You Don’t Critique Another Man’s Meat

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“I love grilling,” Leonard said. “Absolutely love it. Some people do it, and some just do it, but for some of us, it’s a passion.” 

If someone said this from behind one of those sleek, compact, Three-Burner, Liquid Propane grills that feature porcelain-enameled, cast-iron cooking grates, you’d scream, I’d scream, we’d all scream for red meat. Check that, I probably wouldn’t scream, not anymore. I’ve been beat down, brothers and sisters, by all them grill-at-the-parkers hollering about how salvation is near. I’m here to testify that those Willie “the wunderkind” types who man the grill, and who, by all appearances should be the chef du jour, are false prophets.

You’ll be disappointed too, but you, the patron of the park, the family and/or friend of the chef, keep in mind that you ain’t paid a dime for that meat, the seat, or anything in between. You are to be grateful, always grateful, when someone hands you a plate, telling you to “Dig in!” on what you’ve been smelling and salivating over for the past ten minutes. You go grateful and stay grateful, because they paid for that meat, and they’ve been slaving over the fire, and you ain’t paid a dime. 

It’s that smelling that gets us, and it leads us astray, my friends. I’ve been there, you’ve been there. We believed in that smell, and our expectations went sky high. We tried to listen to Niece Maggie talking about her volleyball matches, but we don’t hear her, because of the symphony of sizzles going on behind our back.

When the moment of truth arrives, and I mean that in the most literal sense, we don’t even notice the au gratin potatoes when our plate hits that table. All we see is meat, all we hear is sizzling, and if the Promised Land smells anything like this, we might not mind going there a little sooner than expected. Then we get a taste, our first taste, finally, after all that waiting, and our sky-high expectations hit a gut-destroying, roller coaster dip.

“Is it just me or is this … bad?” we ask ourselves, and we’re all asking ourselves that question. You can see it at the table, especially on Cousin Teddy’s face. Do you have a Cousin Teddy? He can’t hide it? He has an eyebrow raised, but-I-ain’t-saying-a-word look on his face, but that face is just saying what we’re all thinking. Is the meat that bad, or are we all just that picky, and do we have a right to be picky, seeing as how this was all free? “But I had such sky high expectations. Doesn’t that warrant disappointment?”

“No, here’s what you do,” a friend of the family once informed me. “You shut your trap, and you keep it shut. That’s what you do. You open it long enough to put the food in it, then you close it to chew, and you keep closing it, until you’re headed home, whispering it to your wife on the drive home. You wanna be starting something? No, there’s nothing to be gained, at a family picnic, by critiquing another man’s meat.”

And when we talk about meat, we’re not talking about pork, brothers and sisters, because pork is tough to screw up. You know it, we know it, because we all done it, and we know it takes a whole bunch of stupidity to mess pork up. Brats, and all of the other meats that fall under the wiener umbrella, rarely knock our socks off or sadly disappoint, and we’ve had an absolutely horrible piece of chicken, what once? Twice, maybe twice. Red meat is the all-knowing meat. Red meat exposes a man’s under belly. It tells us who we are, who we really are. It tells us something about our attention to detail, the vulnerabilities of our spatula, and the frailties of our fork. Red meat does not forgive and forget, and it’s all about red meat.

Red meat is the reason we just drove thirty minutes to this park. We love our get-togethers, spending time with friends and family, and all that, but red meat is special. Can I get an amen, brothers and sisters? A soft, juicy hamburger is sublime, but a properly prepared steak is divine. I don’t care where they cut it, steak is the meat.  

I don’t keep a ledger on my disappointments in life, but when it comes to steak, I’ll throw out a whopping 95%. The fellas with the finest forks have disappointed me 95% of the time. The gas-grilled steak is edible, most of the time anyway, but it’s not Oh!-I-gotta-have-it scrumptious. It’s usually about two notches above edible.

I’ve seen them roll the most beautiful, top-of-the-line, stainless steel, propane gas machines into the park, and I’ve seen who’s ready and who ain’t. I’ve heard the grillers-in-the-park talk about those machines and how their top-of-the-lines can distribute heat so evenly across the grate, and how their four stainless steel burners can produce incredible amounts of BTUs that enhance heat retention so all that cooking “is not only more efficient, it’s convenient and quick.” And I know nothing about their world. I know nothing about all the knowledge they’ve attained from their research. But I’ve done my own research. I’ve researched what they generously produced for me with all their time and effort, between my teeth and gums, and I can’t remember eating a gas-grilled piece of red meat that’s earned those blue-ribbons. It’s quick, your propane grills with all their fixings are quick, but blue-ribbon? What are you smoking son?

