Clothes make the man

One of the wealthiest people that I know…personally, as a friend that is…is a fellow who never wears anything but blue jeans and a mechanic’s shirt…you know, the kind that has your name on a patch above the pocket. This individual has built several large companies and employs a couple of hundred people. In many arenas he defines success as an American.

The other day I was working at a small sideline job helping to teach some medical students. The university in its zeal for Christmas vacation had failed to forward the instructional materials that I needed and so, after several failed attempts to retrieve these by email, I arrived at my class, headed to the administration floor and asked for the materials. With some elbows and backsides several people readily helped me get them. No errors, no faults. During the instruction I noticed that one of the student handout documents was in error, while my copy was correct. I informed them that I would need a few minutes and I headed to the copier to make copies for them.

While at the copier, I encountered a PhD who ostensibly has something to do with coordinating the teachers and their work requirements. This includes educational materials by the way. I happened to have nothing else to do after class so I arrived in true California fashion in dress shorts and a comfortable shirt, for what is a very casual learning environment. This individual said nothing to me but seemed disturbed over my request for 7…yes seven…copies of a single piece of paper. I didn’t quite understand his concerns until later in the day.

Any fool can make a rule/And any fool will mind it.

Later, while in my office, my own private office where I care for a few private patients, and yes, still wearing my shorts and shirt, I received an email from this individual, dressing me down for unprofessional dress. I was astounded. He relayed that I had a responsibility to present the proper image to the students and that in the future I should work to dress appropriately. No specific dress code was provided but instead some “suggestions” were offered that frankly, when adopted, strike me as exceedingly effeminate and most definitely impotent. Now mind you, I mean just for color here, what I was wearing, I have dined in during the summer at one of the fancier dining halls at West Point and several very nice country clubs over the years. I was not wearing boxers and a toga.

I avoided my natural inclination to reply that I would start wearing what he wanted me too when 1. He started doing his job by providing the educational materials that I needed to teach. 2. He stopped jumping to conclusions. 3. He could demonstrably prove that my dress had some bearing on the success or failure of physicians, and 4. When he learned to actually face me in person and not hide behind an email.

The reality is that this person is suffering from some very specific and deep-seated personal issues.

I have lost my patience for ignorance. The fact is that I have saved human lives and cared for suffering people while wearing gym shorts. My goodness! On one occasion I actually left the gate of my forward operating base and cared for a soldier who had been shot…while wearing nothing by flip flops and a pair of cargo shorts. When I arrived, the fashionably dressed medic was so shaken…al beit he had done a terrific job…that he couldn’t get an IV started. I started it just fine in spite of my shorts and flip flops.

Now you might detect a hint of cynicism in my voice. Well, it is there. I have absolutely no tolerance for stupidity and frankly, this PhD is delving into that realm. For whatever reason, he finds himself in a position where he thinks he knows a lot about what he is talking about, because, likely he read somewhere that if you wear a suit and tie people tend to listen to you and if you work out of a little office with a fancy sign on the door, people are somehow intimidated by that and will cower at your presence…

News Flash! I have been rocketed and mortared. Nobody with a PhD or degree short of GOD is ever going to intimidate me again. Especially some administrative apparatchik that has never come close to saving another human being’s life. This little nitwit actually had the gaul to tell me that he found dress to be very important in getting people to listen to you. Shazam! You know what I find is important in getting people to listen to me? Competence. The other day I spent about $15,000 launching a helicopter to save a person’s life and nobody asked me what I was wearing before they agreed to fly. Amazing isn’t it? My buddy with the mechanic’s shirt finds that his work speaks for itself as well.

Unfortunately, in the world of politics the reality of what I would like to say and what I actually say is quite different. Any kid raised on Wild Kingdom in the 70s will tell you that a good Wildebeest…Wildebeest rank right up there as one of the ugliest animals in the world, hence the analogy with my apparent fashion faux paus. I think that it is a good one…NEVER EVER strays from the heard. My goodness, if you didn’t figure that out after one season, be damn glad you live in the USA where stupidity is protected, because in any other part of the world, you would be a Darwin Award winner.

