Art, a Man, and Intuition

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got art and intuition?

Art

I hate to sound like I was once a sick puppy, but yes, as faithful readers know, I have a past. And so I was already middle aged, over 35, before I took an excellent lengthy aptitude test as part of my undergraduate class. My dominant job aspect? “Artistic.” I said, “Oh.” Me? Really? Of course I’m not prejudiced anymore against fancy artists but… it took a while to sink in. Apparently I would make a good executive on Mad Men.

Happily, I have since been privileged to go with others to periodically visit an artist, my sensei, Sheri-D Wilson, in her living room as part of making my War of the Worlds poetry manuscript. In mid-winter once, after supper at the Wainwright Hotel, I walked through the starlit snow to see Sheri-D perform at the Canmore Opera House. (A wonderful log building) So I know a little about artists. In fact, during a weekend poetry workshop by Sheri-D, I said I was only now learning to feel right saying “we artists.” A lady then began crying, saying she too was learning to say “we.”

A man

I suppose having an artistic streak explains best-selling writer Michael Korda. I found his book about T.E. Lawrence to be, as a blurb writer wrote, “unputdownable.” I started over halfway in, beginning with Lawrence of Arabia’s postwar year, and read through to the end. Took three hours. 

Besides his amazing originality in warfare and statecraft, Lawrence also went on to bring in reforms including (“but not limited to” says my Yankee lawyer) eliminating the taken-for-granted ankle puttees and Prussian collars for the RAF. While working with RAF speed boats, for rescuing planes downed in the water, he innovated a hull design that would be used by the U.S. Patrol Torpedo boats. His small motorboat manual, according to Korda, was excellent in having concision, and being comprehensive, and including extra things such as how to manage during storms. Lawrence’s reforms were quietly accomplished through people he knew of high rank, with no limelight for Lawrence. His own postwar rank? ( Enlisted) Airman second class. (Yes, nearly everybody on base knew who he was)

Apparently Lawrence had an artist’s disregard for conformity. He began the war as a young army lieutenant, and ended as a young lieutenant-colonel. Before the war, of course, he was an archeologist and graduate of Oxford university. Postwar, in his thirties, he translated Homer’s poetry epic, the Odyssey. But not as a poem, as a prose novel: How strange, how delightful. Also strange is how the man who was too poor to afford a boarding school such as Eton ended up a friend to frightfully rich, famous, original people such as George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill. For his friendships, and for his life in general, Lawrence had complete disregard for “fame, rank and fortune.”

So was Lawrence socially, then, an artist among artists? Obviously Shaw was one, but not the others I know of, although of course the British education system at the time stressed being well rounded. Churchill, as it happened, not only painted as a hobby but wrote a book on the subject. 

(By the way, I have seen one of Churchill’s paintings hanging in the stairwell of the Lieutenant-Governor’s house, back when she lived off Jasper avenue across the asphalt plain from the old provincial museum, the one that has since moved downtown to just off Churchill Square. May I boast? I once held the door open for the lieutenant-governor to enter the museum. I didn’t know I was supposed to let her royal Canadian mountie do that, until she laughingly told me so.)

I wonder: Was Lawrence artistic? I don’t think so: Because I have no knowledge of him using art for self-expression, although maybe his entire unconventional life was a work of art. Perhaps his postwar life as a clerk, and as a mechanic, fulfilled a creative streak in him that I don’t know about.. The main reason that I don’t suppose he was “artistic” is I can scarcely imagine a good artist achieving such exceptional success in war. (Incidentally, Napoleon said a general was no good unless he could look dry eyed at a silent body-strewn battlefield)

Perhaps, then, his amazing originality came not so much from an “artist’s creativity” as from feeling “unfettered by society.” Willing to fearlessly think and see. Like young Patton and Eisenhower scandalizing the military establishment by working on newfangled battle tanks together. 

(Patton had to scramble to recover his reputation by writing magazine articles on horse cavalry tactics) 

You can achieve a lot if you haven’t had a lifetime of self-training in automatic conformity. 

