The Future of Sci-Fi Tropes and Dystopic Hopes

July 11, 2015February 21, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

Roads will still exist in the future, but if the “figurative schemes of thought” of the architectural images of futuristic sci-fi movies are to be believed, they will be miles above the ground. These future sci-fi roads will sprout from an enormous, corporate monolith in the manner of an octopus. The import of this sci-fi trope is that we will no longer have cars in the incarnation we now know. These cars do not even require a runway, they lift off the ground, which begs the question why will we need roads? The unspoken answer is that while roads may no longer be constructed for human travel, they are necessary to provide a foundation of stability for the evil, corporate structure.

The corporation, in question, is often an intangible, ominous main character in the story, with an ominous name. This begs the question why would the founder choose such a name for his creation that potential clients might associate with evil? Answer: Corporations have no human origin. The corporation, is, was, and always will be, springing to life from some sort of primordial, evil ooze. The corporation did no originate from a they –those humans who sit on its corporate boards, and worked in its departments, and divisions– it evolved into a self-serving “It” that no longer has a need for employees, much less customers, or any goods and services. It no longer serves man, man serves it.

Those few humans still serve the corporation are made all the less human by the corporation requiring them to be in full battle gear even while tasked with the most mundane chores, such as inputting data into a computer, and their prime directive (much like the drone bee) is to chase and/or kill anyone who dares to question It. And the It (as forecast by those that know) will find a way to progress into our neighborhoods, put us in pods –as opposed to suburban housing– take away our need for Puggles, and parakeets, and drain us of every vestige of humanity, until It can achieve an end game.

This end game often gets muddled in a loose group of references, but most sci-fi fans don’t require a great deal of detail regarding It’s evil plan. (This viewer also thinks the specifics of the corporation’s evil plan end up on the cutting room floor with a “too preachy” note from the monolithic, evil production chieftains from Hollywood.) The average sci-fi fan cares more about chase scenes anyway, the battle scenes, the CGI, and how the movies’ gorgeous heroes will overcome the final obstacle, the manifestation of It (often some monster who drools lot). The details of this plan would be redundant anyway, for as all sci-fi fans know the sole purpose of all corporations is to end humanity as we know it, so the corporation can franchise out to a chain that will exist for the sole purpose of being evil and ending humanity as we know it, unless our unassuming, swashbuckling, and gorgeous heroes can put a stop It.

The website The Millions states that the word trope has taken on a different incarnation through the years:

“‘Various scholars throughout history … have argued that a great deal of our conceptual experience, even the foundation of human consciousness, is based on figurative schemes of thought.’ The writer also notes that Tropes (in the sense of figures of speech) do not just provide a way for us to talk about how we think, reason, and imagine, they are also constitutive of our experience.’” Modern language has it that the word trope has come to mean: “a common or overused theme or device: cliché.”

The origin of the trope for the octopus road coming out of the monolith, corporate structure may have occurred long before The Jetsons, but most of us (of a certain age) saw it displayed there first. To our minds, therefore, when sci-fi movie makers feel compelled to add the octopus road, they are either paying some sort of tangential homage to The Jetsons, or they are attempting to appeal to our “figurative schemes of thought that are constitutive of our experience” of what the future will look like by way of The Jetsons, or the sci-fi novels and comic books that preceded it.

The unspoken reason behind these miles high roads, is based on the idea that we’ll run out of the space necessary for more traditional, ground bound roads. For some reason, however, pedestrians keep falling off these roads that are created miles above the terrestrial plain. We have roads and walkways that were constructed high off the ground in the present, but they’re often enclosed, or they have substantial guardrails to prevent people from falling. There is no apparent need for guardrails in our shared “figurative schemes of thought” of the future.

If guardrails become passé in the future, one has to wonder how the original architect of the evil monolith (often composed of shiny crystal) will manage to avoid federal and state zoning codes that governments throw at every producer prior to construction. If this architect is crafty enough to evade government intervention, or he has enough money to bribe government officials, one has to imagine that he will see financial ruin by way of personal injury lawyers looking to cash in on the mental duress their clients experience when thinking of falling from these roads, and from those families of the victims who do fall.

