Marya Mann : Blog : Obama, Tall Poppies, & Mutually Assured Success

Obama, Tall Poppies, & Mutually Assured Success

KONA, HAWAII ~ Think of Obama as the poet in us all, the one who hears the chant of the muse and is guided by a divine thrumming in his blood to use himself, his hands, and his nature as instruments to reflect the effortless flow of nature.

This poet that lives in us all led Obama’s Chicago Olympics bid, “The Copenhagen Coping Mechanism,” wherein he flew to Denmark for a five-hour stay with Lady Michelle and Oprah, then climbed back into Air Force One, flanked by two 747’s, and sped back to the U. S., guzzling a gazillion gallons of fossil fuels. This adventure, extravagant as it may seem, is a grand “teachable moment.”

As a two-line poem, it might read:

“With dreams of recoloring the world,
They flew into the impossible whirl.”

The Copenhagen quest ended in “failure,” some said, but in the evolution of nature, are there ever really any failures? Copenhagen was a call for an evolved beauty, a more daring harvest, a visionary way to cope with crime-ridden cities and growing-like-a-yeast-infection national debt. In the name of the Olympic celebration of discipline, perfection, and excellence, Obama embarked like Jason and the Argonauts, searching for the modern grail. Never mind that Jason’s quest led to Medea betraying her father and murdering her children; Obama’s quest was to rehabilitate Chicago and save her children.

This is the work of the poet. When you have a president who acts like a poet, at the end of the day, debate, or poem, you’ll also find peculiarities. Genius, glowing in its fiery reflection of paradox, always a union of opposites, sparks a rational irrationality, an explosion of ecstasy fearless in the face of experiment.

As Buckminster Fuller told me one day, most experiments end in failure. It was 1980. Two poles in a recently constructed teepee at John Denver’s Windstar Foundation suddenly collapsed on our heads while we were videotaping Bucky for a program. Stunned, we made our way outside. Microphone in hand, I asked the greatest architect of the 20th century how it felt to have ancient architecture fall on his head. “Oh, I’m used to it,” he said. “Nine out of ten times, they fail. You have to be ready for it, and take the learning.”

Genius plans for success, but expects at least some degree of failure. Genius behavior, outstanding skill, or out-of-the-box thinking also has some degree of social cost. Nature intends us to be our very best, to rise, to be wise, to heal and flourish, to celebrate prowess and success, yet there’s a shadow side to our esteem for creative thinking, genius, and excellence. It’s a social syndrome which an Australian friend mentioned to me one day when I expressed dismay at how the mass media conjures disaster thinking and sabotages good people, raving about them one day and hating them the next.

“It’s called the “tall poppy syndrome,” he said. “We do it all the time. We like to cut down those who stand tall in their success.” He claims it’s an Australianism so pervasive it stops an untold number of people with good ideas from even trying, “lest they fail and get a big “I-told-you-so” from their mates.”

The tall poppy syndrome (TPS) even has its own Wikipedia page, where it’s called “a social phenomenon where people of genuine merit are criticized or resented not because they’ve done something inherently wrong, but because their talents or achievements elevate them above or distinguish them from their peers.” Pundits say TPS has also been spotted in the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand, but I’ve seen it in the Solomon Islands, Italy, and Hawaii. It’s a human trait.

“It’s bred a degree of risk-averseness in Australia,” says my friend. “That fortunately, rapidly melts when Australian entrepreneurs immerse themselves in U. S. business, where short poppies don’t last long.”

The growing “I hope you fail” movement aimed at Obama sounds suspiciously like TPS. Spiteful arguments over reforming U. S. health care, education, and Afghanistan can cause family rifts and public embarrassments these days. Is this the “tall poppy syndrome” rearing its ugly head?

How easily do we cast aspersions, treating people of sincere good will, grace, and intelligence as though they were murderers and holocaustic maniacs.

I wonder what the world would be like if we all took a deep breath and turned all that failure-wishing 180 degrees around into its opposite, into respect. We could start wishing for everyone’s success. With our intention, thought, and word, we could even reverse the suicidal urge to Mutually Assured Destruction – you remember, the MAD reasoning behind proliferation of nuclear missiles. In its place, we can create Mutually Assured Success.

Here’s how: Banish any thought of envy or jealousy from our mental and emotional vocabulary. Choose to listen for the truth in each other, the basic goodness, looking upon each being as a vibrant, necessary, noetic cell in the global body, which is a reflection of the inner body, the inner poet and prayer-giver.

Wishing for the success of all mothers, fathers, children, Ghandi, Madonna, everyone on the streets, in rehab, on the mend, those looking for work, hard at work, and finally resting from work, those in prisons, wishing even for Gaddafi, Bill O’Reilly, and Bernie Madoff to succeed in realizing their basic goodness. Their success – at a spiritual level — will most certainly help transform the world.

Every person has the potential and probability of success. Everyone. You. Me. Us. Them. We have the precious chance to evolve, to be the creators we were meant to be. If we were poppies, we would want to live in a field where the whole atmosphere wished for the success of the whole, not just for the satisfaction of the few. In diversity, in the daring of the impossible, in the geniuses like Copernicus, like the Wright Brothers, like Mother Theresa, like anyone who has a personal relationship with the muse, in such creativity is the hope of the world.

Wishing for the success of sanity, the proliferation of kindness, the grand illumination of compassion, we open even the most jaded eyes to the poetry of each other, the deepening roots in angelhood we find in knowing love and being fearless in our admiration for each other.

Look! Here! In your eyes, I’ve found another universe. You’ve discovered in mine a blue star cluster, planets. Looking together at the world, we see the path of the moon on the sea, how it scribbles poetry in the laps of waves for us to read. Mindful of each other, we allow, celebrate, and send mana missiles for Mutually Assured Success, no less significant, strange and beautiful than the oceans, skies, mountains, and meadows of orange, wild poppies bowing their heads to the sun and glowing in ambient good will.