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 od bless little
Morgan Kay Beamer, born to Lisa Beamer of Cranbury, N.J. last Wednesday
afternoon, weighing in at 7 lbs and by all accounts a fine healthy
baby. Morgan Kay will never know her father, Todd Morgan Beamer,
who died a hero among heroes taking on the hijackers of Flight 93
last September, after uttering the words: "Let's roll!"
I wonder if
you, like me, have spent idle time trying to reconstruct what might
have happened after those words: "Let's roll!" The thing
about an airliner is, its interior layout makes a general melee
impossible. With those narrow aisles hemmed in by high, metal-framed
seats, you basically only have one dimension of movement. You are
pretty much in the situation of the creatures in Alex Dewdney's
"planiverse." Back in the early 1980s, Dewdney wrote a
book with that title, pretending to be a record of contact with
an intelligent race living in a universe with only two dimensions,
one vertical and one horizontal.
The Planiverse is one of the great classics of imaginative
literature, with everything worked out in detail, from celestial
mechanics to the design of door locks. Well, when the creatures
who inhabit Dewdney's planet (the planet is, of course, just a circle,
and the creatures live on its circumference) want to have a battle,
the only way they can do it is as a succession of single combats.
"The best warriors were placed at the head of the army and
the weakest at the tail. By the time the battle had been in progress
for the better part of a day, there would be a heap of dead bodies
upon which the current pair of warriors fought..."
Whatever took
place on Flight 93, it must have involved some element of leadership
among the passengers. Somebody — we shall probably never know
who — must have taken the initiative. Thinking about this got
me pondering the whole business of leadership: Where it comes from,
how it works, who's likely to have it.
On the last
point, my impression from my own life experiences is that there
are no guidelines at all. Back in my wanderjahre I once worked
as porter-cum-dishwasher in the catering trade, in a large establishment
with a side business providing TV dinners to hospitals and the like.
There were three or four of us minimum-wage skivvies on the premises
at any time, drawn mainly, like your correspondent, from the dregs
of society. One young guy, who I worked with for several weeks,
was a born leader, one of the best I have ever seen. If you can
believe it, he used to conduct quiz periods in our rest breaks,
to keep us on our toes, with questions like: "Name the location
of all the waste bins in this building..." We used to have
floor-mopping contests! I've never seen anything like it. This guy
took the lowest, crappiest, least dignified, most pointless kind
of employment and infused it with meaning and purpose. The really
strange thing was that he was a moral cripple: had done prison time
for forging checks, and when I lost track of him had just been fired
from a job as night manager of a diner, for helping himself to a
portion of the receipts. This guy couldn't be trusted to mail a
letter — literally, I discovered one time. Which all goes to
show that you never know where leadership will pop up. (Paul Newman
gives a similar illustration in that excellent movie Cool
Hand Luke .)
Anyone who
has served in the military has seen, or at least heard of, a sloppy,
cynical, ill-motivated unit turned around by new leadership. The
same thing happens in the civilian world, too. I have a friend whose
business is financing software companies. From time to time, he
tells me, he is faced with a failing company for which the only
solution is, as he puts it (not literally, I hope) "to shoot
the CEO and senior execs and put in a completely new team."
Generally, he reports, this does the trick. With the same workforce,
the same product and the same markets, good leadership turns the
company round. Perhaps someone should try this with the Palestinians
— though in that case, I think live ammo would be appropriate.
Leadership,
of course, has a negative side. The German word for "leader"
is, after all, "Führer." Americans in general
are skeptical of leaders and leadership, to a degree not found anywhere
else on earth, I think. The colonial census-taker, back in 18th-century
Appalachia, comes across a man grooming a horse in a field. "Who's
your master?" he inquires. Says the colonist: "He hasn't
been born yet." I think every honest American's heart returns
a cheer to that sentiment. Having already declared
on this site that my favorite movie is
Lonely Are the Brave, the ultimate cinematic tribute
to don't-tread-on-me American individualism, I don't think I need
offer any further evidence that I'm basically with America on this
one.
Basically,
but not entirely.
Reviewing Theodore Dalrymple's recent book Life
at the Bottom, which is about the moral collapse of the
British underclass, I concluded by noting that:
A better remedy
[better than unrestrained welfarism, that is] would be for the middle
classes to behave themselves, and to give a good example to those
beneath them, and to stop feeling so all-fired guilty about everything
under the sun. That, of course, would be "elitist": but
if there is a lesson to be drawn from Life at the Bottom,
it is that a society's choice is never between having an elite and
not having one, it is always between having an elite with a sense
of responsibility and a will to provide leadership, and having an
elite with neither.
A couple of
people have taken me to task over that, arguing that the middle
class has no such duty; that their only social duties are to provide
for themselves and their families, pay their taxes, and obey the
law. Well, I disagree. What's the point of having an elite if they
don't give an example to the lower orders? If the elite admits to
having smoked pot, why should the underclass think it's wrong to
smoke crack? Noblesse oblige: if you are living a fortunate,
prosperous life, you ought to offer some guidance to the dimwitted,
the feckless, and the less fortunate down at the bottom of society.
Whether they want it or not...
In times of
war, of course, some decent leadership is essential. Whatever you
may think of FDR's character and domestic policies, I don't think
it can be fairly denied that he was a terrific war leader. Down
in the trenches, leadership is even more essential. George
Orwell , fighting in a unit of the POUM anarchist militias for
the Spanish Republic in that country's civil war, recorded that
every order passed down to his unit ignited a debate, pending the
resolution of which, the unit would take no action. The Republic
lost the war. On the other side,
Julius Caesar, who knew a thing or two about leadership, records
a stirring example of it from the invasion of Britain in 55 B.C.
Caesar ran his warships ashore to intimidate the British. The ships
were big, deep-hulled vessels, though, and when run aground, were
still some way from the beach.
As the Romans
hesitated, chiefly on account of the depth of the water, the man
who carried the Eagle of the 10th brigade, after praying to the
gods that his action might bring good luck to the brigade, cried
out in a loud voice: "Jump down, comrades, unless you want
to surrender our Eagle to the enemy. I, at any rate, mean to do
my duty to my country and my general." With these words he
leapt out of the ship and advanced towards the enemy with the Eagle
in his hands. At this the soldiers, exhorting each other not to
submit to such a disgrace, jumped with one accord from the ship,
and the men from the next ships, when they saw them, followed them
and advanced against the enemy.
I'd like to
think that Caesar prettied up the language there somewhat, and that
what the Eagle-bearer actually said was the legionary-Latin equivalent
of: "Let's roll!"
We don't know
that Eagle-bearer's name, or what happened to him, any better than
we know who led the passengers of Flight 93 against America's present
enemy. That need not stop us honoring them and commemorating them,
though. (The Eagle-bearer has been sufficiently commemorated, I
think, by having had his story taught to officer cadets in staff
colleges for 2,000 years.) Certainly it should not stop us learning
a lesson from them: that while individualism, contrariness, and
cussedness are admirable things, and are indispensable components
of the very fiber of America — part of what gives this country
its unique character, and makes it such an attractive place —
it is none the less still true that in some critical situations,
a touch of leadership makes all the difference.
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