If this architect manages to develop some patented safety measures that thwart most of the personal injury lawsuits that hit him, and he manages to avoid getting bogged down in all of the bureaucratic red tape from government officials –expressing alarm for public safety with one hand pointing at the inherent danger and taking payoffs for their silence with the other– this architect will probably go broke as a result of litigation brought by patent lawyers scouring the finer details of the architect’s patent to help the lawyer’s clients siphon as much cash off the original architect as possible, until no future architects, seeking to create evil, corporate monoliths will follow the original architect into this minefield.

The future, as cynical, non-sci-fi fans see it, is not one of crystal cities, miles high roads, and constant innovation, but of government-mandated open spaces and wide open plains as far as the eye can see. One has to guess with the current path we’re on –of government officials and lawyers destroying creators’ plans and finances– that our current course dictates that the future will not be one of architectural brilliance and innovation, unless an ingenious mind comes along and discovers a way to bubble wrap the world and have gelatinous bubble guns at every portal to protect anyone from ever being harmed again.

Until that day arrives, a more realistic dystopian, sci-fi movie would depict our future being one of wide open plains and prairies that mirror Kansas and Nebraska where a screaming fall of a couple miles before one makes contact with terra firma –from an octopus road that sprouts from a monolithic corporation– becomes nothing more than a trip over a piece of loose soil. This movie would not provide us the stunning visuals our “figurative schemes of thought” have come to expect from big budget sci-fi movies that project our future, of course, but with the course we’re now on it would be a lot more realistic.

Faith No More: Sol Invictus

May 26, 2015July 18, 2015 RilalyLeave a comment

Three things that are consistent with just about every review of Faith No More’s (FNM) latest output Sol Invictus: It’s been 18 years since 1997’s album Album of the Year; the single Epic was their greatest hit; and the boys in the band were considered zany back in the day. The rock critics also make the leap from that latter point to suggest that that zaniness eventually created a rap/funk/rock movement that we’re all familiar with today. (Side note: Anthony Keidis, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers have hotly contested the idea that FNM created this movement.) Most of the critics also speak of the multitude of projects that the band members have been involved in since the 1997 album, and the fact that the album is named after a Roman Sun god. What is not stated in any of these reviews is that the very idea of an FNM reunion is emblematic of the dire straits of the music industry as a whole.

This isn’t to say Sol Invictus is a money grab, or at least it doesn’t sound like it was. Yet, the reunion is evidence of something that members of this band, Pavement, and to varying degrees Soundgarden, Blur, and The Verve, said would never happen. Or, if they never said “never”, they suggested it would be a cold day in hell before they even considered it. FNM fans would probably argue that the reunion was spawned by how well the members of the band got along together in their most recent European, reunion tour. If we conceded that point, and we have to to some degree, we could hit those same fans with the question: why did they get together for that tour in the first place?

In the eighteen years that have followed the dissolution of the FNM, lead singer Mike Patton was often asked about the possibility of them ever getting back together again, and on one occasion he said, and I paraphrase:

Every so often, a guy will approach me with a suitcase full of money and a plan for how the reunion of Faith No More will work. Maybe if they would offer us two suitcases we could talk.”

To be fair, Patton never hinted that there was animosity within the band, and he never said never, but he did leave the impression that it would be a cold day in hell. Those of us that pined for a reunion, and parsed Patton’s words for hope, read him speaking about fond memories, and a recognition that none of what he did after FNM would’ve been possible were it not for FNM. We read interviews in which he said he learned so much about the craft from those days, and that he was eternally grateful for the opportunity they gave him (my words). We also read him say that he had learned to put the past behind him, and that he felt that they had all reached a creative peak with one another on their last album, and we read lines that amounted to him hoping that no one would hold it against him, but that he was just not interested.

Unless, perhaps, the industry fell to such a level that no one could make money anymore? Unless the dire straits of the industry reached a point where wives were approaching the former band members with employment brochures from the local life insurance company? Hell may not have frozen over, as it did with the Eagles, but there is an apparent point where even the most stubborn artist can no longer laughingly reject that guy with one suitcase full of money.

