“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
~ Albert Einstein
Talk about your idea man! The thoughts from the mind of he who would be Secretary of State and President fall like the rain we had this spring in Virginia. When Rummy puts his sparks of brilliance in writing, they call them "snowflakes," short one or two liners that float like a gentle snow onto the mounding bloodless bureaucratic landscape of the Pentagon.
Rain might be a better analogy, because while snowflakes result in a scenic view before it turns to water, too much rain tends to muddy up the landscape. Of course, maybe I’m just thinking about the most recent ideas from the great master.
For example, Rummy’s latest ingenuity is to have the United States organize "a standing international peacekeeping force that could be dispatched to trouble spots around the globe." Wow — there’s an idea. We don’t like the United Nations telling us what to do and being incompetent — better if we could create an alternate "United Nations" (we don’t even have to reduce, disband, or reform the existing United Nations!) to tell everyone else what to do and be incompetent — but with us in charge! It’s a wonderful idea!
The bubbling over Mr. Rumsfeld has suggested that the United States search teams will ultimately find the smoking gun of WMD for which we sent 200,000 invading and occupying troops to the region. He promotes the Special Forces — perhaps because if any smoking guns are found, it might be the result of a fun game of hide and seek played solely by United States special ops and CIA operatives. Rummy disagreed with the CIA and State’s "intelligence" — so he created a parallel universe of intelligence that he can control. Rummy argued with former Army Chief of Staff Shinseki about that 200,000 number — and then refused to say goodbye at Shinseki’s retirement ceremony. Didn’t attend, and apparently prohibited senior members of the Office to the Secretary of Defense from attending. He remains awfully angry at the French, mainly because, like him, they are arrogant, and unlike him, have been honest and correct about the Iraq war motivation and consequent quagmire. Because of his feelings, he prohibited senior members of the military as well as major aviation technology CEOs from attending this year’s Paris Air Show. He seems to like NATO — as long as the Belgians don’t arrest him for war crimes when he shows up and he is allowed to oversee a new parallel U.S.-dominated mini-NATO ring of American military bases throughout Eastern Europe and the Islamic belt of the former Soviet Union, and of course Iraq. He creatively believes that the military has the right to interrogate prisoners of war without Geneva protections, and prosecute without due process those boys and old men accidentally picked up in Afghanistan along with the occasional American citizen.
The list goes on and on. But if you look closely, a theme emerges in the idea generation machine that is the mind of Mr. Rumsfeld.
We have some reason to expect that Mr. Rumsfeld is an imaginative man. One of my favorite storytellers, W. Somerset Maugham, said "Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.”
His age gives him an advantage. But on closer examination of his creativity, one sadly finds it predictable, pedestrian, and uninspired. His formula is too obvious: Take something that doesn’t work your way (whether it is the United Nations, NATO, European Union Standing Force, General Shinseki, the Army, France, the United States Bill of Rights) and simply put yourself in charge of it — or a new version of "it." Looks just like a snowflake — but unlike those uniquely formed and precious glimpses of nature — each Rummy-gram is imprinted and belched out from the same well-used industrial form. Kind of like how shoes and refrigerators and television sets used to be in the Soviet Union. They looked like the purposed item from a distance, but met no identifiable need or function beyond the factory quota.
Rumsfeld seems to believe in things like the United Nations, a robust NATO in the absence of any of the original motivations for that bureaucracy, and national security intelligence production — if only he were running them. He feels contempt for France’s arrogant honesty, while harboring fantasies that only Napoleon would understand. The oversized and under-trained United States Army would be fine, if only he were directly managing it. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, we have bigger problems than we thought. Rumsfeldian creativity seems to be nothing more than a parody of things that don’t work. While Einstein credited creativity to pre-existing sources — certainly that wise and humble man wasn’t referring to Rumsfeld’s version of global government with himself as the Great Don.
Ayn Rand gives us a clue about Rumsfeld’s true nature in this regard, writing, “A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.” Even a casual observation of Rummy in action — from his boxing days to his Nixon and Ford Administration service, his envoy work for Reagan, and now Bush’s Secretary of Defense — reveals that indeed what we are witnessing is not a creative man.
When it comes to over-funded government functions designed to destroy and restrict activities of citizens, internationally through occupation and domestically through compulsion, it is hard to say how our freedom and honor are better served. Is the cause of American freedom and honor better promoted by actual creativity of government executives like the Secretary of Defense, or by the current Secretary’s mind-numbing apelike plodding for control?
In the American history case study that is Donald Rumsfeld, icon of the George W. Bush administration, this question is irrelevant. As in the old Soviet Union, your shoe size, personal preference that your television not explode, and questions of freedom and honor make no difference.
Funny how young George never mentioned any of this in his last election campaign. Maybe he and his pals were just hiding their sources!
