Micro(soft Outlook) Management

These comments will come as no surpise to the adept workplace leader, but are perhaps pertinent for other young turks who have yet to learn these facile lessons.

1. In the beginning, God created the Earth, and many other things. It took her thousands of years to create email, and to my knowledge, she has never actually used email to communicate. Email is not a problem solving method. Email is the worst way to communicate important messages. Generally, the more important is the message, the more important it is that you pick up the phone or go make a visit to the person concerned.

2. Never email angry. That's why the good Lord created Draft messages in Microsoft Outlook. That line that you thought was very clever, well, it was very clever. And you're fired.

3. Email is the worst way to delegate tasks. If you wouldn't have written a memo about it 15 years ago, don't write an email about it. It is too easy to delegate in our electronic age. Maybe its just in the army that this happens, but the poor junior guy who has nobody to e-delegate to ends up with way too much on his plate. Besides, delegating via email says "I don't care very much about this task".

4. Don't reply to angry emails. Forward them to wiser people who can action them, call the person to problem-solve, or delete them. Angry people suck. (They know they suck, that's why they are angry).

5. Blackberrys are the flail that the monks of the capitalist monastery abuse themselves with during all hours of the day, paying for their sins of greed. They are good for people who get stuck in lines a lot at the bank, or get chauffeured to work (generally not the same class of people). That's about it.

6. Putting a silly quotation at the end of your signature is kitschy, so it had better be a good one....

7. Blind Carbon Copy is a device of cowardice. It is rare that BCC can be used appropriately, unless you are conducting a sting on a criminal organization, and you need to put CSIS in BCC.

8. What you forward, is what you are. A good forward to the right person, is at best a little bit funny. A bad forward is incredibly lame. Some people, instead of having a swear jar, need a forward jar... If they would put a dollar in the jar every time they forwarded, then they would eventually stop. I mean, was that dear friend, who forwarded me a message trying to get everyone in Canada to send little Tim a postcard at Toronto Sick Kids, serious? Have we lost our minds?

9. Asking someone on a date via email is only permissible for those stuck alone on archipelagic islands with no access to telephones, smoke signals, or semaphore.

10. That is all I have for now. If you have others, let me know.

Les enfants

Si j'avais des problèmes avec les enfants,
je n'aurais jamais accepté d'en avoir été un.
L'enfant en moi n'a guère grandi.
Il a survécu la purge de mon éduquance.
Il m'apprend, me reprend, me défie;
Son incompréhension infantile n'est qu'éloquence.

A Genealogy of Mediocrity

A critical reflection must necessarily begin with a self-critical reflection so as to avoid the stench of hypocrisy and ground the critique in its individual perspective.

My undergraduate university experience both at the University of Ottawa and the University of Waterloo was four years of unforgettable friendships and learning. While I will criticize the structural features of today's Canadian university, I will be far more critical of the student culture that is at times anti-intellectual, lazy, and permeated by a rationalist (capitalist) ethic of profit maximisation. At the same time, I must admit that my university experience was highly affected by these features, and that I was at times the bad student that I find so useless.

I was struck during my undergrad days by the number of people around me who were obviously uninterested in the subject matter they were supposed to be studying. A great deal of them were simply sticking it out for a degree. Of course, these are not the silent majority of hard-working students.

However, the average Canadian university (I have taken courses at 5 Canadian universities, all of them fairly similar) is not a bastion of learning, but rather a bachelor degree sausage factory. The causes of this state of affairs are many, but I will place responsibility primarily with the individual student (although structural and systemic factors are surely present).

The young 18 year old today is told two pathetic myths: He must get a degree to be competitive in a professionalized job market, and he must choose immediately in what discipline he wishes to study. The "disciplinization" of the humanities means that the poor 18-year old must choose between sociology, history, political studies, religious studies, etc, as if any of those disciplines can be understood in isolation from each other. Furthermore, the degree mentality means that university studies are seen as a means to an end, a painful exercice like going to the dentist, as opposed to an end in itself. The utilitarian theology of the capital-driven middle-class has a distinct logic: a teleological anti-intellectualism. We see this in Canada in the question of language learning: "Why should I learn French? I don't need to." Learning is seen as an obstacle to be crossed before money can be made.