It may seem like unnecessary cynicism to include such a point, and it may be sad to think that it reached that point for these gifted musicians, but there does come a point where pole dancing around the elephant in the room becomes so tedious that someone’s got to jam a thumb in it.

One, almost universal complaint of the album Sol Invictus, from these rock critics, is that it is not breathtakingly original. The track Sunny Side Up was singled out for the theme of criticism leveled at the album as an example of how FNM followed their soft-loud-soft formula a little too closely. Any fans of the lead singer Mike Patton know that the man has not followed a formula in many of his works, and that he has numerous artistic, and largely inaccessible albums in his catalog. My contention is that once you’ve established your bona fides as a risk-taking, boundary-breaking artist, you can go ahead and make more accessible albums. There is a trade-off, in other words, in which a true artist shows that he can nimbly cross borders without doing damage to his artistic core. And while Faith No More may be more accessible, and more formulaic, than many of Patton’s other projects, FNM’s definition of accessible and formulaic is far more creative and artistic than the many other, computer generated artists in the modern day lists of music.

The one track that some of these reviews list as a standout in originality, on the Sol Invictus album is: Matador. Consider me too well-versed on 80’s hair metal bands if you want, but I consider this song to be heavily influenced by the Warning and Rage for Order-era Queensryche albums. While this track may be original in the FNM catalog, it is not breathtakingly original as far as I’m concerned. I do understand that most people don’t have a thirty-year reference base, but one would expect someone from the world of rock critics to pick up on this one.

One decent excuse for wanting the material on Sol Invictus to be more original comes from Ms. Zoe Camp from Pitchfork.com:

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with a band repeating itself. But because Faith No More have such a long history, and their members are responsible for music in a staggering array of styles, it’s hard not to expect more, to wish that they might in some way top themselves, or at least change direction.”

Among the influences that Zoe Camp, and Adam Workman of The National, list for Faith No More (FNM) is Nirvana? Nirvana? How could anyone listen to any FNM song and think Nirvana? FNM actually came out before Nirvana is a point that I would make in this argument. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Nirvana, of course, but comparing the two sounds is like comparing Neptune and Venus. They’re both planets, and their existence is influenced to varying degrees by the Sun, but the comparisons really end there. I realize that one of the members of FNM was friends with Kurt Cobain, but unless these critics are privy to information I don’t have, I don’t know how anyone could list Nirvana as an influence. One song Star A.D., was supposedly an homage to Cobain, but lead singer Mike Patton has denied even that. Perhaps these two reviewers were attempting to frame the era in which these two bands were popular, but other than that I don’t see a Nirvana influence in any FNM songs or albums.

Most FNM fans, aching for new material, were a little disappointed by the November 2014 single MF. For those unacquainted with the single, the full name of the single is the swear word. We feared that this was a hint of the material to come. The song itself is decent, but we feared that FNM was trying too hard to be racy, naughty, and that it was a cover for a lack of creative ingenuity in the manner that a stand up comedian with subpar material tries to tap into the audience’s preference for a tableau that is titillating and exciting through swears. Not only that, but there was the “act your age” element to it that led some of to believe that these fifty-something rockers were trying too hard to sound young.

When the Superhero track was released, some of us were relieved. Did it sort of plagiarize other material in FNM’s back catalog? Or, could it be stated that it was a Patton-influenced Tomahawk-like track? Whatever the case, it was an excellent re-introduction to the FNM sound.

Some of the reviews focus some of their space on Mike Patton’s lyrics. In my opinion, as I’ve stated in a number of music reviews, when you isolate most lyrics from the music, they are actually pretty mindless.

Lyrics,” as Patton has said many times, “simply fit the music. Lyrics, or vocals, at their best, should be used as nothing more than another instrument in a song. No more, no less.” (Paraphrase.)

If you are still a Mike Patton fan, at this point, you’re not one that demands that he fulfill some sort of unquenchable thirst for knowledge and philosophy you have in his lyrics. A fairly decent chunk of his output involves non-verbal, guttural sounds, and some of it is even in a foreign language. Some of the great lyricists in rock history have stated that they were surprised by the effect their lyrics had on people. The reason for this, we can only guess, is that it was not their intention to be thought-provoking, as much as it was to provide “cool” imagery in word collages made famous by William S. Burroughs, and later used by David Bowie.

