Tough Versus Mean

I was thinking about the good and bad teachers I’ve known.  Back when pterodactyls darkened the skies over Biloxi, I had a marine biology professor named Della McCaughan.  First impressions can be misleading; she was an ‘older’ lady (looking back, she was maybe 50) with a sort of slightly modernized beehive hairdo and horned rim glasses.  I mean: not cool. 

By the way, I was entirely wrong about that – she was the coolest.

She had these huge aquariums in her lab.  We could see the Gulf of Mexico from the lab windows, and so she had only salt water aquariums and she stocked them with creatures she thought we should all be familiar with, given our proximity to their playground.   Around the beginning of week two, she pulled me aside and showed me a workstation filled with unfamiliar instruments, very dangerous looking things, and a microscope and other stuff I’d never seen before.  And a dead blue crab.  She waved at it and said, “My crab is dead.  It wasn’t old and so I want to know why it died.  You find out and tell me.”

What?  I had all manner of questions and protests – I had no idea how to run a crab pathology!  Or a pathology on anything else, for that matter.  Was she serious?  She couldn’t be serious.  Stuff in the ocean just dies sometimes, right?  So I began my protest with, “But Mrs McCaughan, I can’t – “and she stopped me right there, and she wasn’t fooling around, either.  She said, “Yes, Mr. Williams, you CAN.”  And that was that.  She marched off, leaving me with a dead crab and a lot of shit I didn’t know how to work.

She had a lot more confidence in me than I had in myself, obviously, but I thought her confidence was misplaced.  For all I knew, the crab had been shot or stabbed or smothered with a pillow.  It was the 1970s so maybe the poor thing had died from a drug overdose.  In the end, I took the crab apart, made some slides, started with the intake bits – at least I knew where the gills were – and almost immediately noticed that while the crab was completely expired, the thousands of parasitic worms in his gills were still doing just fine.  Diagnosis: death by parasitic overload.  Mrs. McCaughan was pleased.

Della McCaughan was a tough teacher.  She set high goals for each of us in her care and she expected us to meet those goals.  Later in the year, she took me aside and told me that my grade for that semester would be entirely dependent on whether or not I could teach one of her older students – an Air Force NCO – how to read.  He was a functional illiterate.  She gave us an empty classroom, some reading materials and checked on us infrequently.  My grade would also depend, she told me, on keeping my damned mouth shut.  There was no need to embarrass the man.  I taught him to read and kept my mouth shut, and I did well in the actual marine biology parts of her class.  My grades were stellar.

My point is that Della McCaughan was tough – but she was not mean.  There is a world of difference between the two.  Later in life, in my military career, I knew both kinds of leaders – tough and mean.  The tough ones, we valued.  The mean ones, we undermined and tried to destroy, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.  I like to think that I became a tough leader myself.  I know that a lot of people, good people, wanted to work for me when a hard mission came up and I was chosen to lead a team.  I saw good people become invisible when others were chosen to lead teams.  I knew who they wanted to go with and who they didn’t.  (Plus, of course, they would say things to me like, “I don’t want to go anywhere with THAT asshole.”)  I expected excellence and dedication and hard work and results, but I was never an asshole unnecessarily.  I certainly saw some of my peers being assholes for no good reason, and those were the guys no one wanted to deploy with.  They were mean.  Again, a world of difference between tough and mean. 

I have loads of examples.  I bet you do, too.  Most decent people get this without my overly wordy explanations, but I’ve noticed that a core group (of fucking idiots) likes to say that they admire Donald Trump because he’s (supposedly) a “tough guy”.   These people are making all kinds of mistakes.  I think, at the most basic level, that it’s got to be nearly impossible for a man who shits on golden toilets to be tough.  I suppose it can happen but I don’t have any examples of this.  Chime in if you do.

But he is mean.  I almost said, “mean as a snake”, but snakes aren’t really mean, they’re just snakes and have no choice but to exhibit snake-like behaviour.   Donald has had choices and has chosen to be a blustering asshole.  A mean, loud-mouthed blustering asshole.  Leadership requires us to be better than we might be day to day.  Leadership requires us to consider rather than just react.  Leadership requires us to consider the good of all, not just how it may reflect on us personally.  Leadership requires us to sometimes make tough decisions – but not mean decisions, designed to hurt or shame or damage. 

There are so many quotes to demonstrate his meanness.  Think of all the 8^th grade playground nicknames he has for anyone that doesn’t kiss his ass sufficiently.  This is not leadership.  This is not admirable in any way, but has it become the norm?   Hell, I probably don’t even notice it much anymore (except when he said “Cheatin’ Obama”, which was hilarious considering Trump’s many affairs).  The one quote that has been on my mind this week is this: 

 "John McCain is not a war hero. He's a war hero - he's a war hero 'cause he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, OK, I hate to tell you." (Iowa Family Leadership Summit, 18/7/15)
 
Of course, he also said plenty concerning McCain after the health care vote.  McCain wouldn’t kiss his ass properly, so he had to be destroyed.  If we know what Trump said in public, can you imagine what he says in private?  This woman who works for him, Kelly Sadler, said they shouldn’t worry about what McCain thought about CIA nominee Gina Haspel because “he’s dying anyway.”  I hear the press refer to this as “a joke” - but it’s not a joke.  It’s a dismissal.  Jokes have punchlines.  There’s no punchline to “he’s dying anyway” unless the death of a real American hero is funny.  


Leadership sets the tone.  Ask anyone who has served a few years in the military.  This Kelly Sadler knew damned good and well what the tone was regarding John McCain.  Trump’s opinion of him was no mystery at all.  And while I often – maybe always – disagreed with McCain regarding policy, and especially his choice of running mate, McCain earned his way into American folklore.  If you don’t know the facts about his confinement and torture during the Vietnam War, please read the real story, not the shit on a shingle served up by the half-baked right-wing nutjobs who get their information from the dark, scurrilous corners of the internet.  And even if you, like me, disagree with McCain as a politician, he dedicated his life to his country – and to service. 
 
What has Trump ever dedicated himself to?  I can sum it up for you:  himself and his bank accounts.  He’s a small-time, small-minded wannabe mob boss, nothing more.  See who he surrounds himself with?  See how quickly they’re cast aside once he can’t use them?  See how it’s all about him? 

 
Anyway, I just wanted to point out that there’s a world of difference between ‘mean’ and ‘tough’.  A tough president is a good president.  A mean president is a threat to our institutions and our democracy.  So before I forget, as I often say: “Fuck you, Donald J Trump.”