So, we all giggle when Terrance rolls in with his $89.00 charcoal grill that he says he bought on sale at Walmart. We join in the giggles with the fellas-in-the-park, with a beer in our hands, because we know that they know, because they’ve been grilling for thirty-some-odd-years, so we trust they know their ins and outs. When the unassuming Terrance reveals his charcoal chimney starter, his flipper, his forker, and some tongs, the very, very basic three-tool set, that he purchased with the grill “all for a little over a hundy,” we join their public chiding, their gentle public shining, and we even join in on their private, and less gentle, scorn.

Terrance doesn’t talk the talk or walk the walk, because he don’t know it. He lived in an apartment and worked in an office for most of his life. Terrance is the type who prefers to eat out. He prefers restaurant food, and we all whisper that while he’s cooking, and we do it in the most condescending manner you can imagine. Terrance is the “doesn’t get it, and he probably never will” type of chef, because he started grilling late in life. If we talk about grilling with him, we started the conversation, not him, and we find he’s pretty insecure about his ability to cook a meal for the entire family.

“I let you guys do it for so long, because you love it. You all love doing this far more than I do,” Terrance whispers to me. “But I got a wife, and I got a life, so I decided to what-the-hell it.” So, it was the wife who talked him into grilling for the whole family. She also told him he was pretty good at it.

“But, for the whole family?” he complained.

“You’ll be fine,” she said.

We don’t think he’ll be fine. We wonder what she was smoking. I mean, Terrance doesn’t even own an apron that says something funny about the chef on it. He’s so insecure about his abilities that he doesn’t even join the joke Aunt Pat is telling about the time “Terrance couldn’t find the anus on a trout for cleaning.” He doesn’t know what he’s doing behind a grill, so he ain’t got time for her playtime. He needs to concentrate on trying to cook a fairly decent meal for the whole family. He also doesn’t want to make anyone sick, so he keeps plugging his “Walmart temperature gauge thinger-diller” (a term he uses because he can’t remember the word thermometer!) in the meat, and upon grilling, the verbal kind, we find he isn’t “totally sure what’s the difference between a sirloin and a ribeye”.

The “Oh, boy” we give is not kind. “Oh boy, we might need to get someone else to man the grill Helen,” our brother Jerry says about halfway through. “I’m not sure if Terrance is da man,” he adds, and oh boy do we laugh.

That “Oh, boy” consensus quietly turns kind, about twenty seconds after we sink our teeth and gums into Terrance’s finished product. “Oh, boy!” we want to say, but when no one else says a word, we quietly devour this tender and soft piece of meat that quietly changes everything we thought we knew about grilling-red-meat-in-the-park.

A hint of crisp on the outside is expected, but nothing can prepare us for the soft and chewy 145 degrees of medium-cooked insides that informs us how much dopamine the brain can reward a human being for the sense of taste. Everyone has Aunt Phyllis’s green bean casserole on their plate and Aunt Donna’s au gratin potatoes, but no one has touched any of that yet. There is no talk of trout anuses, fishing trips with our recently-deceased Uncle George, or any of the other great times we’ve had at this park over the years. There’s also no talk about how Terrance and his “under a hundy” arsenal just upended thirty years of grilling research the fellas attained with their top-of-the-line materials. We just quietly devour what Terrance made on his “one healthy sneeze and that thing’s going down” piece of junk, Charcoal grill that he purchased, on sale, from Walmart ten years ago.

Now that our course has been corrected on grilling at the park, we love hearing Leonard go on about how he knows his way around a grill, and how it’s all about love and passion for him. He has all of the latest and greatest cooking utensils, coupled with his ‘Kiss the Chef!’ apron. His stainless steel, propane gas grill has a brand name with numbers behind it that Leonard spouts as if it’s a limited model Lamborghini, and the aesthetic design of it is an absolute feast for the eyes. His wife further amplifies whatever Leonard says about himself and his new grill, and you watch him to see if there’s anything you can learn from a bona fide master. Leonard has a wide variety of wood chips, and he “ain’t afraid to use them”, and he “ain’t afraid to season neither.”

“Delicate and measured,” he says. “I know it’s verboten among the smoke whisperers, but if you keep it delicate and measured, seasoning enhances as opposed to overwhelming.”

When we finally sink our teeth and gums into the finished product of Leonard’s decades of fine-tuning, through trial and error and research, we find a truth about his marvel of science and engineering. We didn’t want to find it. That’s the most important note I want to leave you with today. When Leonard started going on about his passion for grilling, we thought we were going to be rolling around in it minutes later. Our only concern was that we would love it so much that we might make noises when we eat, and some of them might not be human noises. 