Can the 18-year old be blamed for learning very quickly that the university cared very little for his intellectual commitment, and structured courses to be standardized recitals that the lazy student passed by virtue of a last-minute study and a ten page essay written in the Grade 5 English? Do general degrees in the humanities represent three years of learning? Or do they represent rather three years of socialization, with the occasional requirement to produce a few essays and an exam on a four month basis? Why does so much mediocre work pass the scrutiny of the system? My friends who have marked undergraduate papers despair at the bald incompetence of much that is written.

The ongoing political decision to keep university accessible, in the financial sense, is not enormously controversial. The ongoing acceptance of mediocrity in the humanities is a logical result of "accessible" programs, but one that is based on the premise that once admitted, the majority should pass their courses. Many departments will not accept high failure rates, and professors who have high failure rates are viewed with suspicion by their departments, colleagues and students. Nobody wants to be mean and evil, and call a spade a spade. Should financial accessibility translate into a free-pass for mediocrity? Should public resources be invested in an adult day-care of intellectual pretensions? If you answered no to all of the above, are you an elitist angry young man, swimming against a current of educational democracy? Or perhaps a calm critic of institutionalized mediocrity... Does the university have a duty to refuse to sanction mediocrity, creating a culture of learn or leave?

Not Saluting Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin, the Globe and Mail's moral conscience and oracle of humanism, has published a neat little rant on the new American strategy in Iraq. While to take up all of Salutin's article would take more time than I can allow for such an inconsequential article, I will take him to task on two points: 1) He criticizes Lgen David Petraeus for not having served in Vietnam, by implying that his PhD dissertation on the subject was "unimpeded by the lessons of real experience." 2) Without so much as a feeble justification, he says that the Canadian involvement in Afghanistan is analogous to the American experience in Iraq.

I will deal with the second point first. On the phenomenological level, the two interventions seem very similar... America and allies topple a middle-eastern government, move in troops (invade, to the critic) and attempt to establish-impose order while supporting an indigenous government that adopts some liberalizing elements and is loosely (tightly?) aligned with the United States. Unfortunately, the comparison ends there. Any deeper analysis reveals fundamental political differences between the two situations. Eg.: The Afghan government that was toppled in 2001 was never recognized by the international community as the legimate government of Afghanistan, Iraq's government was, etc...

It's rather rich that Rick Salutin can flippantly dismiss Lgen Petraeus' PhD dissertation by asserting that it "was unimpeded by the lessons of real experience."

In saying such a thing, the critic gives himself licence to suggest that PhD dissertations must be based on having directly lived through the phenomenon under study. In this case, I would suggest that this methodological requirement would disqualify approximately 98% of PhD dissertations in the humanities.

The critic subtly suggests the infamy of "draft-dodging" by pointing out that Lgen Petraeus never served in Vietnam. In doing so, he has fallen into the mould of the American political culture, perhaps an unconscious reflection of his years studying in the United States during the Vietnam war, which has used Vietnam as a litmus test for character (recall the perpetual critiques of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for having somehow not served in Vietnam, like over 90% of the American population).

The critic's sly attack on the credibility of Lgen Petraeus' graduate studies is all the more self-damning given Salutin's status as public intellectual. A reading of the critic's biography (playwrite, author and columnist) reveals a great deal of what I would qualify as intelligent creativity, "unimpeded by the lessons of real experience."

To mix a cocktail of apt aphorisms: Let he who lives in a glass spire atop a shiny ivory tower, and is without sin, be careful when casting the first stone.

The Incomplete Logic of Limited War

Imagine fighting a foreign war that half the domestic population passively supports, and the other half of the population passively opposes, and everyone actively ignores. Let's say that things are going badly in this war, at least as perceived at home. Now, let's say that withdrawal is a very costly option because it means reneging on commitments made, leaving a vacuum of political chaos, and the conditions for civil war in a (hypothetically) very hot part of the world. Let's also say that the very political forces that argue for withdrawal, are the same ones that will clamour for "peace-keeping" intervention as soon as the effects of the withdrawal and subsequent ethnic conflict are felt.

