Gentlemen first

Columnist Ruth Marcus, in today's Washington Post, discusses power politics these days in the Capital, and reactions to the female gender. It's rather revealing about beliefs about the nature of power and how to judge it. Here's an excerpt:

In case you missed it, the vice president [Cheney] made those comments in an interview with the Politico. "Most striking were his virtually taunting remarks of two men he described as friends from his own days in the House: Democratic Reps. John Dingell (Mich.) and John P. Murtha (Pa.)," wrote my former Post colleagues Mike Allen, Jim VandeHei and John F. Harris.

Cheney, they wrote, "scoffed at the idea of two men who spent years accruing power showing so much deference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the big spending and energy debates of the year." The House's senior Democrats "march to the tune of Nancy Pelosi to an extent I had not seen, frankly, with any previous speaker," Cheney said. "I'm trying to think how to say all of this in a gentlemanly fashion, but [in] the Congress I served in, that wouldn't have happened."

Asked if these men had lost their spines, he responded, "They are not carrying the big sticks I would have expected."

Gentlemanly, indeed. Once, Murthas and Dingells were Big Men on the Hill, swinging the Big Sticks of committee chairmen, Cheney is saying. Now they are, if not nancy boys, Nancy's Boys. Somehow, Newt Gingrich took on the committee chairs when he was speaker, and no one questioned their, um, equipment.

I guess there are people who believe the only kind of power that others understand is brute force and immediate, but I certainly don't believe that's the only kind of power that there is.

In many health and public health settings, persistent chronic pressure has more impact than acute events. Chronic slow low-key pressure can come in under the radar, in fact, of those scanning the skies for acute attacks.

Asian martial arts schools have been teaching for thousands of years the art of "fighting without fighting", as portrayed somewhat humorously by Bruce Li in "Enter the Dragon". The art of winning invisibly features prominently in "The Art of War" by Sun Tsu, written 2000 years ago, and still valid today.

I noted also today that, after several years of kicking the Chinese in the shins and demanding they hurry up and let the dollar fall, and make it fall faster, now that it's falling, the treasury secretary is asking China to increase investments in the US so the dollar won't fall so fast.

Long term thinking about consequences can be helpful sometimes.

There's no question that, in the short run, rock beats water -- but in the long run, water beats rock. In the short range, electromagnetic forces dominate and gravity seems to not exist, but in the long term, on larger scales, gravity dominates everything else. The last shall be first.

A small constant force, working persistently over a long time, can deliver far more power than a huge but very short force.

And, if you are talking about managing growth, not demolition, long-term shaping forces are at least as powerful as acute events.

The best strategies will be based, as I've said before, on taking all the different scales of space and time into account. The US is losing its position in the world primarily because it has been so busy with short-term events that it has neglected to have any consistent long-term strategy, aside from "have a big stick."

Well, we have the largest stick in the world, more nuclear weapons than anyone by far, the biggest and fastest army, and, frankly, so what? It doesn't seem to buy much. Meanwhile, the rest of the social infrastructure we neglected, including the education and health of our children, is crumbling and demanding an increasing amount of attention.

This is a really expensive and frightening way to rediscover what other wise people already knew.

There's an old feminist joke:

Question: How can we be sure that Santa Claus is a man?
Answer: He does something huge once a year and thinks he's a saint.

There's insight here. It's worth reflecting on that.

Of course, the USA is a relatively young country, still feeling its oats, and still convinced that its elders are total morons. It still has the sense it doesn't need to worry about all that stuff they did, because that's old fashioned and it has "Technology."

I'm hoping at some point it will grow up enough and be enough of a man to be able to say "Oops, I was wrong." That's another measure of strength, and that other thingie: "maturity."