We didn’t want him to be wrong. We didn’t want him revealed. We wanted a savory slab of steak between our teeth and gums. When Leonard graciously gave us one of his steaks, we were grateful, but we couldn’t help but notice that it produced a flavor so close to steak that it was edible, but compared to Terrance’s amateur production, Leonard’s steak was anything but we we call a tour-de-force.

“It was actually pretty bland,” we whisper to our wives on the ride home. We don’t say this to Leonard, however. We lie to him, as any respectful guest who just ate the product of another’s effort and generosity will. We whisper that Terrance, and his piece of crap $89.00 cooker, “Actually grilled up a better steak.” We whisper that because we don’t want anyone to know what we don’t. 

“I know,” she whispers back, “But shhh!” We’re in the privacy of our own car, and we’re whispering, and she’s shushing me to try to prevent me from carrying on to the point that someone might hear us and know that we don’t know what we’re saying. We don’t know anything. We know so little that we don’t even know what we don’t know, but we know what we know, and we know you don’t critique another man’s meat.   

Mathematics and Telescopes: The Triumph of Neptune’s Discoverers

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“Neptune was the first planet to be discovered through mathematical equations, as opposed to astronomical observations.”

Wait, before we continue, think about that for a second. A man, or two men, or three, used the data of the day, a pencil, paper and nothing more than their brains to declare that a planet should be … right there! Let that sink for a moment. 

Five of the planets were discovered by humans looking up, and we’ve been doing that for so long, thousands of years that someone would’ve eventually gone on the historical record to say, “I have just discovered a planet.” Was that impressive, well there is documented evidence that early civilizations in Babylonia looked up and said, “That right there, ain’t no star. That’s a damn planet” as far back as 1,000 BC. Actually, Teddy, we always knew that was there, you just beat us all to the historically documented record. 

When Sir William Herschel discovered a planet we now call Uranus on March 13, 1781 with his trusty telescope, and his further observations found that it wasn’t a comet, but a planet, they all thought he made one whale of a discovery, but if everyone had telescopes at that point, we could say Sir Herschel just beat everyone else to the historical record. Whatever the case, Sir Herschel was given credit for discovering the end of the universe. There was one problem, the astronomical community could not plot point Uranus’ positions based on mathematical projections. Every other planet had very specific orbital points that they would hit, based on the gravitational laws of the universe, otherwise known as Newton’s laws. Those planets pushed and pulled on each other to keep themselves in line. This new planet, that we now call Uranus, was all over the place, and its orbital pattern, or its projected plot points, made no sense.

Using all of the pre-discovery data, Astronomer Alexis Bouvard made seventy-seven projections on where Uranus should be, but his fellow astronomers called him out. Based on their observations, they found that all of his projections were wrong. Recognizing his errors, after the tables of his projections were published worldwide, the confused Bouvard initially blamed the pre-discovery data, but when that didn’t satisfy him or the astronomical community, Bouvard came up with a theory called “A Perturbing Force.”

My guess is that the astronomical community initially greeted the perturbing force theory as an excuse Alexis Bouvard made for his inaccuracies. “Alex, my guy, just admit it, you were wrong. We all know you’re a genius, but we’re dealing with the unknown here. Maybe you should just admit that you were wrong and move on.”

Here, we have to have some sympathy for Bouvard, as we can only guess that he pined for months and years to come up with these tables. We can guess that he said something along the lines of, “Hey, I didn’t just throw this stuff out there. These were precise projections based on all the data I had at my disposal, coupled with the laws Sir Isaac Newton. I wouldn’t just guess and then publish those guesses to subject myself to this level of humiliation. There’s something more here, something we need to study.” Bouvard further suggested something that probably furthered his abuse among his peers in the astronomical community. He suggested that this perturbing force could quite possibly be another planet. Then, he submitted that proposal that Uranus might not be the end of the universe to the Paris Observatory, but unfortunate for the legacy of Alexis Bouvard, the astronomer who received that request for a follow up left soon after Bouvard submitted that request for further findings.

Furthering the unfortunate nature of Bouvard’s legacy, Alexis died before anyone would substantiate his projections and the idea that it had to be a perturbing force gravitationally pulling and pushing Uranus off what should have been precise data points dictating its orbit. Thus, we can only guess that Alexis Bouvard probably died believing himself a failure, or at the very least that everything he accomplished in life ended with a huge stain, in the form of an exclamation point, on his legacy.

