Connecting The Dots

The President announced today that our various intelligence agencies had all the information to have thwarted the Christmas Day terrorist attempt before the fact, however, “they failed to connect those dots.”

I have a theory as to why.

We live in a world of titles. In a world of titles there are no grunters! There is nobody down in the trenches. Everyone has a title and is hell-bent on getting another one. It all began when we awarded a college degree in reading comic books! It is called Sequential Art. For goodness sake, it is a comic book; it is not high literature! Get off your duff and read a real book – one with few pictures!

It is a part of the culture that says each child should get an award, even Billy who missed more days than a tenured PE teacher. Remember that horrible line from MC Hammer, “you can’t touch this?” I cannot believe that I confessed that I had heard that dribble. So we reward Billy’s ineptness with a prize of some sort merely for breathing and in so doing tell his parents, or in many cases the grandparents since the parents dropped out of sight, let Billy miss school, it’s ok. We don’t want to traumatize him. It is ok to be unmotivated, unchallenged.

Remember Stuart Smalley? “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog-gone it, people like me.”

When I was teaching a college course in American Studies, I had this eager student who handled my essay exams with the barest of success. She just couldn’t master abstract thinking. But she was so eager. She stopped by often to try to find her way amid the concepts presented in class. I will admit I was never interested in the memorization of a list of art, architecture, philosophers, or music. She could have handled that well. Instead, I wanted my students to grasp what was behind the products of the creative mind. Sheila just couldn’t, but she was so eager. She was the first in her family to attend college. She had such energy. So I looked the other way and gave her a better mark than I should have. After all, my humanities course was not the glue that held her career together.

A couple of years later she stopped by my office. I don’t know why. She gave me an update which evoked horror. She was getting a degree in English and the humanities. Afterwards, I stopped by a colleague’s office to confess my sin and reveal the result. Halfway into my outpouring of my academic sin, he exclaimed, “I know her. She was a really eager student. Not great, but so eager. I had her in one of my classes.” Well, it seems several of us had succumbed to the eagerness and cooperatively created this academic monster. Mediocrity breeds content.

Washington has also created monsters. Monsters of entitlement. People rewarded with jobs because of political connections. Sometimes because of donations to campaigns. Had Desiree Rogers been doing grunt work instead of parading that dress that looked remarkably unfinished, perhaps there would have been no gatecrashers at the party. Somebody has to do quality control.

So, I wish to offer a way to connect the dots.

Create a series of jobs with no titles, and, of course, no business cards. With a business card comes networking and with networking, job performance goes down the tube. The person is always off schmoozing.

Remember: in this job your are a grunter. There are no windows in the office; no name on the door. You will give no interviews and appear in no photographs.

The job: spend each day pouring over the data. Look at all the clues. Read all the reports; all the emails. Make lots of post-it notes. Make a flow chart. Use colored pens if necessary.

“Connect the dots.” Then get on the phone and let everybody know! After that, call your mother, she has been worried that you have not been getting enough sleep.

For every planned attack you stop, you will be given a bonus on the order of one doled out by AIG. Then you may retire early and give another grunter a chance. No strobe lights. No smiles toward the camera.

Then, and only then, we can arrive at the airport with all our clothes on.