If my speculation is correct, then Lawrence’s social circle was not other artists, but other “originals,” folks who were themselves unfettered. I wonder if they formed a secret club of those who conformed in dress, speech and thought only out of politeness, who would then fondly enjoy relaxing in private with likeminded friends. 

Like how if you and I were transported to the 1950’s we would naturally gravitate to relaxing among individuals who believed in equal respect for women and nonwhite races, and enjoying drinks among folks who believed it was OK for males to be verbally skilled and cultured, instead of “strong and silent.” Maybe if I went to live in the year the twin towers fell, I would be dining among those who share our 2020 A.D. belief in the appropriateness of homosexuality, and of gender transitioning, for schoolchildren. Or maybe not.

It was a countryman of Lawrence, the Nobel prize winner and philosopher Bertrand Russell, a man born in the Victorian age, who said you could achieve the freedom of a “licensed lunatic” if only you “made it clear, even to the stupidest, that (in being original) you were not criticizing them.” I can relate, having a life-time of self-training in being nice and polite. Truly, no one angrily says, “Who does he think he is?” Except maybe the very stupidest.

Everyone knows I’m a thinker; no one calls me a nerd,. As for thinking, my new insight on T.E. Lawrence being not an artist but an original has “made my day.” That, and being amused at the idea of a secret club. 

Last month in London, I socialized with a chap from Oxford who was born rich middle class, now a multi-millionaire. And even though “I’m just a poor boy, from a poor family” I swear we both felt perfectly normal around each other. Call us club members.

Intuition

As for what club my poetry teacher would belong to, I have no idea. She is certainly intuitive. By this I don’t mean the usual definition that might, maybe, possibly, be “explained” by having a subconscious like a super-computer, putting together teeny tiny unnoticed clues. I suppose a lifetime of being willing to see would aide the inner computer. 

No, what I mean is Sheri-D Wilson had access to “an extra perception.” You’re on your own with that one, as I can’t begin to explain her various examples. One thing my sensei could (rarely) do is like what was documented by Robert Masters, a British officer stationed in India, who could speak both Gurkha and English. He once overheard a British Tommy and a Gurkha soldier, each speaking only their own language, having a sensible conversation.

There are things beyond us, oh Horatio.

I’m artistic myself, yet I don’t know if that explains my having a “weird intuition” three times last month while I was in Central London. 

(By the way, I just barely beat the virus by flying home February 28, started coughing five days later… but it was only a cold. Praise the Lord.)

In a Bloomsbury used book store I asked a handsome, plainly dressed staff, “Are you a linguistics guy?” We talked. He was from Italy, and yes, he had minored in linguistics. 

(I wanted to know why foreign languages have so many syllables; his answer jived with my essay where Doctor Who pronounces “Vincent Van Goff”, archived as Anglicizing, June 2018) 

In a diner near my hotel I asked a young lady with an original hairstyle, “Are you a poet?” We talked. (Besides putting poems fortnightly onto my blog, I attend a weekly poetry cafe) Not only was she an active poet, she was just learning to write sestinas. (poems with the hardest rules, harder than a sonnet) 

In a Van Gogh exhibit on loan from Holland, in a huge special tent, I found a pretty teenage girl on a bench in the lobby, waiting for her father. I asked, “Are you a Doctor Who fan?” She was excited to answer “Yes!” and told me that part of the TV episode with Vincent Van Gogh was included near the end of the tour. We talked. I told her and her dad about the Who Store being only 30 minutes by tube east of Central London, and about a fan’s “Doctor-and-Vincent” music video on Youtube. I play it often. The dad knew of the band ,Athlete, although I didn’t. Here’s the link.

By “weird intuition,” I mean: Who in the world would suddenly blurt out speculations about perfect strangers—and be right every time?

Sean Crawford 

East of Banff, 

March, 

2020

Footnotes: 

~I usually forget that I can figuratively “open my third eye” for about ten seconds at a time. No more, because it blinds me. Some knowledge is too much. Like how a social work student can do the in-class exercise “What I hear you saying is…” and then refuse to do so in the student union building—because who wants to know how very seldom we “get it right” in real life?

