Benjamin C. Works, Executive Director

--Celebrating Chaos Theory Since 1990--

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SIT 8-17; Monday. August 17, 1998

Strategic Issues Today - In this Special Issue: Clinton as Cynosure  

* The Cynosure - Of Pride, Comparative Hypocrisies, Civic Cohesion & Policy:

Cynosure, n. Constellation containing Pole star, Little Bear; guiding star; centre of attraction or admiration. [From Greek kunosoura dog's tail, Little Bear].

• From The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 1925

In his play, Antigone of 442 BC, the Athenian general and playwright Sophocles advanced a metaphor of "the ship of state" embarked on a course, towards a defined destination, under command of an able captain. Our American Republic has been on such a deliberate course since 1776 and it has made a succession of progressive voyages, and occasional side trips, under its succession of able and reckless skippers from Washington through Clinton, and beyond. Good captains plan and chart courses with destinations beyond their own term of command; bad captains merely cruise and occasionally hit unexpected shoals when they ignore or misread their charts.

What follows begins as a bit more personal rumination than most SIRIUS reports, but to a purpose. Sometimes what begin purely personal matters precipitate thoughts that lead to social and civic insights of some value. So too with considering the Ship of State metaphor. The other day, I began to think about the word cynosure, originally a dog's tail, but also meaning a guiding star. It triggered consideration of an even older Greek heroic metaphor among other things.

In some sense I have been on an Odyssey for the last 27 years, since leaving the United States Army to matriculate at Yale University in 1971. In these years, to a veteran among the Anti-War generation, it sometimes felt not unlike Ulysses adrift on his raft. A love unraveled about that time and somewhere I later was blown further off course and drifted into Antipodean waters where my Pole Star was lost over the horizon. Pride keeps you going at such times, along with hope, honor and your sense of purpose, until the Pole Star --the cynosure of one's life purpose-- is again visible. In a sense, though odysseys are interesting journeys full of discoveries, I've had to outlast Ulysses' alienation from Penelope's nuptual couch by a full seven years.

The Equator has been re-crossed and that Pole star has again briefly appeared bright in my firmament. That cynosure seems to set a course for my voyage home to Ithaca --unless, of course, the gods choose to exact another last minute punishment for youthful hubris. That made me think of our public Pole Stars and Cynosures as we approach a millennial turn in the course of our human progress. That course does not seem to be clearly charted for the longer voyage.

- Juvenal; The Satires; VI, 292

A national leader is both Captain of the Ship of State, steering the course he has set in his election, and is expected to be a Cynosure by approaching a high standard of personal public and private conduct --this is the Bully Pulpit and more. We do not elect saints and do not fancy great leaders do not have strong egos, but we find in 1998, that our President, Mr. Clinton, chooses, as First Cynosure, to underscore a definition of cynosure only as a center of attention --a most voracious narcissism substitutes for behaving as a guiding star. Today, he testified regarding the Lewinsky matter while America's foreign policy course seems increasingly adrift and consigned to the hands of bungling ideological tacticians rather than steady-handed strategists. Bombs are exploding and people dying as we stumble through towards the fourth and final 2-year act of Mr. Clinton's 8-year Greek drama. An increasingly unruly, conquered world is exacting its revenge on the Clintonian "sole remaining global superpower."

In a sense, the cynosure, as a dog's tail, attracts attention as with the tail wagging the dog. That led me to dwell facetiously for a moment on the "Wag the Dog" theory of faking an international crisis to cover over a domestic entanglement, particularly since the recent movie dwelt on an Albanian crisis. We, today, have NATO military exercises going on inside Albania as some "warning" to Belgrade regarding the Kosovo insurrection. Then the "Pole star" reminded me of Bill Clinton's status as a "Poll Star" and his persistent high opinion poll numbers. That led to hypocrisy and back to the role of the public cynosure. In terms of markets analysis the "Little Bear" definition reminds me of the deep correction the market has experienced in the last 5 weeks -- a "Little Bear" market that I had been expecting, where the smaller capitalization NASDAQ stocks have suffered greater losses than the Blue Chips of the Dow Industrials or S&P 500 --but this is not a market letter today.