Most lyricists are not trying to be philosophers, social commentators, or poets, and they’re not trying to write that college thesis that they never had the chance to write after dropping out of school to pursue the dream of being a musician. The import given to most rock lyrics occurs in the creative minds of rock critics mining the material for something they can expound upon. If I had the ear of a rock journalist for one minute this would be my plea, get over your obsession with lyrics, they mean far more to you than anyone else.

Chris Conaton of Pop Matters writes that:

Sol Invictus probably isn’t going to top Angel Dust or The Real Thing on most fans’ lists of favorite Faith No More albums, but it’s a step up from Album of the Year and holds its own with the strong but slightly bloated King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime record. This is a solid comeback album that succeeds on its own terms. Namely, the whole band sounds engaged and enthusiastic to be working together, and that’s good for everyone that’s ever had a vested interest in Faith No More.”

The very idea that anyone that follows what “most FNM fans” think would consider The Real Thing for their top FNM albums’ list reveals that that person has no idea how most hard-core, longtime FNM fans think. Most of them don’t even mention The Real Thing on FNM discussion boards. Perhaps those that are just now learning of FNM, or those only familiar with FM radio’s version of FNM would consider that album for their top two. For most of us, however, The Real Thing put FNM on the map, and we’ve moved past it to such a degree that unless we’re bit by the retro bug, it is growing dust in our basement. Most true fans would surely agree that Sol Invictus is not going to cause anyone to forget Angel Dust, however, and the point about King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime would probably lead to some debate, but Mr. Conaton’s greater point about Sol Invictus appearing to be more of a creative interest for the band, than a purely financial one appears to be a strong one.

Reading through the critical reviews of this album, and all album reviews, this reader gets the sense that most rock critics are less concerned with you actually buying the album, in question, than they are getting you to scroll up to see the writer that wrote the review. They use huge, lofty words to describe the band’s history, and they use flowery language to describe the intricacies of the music involved on the album. It is, of course, incumbent on them to prove some mastery of both in any album review, but some critics get so out of hand that it can appear a little self-indulgent at times. Sol Invictus is a hard rock album that will remind you why you fell in love with the artistic brilliance of Faith No More in the first place, and just about everything that Mike Patton has involved himself in over the past twenty-five years. The fact that the music therein will never cause the hardcore, longtime fan of FNM to forget Angel Dust; coupled with the fact that the lyrics will never cause you to forget Robert Frost should not deter you from purchasing an album that someone finally approached them with two suitcases (or the one that is now more valuable in the current climate of the music industry) shouldn’t deter you from purchasing what happens to be a damn good, hard rock album.

Wearing a Mask the Face Grows Into

January 23, 2015January 8, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

Shooting the Elephant involves the struggle to find an authentic voice in the midst of ceding to authority and group thought. Shooting the Elephant is about a moment in Eric Arthur Blair’s (George Orwell) young life when he was forced, by a number of external forces, to shoot an elephant. The goal of a writer is to take a relatively benign moment in their life and translate it into a meaningful moment, and by doing so unearth the ideas and characters involved. In the course of discovery, an author might become obsessed with why they acted the way they did. What was my motivation at the time, a writer may ask, and what does it say about me, or what does it say about humanity as a whole?

As a standalone, i.e., listing off the events that took place, I’m guessing that the aspiring Eric Arthur Blair considered the story incomplete and without purpose. I’m guessing that he probably wrote and rewrote it so many times, and introduced creative bridges, that he couldn’t remember which details took place and which details he created to support the bridge between actual events that took place and that which would make the moment transcendent.

We can also guess, based upon what Blair would achieve under the pseudonym George Orwell, that the search for the quality story, supported by a quality theme, was the driving force behind his effort. If the driving force behind writing a story is to achieve fame or acclaim, so goes the theory, you’ll have neither the fame nor a quality story. The mentality most quality writers bring to a piece is that fame and acclaim are great, but it should be nothing more than a welcome byproduct of a well-written piece. Shooting the Elephant is a really good story, but the thought provoking, central message is the reason Eric Arthur Blair would go on to achieve fame as George Orwell.