~Speaking of smart people, I had a friend who, although from remote Saskatchewan, knew foreign languages, and attended medical school without needing to take the Latin course. 

In my essay Blair, Being Smart, archived September 2011, I wrote of how Blair coped with being so brainy.

~In my essay Loving Greek and Latin archived March 2012, while feeling a gentle breeze from Oxford, I wrote of learning among future physicians and biologists.

Wanting Common Sense, with HG Wells

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Back again?

Today’s prose and poem takes up where last week’s prose and poem left off.

Short Essay

Quotation

Long Poem

Short Essay

My parents survived the Great Depression. I survived the Great Flood of 2013—That’s when we had to evacuate the downtown. It would not have been so bad, if after the last “once in a century flood” of 2005, the city authorities, from their being “common sense challenged,” had not, after a city report was finished, classified as secret the report on the flood for five blankety-blank years! (Who knows what flood control efforts could have been enacted before the waters rolled in again in 2013)

The U.S. civil war, 1860’s, saw fighting between wooden warships covered with iron: The ironclads. The Great War was 1914—1918. Ordinary people back then thought it was a war totally surprising and unprecedented, because—because the learned authorities had neglected to notice the “total war,” (not “army versus army”) the trenches, and the machine-age weapons of the US civil war. Worse: They ignored H.G. Wells—and I don’t mean his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds with metal fighting machines (like tanks) and Black Smoke. (like chlorine gas) 

Wells wrote a 1903 short story about The Land Ironclads manned inside by commoners with a practical education, such as chemists, mechanics and electricians. The theme was that these little peace loving chaps could stand against upper class warrior-bred fellows, with their silly swords, their calvary horses and their titles like Von in their name, fellows very arrogant and very rich, but also very ignorant.  

After Wells wrote, inventing land battleships should have been a no-brainer for both allies and axis. But no. Last week I mentioned the How and Why Wonder Book of WWI where both sides sought to break the trench deadlock with a secret weapon. I wrote then how the Germans ignored the common sense idea of being prepared for an offensive deep into enemy territory: They didn’t begin by stockpiling their secret equipment. (gas masks) The allies, for their secret weapon, would be equally unprepared. (General Baden-Powell, the Boer War hero with the motto of “Be Prepared,” had already left the army, at the request of his king, to run the Boy Scout movement)

The allied secret weapons were shipped over from Britain, concealed in great containers marked “tank.” Hence the short word, “panzer” in German, that forever replaced “land battleship.” Did the British proceed to prepare for a breakout by stockpiling rations, ammunition and an army of tanks?  And maybe, perhaps, spare engine parts too? No. Although only a precious few tanks had arrived yet, they were nonetheless used in the next battle. The good news? For once, church bells rang all over Britain, rejoicing for the Battle of Cambrai—the biggest victory so far!—as the tanks rolled right over machine gun nests, supporting the army to advance through a lunar landscape for an amazing distance… of …six miles!

But without stockpiling? Once the few tanks had all broken down or been disabled—that was it. No breakout. Of course it didn’t take long at all for the Germans to rush in elephant guns and small direct-fire cannons and to invent elegantly simple and practical anti-tank ditches. (Angled so the tank’s nose would face into the dirt—full stop) 

(Elephant guns? Sure. Today huge .50 calibre machine guns, firing slowly, like you see mounted on tank turrets and Arab Toyota trucks, can punch a round into armoured cars to bounce around inside, while the normal sized .30 calibre, firing rapidly, can take out surrounding personnel)

Obviously both sides, Allies and Axis, were as “common sense challenged” as our own city hall which classified our flood report. 

In our 21st century, if Canadians didn’t join their US cousins in declaring War on Terror, or join them in Iraq, maybe it’s because Canadians, even the ones who were history-challenged, knew their government’s limitations. Meanwhile, despite seeing their cousin’s “farce” (as the Toronto police chief labeled it) of their War on Drugs, the average Canadians, while knowing the difficulty of counter insurgency, never imagined the sheer colossal incompetence, the “fiasco,” if one might speak plainly, of the U.S. war effort “to instil democracy” in Iraq. 

