Life's Little Lessons

To get the answers to any doubts or questions during the Great Cultural Revolution, what a good Chinese citizen was supposed to do was carry around a copy of “The Quotes of Chairman Mao,” popularly known as “The Little Red Book.” Failure to produce a copy upon being asked could bring on a beating by the Red Guards. It was the Communist equivalent of “Don’t leave home without it.”

On the question of war, for instance, Mao explained that massive killing was OK as long as it was about something progressive, like knocking off the bosses and landlords or slaughtering the peasants who grew the tallest wheat and made everyone else feel inadequate: “We Communists oppose all unjust wars that impede progress, but we do not oppose progressive, just wars. Not only do we Communists not oppose just wars, we actively participate in them.”

On women, Mao advised that the classless utopia wouldn’t arrive until there were an equal number of men and women bending down and pulling beets out of the collectivized dirt: “Our fundamental task is to adjust the use of labor power in an organized way and to encourage women to do farm work.”

In another witticism, Mao warned about the dangers of sweet talk: “There may be some Communists who are not conquered by enemies with guns and are worthy of the name of heroes for standing up to these enemies, but who cannot withstand sugarcoated bullets.”

And if one was feeling a little too independent of the group, a little too unique or individualistic to be absorbed into the collective, Mao offered this prescription for those who weren’t exactly sure of the meaning of life: “Proceed in all cases from the interests of the people and not from one’s self-interest. The part must give way to the whole.”

FROM MAO TO RUMSFELD

Here at home, Donald Rumsfeld, never one to hide his light under a bushel, delivered his own mini-version of Mao’s quotes-from-a-great-leader epistle in “Rumsfeld’s Rules: Advice on Government, Business and Life,” published in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 29, 2001, nine days after he was sworn in as secretary of defense.

Pointing with no humbleness to his 40 years of top-level experience, Rumsfeld wrote that many of his “rules, reflections and quotations” came from “my role as chairman of the ‘transition team’ for President Ford and my service as White House chief of staff” and “from experiences as a U.S. naval aviator, a member of Congress, ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, secretary of defense, presidential Middle East envoy, business executive, chairman of the US Ballistic Missile Threat Commission, and other experiences.”

And so, with all that, Secretary Rumsfeld provided us with one of his key rules for living: “Don’t divide the world into ‘them’ and ‘us.'” That was, of course, eight months before Mohammed Atta and his team crashed the passenger jets into the World Trade Center, eight months before we saw a jovial Osama bin Laden on videotape telling of the happiness he felt when he saw that his plan to destroy the World Trade Center had been successful and that nearly 3,000 people had died, eight months before President George W. Bush declared that America was determined to “rid the world of evildoers,” and a year or so before Secretary Rumsfeld began to speak regularly about the “thugs” and “dead-enders” in Falluja and Baghdad.

In another of Rumsfeld’s key rules, he offered words of caution to those of us who might be a bit too impulsive and reckless: “It is easier to get into something than get out of it.” And that, of course, was written well before the spread of the insurgency in Iraq, before the casualties mounted, before the beheadings, before we learned that the US armed forces were overstretched, and before we were told that we had a good shot at turning Iraq into a pro-American model for Arab democracy.

That last proposition, about turning Iraq into an Arab Massachusetts, probably best relates to another of Secretary Rumsfeld’s fundamental rules: “Beware when an idea is promoted primarily because it is ‘bold, exciting, innovative and new.’ There are many ideas that are ‘bold, exciting, innovative and new,’ but also foolish.”

The lesson? Perhaps it’s this, from David T. Wolf: “Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.”

September 30, 2004