It’s possible –knowing that Shooting the Elephant was one of Orwell’s first stories– that the theme of the story occurred in the exact manner Orwell portrays, and he built the story around that theme, and he then proceeded to build a writing career around that theme. The actuality of what happened to Orwell, while employed as the British Empire’s police officer in Burma is impossible to know, and subject to debate, but the quality of the psychological examination Orwell puts into the first person, ‘I’ character is not debatable, as it relays to the pressure the onlookers exert on the main character, based on his mystique. It’s also the reason Orwell wrote this story, and the many other stories that examine this theme in numerous ways.

The first person, ‘I’ character of George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant was a sub-divisional police officer of the town of Burma. Orwell writes how this job, as sub-divisional police officer, brought him to a point where he began to see the evil underbelly of imperialism, a result of the Burmese people resenting him for his role as the one placed among them to provide the order the British Empire for the otherwise disorderly “natives” of Burma. Orwell writes, how he in turn, began to loathe some of the Burmese as a result, while secretly cheering them on against the occupiers, his home country Britain. It all came to a head, for him, when a trained elephant went must<1>. Orwell’s responsibility, to those he swore to protect, and to those who commissioned him to protect, as a sub-divisional police officer, was to shoot the elephant.

Orwell describes the encounter in this manner:

“It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act.”

The escaped elephant gone must wreaked some carnage in his path from the bazaar to the spot where Orwell came upon him. En route to the eventual spot where Orwell came upon the elephant, Orwell encountered several Burmese people who informed him of the elephant gone must. Orwell then discovered a dead man on the elephant’s destructive path that Orwell describes as a black Dravidian<2>coolie in one spot of the story, and a Coringhee<3> coolie in another. Several witnesses confirmed, for Orwell, the fact that the elephant killed the man.

When the ‘I character’ finally comes upon the elephant, he sees it “peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow,” Orwell then describes the Burmese throng that surrounded him:

“It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib<4>. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.”

Orwell states that he did not want to shoot the elephant, but he felt compelled by the very presence of the thousands of “natives” surrounding him to proceed. He writes:

“A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that (coolie) up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh.”

In the aftermath of the shooting of the animal, Orwell describes the controversy that arose, and he concluded it in the following manner:

“I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.”

The Hard-Ass Boss

At a warehouse-sized office I worked in, we had a supervisor who enjoyed the mystique of being a hard-ass. He enjoyed having those of us under him believe that he would do whatever it took to help the employees on his team achieve maximum efficiency. If we did well, he took credit for it. He was proud to take credit for it, and we were supposed to feel proud when we made him look good. Some of my team members were proud, for there are always some who enjoy autocratic rule. What they didn’t consider was what might happen if they had a poor quarter. Not only did he deflect 100% of the blame to the accused, but in a stylistic homage to Josef Stalin, he had them unceremoniously stricken from the record. We had a friend sitting next to us, laughing at our jokes and telling us stories from their life one day, and we had an empty desk sitting next to us the next. If he didn’t choreograph the chilling effect this had on the team, he might have taken credit for it if we asked him about it.

In this particular office, a sub-par employee had so many chances to recover from past performance that it was an ongoing joke among the employees that we could set the building ablaze and nothing of consequence would happen. If our perceptions of this climate were anywhere close to the truth, this supervisor stood out. In a corporate climate of managers defining supervisors on their creative abilities to retain employees and receive quality, employee review scores from those employees, our supervisor was an aberration. I do not know if the numbers we produced for him placed him above reproach among his superiors, or if my fellow employees were afraid to score low on their reviews during his tenure as their boss, but he managed to remain a supervisor of a team that hated him. If the reader knows anything about the corporate climate of America today, and the constant reviews employees and their bosses undergo, they know that is a near-herculean chore.