(Early in the “occupation,” before the Americans had the guts to call their liberation an “occupation”—Iraqi’s seeking employment would warn each other not to use that word around Americans—someone wrote a thick book called Fiasco, that obviously not a single U.S. official paid any attention to) 

Americans didn’t even involve their own State Department! Too bad, because State, of course, would know a lot about nurturing freedom. 

(State would know that former colonies, upon achieving independence in Africa and Asia in the 1950’s and 1960’s, did not come instantly, overnight, to understand democracy—And no, you can’t teach democracy with a simplistic sound bite of ‘you just need freedom and elections’—anymore than you can simplistically tell American farm boys, for their domestic war, ‘you can just say no to drugs’ or tell a South Vietnamese rice farmer, ‘you can just say no to communism.’  

State would know exactly what an embassy filled with naive Americans would not know: You can’t reach “the hearts and minds” with a mere sound bite… Two patriots wrote a best-selling book called The Ugly American, a book I’ll wager not one American in the Iraq embassy enclave, the Green Zone, ever read… Yes I’m angry, thinking of lives wasted in goddam Vietnam)  

Quotation

He was a young man, healthy enough but by no means sun-tanned, and of a type of feature and expression that prevails in His Majesty's Navy: alert, intelligent, quiet. He and his engineers and his riflemen all went about their work, calm and reasonable men. They had none of that flapping strenuousness of the half-wit in a hurry, that excessive strain upon the blood-vessels, that hysteria of effort which is so frequently regarded as the proper state of mind for heroic deeds.

The Land Ironclads (1903)

Poem 

As you may recall, last week’s poem ended after the young narrator has cried and sadly fallen asleep in the top of a church steeple, unaware of what would happen as he slept. The drama resumes:

Survivor of the Black Smoke 

I awake with dry tears,

lying stiff in the old wooden steeple 

on the floor that smells like a church,

I hear silence.

Strange, deathly silence.

I crawl up,

stand up.

I don’t glance down—I enjoy seeing a few fresh stars.

But—is something wrong?

Nothing heard.

No lorries groaning on the far highway,

their engine retarders going turrrap-tup-tup-tup.

No motor rumbles from right below.

No horns of motorists navigating narrow streets.

Something is pressing at my mind,

and I don’t want to open that door.

I look down.

Nothing. 

Only blackness.

No amber street lamps in friendly rows.

No red-white moving lights of motorists heading home.

Nothing but a black void,

formless, muffled, 

where the light shineth not.

A bat zigs past—I say, “Don’t go!”

Don’t go down into that dark fog.

The bat does not hear,

heaven does not heed.

Lonely, 

in an empty steeple,

above the silent dead.

After three days

I could descend.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

June

2019

Footnotes: 

~Wells was such a thinker! A forward to a modern (I forget which) edition of The War of the Worlds points out that Wells (in 1898) was the first to predict refugee columns, such as would (in 1914) swell the roads during the opening of the Great War, during that hopeful autumn before anyone realized the war would become horribly Great.

~Here’s the short story, as per the Gutenberg press

Bullying Still

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Sometimes a “bullying solution” is 

not found with “the total school” or “the students” but firstly with “the teachers.” Just the teachers.

Hello Reader,

Got bullying? Still?

Sorry, I know I’m being angry here when I start speaking with words in italics, or in this case, writing with italics, but hey, I’m not apologizing.

In February I reported on bullying in Ontario, where the teachers were in denial. From May 4th, here is (link) a case where a girl’s teacher allowed her to sit in class with orange juice having been thrown on her face, the same girl who had received an award from the prime minister. The girl, Nadia Sparkes, 13, is a hero, except to losers who believe in excruciating conformity. Easier for them to crucify a peer than to look within and face their own discomfort. I had read about Nadia before; I never thought she would have to change to a school eleven miles (17.7 kilometres) away. Because of bullying.