Even though Alexis Bouvard never found a workaround to nature taking his life, his idea of a perturbing force remained. Skeptics of the day argued that because Bouvard’s projections relied on Isaac Newton’s theories, Bouvard’s inaccurate projections exposed the flaws in Newton’s theories.

Mathematicians, like John Couch Adams, insisted that Newton’s theories were sound and after studying Bouvard’s projections, they believed they should’ve been true. Adams was young, twenty-four-years-old, old enough to know the laws of nature, and all the laws and bylaws his peers developed to explain the universe, but he was still young enough to think they were all wrong. He thought he could use Bouvard’s projections, and all of the data Bouvard compiled, coupled with Newton’s laws to deduce the mass, position, and orbit of this perturber Bouvard theorized. Couch Adams then devoted four years of his life to study, calculate, and project where a possible perturber could be, and he submitted those four years of work to the esteemed British Astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy.

Biddell Airy was understandably skeptical of Adams’ findings, as the mathematician submitting them was such a young pup. We can also guess that Airy was wary of placing his esteemed stamp of approval on Adams’ findings without further evidence. He decided to press Adams for more detailed computations. Unfortunate to the legacy of John Couch Adams he did not respond, some suggest that this failure to respond was due to Adams’s unprofessional demeanor, his nerves, procrastination, or the idea that Adams may not have had those detailed computations. Whatever the case was, Couch Adams’s failure to respond in a timely manner cost him sole credit for the discovery of the planet Neptune.    

Some suggest that Frenchman, Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier, was unaware of John Couch Adams work, his subsequent submission, and his failure to complete the work, but Le Verrier was very aware of Alexis Bouvard’s life’s work. He paid particular attention to Bouvard’s “perturbing force”, and it fascinated him. He thought he could find the missing link, and he thought he did. He first sent his findings to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, but due to bureaucratic inertia and a lack of proactive observation, the Academy did not follow up. They did not reject Le Verrier’s math, however, as they found it rigorous, but his findings did not translate into instant acceptance as a confirmed discovery because to them it remained theoretical until it could be observed. The Academy later stated that they had “other concerns” that precluded them from making such observations, and they claimed that they lacked the capacity to follow up with the level of immediacy Le Verrier demanded. Whatever the case, Le Verrier basically said if you’re not going to do it, I’ll find someone who will, and he submitted his edited findings to Johann Gottfried Galle at the Berlin Observatory on September 18, 1846. Berlin had a powerful new refractor telescope and a more agile response, partly because Galle and his assistant Heinrich d’Arrest were eager to test the hypothesis.

Galle confirmed Le Verrier’s detailed calculations, and they confirmed the  existence of the planet we now know as Neptune on September 23, 1846, but they added that Le Verrier was one degree off. Here we reach another “think about it, before we move on” moment. Le Verrier took Alexis Bouvard’s precise projections, based on pre-discovery data, and he joined Bouvard’s mathematical calculations on his errors, coupled with some theoretical notion of a perturbing force, pushing and pulling Uranus off what should have been its normal orbit, and declared that Neptune should be right there! And those calculating his math, nothing more than math(!), found that he was one degree off! [Note: The international astronomy community eventually decided to settle the international dispute by giving credit to both the British Adams and the French Urbain for Neptune’s discovery, even though Adams unofficially discovered it first.] Astronomy.com also states that “Adams [eventually] completed his calculations first, but Le Verrier published first. Le Verrier’s calculations were also more accurate.” The lesson here for you kids looking to submit astronomical findings to a governing body, when they approach you for detailed calculations to support your astronomical findings make sure you either respond immediately, or maybe you should have your detailed calculations ready before declaring your findings. 

Neptune is not visible by the naked eye, and this, coupled with the technological limitations of the time, forced the brightest minds in astronomy, physics, and mathematics to base their theoretical predictions and findings on the celestial mechanics of Isaac Newton theories, and this idea that the entire universe existed on universally accepted mathematical principles.

Anytime we discuss a first, we encounter the eventuality of someone discovering something eventually. In doing so, we undermine the definition of smart, creative, and ingenious. Some of us might be too easily impressed by knowledge in an arena for which we are basically neanderthals. Yet, how can anyone not be impressed that a man, or two men, or three men in total, used relatively basic theory, combined with data points, and a vague supposition to mathematically project that due to the irregular movements of one body in the universe is acting so unusual that it must be acting or reacting to another body in such a way that it has to be … right there, only to find out that they are one degree off. We can only guess that in the intervening twenty-four to twenty-five years, between Bouvard’s guess and Adams and Le Verrier’s confirmation, there were hundreds of guesses submitted to observatories, and they were all wrong.

