When You're Out of Leaders
Dear Friends:
The other day, I took an online BDSM test. It’s not a kink I’m drawn to, and I’ve never entertained any fantasies, but I was curious, and I’ve been proved wrong before about such matters. And yet, with no surprise, my results showed I was 0% masochist and 0% slave. On the other side of things, I was 7% sadist and 11% master. (My dominant and submissive scores both flanked 50%, confusingly.)
Not exactly time to convert the basement to a dungeon.
I share this by way of introduction to this week’s Main Matter on leadership. When I think about these results, and my disinclinations, I come to the question of control. Who controls whose actions, whose pleasure? How do both roles control the BDSM scene? Who takes control so that the other might lose it, for a time, and be transported somewhere else?
Sex is so much like dancing: always best, it seems, when the whole notion of control is thrown out the window, when it’s like nobody’s proverbially watching—which explains what’s so depressing about TikTok: it’s 2 billion people dancing in hopes that everyone watches. BDSM has always felt to me like square dancing: now do this, now do this, slap your partner and now do this.
I admit my full ignorance on control dynamics in BDSM, but behind my 0% slave score + my thoughts on leaders below lies a tension about being held in someone’s grip, however metaphorically.
Like a hug.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements
1. Milk-Dunkable Girl Scout Cookies
Girl Scout Cookie Season is coming up, and many of you are going to make the same annual mistake of blowing your budget on Thin Mints and Samoas, two cookies engineered to be just impervious to milk.1 Instead, Trefoils (below left) are your best bet, because the shortbread cookie is absorbent but not too, with just enough salt to counter the milk-and-cookies’ sweetness. (They’re also good value, with 40 cookies per box compared to Thin Mints’ 32 and Samoas’ measly 14.) Trefoils are delicate, though, so you have to be careful not to dunk too long. For longer dunks, you’ll want Do-si-dos (below right), known unimaginatively in some regions as ‘Peanut Butter Sandwich’: crisp, milk-absorbent peanut butter cookies with a peanut butter filling. Don’t like to dip your cookies in milk? You can unsubscribe in Account Settings.
2. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Sounds
I’m taking part in a weekly reading group on the life and work of 19thC poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, taught by my friend Mathias Svalina. I only knew going in what you might’ve read in school—i.e., ‘The Windhover’ which starts, ‘I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-’. Much is made of Hopkins’s alliteration, but in reading his poems I’m astounded by the ideative, germinal effects of his words’ sounds. Mathias has smartly pointed out how Hopkins’s work doesn’t seem to fit with Keats’s notion of the ‘egotistical sublime’, in which the event of a poem happens in the poet’s genius/imagination/philosophizing/argument. Hopkins instead wants the event of the poem to happen in the reader’s head mouth. Feel and hear and behold what’s created in the opening of Hopkins’s ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’, how sky and thunderstorm and earth and swamp are built, sculpted almost, not out of metaphor (singly) or interpretive description, but of the sonic stuff of words:
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in
marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on.Go somewhere private and read it out loud. Afterward it’s like you’ve chewed five erasers to bits.
When You’re Out of Leaders
We had a sub one day in 8th grade science class, one of the familiar subs we had in regular rotation. She told us that our teacher had left her detailed notes on what to do with each period. ‘And for this class she wrote explicitly about one student,’ she started, and I caught her glance just briefly in my direction. ‘Well I won’t say who, but I wasn’t surprised.’
I was a good student when it came to tests and grades but a bad one when it came to shutting up. Mr. Aylor in 3rd grade was the first teacher to start sending me and my desk out into the hall after talking too much to my deskmates, and stuff like this continued even through high school, when I’d interrupt our AP history teacher’s lectures whenever I had what I thought was a witty retort. Looking back, I was a tedious kind of asshole, insecure and desperate for attention.
‘This student…’ our sub continued, looking up into the air as though for a sign on how to proceed. ‘Well this particular student is a born leader, that much is clear.’ Her tone was wry, as though conceding something she oughtn’t. Another quick peep over to me. The last time she subbed for my class, I’d taken advantage of the proverbial cat’s being away and spent the whole period being a noisy spaz. We had gotten into it, she and I, so I know who she was referring to.
A born leader? It sounded like a compliment, but wasn’t I being labeled A Problem?
Anyway I was the youngest sibling in my family. Literally born to follow.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about leaders, likely because I feel I’m (we’re all?) in a dearth of them. Some of this has stemmed from Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine, our elected officials’ failure even to call it genocide, and the whole attendant shitshow of that Ivy League presidents’ Congressional hearing. Some of it stems from the last six years, when I was handed a leadership position in our MFA program, like a baby it was my turn to hold for a while. I didn’t ask to hold the baby, and I certainly didn’t beget the baby, but for six years it’s been my job to ensure the baby’s care and growth.
End of metaphor, except it suggests another: leader as parent. I don’t know from an orphan’s upbringing, but when you’re out of leaders—or when the leaders you have fail to deliver on their promises—abandonment is what it feels like. You understand you’re on your own, through no fault of your own.
Immediately, some questions:
What are the pitfalls of attaching love/familial relation to leadership, civic or otherwise? Are leaders born or made, nature or nurture? Do political leaders whose rhetoric and actions I disagree with no longer count as leaders? Am I drawing a line between de jure leaders and de facto leaders, a la ‘Not My President’ bumper stickers? Is a leader something someone is or something someone does, or both, or neither? Is behavior a more useful object of analysis than identity? What, then, is ‘leadership’? And then what makes leadership good?
