Everything I Learned About Being a Bad Leader I Learned by Being a Stage Manager

I've been trying to figure out some things about stuff.

More specifically, I'm puzzled why I can't understand the root of my discomfort about Bush. I mean, the news media is clearly still on his bandwagon ("Wanna change the national conversation just three days after a senior White House official was indicted, the first time that's happened in 130 years? Sure thing!!!"), so despite the specifics of why our President makes me queasy as a leader (Abu Ghraib, Big Oil, Big Mergers, press manipulation (e.g., Armstrong Williams, Jeff Gannon), John Bolton, John Ashcroft, John Roberts, Faith-Based everything*, 2000+ American war dead, Osama bin Laden still alive (& free!), Katrina (and the photo ops!), I. Libby, The Grim Cheney, WMD vaporware, mediocre economy, mediocracy embraced, ballot machine hijinx, Terry Schiavo, "Heckuva Job", Sixteen Words, et al)...

Despite all that, I still get the distinct impression that not only will the press never wisen up and look at that bigger picture, I'm still supposed to embrace this president and his administration. So I delved deep into my psyche this morning and found an answer while in my psyche, listening to the news.

He peddles fear. Not only does he peddle it, he manhandles it, twists it like so much silly putty and flings it out in all directions. To add to the laundry list of things we're supposed to be fearing now, he spent this morning at the National Institutes of Health talking about why we should be afraid of the chicken flu.

My point here is not to lessen the perception of the seriousness of the flu, but to look at the way this administration is and is not reacting to it.

The thing I learned in my career as a stage manager (truth to tell, I'm still learning this) is that no matter what sort of problem arises in the course of the run, the stage manager must deal with it quickly, effectively, and with a minimum of fuss. Fuss concerns actors, the poor dears. Alot. As a stage manager, it is imperative to deal with the problem without creating a fuss among the actors.

Expand the analogy to Nation-Sized. [insert nation-sizing sound effect here] Here, the actors (fragile little things) are the populace of the country. The leader of the country is the Stage Manager. (I'm simplifying a bit... I don't actually think the SM is the leader of a production. Mostly.) If a problem arises, it's the leader's job to deal with it without sending the population into a tizzy. But our leader, our President, has built his presidency on making certain we're in fear of something all of the time. Witness Tom Ridge and his call to prevent nerve gas injuries with duct tape, and the consequent run on duct tape. Or the run on flu shots everytime there's a scare of the reg'lar ol' flu. (My personal favorite was the Creamsicle Alert, an Orange Terror Alert the same day a Blizzard Warning was declared for DC.) We've been conditioned to fear everything, and the reaction has been, to the Bush administration, predictable.

My problem with this: It's at the very least unprofessional. Maybe some of it stems from incompetence. But I think there's at least someone in that organization who counts on the 'actors' getting into a tizzy when they see their SM running around squawking about nuclear threats, chemical threats, influenza threats and generally getting little done about them.

Because the second part of my problem with this is the fact that we're not safer than we were on September 10, 2001. The response to Katrina is all you need to see that. And I'm not talking about who's to blame here. I'm talking about the response. The fact that Chertoff and Brown and the rest of the country's emergency management infrastructure was "surprised" (their word) by the Katrina aftermath is a damning indictment. If there was actually something that surprised us one horrible, horrible day in the future, could we get 9 million people off of Manhattan Island? Could we get a million people out of DC? No, we couldn't.

Remember the two aspects of crisis control in stage management: Don't frighten the actors, and deal with the problem. This administration is not only not following those rules of thumb, they're acting in exactly the opposite manner. They are trying to frighten the actors and not dealing with the problem. The fear will distract the actors long enough to get re-elected, I'm guessing.

That's why when I'm President, I'm gonna have a Cabinet full of Stage Managers.

* Faith-Based Politics: The faith that politics will be base, yesterday. today and forever. ("O politics, where is thy sting?")