Were all of those theoretical guesses wrong, or were they, as P Andrew Karam, at Encyclopedia.com states, simply the result of bad timing? “The discovery of Neptune proved more a remarkable coincidence than a testimony to mathematical prowess.

“Leverrier’s and Adams’s solutions for Neptune’s orbit were incorrect. They both assumed Neptune to lie further from the sun than it actually does, leading, in turn, to erroneous calculations of Neptune’s actual orbit. In fact, while the calculated position was correct, had the search taken place even a year earlier or later, Neptune would not have been discovered so readily and both Leverrier and Adams might well be unknown today except as historical footnotes. These inaccuracies are best summarized by a comment made by a Scientific American editor:”

“Leverrier’s planet in the end matched neither the orbit, size, location or any other significant characteristic of the planet Neptune, but he still garners most of the credit for discovering it.”

“It is also worth noting that, after Neptune’s mass and orbit were calculated, they turned out to be insufficient to account for all of the discrepancies in Uranus’s motion and, in turn, Neptune appeared to have discrepancies in its orbit. This spurred the searches culminating in Pluto’s discovery in 1930. However, since Pluto is not large enough to cause Neptune and Uranus to diverge from their orbits, some astronomers speculated the existence of still more planets beyond Pluto. Hence, Pluto’s discovery, too, seems to be more remarkable coincidence than testimony to mathematical prowess. More recent work suggests that these orbital discrepancies do not actually exist and are due instead to plotting the planets’ positions on the inexact star charts that existed until recently.”

The two of them got lucky in Karam’s words. They made 19th Century errors that we can now fact-check with our modern technology, and we can now say that they timed their findings at a most opportune time in Neptune’s orbit. Yet, whatever “remarkable coincidences” occurred, it turns out Adams’ and Leverrier’s “calculated position [proved] correct”. 

“The remarkable coincidences” answers the question why so many previous theoretical submissions were incorrect, rejected, or couldn’t be observed by observatories and thus verified between Bouvard’s initial theory in 1821 and Leverrier’s detailed calculations of the positioning of the planet later named Neptune.

As with any story of this type, some of us wonder what happened between the lines? Have you ever been so obsessed with something that you couldn’t function on a normal human level? Have you ever been so obsessed with something that you didn’t enjoy food, drink, or any of the other fundamental joys of life the way you did before? Have you ever been so obsessed that you couldn’t sleep at night, and routine, mundane conversations with your friends seemed so routine and mundane that you can’t bear them, until you resolve the one problem that haunts you. How many accomplished individuals in their respective fields sacrificed dating, marrying, and having a family to their focus their existence on being the one to find the answer to the perturbing body theory? We can talk about fame, and fortune, and all that, but if you’re genuinely obsessed, you reach a tipping point where those things become nothing more than a byproduct to working through the question to find the answer on your own. In instances such as these, even a level of historical fame pales in comparison to the personal satisfaction we feel by finding the answer. 

Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier

Whatever the case was, we can comfortably guess that Adams and Le Verrier didn’t submit the first predictions. We can find fault in Le Verrier’s projections, but we should remember that he was providing an educated guess that a planet one billion miles away from Uranus, and 2.7 billion miles away from him on Earth existed. The observatory asked him for detailed calculations, he provided them, and the observatory used those calculations to spot Neptune. I consider that a point blank exclamation mark at the end of this discussion.

Yet, whenever we discuss the idea that .25% of the population, or one in 400, are geniuses, and we publicly marvel at their accomplishments, some ninny comes along and drops the ever-annoying, “It would’ve eventually been discovered by someone, somewhere.” When we express exhaustion, they add, “What? It’s a planet, a planet that is roughly four times larger than Earth. Someone would’ve eventually spotted it.” 

As much as we loathe such dismissals, it appears to be true in this case. If P Andrew Karam is correct, and we have no reason to doubt him, Adams and Leverrier were the first to submit right place, right time predictions that due to “a remarkable coincidence” could be verified due to the timing of their submissions.

It also bothers those of us who enjoy marveling at genius to hear things like, “Some guys are just smarter than others. I know some smart guys who say some smart things.” That’s true too, of course, but some are geniuses, and some of us love nothing more than dissecting, refuting, and demystifying the notions of their genius. Were John Couch Adams and Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier geniuses who figured something out that no one else could, or were they right-time, right place opportunists? No matter what Karam writes about their errors, he admits the “calculated position was correct”. 