Denial is easy: Regarding my last bullying essay to expose teachers and propose a remedy beyond merely “trying harder,” (link to February essay on Bullies and Teachers) you could smugly say, “Ontario is a b-a-a-a-d province, not like ours.” Oh sure, in fact, on a road trip in a province west of Ontario, I found a newspaper letter by a retired teacher who that said that in her school bullying was dealt with; in her school teachers would report bullying… Doubtful! I hate to burst your bubble Ma’am, but we even had to pass a law to legally FORCE teachers to report child abuse. 

To my knowledge there is no law forcing teachers to report a child sitting through class with orange juice sticking to her. The article adds that a bully who pulled a knife on Nadia “is getting support.” That’s nice, but Nadia is not. In the article there is nothing included about support for Nadia while other children continued to bully her. I strongly suspect she did not get any support at all, right up until she changed schools. Not if her teachers were like the ones in Ontario, and in Alberta, and in your province too.

As for Alberta, the letter I found was from a teacher here. Easy to deny and say,  “Our province is better than Ontario,” but… in March an innocent nine-year-old, here in Calgary, ended her bullying… by ending her own life… The parents had gone to the teacher four times. As it turned out, it was the teacher who sparked the bullying by being, er, “non-nurturing,” one day in class.

—Update, Mary 6: Today CBC Radio reported another family at the same school saying the school is “in denial” about bullying, saying they have given up and taken their girls out.

Now here I am at my keyboard feeling crazy enough to have put words in italics, which my English teacher says I’m not supposed to do. And feeling crazy to say we have to start with the teachers, NOT with the children, by making a concerted long-term effort. (which I essayed about in detail in February) I feel a teeny-tiny bit humiliated, right this second, from knowing, as I type this, that teachers will diplomatically say I’m impractical, or will use that age-old teenager’s slogan, “You just don’t understand!” My reply, after taking a breath… so I don’t use italics… 

“Is that so? Tell me, how are your other methods working out for you?”

Sean Crawford

Calgary,

Hoping a grief-crazed father 

doesn’t try to prevent innocent children suffering another Columbine massacre, 

By going after the guilty teachers in their staffroom at lunchtime,

with a gun, 

that shoots paintballs,

May,

2019 A.D.

Footnotes:

~Sometimes when teachers are supported then they can feel safe in dropping their denial. 

~It was a man from the provincial legislature, Brian Lee, who created the company that leads agencies and hospitals into being world-class, as I mentioned in my Bullies and Teachers essay. His company is called Custom Learning Systems Group Ltd.

~Supporting our dear teachers to effectively have a “non-bullying culture” could then result in less bullying in the adult world. Which could then help our economy. (if only from having less turbulence in the business world from bullying) To explain:

Today, May 4th, (for white coat, black arts)

 the CBC aired a documentary on how a taxpayer-funded hospital paid seven lawyers for a span of ten years to try to uphold bullying. But in the end the hospital was found to have “bad faith” by a jury and was therefore ordered to pay a bullied innocent doctor over a million dollars. What if future doctors, back in high school, had seen that everyone should have dignity? Had seen, with their own eyes, that bullies would not succeed? The taxpayers could have been saved millions of dollars.     

SIDEBAR, May 4th, after British council elections, 

On British adults being Bullies in Parliament.

Is it OK to have initiative? 

When I chair the weekly Friday Fee Fall, if volunteers are learning to put healthy expectations on themselves for their role as participants in a meeting, (and doing so much better than folks in the working world who “hate meetings”) 

then I don’t mind at all if they intervene to help things move along.

At work, if some staff are standing by a fence line, I am confident my manager wouldn’t mind if I started picking up litter blown against the fence, or sparked others to join me in doing so.

So yes, initiative is fine. 

But right now, certain Members of Parliament, while having zero initiative themselves, are saying Prime Minister Teresa May should step down, so that “someone else” could talk and lead, amongst the members of parliament from various parties, in order to deliver Brexit. Well.

