Bryan: French people?

EPISODE 007: Sundance '92 Selection Ranked

American documentary filmmaking emerged as earlier as film equipment became widely available and affordable. Many young filmmakers sought a collective resurgence in a new era of American cinema, now broadly accessible -- this time it helmed at the heart and gut of independent filmmaking. The quintessential roots of American independent cinema can be found in the films selected for the Sundance Film Festival of 1992, which is available on the Criterion Collection Channel. In this episode on LA CINEASTE, we will sort through and essentially rank the 25 captivating films in the 1992 Sundance Selection. Though many auteurs exceeded with accolades and impressed the new age, others found challenges along the way.

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by James Hatch, medium.com 20200418

Leadership is an essential element in the success of any group endeavor. The massive scale of the challenge we face with Covid-19 is a staggeringly tricky leadership challenge.

Leadership books are the “thoughts and prayers” segment of the publishing world; there are so many of them that they are mostly falling on deaf ears. Despite all these books, we seem to have a severe lapse in successful leadership.

In my career in the US military, I was exposed, for 25 years, to many different leaders and in situations that were, like this Covid-19 struggle, a grave matter. In the Special Operations world, leadership is a matter of life and death almost every single day. Even in training for special operations missions, people can and do get killed on a far too frequent basis because of the dangerous nature of the work.

When I watch the President at his various press conferences, I see an inferior leadership style. Precious time is taken up by his appointed experts, talking about how great he is and mostly kissing his ass so that they can keep their jobs. I never experienced anything like this in all my time in the military. I never had an executive officer get up in front of a group of people under his or her command and spend even two seconds of everyone’s precious time, talking about how awesome our commanding officer was. I never had a commanding officer who was so insecure and so weak that he needed that stroking to do his job. Not once did any of my bosses talk about their social media “likes” or their last fitness report. My bosses respected our time and the gravity of our work. Our time was valuable. The nation’s collective time is precious right now.

The best commanders I had never had to have anyone publicly kiss their ass because they had, for the most part, earned the respect of the people who worked for them. We all knew that the commander (most of the time) deserved that position. We may not have cared for that person’s personality or methodology in every instance, but we knew that we had the best chance of success in battle if we all invested in that leader’s clear vision for success.

The best leaders I had, especially at the tier one level, were extremely humble and extremely conscientious of their environment and the importance of the way they conducted themselves. I saw this type of leadership in virtually all of the successful combat leaders with which I worked.

Never, not one time, did I have a leader say things like “I’m the chosen one” or refer to themselves as a “stable genius.” I cannot even imagine what would have happened if one of our strategic or tactical leaders had seriously said something like that. Now, don’t get me wrong, I did have a few leaders who probably thought they were smarter than everyone, but they sure as hell never said it. Additionally, none of my leadership ever spent time in front of our crew talking about themselves unless it was to communicate a point of confusion or a mistake that they had made. Never, in my entire military career, did I hear a commander get up in front of our crew and tell us how gifted they were, how amazed all of the experts were by her, or his grasp of some situation where they had not trained to be an expert.

Here is why; if my commander had said things like this, or wasted our time extrapolating on their genius or “chosen” status, we would one-hundred percent believe that they were unfit for their job. We would all know, immediately, that this person was so very insecure that we shouldn’t trust our lives to them. We would probably have come together as a group and used the chain of command to express our fears, and I am betting, though there is no way to know for sure, that any commanding officer who said or did those things, would most likely be removed from their position of command.

In my experience, when people talk like our President does, it is because they need to compensate for being put in a situation that overwhelms them. It is one thing if a person gets promoted into a position that may be above their head. It is another thing entirely when someone seeks a position of authority that they genuinely know they are not capable of executing on or, even worse, is delusional about their abilities to take care of the people they seek to lead. This type of delusion generally gets people killed. The military has its flaws, but most of the time, leaders, especially in combat units, are vetted and judged and screened and chosen carefully.

The President talks about how he is a “wartime” Commander in Chief. In truth, he is far from a wartime leader, he is insecure, and his insecurity is going to get people killed. He needs constant stroking and the public adoration that comes from his staff kissing his ass in a press conference where we are talking about life and death issues for America. All of America. Identity politics will never go away, and the people who make $ off of amplifying the “culture war” can dress this leadership style up and garner viewers and clicks. Still, it won’t help us overcome the challenges that face our nation. The President is weak, and the people who blow smoke up his ass and tell him what he wants to hear are guilty of the worst kind of cowardice. I am an American, and I know that Donald Trump won the last Presidential election. But now, he is hurting the country and destroying our culture with his nastiness and divisive rhetoric.

I’ll leave you with this;

General Eisenhower, who gives us an example of what a true leader should look like, wrote this message in advance of “Operation Overlord,” the invasion of France by the allies in WWII:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.

Can anyone reading this essay, look themself in the mirror and believe that our present commander in chief, our “leader” would ever take personal responsibility for his actions or decisions?