Little offices with signs on the wall protect the toothless lions of humanity who would have a hard time actually chasing down a Wildebeest, let alone killing one for real. But they are still a lion in appearance and even a Wildebeest packing heat, if he is a smart one, knows better to size up any lion long and hard before taking one on…even if the end result is a thorough session of kicking the shit out of that lion some day.

Did I just write that? For the record, “kicking the shit out of anyone” for this Wildebeest, while in the USA, means that I will find a way to put that lion in his place in a lawful and non-violent manner. If I meet the lion in Afghanistan, where the ROE is different, well then kicking the shit out of him will mean just that, but here it will mean something different. Let me illustrate.

Years ago, while I was just a heavily indebted medical student, and as such quite worried about ever being able to repay all that debt should I fail out of med school, I took a lot of verbal thrashing. More senior doctors seemed to relish the idea of giving me a hard time for the sake of just busting my chops. I am by nature very much like a well made nuke…you can hit me with a hammer, push me around, roll me all over the floor and drop me into the Mediterranean from 25,000 feet and I won’t go off, but at some point you will find the subtlety of my trigger and then, BOOOM!

Well this group of suit-wearing, Lexus driving morons up in Cleveland decided that I was their special project and in spite of the fact I had never failed anything in medical school, took a particular interest in the fact that I dress somewhat eccentrically. I admit that I would wear sweats and go sock-less to get to work, but that I would always change into appropriate scrubs as soon as I arrived. Well, to make too long a story, thankfully shorter, I was about a basket case by the end of a month of surgery rotations and could take no more. One day, within 2 days of being finished, the megalomaniac surgical resident decided to administer another verbal beating. I threw down my scrub brush, I walked right up to him and backed him into a wall and told him to get it all out because I was done. I had had my fill and if he didn’t want to get an ass-kicking, this had bettered be the end of the story.

It wasn’t two hours later that I was in the dean’s office, himself a portly, self-absorbed prig of a man…I won’t delve into my suspicions about the size of his genitals…being told what a screw-up I was and how he was basically going to personally see to it that I was remmediated or thrown out. Nice. No concern over abuse, no concern over mental duress, nothing, just that I was a screw up and he was going to wash me out.

Darkness fell over me. I was doomed. I was Linus in the Pumpkin Patch waiting in vain for the Great Pumpkin who would never come…

But then, providence arrived in the form of a very dear, if not curmudgeonly, surgeon who for whatever reason had a few years earlier asked me to assist him in surgery. I passed instruments in the middle of the night and he learned that I was competent and that in spite of an absolute hatred of neck ties and stupid suits, I had some marginal promise as a physician. It turns out that not only did he write all the final exams…which I might add that I passed without difficulty in spite of nobody else every having done so…but that he also sat on the selection board for fellowships, one of which was sought after by the little dipshit surgical resident that wanted to do some Marquis d’ Sade act on my backside.

In the end, the dear, now deceased, surgeon ‘took care of my problem’ and the resident got his and the dean was forced to choke out an apology for being and ignorant idiot. Actually, that is not true, he was forced to choke out an apology for not addressing some fundamental abuse issues. Like many unjust situations he ended up being the president of my professional society and continued having those absurdly self-indulgent photos taken at national meetings that speak volumes about the psychological overlays of the people in them.

Note to high profile people, the less photos the better; it makes you less of a target and if you are corpulent and suffer from shortness of breath, the last thing you need is to be an easily identifiable target.

Okay, so where was I?

I have been extremely blessed with a good mind. I have a doctoral degree. I have consistently earned and performed in the top of my peer group. I have been honored by the people who have entrusted their care to my hands. I have benefited from a tremendous education and I have been served well by my nation. I have risen at a young age to a high rank in the military and I am eternally indebted to my nation for the confidence that it has shown me in my small part defending our Constitution and land. I am by nature a man who is very humble and in full reality check about where I came from and who I am.