John Couch Adams

Le Verrier’s calculated position was also derived without the benefit of James Webb or Hubble telescopes, and he and Adams did not know the nuclear-powered space probes that could confirm theoretical guesses on the molecular composition of the lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan. They also did not have the advantage provided by Voyager Spacecraft visits, of course. They had Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation, the idea of celestial mechanics from Johannes Kepler, some comparatively archaic technology, and a pencil and paper.  

With our modern technology, we can now correct the mistakes of the past. This is the way it should be, of course, but we should refrain from diminishing past accomplishments or inherently claiming superior intelligence now. We might know more now thanks to the brilliance of our greatest technological toys, but most of us had nothing to do with building that technology. We’re just the beneficiaries of it. We now have the advantage of all of these marvelous gadgets and tools at our disposal to fact-check prior “geniuses”, but does that mean that the brilliant minds of the past weren’t geniuses? We can talk about how some of the theories don’t stand up, but think about how many physicists, astronomers, mathematicians, and general theorists of yesteryear developed theories, without the advantage of the accumulated knowledge we’ve gathered since, that do? 

Some of the geniuses of yesteryear turned out to be wrong, of course, and some of them were right-place, right-time opportunists who discovered things first, but before you say “Someone, somewhere would’ve discovered it” remember the guys who mathematically predicted the existence of Neptune, probably road a horse to work on a dirt road, if they were lucky enough and rich enough to own a horse, and their definition of the heart of the city was often just a bunch of wooden store fronts, like the recreations we see on the old HBO show Deadwood. Most of what these 19th century astronomers and mathematicians saw in the nighttime sky is what we can see by stepping outside and looking up into the sky. They had some technological assistance back then, in the form of relatively weak telescopes, and some theorize that astronomers, like Galileo Galilei in 1613, Jerome Lalande in 1795, and John Herschel in 1830 may have used it to spot Neptune first, but they didn’t know they were seeing a planet, because their telescopes were not powerful enough for them to know that. Those of us who write articles about such topics and the geniuses who made ingenious discoveries or theories that proved slightly incorrect or somewhat flawed should asterisk our critiques by saying, “I am smart. No, really I am, really, really smart, but as ingenious as I am, I don’t know if I could’ve done what they did with the primitive technology they had, primitive when compared to ours. So, before I go about correcting and critiquing their findings with the technology I have at my disposal, thanks to those who developed it for me, I’d like to say how impressive it is that they came so close that it’s impressive that they did what they did with what they had.”

Fear’s Veil: Decoding the Leadership Mystique

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“You’re getting a detention for that,” were the scariest words we could hear between fifth grade and eighth grade. To avoid hearing that from a teacher, the principle, or any of the other authority figures who stalked the halls of my school, I walked straight lines, stood as straight as I could, and I didn’t respond to neighbors who whispered something funny that required a rejoinder. We were not only scared, we were terrified to the point of anxiety attacks when the teacher would give us the pre-detention eyeball. 

A detention required us to spend one half-hour after school. Thirty minutes. You might think that serving a mere thirty minutes after school would lead an overwhelming majority of us to think, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad after all.” No, it was so terrifying that some of us had nightmares about being caught in the act, the teacher writing out the detention, and the din of silence that followed with everyone staring, looking away, and staring again. Thinking back, it’s almost funny to think how powerful the culture of fear was, but we all knew it, and we all participated in it in our own individual ways. 

The tradition of forcing a student to stay after school, as a punishment for bad behavior was not new, or unique, to us. This punishment has probably been handed out for hundreds of years, the world over. It was also not unusual for us to fear getting in trouble in grade school, nor was it unprecedented that the kids in my grade school were absolutely terrified. This article isn’t about the silly effort of trying to suggest that our experience in grade school was worse than yours, better, or any different. We’re far more interested in the culture of fear that some institutions, such as my grade school, instituted to modify behavior.    

As scary as our principal was, and Mary Jane Meyer (aka Mrs. Meyer) was as scary, and as angry, as any individual I’ve met in all the decades sense. You might suggest that she thought she had to be to keep the hundreds of grade-school-aged kids in line.

“And if you just happened to catch her tending to her garden on some sunny day, she was probably a sweet, elderly woman.”

I just can’t picture it. I can’t picture her being gracious, warm, or even smiling. I’m sure she was quite pleasant to certain people, but I can’t picture it, and I don’t think any of my fellow students who attended this grade school during her reign of terror could either.  

