In his perceptive eulogy for Queen Elizabeth II, Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, observed: “People of loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders of loving service are still rarer.”
Ain’t that the truth. At the risk of sounding like the hammer always in search of a nail, I must nonetheless note once again that we are in an increasing crisis of leadership, from Vladimir Putin’s bungling attempts to conquer Ukraine, which would be laughable if they weren’t so horrific and dangerous, to the ham-fisted handling of Miami Dolphins’ quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s concussion. (The doctor/consultant who cleared him to play was fired. Really? The team’s front office and ownership should all be fired.
What does it mean to be a leader? it means you are a steward of everything and everyone in your care, a servant of others. It means you take responsibility, even when you are not directly involved in the action. Say what you want about QEII, but she saw herself as a steward, one who remained on the job till her dying day.
For most, however, it’s me, me, me all the time, and it doesn’t help that people don’t really understand this, because they have a limited understanding of culture. In her Oct. 1 column “Putin’s ‘Medea,’” Maureen Dowd writes:
“Putin is less Dostoyevsky than Euripides, a walking revenge play. Like Medea — a searing production of (Cherubini’s) opera kicked off The Met season on Tuesday — Putin commits savage murder of innocents without worrying about the consequences.”
It’s a gib analogy in the tradition of Dowd, a self-described “Cosmo Girl” — gee, no kidding — who’s clever with a turn of phrase but not always with a turn of thought. Her remark displays a facile knowledge of “Medea,” Medea, Euripides and ancient Greek literature and society. The exiled Medea kills her children not just to get back at her two-timing hubby Jason, who’s thrown her over for a younger woman and a position of political power. She kills them, because she and Euripides know that without a father, the children are nothing. It’s not like she and the kids can pick up and start a new life in,, say, Boca or have a sob fest with Oprah.
By delegitimizing their past to legitimize his present and future, Jason has disenfranchised his children. Their shocking murder is a reminder that they’ve been canceled. They might as well be dead. (In some versions of the myth, Medea serves the kids up to Jason and his new bride as a meal. By doing so, she is saying that they came from their father’s body. And to their father’s body they now return.)
Putin may be a monster and Medea’s act is monstrous, but the equivalence by Dowd is false. Putin isn’t Medea. He’s Jason, a cold-blooded manipulator who would throw over his own kids for his political ambitions. Medea is just the hot-blooded, vindictive instrument of his narcissistic passive-aggression.
Do such subtleties of thinking matter when Ukrainians and Russian soldiers are dying needlessly? They do, because a lack of deep, nuanced thinking is what’s gotten us into the mess we’re in. If a New York Times columnist can’t see shades of meaning, what hope is there for the LOL crowd?
Ignorance bred Brexit. And the Brexit chickens ;have come home to roost in the person of Prime Minister Liz Truss, the anti-Churchill who promised to “deliver, deliver, deliver” for the British people. And she’s done that all right, with her proposed Reaganomic tax cuts delivering the United Kingdom into an economic disaster. (She’s since done an about-face.) Her Conservative Party rival Rishi Sunak, who could see this train wreck coming down the track, would’ve been a better choice for PM. Was he denied because he resigned from the buffoonish Boris Johnson’s cabinet, is Anglo-Indian, or both?)
Truss, who apparently pressured King Charles III, not to attend a climate summit that you just know is his meat and potatoes, is proof that while male leadership has created this screwed-up world, the jury’s still out on whether female leadership offers any improvement. Witiness Giogia Meloni, Italy’s new prime minister who damped down some of her ultra-right views to secure the election. But will she govern from the center or prove to be the Italian Marine LePen?
Male, female, at the end of the day, it’s about power, and power is all about the attaining and retaining of power. So poor Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida has had to go hat in hand to President Joe Biden, a man he despises, for funds to help victims of Hurricane Ian, the same funds he voted to deny to people in New York and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy when he was a congressman. How that must hurt. Yet he had all kinds of money to send Venezuelan immigrants in Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts to stick it to the libs, didn’t he?
Why the governor of one state can ship people in another state like so much cattle to a third is beyond me. What happened to the states’ rights the Republicans are always squawking about? Fortunately, the matter will be investigated and litigated. But DeSantis’ power play — a page out of the mean playbook of former President Donald J. Trump that may have gotten its karmic comeuppance in Ian, is yet another example of leaders’ lack of “loving service.”