Cincinnati is turned into the mother’s milk of politics, cash. Thus is one man’s scandal turned into another man’s success and this rapt commentator kept happily at his work.

Envoi.

Of all our recent presidents probably the first president George Bush ’41 understood nonprofit organizations best… for he genuinely believes in their necessary mission of improving the Great Republic. Thus it was no surprise to hear his encomium on these absolutely essential organizations of every kind.

It was written by crack speech writer Peggy Noonan and delivered in his acceptance speech for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. It came to be called the “Thousand points of light” speech:

“I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good.”

For Bush this wasn’t just rhetoric. It was a core of his belief and he showed as much in 1990 when he spearheaded the creation of the Points of Light Foundation, the goal of which was to promote private, non-governmental, tax-exempt solutions to social issues.

Thus, for the music to accompany this article I have selected “Point of Light,”a tune written by Don Schlitz and Thom Schuyler. It was recorded by Randy Travis and is available in any search engine.

It isn’t a very good song; it doesn’t tug at your heart, though it should. Even so, it’s worth listening to: “All it takes is a point of light/A ray of hope in the darkest night/If you see what’s wrong and you try to make it right/You will be a point of light.” But, remember, if your application goes to the IRS in Cincinnati, you might have to wait a while…

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is the author of 15 print books, 3 ebooks, and over one thousand articles on a variety of timely topics.

Howard Phillips

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant.

Author’s program note. On February 7, 1839 one of the greatest of senators, Henry Clay of Kentucky, gave one of his most important of speeches… and in the process he handed his numerous detractors just what they needed to ridicule him for the rest of his life. (1777-1852)

His remarks that notable day were about slavery and how this key issue should be handled with minimum damage to the Great Republic. He had a mission that day. He wanted to be seen not as a politician but as a statesman who could rise above, take the long view, tell the unpalatable truths and so lead the increasingly factious and dangerously divided nation to the Promised Land.

This man who so desperately craved the presidency, and was doing everything he could to get it in 1840, told the biggest lie of his life when he said the words which became notorious the minute he uttered them… because every political being in the land… and that included every single citizen of the young nation… knew these lofty, sententious words of bloated pomposity were the whopper of whoppers. “I had rather be right than be president,” he intoned… and in just 8 words of self laudatory moralizing ensured he never would be. Thus the man of the people disconnected from the citizenry who knew him so well and who he must have to win.

“Why ol’  Henry would kill his own mama if it would get him elected,” and whether you were a Whig like Clay or partisan of some other party, you knew that was true… for Clay was a political animal to his finger tips and knew how to play the great game not with pontification and condescension but with hands on dexterity, flexibility, good humor, focusing on the specific and practical… for such are the realities of what it takes to rule real people and their imperfect natures.

Had he said instead that he stood up to save the Union, the greatest experiment on Earth, and that he would use every expedient in his power to achieve the objective, why then the nation already renowned for doing whatever was necessary to move mountains and perfect the federal principle would have revered him the more; why then he would have burnished his already great reputation… and even snagged the presidency his breathtaking mendacity ensured he would never achieve.

“I stand before you a citizen of the Great Republic ready to do a citizen’s labor on behalf of our Great Idea, the greatest ever forged.”

This is what Henry Clay at his best would have said… for that man knew how to achieve great results and knew that without such results the nation would stultify. Standing on a soap box prattling on with windy rhetoric was pointless. Doing what was necessary to win was everything… for the Great Republic was all about winning.

And this was something Howard Jay Phillips never seemed to grasp. He was a grandstander, a man who made gestures, not policy. A man of hot words who thought such words sufficed… but they never did nor can. There must be victories, sweet victories. To get them there must be compromise, there must be deals, and Howard Phillips would not stoop to make the deals victorious parties and their leaders required.

That is why he never became president and why the men he tilted with a la Don Quixote did. For the first principle of success in the Great Republic is: victory for without this there can be nothing, a point with which Phillips could not have disagreed more .

Thus he became that most uncomfortable of beings: the gadfly, often right in the particulars, but clueless on the big picture which he disdained to the point of being consistently impossible to work with, disagreeable, and entirely insufferable. In short order, he got the reputation of being “difficult” and so his fate was sealed.

Some background.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University and Veritas is widely regarded as the capital of liberal ideas and progressive, ground-breaking notions, leaving the development of conservative antidotes to the lesser folk at Yale, or worse, Dartmouth of the secret societies and an anti-social kookery born of copious liquors and dark forests.

