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.
"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.”
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