The walk to an unscheduled, closed-door, one-on-one with this supervisor was equivalent to a criminal suspect being frog marched into a courthouse. The audience of it found themselves caught between trying to see the emotions on accused’s face and trying to look away to preserve the accused’s dignity. These moments informed us that in a world of supervisors claiming to have our back, in closed-door sessions with Human Resources and their managers, we had one that had so little concern for us that he did not even try to fake the support other supervisors did.

Those of us who worked under this hard ass boss knew he would not defend us, even if we had verifiable reasons that warranted a defense. We figured that if we had that reason that we might have to go to our Human Resources department to mount our own defense, and there was also a sneaking suspicion that we might have to mount a defense against him in that meeting.

This resulted in most of us believing that he cared little about us and only about advancing his mystique, until it advanced him within the company. Was this a fair characterization? It might not have been, but it was pervasive throughout the team, and he never did anything to dispel us of this notion.

Thus, when I was frog marched into my first unscheduled one-on-one session with him, I was astonished to find out that not only did I receive the least severe punishment possible, but I didn’t receive the punishment specifically proscribed for my offense. He informed me of the charges against me, and he provided print outs of my action in the event that I might mount a defense, and then he cut my punishment in half. He did so in a congenial manner that I found unsettling, and his unassuming smile of sympathy was so shocking that I experienced an inexplicable disappointment.

Another inexplicable emotion I experienced was a diminished respect for him that I couldn’t avoid pursuing. My characterization of him, compiled data furnished by him and the group thought that pronounced such characterizations after all of his actions, left me with blanks to fill that included pleasant and unassuming characteristics.

He offered me another pleasant and unassuming smile in the silence that followed.

“See, I’m not such a bad guy,” he said.

Had he had asked me what I thought of this side of him, before I left the boardroom, I would’ve told him that he would have been better off refraining from all that smiling. “Smiles look weird on your face,” is something I might have said. I would have added that there was nothing unusual, or unattractive about that smile, but that it just looked odd on him. I also would have informed him that we both would’ve been better off if just gave me the proscribed punishment for my offense. I would’ve told him that the mystique he had a hand in creating, and that which was so firmly entrenched by the time I entered this boardroom, placed him in a no-win situation … “If,” I would add, “it is your hope that I like you, or in anyway consider you to be something other than a bad guy.” I would’ve informed him that once you establish a firm, hard-ass leadership mystique, doing otherwise will only lead the recipient of your leniency to believe that you are flexing an authoritative muscle in a condescending reminder to those under your stewardship that they will forever be subjected to your whims and moods, until they leave the room loathing you more than they had when they entered.

I would’ve ended my assessment by informing him that he’s so worked hard to foster this image, and sustain this mystique, that he should probably just sit back and enjoy it. The employees on your team are now working harder than they ever have, because they fear that you won’t do anything to help them if they don’t. They are also putting a great deal of effort into avoiding anything that could even be reasonably perceived as wrongdoing, based on the idea that if they get caught up in something that you won’t defend them. I would tell him that by firmly establishing yourself as a hard-ass boss you’ve given up the freedom of latitude in your actions. We’ve adjusted our working lives to this mask you created, and any attempt you make, going forward, to foster a “nice guy” image will be perceived as weakness, and it will not redound to the benefit for any of the parties involved.

It’s too late for you, and your current mystique, I would inform him, but if you want to escape this cycle in your next management position, clear your desk library of all of these unread “how-to lead” guides that you have arranged for maximum visibility and pick up a copy of Orwell’s Shooting the Elephant. In this story, you will find the true detriment of creating a hard-ass boss mask, until your face grows into it, and while it may impress your superiors to be this way, the downside will arrive when you try to impress upon “the natives” the idea that you’re not such a bad guy after all, and you spend the rest of your days trying to escape the spiraling duality of these expectations.

<1> Must, or Musth, is a periodic condition in bull (male) elephants, characterized by highly aggressive behavior and accompanied by a large rise in reproductive hormones.

<2> A Dravidian is described as any of a group of intermixed peoples chiefly in S India and N Sri Lanka

<3> “A Coringhee coolie” refers to such an Indian immigrant working in colonial Burma as an unskilled laborer in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

<4> Sahib –A name of Arabic origin meaning “holder, master or owner”.