But such deduction would be wrong, for Fair Harvard and its neighborhood, with its unending supply of the very bright and terminally ambitious has always proven fertile ground for their insistent, often unsettling, even revolutionary (albeit right wing) point of view.  So it was for Phillips, born in Cambridge, Harvard Class of ’62, the white lightning of his class, college, and community. He was smart, good looking, indefatigable and persistent. Such traits got him elected president of Harvard’s student council and then re-elected for a second term.

Thus his electability was tested and confirmed… and that made him a potential player in Massachusetts politics, but not as you might suppose as a Democrat in this, JFK’s native state. Oh, no, Phillips was a Republican. And as chairman of the Boston Republican Committee he looked likely for better things. President Nixon gave him a big boost by appointing him director of the Office of Economic Opportunity.

But he didn’t last in this stepping stone to greater things. Instead he burned a bridge by taking Nixon to task for failing to live up to his promise to dismantle social programs created by President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Thus did Phillips indicate that he was not going to be moving up as expected; presidents rightly expect loyalty, and Phillips, for whatever reason, was unable to give it. It was an unmistakable portent of things to come… Phillips had to have his way… or he quit.

This wasn’t politics… it was petulance, and it was certain to offend the maximum number of people.  Phillips didn’t care… he was on the right side, doing God’s business God’s way (for of course God was on his side).  His vehicle was the Conservative Caucus he founded in 1974 and would lead until 2011.

It caught fire with conservative leaders like Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie and others who met weekly at Viguerie’s home in McLean, Virginia to rally what became known as the New Right. They were ideologues, adamant, determined to regain an America they thought gone seriously awry. They wanted change! They wanted it now! And bit by bit they became power players not least because they developed and controlled the all important mailing lists of sympathetic conservatives… Howard Phillips was their recognized leader every step of the way.

In the process they changed the debate from what the Old Right advocated, with insufficient vigor, namely economic conservatism, free market economics, and a vigorous national defense to a red-hot social agenda that ignited people… and divided the Great Republic from stem to stern, anti abortion, no gun control, the need for prayer in schools but no forced busing, the defense of marriage… each one calculated to energize the faithful, get them to work and, always, maximize their financial support.

Compromise was banned… it was war a la outrance… the only kind of action they knew, and it lead them not merely to attack Democrafts and other noxious advocates of  One World and other pernicious isms… but the real enemy, those who were insufficiently conservative… like Sandra Day O’Connor whose historic nomination to the Supreme Court they vigorously opposed… and even the most important conservative voice of the 20th century, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

It was all such fun, convulsing America, masters of the well timed stink bomb, but in truth they were pining for the presidency, no more so than Howard Phillips and so he did that which showed how little he understood the Great Republic and how he lost his bearings. He set up a rinky-dink third party, the Constitution Party, and became the Harold Stassen of the right, running in 1992, 1996 and 2000.  “If God wants us to win, we’ll win,” he told an interviewer in 1996. God didn’t. Phillips for all his many gifts had become an embarrassing irrelevance, a player no longer.

No doubt somewhere along in this abashing declension Phillips remembered Henry Clay’s 8 highfalutin words, “I had rather be right than president.” No doubt he took what comfort he could from them. Perhaps he didn’t know what some smart aleck at the time had said in response: “rather be right that president? In fact Senator Clay was neither”, and neither was Howard Phillips. Moreover, he couldn’t claim the consolation prize of having introduced the Mint Julep to Washington, D.C. That high honor unquestionably belongs to Henry Clay, three times a candidate for president, three times a loser..

Envoi.

For the music to accompany this article, I have selected “In the Sweet By-and- By”, published in 1868, music by Joseph P. Webster; lyrics by S. Fillmore Bennett. It reminds that there is a place for all of us, that “beautiful shore” beyond partisanship, beyond rancor, beyond scheming and the thrill of outsmarting and crushing the competition. It is the “sweet by and by”. If so, I hope Howard Phillips has found it and doesn’t irritate the proprietor, least he get kicked out. Go to any search engine and play it now. You’ll feel better when you do. “And  our spirits shall sorrow no more/ Not a sigh for the blessing of rest.”

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is a 15 time published author as well as 3 e-books and over one thousand articles  on a variety of current events.