However, I have absolutely no tolerance, and with age I lose ever more, for stupidity and marginal idiots who think that they know something about reality because they read it in a book or wrote a thesis about it as a graduate student. Reality is reality. Reality is being covered in the blood of a young man in the middle of fucking nowhere in Iraq, knowing that he might well die and you are the only man who is going to get him back to his Grandma…I was wearing a dirty T-shirt when I saved his life…Reality is working faster than you ever have had too when a little kid comes in not breathing or some fellow arrives crumpled up in a ball in the back of a pickup truck with a broken neck...again I was covered in grime…

Reality is not some little office where one sits and looks at a wall full of I love me bullshit thinking that they know something about anything. Reality is dialogue with another person and getting to know them and not hiding behind some electronic firewall while you pull the strings of your empire. Robert the Bruce tried to do that and one night, and if one is to believe the movie Braveheart, he unfortunately awoke just in time to see William Wallace dropping a flail which smashed his head in like a 2 month old Pumpkin. That’s how it usually ends. Unfortunately, these toothless lions, don’t read the history and continue to live in little offices and laud their initials over wine and cheese in effete little soires filled with self-addulation. Sad, very sad.

Plato…likely Socrates, who was of course the first operational ‘PhD’ and lived reality right up to the point where Greek mid-level idiots forced him to put the hemlock to his lips…said that, “The life which is not examined is not worth living.” Plato didn’t live in a little office.

The doctors that have taught me the most about caring for patients and saving lives have actually been the most disenfranchised of the bunch. They are the ones who cared little about appearance and focused their energies on listening and reading and learning more about how to help people. At the end of the day, I find that there is an inverse relationship between how trussed up you are in terms of suits and ties and how well you can roll up your sleeves and get busy in the trenches. My students will learn and heaven help me that I teach them, not to channel some irrelevant bullshit about clothes into their students at the expense of solid medicine.

What’s the bottom line? I am a big f-ing Wildebeest but I know my place in the food chain. I will continue to graze dutifully and not get too far from the heard but in the midst of that grazing I am watching and learning. At some point, I might just find the right rhinocerous, another grazer, to strike up a chat with and that rhino might just decide that in spite of my wardrobe, I am a good ally. We’ll keep grazing, we’ll keep watching and learning and maybe never another issue will arise. But perhaps one day the toothless lion will stray from his little cave to try and hassle a little Wildebeest or something vulnerable. You know, try to strut his stuff. He will quickly learn that in a 360 degree world, a big roar and a lot of fur does little to defend against a pissed-off tank with a giant horn on his nose and a steamroller of an herbivore with razor sharp hooves.

I love a good and righteous fight.

In the end, it might just be that I am not suited for the academic world. Like most bureaucracies, the ones that regulate the private industry that pays the taxes to pay the wages of the idiots in offices that regulate the industries, these people may well have no room for me in their inn. My wife is sober in her suggestion that I just suck it up. The university is a good job, with good benefits and blah blah blah.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still inside them.

How can a man, a real man, live a life of sucking it up from a group of theoretical pencil necks who learn from someone else’s theoretical nonsense and in the end still feel that he led a full life…all for the sake of a medical insurance package? I would feel disingenuous if I had to spend a lifetime in a little office cubicle surrounded by other little apparatchiks who never accomplish anything other than printing out yet another colored paper memo about some bullshit dress code. Where is the glory…where is the honor in that? It is not what made America great and it is not what cares for the future.

So I will watch and wait. Find some low profile compromise that doesn’t make me look like some mid-level manager with cross-dressing tendencies but still satisfies the “slacks and air conditioning” crowd, and wait. If I get hired full time by the university then I have a little more power and a little less vulnerability, if I don’t, well, then I will send a carefully written letter to the head of the medical school, whom I respect very much, by the way, about why he has problems in his university and how some people are a little closed in their thinking.

And finally, I think it is time that I sent an anonymous gift in the form of Henry David Thoreau…whose quotes appear above in single lines worthy of their unique stature…to a certain toothless lion. He might learn something, or not…so hard are the heads of the dogmatic middle managers of the world at times…from this gentle and most impressive of American philosophers. It will most certainly not be that a good life is found in pointless memos and theoretical ideas born from hiding in small offices and wine and cheese gatherings.

Whew! I feel better now.