Here’s how I’m possibly a ‘born leader’: I don’t like being told what to do—even if you know better, let me fail and then learn from my failure. (Or not! Let me fail multiple times until the lesson sticks.) Related: I don’t like being kept out of any decision-making, especially at work. (But make every decision about where to meet for dinner or drinks, please.) I don’t like being behind people in lines, or on the highway. In marching band, I became the drum major not because I loved marching the most, but because becoming ‘the leader' was the only way to make this thing I hated tolerable.
All these qualities make me a person who refuses to follow, which ≠ leadership. My kind of leader literally turns his back on the people he passes by on his anxious race to the front. What I’m thinking of as leadership is like those students who do campus tours: they’re always in front, but also always facing and addressing the needs of the people following them.
Get to the front. Turn around. Acknowledge who’s behind you. Say this: ‘I got up here one way or another, so tell me what I can do from this position to get you where you need to be.’
Leadership.
But the other crucial thing is perspective: What can you see from up there that we can’t? Where are you taking us? This part of leadership—having a vision—is where I most feel the dearth. On a local level, our mayor’s vision for where San Francisco is headed begins and ends with more cops on the streets. She’s up for reelection in November and seems committed to run on people’s (chiefly unwarranted) fears for public safety.2
But like: how are more cops going to make San Francisco a more equitable place where those of us who aren’t millionaires can flourish? What might the mayor’s office do to convince those who have too much to help those who don’t have enough?
The failure in our political leadership to heed the will of the people over the will of the rich goes back at least to 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which makes that failure the status quo, the ‘state in which’ we do things.
To this end, I was cheered by our president’s proposed billionaire tax in his FY24 budget, and disappointed but unsurprised that Congress couldn’t get it passed despite broad support. As I was disappointed that the recently passed budget stopgap included $20 billion cuts to the IRS, thus undoing much of the work that passing the Inflation Reduction Act did to get more money from billionaires.
I get that Congress is a disaster, infiltrated by people whose form of leadership involves upping their personal wealth/fame/power and eradicating the federal government. I get that the above ¶ is about the mess of politics, not leadership. But then I read statements like this, from the 2023 SOU address:
I ran for President to fundamentally change things. To make sure the economy works for everyone so we can all feel that pride in what we do. To build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not from the top down. Because when the middle class does well, the poor have a ladder up and the wealthy still do very well. We all do well.
Another hard thing about being a leader: you actually have to do what you say you’re going to do.
Days after Hamas’s attack on Israel in October, the president addressed the nation—i.e., us. On a phone call with Israel’s prime minister, he said, they ‘discussed how democracies like Israel and the United States are stronger and more secure when we act according to the rule of law. Terrorists purposefully target civilians, kill them. We uphold the laws of war — the law of war. It matters. There’s a difference.’
For months now, the global community has watched Israel purposefully bomb civilians, killing them, and the president has asked Congress for $40 billion dollars in military aid for this nation not upholding the laws of war. He even called this money ‘a smart investment that’s going to pay dividends for American security for generations,’ in a primetime address to the nation (i.e., us). Israel continued to kill children, bomb museums and universities, and with Congress not approving the funds, the president sent $147 million of military aid anyway.
‘I ran for President to fundamentally change things.’ And yet here the president is, upholding the status quo of saying one thing and doing another, unwilling or unable to tell us the truth. And on a local level, when 65% of San Franciscans say life is worse in the city than when they moved here, it’s clear that the status quo isn’t working, that someone needs to show us a better way.
The absence I feel of any useful someone (which maybe you feel too), I know in my heart is felt by somebody hoping to (re)elect a GOP fascist in the fall, one who will campaign on everyone’s worst fears. Lots of purported leaders out there are speaking to either of us, but what I’m looking for is someone who can speak, honestly, to both of us, who can bring us together by acknowledging our differences and our shared goals, reminding us that any vision of the future, if it’s ever going to work, will need to be one we work toward together.
Amid all these thoughts and questions about what makes good leadership, and why after a lifetime of not wanting to follow anybody I’m yearning for good ones, I read this helpful bit from Sam Kriss, in a piece from the Nov 23 Harper’s on René Girard, a writer/philosopher currently in vogue among by the Thiel-funded Extremely Online Right. His central (dubious) thesis was that we desire only what we see others desire, which turns others into rivals, and in time all of us into a mob needing a sacrificial lamb:
If so much of history is the history of the mob, where did kings come from? Girard concludes that they must have once been designated sacrifices. Leaders have a numinous aura; they are separated from the rest of society; they resolve conflict. Eventually we stopped sacrificing our kings—but if you sometimes feel like you want to tear politicians to shreds with your bare hands, it’s because that was their original purpose.
Which brings me back to that first leader we find ourselves yearning for: our parent(s). Would that I had the courage to sacrifice myself so that a child can keep feeling loved, to bear their hate, at times, so they always know they can express it. I’m talking about a humility behind all good leadership, one that repeats Yes, I am flawed, and I will disappoint you, and I will make decisions that leave you feeling betrayed, because I’m not the god you need, that we all need, but someone has to be responsible, someone has to make the decision, and when I make the decision that betrays you, I want to hear of your betrayal, I want to feel the hurt, so that next time, at the next decision to be made, we can, in some fashion, try to make it together.
I’d give it all up just to hear someone say it.
This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store is this Hasbro® Nurse Kit, complete with specs, candy, hypo, play clock, and ‘Toyville Hospital Guide’:
To rectify the Thin Mints problem, I take a page from our friends in Australia and do a modified Tim Tam Slam, in which you nibble off the ends of their beloved Twix-like chocolate-coated cookie and use it as a straw to sip up some tea. Harder to do nibbling off top and bottom segments of the Thin Mint’s circle, but it gets the milk up in there.
When leaders speak to our fears and we respond positively—with cheers and applause, say, or reelection votes—we free them from their responsibility to provide us a shared vision, and they start to give us only what we want to hear, not what we need to.