Mrs. Meyer provided us a more tangible fear of God, and she was the wizard behind the curtain who orchestrated the culture of fear we knew. If we messed around in class, our teacher might scold us. If that wasn’t enough, she could threaten and/or give us a detention. That was enough for an overwhelming majority of us, but there were a few, and aren’t there always a few, for whom that wasn’t enough. For them, there was the ever-present threat of being sent to Mrs. Meyer’s office. That was enough for just about everyone else.

As scary as she was, however, Mrs. Meyer couldn’t have created the level of fear we knew on her own. She delegated much of the responsibility to her teachers, but they couldn’t have terrified us to the degree that some of us had anxiety issues, and others had such horrible nightmares they couldn’t sleep at night. For that level of fear, the institution needed compliance, our compliance. It needed our participation, and our promulgation of the culture that suggested that getting a detention was the most awful thing that could ever happened to a human being. No matter what they did to establish this climate, it wouldn’t have been half as effective as it was if we didn’t participate and fortify it. We did that to ourselves.   

“Did you hear that Gretchen and Marla got detentions?” someone would say in conspiratorial whisper.

“No way! For what?” No matter what the conspiratorial whisperer said there, the gossip mill spun the threads out to ultimately characterize the alleged perpetrator as the most horrible person of the day, and they often had a difficult time recovering their reputation in the aftermath.

When we approached one of the pariahs to get their perspective on what happened, they usually broke down like a politician in the midst of a career-ending scandal. Some tried to maintain a strong façade, but most couldn’t. Their defense usually devolved to those scared, uncontrollable tears. We empathized, because we knew firsthand the idea that nothing this bad had ever happened to them before.

It was our fault that she felt that way, because when she’d walk down the aisle to receive her detention, she felt our eyes on her, and she heard our whispers. The minute she turned around, we’d turn away and go silent. When it came to defending herself against the mob, she’s lie, obfuscate, try to shift the blame, and try anything and everything she could to salvage her reputation. We empathized here too, because what else are you going to do? 

We did more damage to her than the teacher, the principal, or any of our other authority figures could to demonize her, the detention of the day. We did it to ourselves. We policed our own and promulgated the culture of fear that surrounded the detention.

The idea that we cultivated their culture of fear wasn’t apparent to me in the moment, of course, because I was too young to grasp such complicated concepts, but it was crystallized in the form of a transfer student named Billy Kifferly. I knew Billy Kifferly before he transferred to our school, he was a friend of a friend, so when he got a detention I was the emissary sent to find out what happened, and how he entered into our dominion of the damned.

I asked him about it in the most empathetic manner a ten-year-old could. “… And it’s fine if you don’t want to tell me …” I added. I was fully prepared for his tears and/or the anguish that followed, and I had my shoulder all ready for him to cry on.

Not only did Billy not cry, or show any signs of fear of remorse, he told me all of the damning details of his detention, as if … as if they didn’t really matter. He didn’t try to wriggle out of it, or spread the blame. He said, “I did it. It was all my fault and all that, but it’s a half hour, so, big deal, right? I could do that standing on my head.”

That put me back a step. I couldn’t understand how he could be so blasé about it. As his only friend and confidant, I wanted to say, ‘Billy, you don’t understand,’ but Billy’s reaction to it informed me that there was something larger going on here that I didn’t understand. I didn’t get the fact that he was more accustomed to getting in trouble, or failing to meet the standards. He just got expelled from his prior school, so on that scale, a detention, or a half-hour after school, was nothing to him. I also didn’t understand that I was not only a part of the institutional culture of fear, but a promulgator of it

“It’s just a half-hour,” he said, and he was right, but ‘It’s so much more than that’ I wanted to say. I couldn’t back that up though, because I was too young to understand the nature of authority, rebellion, and Billy’s far too mature definition of the system-is-a-farce reaction. I knew Billy was the rebel, on some complicated level, I knew I’d become the standard bearer for the status quo if I said anything further.  

By not fearing the institutional hierarchy, and the elements that propped it up, Billy essentially informed me that the whole system was a farce. “Why should I fear spending a half-hour after school so much?” was essentially what he said. I thought of instructing him in our ways, but I was too young to understand the nature of our ways, and I was also far too immature to understand that we weren’t just ceding to authority, we were contributing to it.  

***

We can now all laugh at this kid, I call me, now. We’re sophisticated adults now with a more sophisticated understanding of authority, rebellion, and the balance of the two that forms a foundation that helps maintain a system, but when we look back at our naïve, immature understandings of an authoritarian world, we laugh. While we’re laughing, we should also take a look at how we sophisticated adults not only cede authority to authority figures in our lives now, we contribute to the underpinnings of their authority?

