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Title: Dubya Moved My Cheese
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: February 10, 2005
Language: en
Topics: George W Bush
Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/02/dubya-moved-my-cheese-or-chicken-soup.html

Kevin Carson

Dubya Moved My Cheese

A wide variety of left-leaning blogs and websites have already pointed

to Bush’s lame attempt at empathy with someone who actually works for a

living:

In Omaha on Friday, a divorced single mother named Mary Mornin tells the

president, “I have one child, Robbie, who is mentally challenged, and I

have two daughters.”

“Fantastic,” the president exclaims, and he tells her she has “the

hardest job in America, being a single mom.”

Later, the 57-year old Mornin tells Bush that she works three jobs,

which the president deems “uniquely American” and “fantastic.” He asks

her if she gets any sleep.

Ha. Ha. And they say this is a jobless recovery.

What really caught my attention, though, was this:

But some of the country’s most celebrated hawkers marvel at Bush’s gift

for selling. They rave about how he connects and inspires. With

exclamation points!

“You can tell he has God within him!” says Zig Ziglar, the sales guru

and motivational speaker, in a phone interview from Montgomery, Ala.,

where he is hosting a seminar. “The president walks with his shoulders

erect!” lauds Tom Hopkins, a professional trainer and author of “How to

Master the Art of Selling” and “Selling for Dummies.” “He makes great

eye contact! He is buoyant! He walks at a fast pace! You can tell he’s a

great listener!” These are all the marks of successful salespeople,

Hopkins says. Great salespeople like Tom Hopkins, he keeps telling us.

“I have had so much success in real estate! I’ve set so many sales

records!”

So Bush is popular among the Barnum-wannabes of the management theory

and motivational speaking racket (deliciously parodied by National

Lampoon in the person of Sphinx Sphincter, author of the motivational

classic Visualize, Actualize, Grasp and Claw). Who woulda guessed?

I always figued Bush’s speeches were written by Tony Robbins. He reminds

me of too many of the Young Republicans (complete with identical

uniforms of blue blazers, khakis and topsiders) I met in college, who

kept a copy of Robert J. Ringer in the glove box and couldn’t refrain

from using the word “leader” in every sentence.

For an irreverent take on the motivational/management genre, I strongly

recommend “Molotov Cocktail For Tom Lagana’s Soul”:

Snatching hypocritical victory from the jaws of defeat, this electrical

engineer turned mind engineer is now complicit with his old “redundancy

eliminators.” He now helps “organizations who want to get the most out

of people;” and those people would, of course, be the Prozac-plied

personnel now doing twice the work they would have at the same position

twenty years ago and are too sedated to feel the boss’s whip cracking

across their backs. “[Lagana] put a smile on my face and it stayed there

even after I went back to work,” gushes one successfully sheered sheep,

her organization now getting the most out of her. “I already feel less

stress as I apply some of the techniques,” bleated another after

scampering from a Lagana seminar payed for by the Firm.

Lagana has repeatedly asked that this “hateful” review be taken down, so

you know it must have struck home.

For a more recent and dumbed-down version of the same thing, nothing

beats Thomas Frank’s scathing commentary on Spencer Johnson’s wretched

Who Moved My Cheese? That “asinine” work of “breathtaking obscenity,” as

Frank describes it in One Market Under God, is designed to “openly

advance a scheme for gulling, silencing, and firing workers who are

critical of management....” Not only is the mover of the cheese never

identified, Frank points out:

...[E]ven to wonder about the logic of the cheese’s movements or to ask

the title question Who Moved My Cheese? is to commit workplace error of

such magnitude that management can rightly “let” workers who are given

to such thoughts “go.” So while one of the “littlepeople” remains

stubbornly at the place where he last sighted the cheese, the other sets

off through the maze again, running the rat race, but finding along the

way that job insecurity is good for his soul and composing a number of

pithy observations about adapting to “change”....

See, “change” is good. It doesn’t matter that it’s the kind of change

that’s shoved down our throats by people totally unaccountable to us.

The book, in fact, was created as a management tool for dealing with

“change resisters.” And naturally, it’s a big favorite of HR departments

everywhere. Those managers who applied the lessons of the book in their

thankless job of imposing “change” found, to their delight, that it

“worked wonders.”

Those who had been fired learned to relish their situation (“there was

New Cheese out there just waiting to be found!”) and those were

permitted to stay stopped “complaining” and bowed to management’s new

scheme.

I wonder if that woman with three jobs relishes her situation? At the

close of his review, Frank raises the most subversive question of all:

While most of us must “adapt to change,” others get to make change;

while most of us are expected to smilingly internalize management

theory, to learn our place in the world from vapid fairy tales, others

buy the insulting stuff in bulk in order to cram it down the throats of

thousands who have the misfortune to work in the bigperson’s insurance

agency or box factory.

Will the time ever come, Americans might well ask, when we get to move

management’s cheese? When the people, “little” though they might be,

acquaint society’s erstwhile cheesemasters with this “inevitable” fact:

That there is no social theory on earth short of the divine right of

kings that can justify a five-hundred-fold gap between management and

labor; that can explain away the concentration of a decade of gain in

the bank accounts of a tiny minority.