This begs me to ask the question: Why isn’t the “someone,” who could be anyone, such as the conservative party’s Boris Johnson, already showing initiative? Perhaps by talking to other MPs; perhaps through joining Mrs. May in talking to the labour party’s leaders; or through keeping an eye on the ball by taking initiative, every day, to mingle with all the rest of parliament to spark new, improved ideas for Brexit. Instead, I have read about MPs claiming “new ideas” could appear “if only” there was another extension to the Brexit date, or if only Mrs May would quit parliament. From MP’s, such talk is fantasy. From teenagers saying “if only” I sense victim-talking. Better to replace “if only” with “next time…”

Those idle MPs who publicly want Mrs. May to take her eye off the ball by resigning are the same slackers who seem unwilling to be part of the solution. Mrs. May is too busy to reply or call them names. Not me: I call them bullies.


Update: The prime minister of Ireland is not impressed either. For June 11, 2019:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48602072 Also he said:

"What people are saying is, 'give up the backstop' which we know will work legally and operationally in return for something that doesn't yet exist but might exist in the future. 

"I can't do that to the border communities."

Mr Varadkar also said he was "concerned at the idea, and there is an idea there in Westminster, in London, that somehow Theresa May was a bad negotiator and got a bad deal. 

"That's not true. She was a good negotiator, she had a good team.

"She probably got the best deal that she could get given that a country leaving the EU doesn't have much leverage. 

"The fact that the failure of the House Of Commons to ratify the Withdrawal Agreement somehow means they are going to get a better deal, that is just not how the European Union works," he said.

Epi-notes:

~For more on MP’s being silly see my essay on Statesman Mrs. Teresa May, archived March 2019, and Billy Bragg and Brexit, archived January 2019.

~Drat! Fooey! Rats! That idiot investor, Warren Buffet, has said he would invest in Britain despite Brexit. And people respect him just because he’s a billionaire. That and his track record. So today the pound sterling has soared in strength against my poor scanty dollars.

~OK, I admit I was angry today: I was “s’posed to” follow up on last week’s essay on Alienation and Isolation. Well. So click in next week for Human warmth and The War of the Worlds.

Statesman Mrs. Teresa May

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

This week’s essay, like my other blog posts, is intended to be an “evergreen” post: still relevant next winter, and long after Brexit has receded to nothing but a blip on time’s horizon.

Hello Reader,

Got project skills?

Years from now, if you are reading this essay in some dusty digital library, you may be thinking that my peers and I, during these seasons, were correct in judging that Brexit, as in Britain leaving the European Union, (EU) is one of the greatest projects of our time.

The summary so far: The people had a referendum in 2016. It would be, they were told, a “once in a lifetime” referendum, meaning: no second chances, no do-overs, meaning: a result closer to a grave Constitution than to a light bylaw easily changed. Today’s prime minister was an MP back then, and a “remainer”—until the vote was in. Then of course she tried to honour the referendum. Other MPs do not have such honour, and by journalists today they are openly called remainers.

Soon after the referendum there was an election where the people voted into power a minority government, partly because, while a big majority government might strengthen Britain’s hand for negotiating with the EU, few voters imagined a majority government would be critically needed for Brexit. I know I for one, back then, thought Brexit had already been decided.

You, years away, may be calm and objective about it all—but today we sure aren’t! In fact, as I write this, “tens of thousands” are marching for the issue of a second referendum—even though it’s Saturday March 23, 2019, with the exit—until yesterday—lawfully set for this coming Friday. A little late to be marching, eh?

As for the details of what the marchers want, and the details of Brexit: All of this, dear student researcher, you must already know as you “compare and contrast” and “document and footnote” old archives… So let me, today, only give you a single lens, like Grandmother peering through her monocle, for seeing the world. Not to see the important details, but to merely see a few concepts.

Here’s a controversial concept: If this is a great project, then perhaps  Prime Minister Teresa May, now being widely derided and disrespected, is a great statesman. Not like the other MPs. In my recent reading of newspapers, no other MP has said anything great, and a great many have said things that made me groan. 