We call certain individuals in our culture authoritative experts, and we allow them to dictate their facts and opinions in a manner that changes the direction of our lives. “Why?” we ask rhetorically, “because they are more informed.” Are they? “Sure, they use the scientific method to arrive at dispassionate theories based on empirical data.” We learn from their research that there is “there is no conclusive evidence” for what we see and hear. How can that be? “After exhaustive research, the team at (fill in the blank) has determined that there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that’s true.” We learn to accept what they say, until we develop a level of faith in their point of view, their expertise, and their authority on the issue. We learn to accept their values through their lens. Are they right? “They’re experts, what are you asking here?”

Analysts call the dynamic of subjects contributing to expert analysis and authoritative dictates the leadership mystique. We now have unspoken requirements of our leaders to which they must adhere. We require them to exhibit, display, and provide some semblance of leadership qualities to fortify the facade. What are these requirements? They vary, but anyone who knows anything about icebergs knows that 90% of an iceberg is underwater. It could be argued that we create 90% of the foundation of leadership mystique for us, and we contribute to it in our interactions with other, fellow subjects.

We see this at play in the workplace when someone everyone considered an oaf yesterday, receives a prominent promotion today, and we agree to their leadership qualities tomorrow, characteristics that we never saw previously. Our authority figures obviously saw something special in them, and that’s enough for us, for some of us, and the onus is on us to help others see, accept, and promulgate their authority tomorrow.

Coupled with our concessions and contributions to authority figures and their rules and punishments, is the inherent recognition that even if we disagree with all of the above, we can’t choose our leaders. We are subjects who are subjected to those who make the rules, and we don’t even know who to blame when those rules prove silly. We blame our supervisor for imposing a rule passed down by a manager; we blame the policeman for carrying out a silly law passed down by a state legislator or federal official. We blame the person who is in our face, enforcing the rules, because most of us don’t dig through the layers to find the person who is to blame for drawing up the rules/laws, and those who pass them. 

The United States citizen lives in a Representative Republic that permits us to choose those we deem our authority figures. Yet, how many of us choose a representative of what we want to be as opposed to who we are. An overwhelming majority of us live within our means, and we’re quiet, unassuming types. We’re more like the character actor who quietly assumes the characteristics necessary for a role, but we prefer to vote charismatic game show hosts types into office. That guy looks like someone who would be fun to hang around. If that’s our choice for a leader in a Representative Republic, who are we? Who do we deify and assign leadership qualities to satisfy our role in the leadership mystique? How many of us assign such qualities to the manager of our local Wendy’s? We don’t, we hold them accountable for producing an inferior product.

Most of us don’t condemn representatives we charge with voting the way we would or the manner in which they spend our money. We direct our ire at those who don’t pay enough in taxes instead. We police our own. The governments can levy fines, put liens on our property, and take away our freedom if they determine that we didn’t pay enough taxes, but they cannot convince us to condemn our neighbor as a pariah for not paying what we deem enough. That’s our job, and we relish it.    

This article is not about the rebels or the figures of authority in our lives, though those would be interesting pieces. It’s about us, and our amenable and compliant ways of helping authority figures establish and maintain a level of authority in our lives. It’s about ceding elements of our lives to authoritative experts who sit behind a type writer telling us how to live our lives, raise our children, and go silent when they need us to just be quiet. 

In grade school, we were little kids who were easy to manipulate and cajole into carrying out institutional planks, but how many adults aid in the culture of fear of government edicts on paying “enough” taxes? We’re not half as concerned when our government officials spend our money in foolish ways, as we are the CEO of a company not paying what we deem enough in taxes. We not only cede authority to government officials. We contribute to it by condemning our neighbor for not paying enough.

As someone who has been on both sides of the paradigm, on a very, very minor scale, one thing I recognized when given an relatively insignificant level of authority was that my level of authority was not recognized or appreciated by my fellow authoritative figures. As a huge Letterman fan in the 80s, I’ve always found some inspiration in his idea that he was a bit of a joke. You can be king of the world, and he was in his own little way, but you’re still that goofy kid from the Midwest who had some really stupid notions about the world. His influence led me to consider myself a bit of a joke, and I saw the joke in everyone around me too, especially those in leadership positions. Everyone enjoys hearing that what they’re doing is important and substantial, and they don’t mind laughing at themselves, but they do no enjoy hearing that they’re kind of a joke too. When I learned to control my comedic impulses, and I ceded to their authority, they began to appreciate and contribute to my comparatively meager mystique. 

“It’s called reciprocity,” a friend of mine said, “I scratch your back, you feed my need!”