A limited engagement

Published : 18 July 2013, 09:59 AM
Updated : 18 July 2013, 09:59 AM

The rain had abated.

Enough.

And when I say "enough", I mean it was still drizzling, just sufficiently to cool the sidewalk and prevent that updraft of humidity from massing on the pavement. Through the dripping shrubbery and trees that landscaped the outdoor atrium, the starless, cloud-laden sky was alight. Fireflies danced in the crisp, wet air. The sun had finally set. The band took to the stage.

Tonight,  I'm at a Grateful Dead concert.

A pimply-faced security guard appears and wields all of the authority his seventeen years on earth allows. He quickly disappears into the blue haze of marijuana and tobacco that the rain has kept grounded. The winking glow of many a marijuana cigarette evade the young man's earnest policing. When he does request an audience member quench out  the smoking materials, the response always the same — amusement. The old hippies make a show of extinguishing the glowing tip. Their face shows a look of condescension — that smile that a grandparent gives when he's about to let his five-year-old win at checkers.

When the guard leaves, the revellers light up again. Eventually, the young man gives up, but when the concert is over, he makes it his business to specifically thank my companion and me for not smoking. His gratitude makes me feel about as cool as a Narco agent.

Onstage, the band plays on. I mentioned that the name of the band is The Grateful Dead. That's not exactly true. Upon the death of one of the key musicians, the band re-christened itself "Furthur". Their music is masterful. For three and a half hours they play without stopping. Between the songs, where most bands reserve time for interacting with the audience, they play a thread of improvised riffs. They say nothing. We sway and dance, hypnotized by the music (and, presumably the chemicals in the air).

I do my calculations. This band must play more than 50 hours a week at least 40 weeks a year, between rehearsals and performance. Fifty times 40. Two thousand. That's two thousand hours of perfecting the sound. Two thousand hours a year since 1965. That's close to a hundred thousand hours of music. In 2008, writer Malcolm Gladwell published a book that claimed that ten thousand hours of practice made an individual a virtuoso. If this is the case, then what I was witnessing was almost a hundred thousand hours of practice — virtuosity ten times over.

From their performance on this night, I accept that they're that good.

As for me, that night, and all the days of my life, I am a professional amateur. See, I have the formula backward. I spend one hour doing ten thousand things. Partly this is because of the circumstances of my life, but partly it's due to the fact that because God has spread such a rich table of life before me, I find it difficult not to sample every flavour before sunset.

And because I am often focused on politicians, I wonder about the politicians who become virtuosi, those who have ten thousand hours of schooling in the governance of a nation. How do they get their ten thousand hours? Certainly, the US President Barack Obama did not complete the requisite hours before assuming the mantle of leadership, although he might have logged that many hours in campaigning and governing. See, governance and politics are separate skills. It may be that democracy does the best job of any form of government of keeping the two separate, but confusing one for the other nevertheless.

When the democratic system was first conceived, I imagine that Governance was meant to be more like a venue than a skill unto itself. In other words, "The band" (Potential leader), having honed its skills in private venues and lower levels of government "plays a gig" as a national leader, bringing those "chops" to centre stage for a limited engagement. They perform, maybe take a curtain call, and leave so that other virtuosi may subsequently take the stage. The band goes on to play other cities, building their fan base, and taking on new challenges.

We come and celebrate because they may never appear at this same venue again.

The problem comes when the same bands keep playing on the same stage, over and over again. That poor security guard might quickly lose his zeal to enforce the rules if he were ignored night after night. He might even figure out a system to get the fans to slip him a little money to look the other way. When that becomes the case, then his job gets super cushy. He wants that band to keep playing, so he can keep looking the other way and getting rich in the process. Eventually, if another band is lucky enough to show up, and the fans aren't big smokers, he'll have to go back to his usual set of rules. Therefore, his best interest dictates that he should make engagements as miserable as possible for all other bands so that the only one that plays the venue is the one that yields him the highest profit.

In other words, the pimply-faced seventeen year old of Corruption has slinked into the formula wearing his yellow "staff" shirt of deception!

Government is jazz. To work, it must be adaptive and synchronous. The problem is that after awhile when the point is no longer the music, when the performance is about the banter between the performer and the audience,  then the musicians begin to play the same simple tunes over and over again. The audience stops dancing. The people lose heart. The whole performance becomes an act of affirmation of the people's love for the performer, and relies upon the relentless never-changing sameness of the act.

That's why it's important to limit the time any politician is allowed to play upon any one particular stage. They must move on, use the leadership to conquer new territories, much the way that ex-US President Jimmy Carter has used his post-presidential leadership to help change the world. The US lacks term limits for its congressmen and senators. As a result, we have corruption and gridlock in Congress and the Senate.

In my humble opinion, Bangladesh also needs term limits for its leaders.

Somewhere out there is an aspiring leader waiting to take his or her place on the national stage. What can they do to get ten thousand hours of experience? Perhaps they can tour the world speaking about the conditions of the Bangladeshi workers, like Kalpona Akter, a former sweatshop worker who has made herself famous, at least here in the US, for standing up to WalMart. Perhaps they can start a bank like Muhammad Yunus, or be the founder of the worlds largest NGO like Fazle Hasan Abed. These people can come onto the stage for the short time that democracy intends for its leaders to be in power, then move on and let some other talented individual take the stage.

Even here, on the other side of the world, separated by our language, and half a day of time difference, I get the sense that no one would be too disappointed to see some new names on the ballots in Bangladesh, just as here I am longing for someone who is neither Democrat nor Republican to get elected.

If we consider the tenure of some successful elected leaders in the last two hundred years, Winston Churchill (1940-1945), Abraham Lincoln (1860-1865), Nelson Mandela (1994-1999), to name a few, we can see a pattern:

Stability and peace follows when a great leader shines bright for a limited time, steps down, takes his curtain call and allows the next experienced band to peaceably take the stage.

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Frank Domenico Cipriani writes a weekly column in the Riverside Signal called "You Think What You Think And I'll Think What I Know." He is also the founder and CEO of The Gatherer Institute — a not-for-profit public charity dedicated to promoting respect for the environment and empowering individuals to become self-taught and self-sufficient. His most recent book, "Learning Little Hawk's Way of Storytelling", teaches the native art of oral tradition storytelling.