I am reminded (to paraphrase Swift) of the slogan: “You know a great person by this detail: there is a confederacy of dunces against her…” Maybe there is a reason the rest of the Honourable Members of Parliament are unable to come up with a ghost of a start to a beginning of any agreed-upon plan; maybe they have pointy caps.

I first began to realize this one day in 2018 when Mrs. May was headed off to “the continent” to negotiate the terms of the exit, no doubt praying and firmly grasping her economic papers, while keenly scanning for the umpteenth time what terms she could fight to the bitter end on. May reminded me of that other lady prime minister, the Iron Lady, and the British forces in the Falklands, on a bright and fearful morning, moving off to manoeuvre over “no man’s land” to finally cross the wire and close with the Argentinian forces, each man firmly grasping his rifle—and praying. 

And May’s critics in parliament? On the very day she flew? They were asking what Ms May’s “plan B” was. 

Good lord! When you are down to the wire, whether on a jet plane to Brussels or about to cross a smoky battle field, the final thing to do is not to make a plan B—it’s to synchronize your watches. (Yes, I was a soldier once) Like a civilian plowing a long straight furrow, you don’t distract yourself by “taking your eyes off the prize.” (Nor does an army or corporation broadcast it's plan B "in the clear" to competitors and negotiators)

In fact, any plan B, such as secretly wanting to "remain" back in (the EU) your own trenches, is like a stab in your courage tank, letting out all your air. For a desperate battle, the Holy Bible talks about the folly of having the trumpet give an uncertain sound.

(By spring of 2019, with the drawn-out agony of Brexit, "remain" is no longer a secret but something to want publicly. It is still a secret, but now an open secret, that the calls for a "confirmatory vote" referendum is actually meant to torpedo Brexit)

I knew then, as the prime minister was in the air, that many learned folks in parliament had come to their seats not from managing projects but from desks in law offices. Not the same.

As I said back in January, in my archived essay Billy Bragg and Brexit, all of the prime minister’s critics thought she should take her eye off the ball. Not just in smaller ways such as while she is flying to Brussels, but in bigger ways too. For example, some MPs advised she should stop everything to have a general election. I reply, “Really? I mean, yes it’s exciting to campaign with long days and short sleepless nights… and then get re-elected… and then? …Then time has flowed by while you were too distracted to keep your eye on the Brexit ball.

Projects, like businesses in general, need a laser focus. In business one might, as Avis rent-a-car did, invest in meetings for six months to come up with a concise definition of purpose, so the company can then take steps to avoid distractions. No point in a profitable distraction; that’s why Avis dumped their limousine service. 

I like how May, as a good project leader, keeps her eye on the ball in contrast to other MPs including the head of the opposition party, Jeremy Corbyn. You might think another party leader, greatness-wise, would be in the same ball park as Ms May. Nope, not in this case. 

Corbyn’s advice to everyone reminds me of some Quebec leaders, before their calling for voting on an exit from Canada, telling everyone Quebec could have a “sovereignty association” with Canada, even though there was no clarity as to what the heck that would mean. Corbyn is talking about some sort of unprecedented association between the United Kingdom and the European Union, but I can’t explain it here, because nobody can. No one—certainly no leader in the EU—can say exactly what Corbyn’s unwritten, unprecedented, unlegal plan might be.

What I can say, using Granny’s simple monocle, is that Corbyn is taking his eye off the ball by calling for the UK to be in the same customs union as the EU, without being in the EU. Call it, to paraphrase the Americans, “Customization without representation.” Yet the Brexit ball presumably means freedom from the EU, full sovereignty, not partial freedom.

Right now, through my lens, I see MPs believing the people’s vote doesn’t count until the majority of confused MP’s vote to agree with them. I think of parliament as a ruling mini-democracy, complete with jokers and anarchists: folks in the guise of “remainer” MPs. How queer, because by my monocle the 2016 referendum supersedes the current parliamentary session. As clear headed project managers would say, “A done deal. Move on to the next step.” 