The limited nature of foreign wars by great powers means that the domestic population of the great power has just enough inertia to support "some" war, but not the political will to apply the resources necessary to achieve decisive outcomes. The asymmetry of powerful imperial militaries against small local insurgencies is matched by an asymmetry of political will.... Limited political will on the part of imperial forces and decisive political will on the part of indigenous warriors.

The tragedy of the limited political commitment of the imperial force is that it is committed just enough to incur substantial costs, but not enough to decisively impose a lasting order. At home, any increase in resources for a foreign war is seen as "escalation", as if wars are fought by degrees. The hypothetical limited warrior will say "We can't escalate this war from 20% to 34%, because the 20% is already to heavy a burden." The logic of limited political commitment is a sufficient condition for the success of a guerrilla insurgency. As soon as the empire has decided that the costs are too great to subdue effectively, but too great to withdraw definitively, the tragedy of limited war is present and conflict is sure to persist.

The hypothetical great statesman will look at any conflict as a means to an end, and thus a transitory state to a more acceptable political situation. The way to end conflict is either definitive (potentially costly) withdrawal or decisive and costly commitment. The logic of decisive commitment sounds something like this:

"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old." Sir Winston Churchill

The tragedy of limited logics and divided publics, led by lesser statesmen, is that those who abhor conflict (which should be all) cannot agree on a decisive strategy: withdraw or win. And as the epic struggle endures, it drains the vitality of the warring polities until even the eventual winner will likely collapse under the strain of its own success. And surely no one can envy having to choose between the overwhelming, bloody assault and the torture of an enduring and underwhelming deadlock.

The Promise of Compromise

Holidays and the beginning of semesters are times to read books that catch our interest and have no relation to our everyday obligations. This holiday was about running, hiking, kayaking, bodyboarding, drinking rum made from coral filtered spring watered sugar cane and aged in Kentucky oak barrels for 12 years, and spending time with my family in a far-away land. It was also about two books: Charles Taylor's the Sources of Self and Graham Fraser's Sorry I don't Speak French. I had to relinquish Taylor's book to my brother, so it is Fraser's book that I haven't been able to put down.

Sorry I Don't Speak French is, in part, the story of the language divide in Canada since the 1960s. The title is indicative: the intended audience is the unilingual anglophone. The truth is the language divide is exacerbated by the fact that each group communicates its grievances primarily in its own language, primarily to its own group, and largely ignoring the incomprehensible grievances of the other. Graham crosses this divide by bringing the full story to the anglo reader. More to the point, Graham's book points out that objectively, the major grievances rightly belong to French Canadians, who have had to justify something that the rest of us have never had to try and justify: why we act, think and talk the way we do.

This book has especial poignance for me. I was a product of the immersion push. I travelled to Québec as a child, crossed the St-Lawrence by ferry and played with other children in their language. I later went to a truly bilingual university (despite all the normal complaints of imperfect bilingualism) and took all of my courses in French, lived in a francophone residence, worked in a bilingual Parliament and worked as a French language monitor. After joining the army, I was assigned to the Royal 22e Régiment, the historic French language regiment that was the first truly French language military unit in the regular force since Confederation. One could almost say that the bilingual dream has marked my destiny, forming patterns that I saw as personal choices, but that now seem like inevitable conclusions of a deep-seated commitment to the big country that stretches from the North Pole down to the 49th parallel. In that sense my terrible, romantic pseudo-nationalism is geographic. But it is also deeply rational. I do not imagine that a Canada can exclude the peoples that inhabit it. I do not imagine believing in a country that includes peoples who I do not understand, and who do not understand me. That is why I chose to speak French. That is why I suffered the odd looks of store clerks who thought my anglo-accent affreux. That is why I took twice as long to do my readings in university in my second language.

No one alive today fought the battle at the Plains of Abraham, that grassy place that is now a federal park where children run and play under the supervision of both federal and provincial flags. There is no reason that those long past sins cannot be buried in the building of a new national myth. That myth is partially constructed, and is in need of much support. The promise of compromise is real. My true New Years Resolution is that every anglo in Canada read that book.

My friend Dan Fournier once told me something that I'll never forget: "Sorry means that you'll never do it again."

20s

I am wisely using my 20s as a time to learn all the things my parents told me as a child.