Dateline: my Mom's in Boscobel WI, 4 September 2005
Saw my childhood home yesterday. The front porch is still missing and now the owner is adding a godawful gazebo bit on the side. This is an historic home, one of the three Blaine homes in Bosocobel that's easily 130 years old. Blaine was the most famous resident of Boscobel's origins in 1875, eventually going on to become governor of Wisconsin.
It's sad to see that home get progressively weirded out, although we did our own share with an addition off the back in the 1970s.
So I guess I'm not pretending to be the historical purist here, just the sentimental fool.
Vonne and I talk about the second vacation home somewhere that doubles as our think-ahead toward a retirement home--long range planners we. Yesterday, she just tossed out the notion of buying place here in Boscobel (my Mom had pushed us to buy the famous old Ruka house on Wisconsin Avenue (1872), a huge expanse of a place that ran in the 160s (houses not exactly expensive in this backwater). It was just a dream for us now to own a second house (my God, we have kids heading toward college!), but frankly, you should always be dreaming 15-20 years down the road (we'd be in our early 60s)--just like I do in Blueprint for Action. No dreams is the perfect recipe for inaction, I say.
Anyway, the dream would be for me to buy our old place on Superior Street so that when my Mom eventually leaves town, there is still a Barnett (we were the town's first mayor) owning property here. We'd try to fix it up to its original grandeur, including the cupola on top, and it would become a private bed-and-breakfast for our collective family to use for mini-getaways. Sounds crazy, some distant Green Bay cousins of mine did the same thing on a farm around here not long ago for their big brood of siblings and associated families. Imagine a collective family gathering in the old house to open presents on Christmas Eve, and then the block-plus walk to Immaculate Conception Church for midnight mass!
A nice dream, yes. How likely, I have no idea, but I don't want the only place I visit years from now being the graves of my parents, my two brothers, and my paternal grandparents and Great Aunt Catty. I want some other reason for coming here than just death.
So I dream this little dream.
And it's good to have such dreams.
A lot of readers want me to get wrapped around the axle on various current events--to make them the immediate and broadband fixation of my work. But to crusade on Iraq or China or Katrina alone isn't really what I do, nor is it what I want to do. I want to stay the grand strategist, meaning most of my battlefields will remain in the future.
So instead of always bemoaning today's failures, like Katrina, I like to focus on tomorrow's victories, like Porter Goss opening up the CIA ("Opening Up the CIA," by Timothy L. Burger, Time, a recent one (I pulled the page out of one of my Mom's issues last night and now I can't find where she put them away and for some reason the sheet has no date!)).
Instead of crusading on today's fault-lines, I like to highlight and get behind tomorrow's new capacities, and Goss is doing just that, tossing $100 million at an open-source unit. That's what I and others have been saying for a while: make the CIA more what it was originally supposed to be--not the puzzle palace but the actual central respository for intell that all could contribute to and all could use (both public and private).
You know, I think Google's got 'em scared at Langley . . .
This doesn't mean the occasional broadside won't emanate from my lips, and that is exactly what we have teed up in the November issue of Esquire on China. But no one such rant will overwhelm the raves, because the raves are future pointers and not just finger pointing, which always has a past-oriented flavor (who didn't do what when).
In sum, this is how I maintain my optimism and it's how my influence can truly be expressed. The SysAdmin force is coming into being, in a big way and all around the dial. It will be created not by the political leaders so much as the mid-level bureaucrats who you never hear about and who never leave. And it will be created by a generational wave of military officers.
The temptation now is to crap on everything, to bundle up Katrina and Baghdad and say this'll never work and let's go back to what we know and love (big war with a big opponent to justify our big contracts and our big bases that keep so many jobs and votes and congressmen in their seats). And while some of that is completely right, and for some people, a good call as a full-time calling, it's isn't what I'm all about--nor will it ever be.
Nor will I be putting one party or leader (like Bush today) off to the side WRT to critical remarks. I have to tell you, whenever I get that email saying what a smart fellow I am virtually all the time except for that one comment about Bush, the simplest reply to self-professed vision adherents is that they have both the wrong guy and the wrong vision. I don't generate long-range strategic vision that works for only one party because that concept is so anathema to my logic as to defy everything save some useless angry sputtering in print.
In short, if that is what you need to stick around, then it's time to move on. I don't have that blind spot and I never will. I criticize all and I work with all. In my business, the Dem-Repub divide really doesn't mean a whole helluva lot--and I like it that way.
That's the price of the long view, as my friend Peter Schwartz would say.
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