General Hostile

Getting things wrong on a consistent basis while suffering very few consequences for it is the hallmark of a truly great job. A bulletproof tenure most of us can only dream of ever obtaining. Certain occupations end up drowning in data sets and peer reviews. They are constantly grading employees, ascertaining their place among the easily quantifiable. But who wants a job where prosperity and success are fundamentally tied to outcomes? We’re all just spit-balling here. It’s creepy to come back months or years later to see your careless, thoughtless words thrown back at you. The time has since passed to let it go.

Football draft prognosticators are given wonderful leeway to do their best, making selections, guessing which players will go to the hall of fame and which ones will end up cleaning the jacuzzi jets in a Motel 6. No one is going to remember that in 1998 you predicted on live television that pretty soon the league was going to add a second, smaller pigskin for fourth down conversions. Or that it was only a matter of time before the end zone occupied all four sides of a square field instead of the current double goal rectangle. You were going for something, pushing the limit, and so what if you came up short? It happens to plenty of teams marching down the field aiming to score. 

Weathermen, those rain-soaked artistes, pointing their wands at pressure systems and making outlandish predictions for holiday weekends. They are, in many ways, fragile predictors of an unpredictable world. But they try, with their emphasis on boots and hats, umbrellas and ponchos, to make life dryer despite a moister future. Their job security is like few others. They are given the latitude to go for it – calling for hurricanes when there’s barely a droplet in the sky. But natural disasters always keep you tuning in, for it’s a far better story when trees go horizontal as the whipping wind wins an invisible arm-wrestling match between the two parties.

Then there are the members of the Eisenhower-labeled military industrial complex. Gilded warriors and greasy television personalities, constantly invoking the past in ways that serve a grander purpose. You’d think that ancient quagmires would be left off their resumes, the way you remove a job based on poor performance or a personality conflict with a colleague. Not them. They burnish their image on ideas still germinating during Vietnam. It is, as always, a sight to behold. There are protests and routine anger directed their way, but none of it disrupts their membership in the cocktail elite sipping and clinking around the stupidly alphabetic streets of our nation’s humid capital. 

The rest of us regular folks are afraid to fail. Not these heroes of errors though. They exist in a different reality, abiding by separate governing laws, where to be wrong is closer to being right than actually being right.