As I see it, the people of a great democracy didn’t say: Brexit only if the EU agrees, or, only if we get a good deal, or, only if we get no deal, also known as a “hard Brexit.”  To the people? “Brexit means Brexit.”  This Teresa May has quoted. I can’t attribute who she got the quote from, since it’s such a wide spread “no brainer.”

Good foundations, or good first decisions, as with an engineer’s postulates and theorems, are the bedrock, the sine qua non (without which not) of every engineering or business project.

Dear future student reader, I am feeling quite at ease, with no emotional need to weigh and balance the latest “six options”… because, although I am not from the future, I am from Canada. I will merely note that creative brainstorming is best for the start of a project, not at the end. 

Below are some creative options, stated this very weekend, by the MPs. My classroom exercise for you, oh learned student, is this:

To look through a monocle at each option in turn to ask: Does this take eyes off the ball?… 

Surely in her clarity of intention, against stormy waves of harsh MPs, Mrs. Teresa May is a rock of Gibraltar. …

God save the Queen.

END NOTE: 

HERE ARE THE OPTIONS  

From the BBC web site, with bolding by me, for Friday 22nd March:

QUOTE

in the coming days, as many as six other options, in addition to Mrs May's deal, could be voted on:

• Revoking Article 50 and cancelling Brexit
• Another referendum
• The PM's deal plus a customs union
• The PM's deal plus both a customs union and single market access
• A Canada-style free trade agreement
• Leaving the EU without a deal

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who wants his alternative plan for a customs union and guarantees on workers rights to be among those voted on, said there was support for a different way forward.

Conservative MP Sir Oliver Letwin, who is spearheading the move with senior Labour MPs including Hilary Benn, said he believed enough MPs would back an amendment to a government motion on Monday to trigger the so-called "indicative" votes later in the week.

But Conservative Brexiteer Marcus Fysh said the idea of giving MPs a menu of options after two years of negotiations was "ludicrous and childish", while ex-minister Steve Baker said it would end in "national humiliation”.

UNQUOTE

Sean Crawford

Under serene prairie Skys,

Alberta, March 24, 2019

***Update, March 27: May has promised that If MPs vote to back her deal with the EU, Then she will resign. (Because they will be voting for Brexit, at last)
***Update, April 3: 
Wow, talk about keeping your eye on the ball: May has put getting a deal for Brexit above party unity. Here is an editorial about her sacrifice. Her fellow conservative-party MPs will be angry, but they couldn't be counted on to vote for Brexit. (They opposed everything, including her negotiated deal with the EU)
***Below is from March 27, I think..

@AlanDuncanMP

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I don’t care what her critics say about my view - I have massive admiration for Theresa May’s fortitude and sense of duty. How has she managed to go through every day taking so much flak from less decent people?

Replying to @AlanDuncanMP

Agreed. She has been bullied by almost everyone in parliament. But she has stood firm and may just about make it out the other side. The fact she is prepared to give her job away in order to respect the referendum result should be applauded and respected. Thankyou PM.

Footnotes: 

~As an evergreen post, archived January 2019, I weaved together MP’s, Politically Correct guys criticizing idealistic folk singer Billy Bragg, and polarized politics in Billy Bragg and Brexit.

~Aw, shucks! The British Business community still ain’t worried enough, as the pound is nearly the strongest ever on a 120-day graph. Fine, but I want to buy cheap pounds!

~Surely frustration causes fantasy: A recurring fantasy, one printed again today, is that if May took her eyes off the ball by resigning, then “somebody,” never named, could somehow lead the MPs to a solution that has somehow eluded them—including those remainers, which implies the same chaps who won’t honour a referendum will somehow honour a new leader. This fantasy I somehow doubt. 

From what I have read from over in Canada I reply: Get real; not even Abraham Lincoln could possibly lead MPs like Corbyn, or those other MPs with their fantasies that are not sustainable unless they keep their eyes off the ball. I suppose even Lincoln confined his leadership to his own cabinet.