There are two modes of hypocrisy, one for times of relative virtue and another for times of relative vice as defined by la Rochefoucauld and Shakespeare:

- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-80), Reflections.

- Hamlet; III, iv, 154-55

I am comfortable with some level of homage being paid by hypocrites to public virtue. I am utterly uncomfortable with, as in the Clinton years, the virtuous having to accept the barely- concealed licentiousness of the Clintonians and their like-minded supporters in the public arena who seek to seduce and degrade society in their values-free vision of social order. Nor is the world comfortable with the enlightened agenda the New Left seeks to jam down our throats via the UN. Moral philosophers and other spectators have observed time and again the confusion of the clear distinction between personal liberty and personal license, but in times of vice, license is advanced as an extension of liberty, as in our time. This breaks down civic cohesion and social order more rapidly than most think.

Prosperity breeds luxury, and luxury, license and corruption. Such are the luxuries of a long peace, as Juvenal observed above, and who also noted that in such times, "Censure pardons the raven, but is visited upon the dove." (The Satires; II, l. 63) Sound familiar?

Civic Cohesion

- John Milton; Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 1649

In the military, we rapidly come to understand the need for unit cohesion, built upon shared discipline, honor, pride and comradeship under the willing suspension of our individual liberties for the benefit of the commonwealth. To the Left's intelligentsia --who know the price of everything and the value of nothing-- this cohesion is an utter mystery that they find dangerous and always attack.

We have been repeatedly invited by liberal leaders to cower behind the "thin blue line" of law enforcement and to expect that government could solve all our social and civic problems, without our personal involvement. But society is again growing out of this preposterous notion and there is a return to civic volunteerism underway in most parts of our nation. The Left's establishment could not quite kill off the Boy Scouts and Little League, so they embraced Soccer leagues as their alternative.

Society rests upon an intrinsic cohesion at the family, neighborhood, community, state and national level as well. This cohesion is both social and civic; the social side is built on moral values of self-discipline, self-sacrifice and self-respect, the civic side is built on respect for the law, respect for others and good public manners --civility or common courtesy

Both elements of cohesion depend on the forces of law for their ultimate protection and societies charter their governments to both protect civil and social order, while protecting the society's circumstances that permit growth.

"Good government obtains when those who are near are made happy,

and those who are far off are attracted."

-  The Confucian Analects; Book 13:16 ii.

Invariably, in history, governments become corrupted and begin to dilute standards while slowly beggaring their societies through neglect and excessive taxation to sustain an increasingly corrupt governing class built on a spoils system.

History tends to show that such systems corrupt in a mere three generations. From the Augustan George Washington to the egotistical and corrupt Andrew Jackson was a process of three generations of leadership. From Lenin's erection of Bolshevism to its collapse was accomplished in a mere three generations --what Andrew Carnegie observed in wealthy families as "three generations from shirtsleeve to shirtsleeve."

Adults are expected to accept a values-free leadership as we have been getting prosperous in the last seven years; but money cannot buy every happiness, beyond the basics it can only slake physical appetite. Every public action generates side effects and reactions. The values-free and politically correct agenda of Clintonism is failing domestically and generating side effects visible among the very youth of America the Clintons profess to care so much about. The curriculum is too contradictory to common sense, logic or to the visible facts. Abroad, zealot bombers and rogue-state despots are openly defying the foreign policy agenda designed to appeal to the academic innovators of the New Left.

It comes to the point where the leader, the civic cynosure, becomes the greatest danger to society, even when an elected democratic head of state --he makes himself the enemy within his society, in this case, for the mere purpose of ego gratification and satiation of voracious appetites.

- William James; Oration upon the Unveiling of the Col. Robert Gould Shaw (54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry Regiment) Monument, on Boston Common; May 31, 1897.

Good gifts cannot come from bad men, and Mr. Clinton has shown that he is not a good man. Nor is his foreign policy in steady, far-seeing hands capable of maneuvering a long voyage. But still, the Clinton team blusters its way through crisis after crisis.

- Rudyard Kipling; Recessional; 1897.

We are, in former-Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Russia, elsewhere-Asia and even in our basic relations with Western Europe, committing to policies that are not working and do not make sense. We have merely loosed wild tongues.

© Copyright 1998 Benjamin C. Works-SIRIUS