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(This continues a story I started telling in April, 2003, about how I spent a college summer in Reynosa, Mexico helping a well-organized church program build houses. And about our contact there, Rommel Kott. And, eventually, how I got a big dent in my left leg.)

Rommel Kott was, single-handedly, the person who transformed the World Servants experience for me from a staid church-camp summer into a cross between Fear and Loathing and Heart of Darkness. With some Eurythmics Missionary Man thrown in. Though he was born and raised in Reynosa, Rommel was ash-blond, with blue eyes. He was also dating the mayor’s daughter. In the States, that might get you occasional seats at a Kiwanis banquet. In Mexico, that’s more like having control of your own sector of postwar Vienna.

Rommel used his connections to kit us out with portable CB radios that were connected with a central repeater and a cellphone patch. This was 1991, and cellphones still had shoulder straps. Our tiny Yaesu radios had an effective range of five miles, and let us place TELEHPONE CALLS. When we went to the mall in Brownsville, Texas, the security guards came up to me and asked, very respectfully, if I was there in “an official capacity.” Apparently, these radios were Strong Juju, a powerful totem in the land of the paramilitary.

World Servants was so loved down there that the rental agencies gave us maximum upgrades, too — so the head of the project down there paid for a Plymouth Horizon for the summer, but was issued a convertible Datsun 280Z instead. So there we were, wearing our green World Servants T-shirts, driving our hot-rod cars, and carrying some kind of License to Kill CB radios with tiny batteries. “It’s a new day in missions!”, we’d laugh before zooming off to go pick up more roofing nails to put in the trunk of the Z. We were probably insufferable, but it was a hell of a good time feeling like we were the Good Guys, with all the Bad Guy trappings. And good tans.

Now, as mentioned before, at the beginning of each week we’d be bringing tens of thousands of dollars of donated construction materials across the border to build houses. This means that you either have to wade through mountains of red tape and bureacracy, or you bring Rommel along to assure the federales at the border that Everything is Cool. So we’d load the pre-cut lumber into a red, rusty tractor-trailer driven by a laconic man in a cowboy hat named Elvis (pronounced “el-WEESE”), and then Rommel and I would follow it to the border. The federales would come out, resplendent in epaulets, bristly mustaches, braces of pearl-handled pistols (I’m not making this up), and Rommel would hop out and shake a few hands, and in we’d go.

Rommel was our liaison because he was involved with the family relief agency in Reynosa, named DIF. One of his many jobs for DIF (besides getting us waved across the border) was to collect the winnings from the palatial cockfight ring in Reynosa, and then escort them home to make sure they were deposited properly. When the cockfights were on the night before our border crossing, I’d stay at his family’s walled compound the night before, ostensibly to make sure that we got to the border at the same time as the lumber the next day.

The cockfight ring — the palenque — in Reynosa was indescribably awesome, assuming that you can get past the whole chicken deathmatch thing. For one thing, everyone was beautifully dressed. Imagine a huge concentric tier of scaffolding and sawdust, covered with a splintery wooden roof, inhabited by a luminous crowd of beatiful women in spotless clothes and their dates wearing natty, well-cut suits. I mean, you could have filmed a dozen Thin Man movies using extras straight out of that place. There’d be five or ten fights, then fresh sawdust would be spread on the blood-spattered ring, and more beautiful women would come out and dance and sing for intermission. Gorgeous costumes! Exposed midriffs! Tight choreography! The mixture of sex, death, and high production values was dizzying, especially when Rommel took me to a smoke-filled back room where a burly man in a black suit and a green eyeshade (again, I am not making this up) was counting tall stacks of paper money. He asked Rommel in Spanish if I was CIA, and Rommel told him no, that I was a priest. The man blinked, stood up, and shook my hand, then caused a beer to be handed to me.

Given that I was a nineteen-year-old with a long ponytail wearing a black frog-button kung-fu shirt, I think that probably seemed pretty improbable, but given the atmosphere (and six or seven Modelo beers in steel cans), it seemed perfectly natural that they would assume that I was some kind of kung fu assassin for the CIA. Or the Vatican. Hey, I had the radio for it, didn’t I?

(More to come)

In fifth grade at Westtown school, we were assigned “artist reports”; a ten page(!), illustrated biography of an artist we admired. To a fifth-grader, ten pages is a dissertation, a monumental scholarly work that consumed the whole second half of the year, so we selected our subjects pretty carefully.

I picked Norman Rockwell. Partly, I think, because I had come across something snotty in a World Book (O, pinnacle of academic scholarship! O, font of wisdom!) entry about how many considered Norman Rockwell not a Real Artist because he sometimes used photographic techniques, projecting an image onto a canvas and using that as a template. I was indignant: look at the command of the brush! Look at the work that went into the detail of each wood-paneled doctor’s office! Damn it, that mastery of craft and that attention to detail was ART, and I was going to write an artist report about him to put him next to Van Gogh and Kandinsky and Manet and other artists that didn’t need a championing in TEN WHOLE PAGES of carefully prepared erasable pen.

Looking back, I realize that the more salient criticism may have been that Norman Rockwell was mostly an illustrator, rather than an artist, and that being simple and popular (and, especially, funny) is anathema to serious critical success. This is a serious error that people make all the time. With Pascal and G.K. Chesterton, I think that most things worth knowing in life are not the things that come with lots of frowning, brain-wrinkling mental calisthenics. Life does indeed require a hell of a lot of effort, not the kind of Important Effort that we usually spend time attributing gravity to. From Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy“:

“Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”

You see that last bit on (wood-paneled) doctors’ office walls, sometimes. Chesterton also had a lot to say on the subject of such difficult and non-serious subjects like why a pompous man sitting on his hat is funny and reminding alarmist Victorians that just because the errand-boy is reading “The Red Revenge”, it’s unlikely that he’s really dripping with the gore of his own friends and relatives. That essay, A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls, is one of my favorite historical essays to point to when people get hysterical about television or game violence. That’s an old, old argument.

Okay, returning to the point once again, I think that we tend to take the wrong things in life seriously, and think that the easy bits are the hard ones. Love is easy (which is the staggering, amazing wonderful thing about love); the daily activity of showing love is hard. Faith is easy; works are hard (nb: I’m an atheist now, in case it matters.) Getting told what to do, then doing it? Easy. Making sweeping strategic decisions? Easy.

Middle management? Hard.

Now, don’t get me wrong — I don’t think work is easy. Work is, well, work, and just in case any of the members of my team is reading this, you do a great job of it: cheerful, speedy, competent, efficient execution. What I’m talking about is the fact that the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ACTIVITY OF BUSINESSES EVERYWHERE AROUND THE WORLD seems to get trivialized: the act of figuring out what the hell needs to get done next, who the hell is going to do it, whether they understand what you asked them to do, how long it’s gonna take them, whether they’re on schedule, whether they’re done, whether they did what you asked them to, and what the hell to do next. In other words, middle management, and that’s the hardest work that people who work for me do. I guess I started to learn this building houses in Mexico, where we had thousands of cheerful, energetic, and completely clueless high-school students on hand. Move ten thousand pounds of lumber? Easy. Figure out where to put it? Harder. Keep all thousand smiling Southern Baptist teenagers busy at the same time? Very hard. I learned another piece of it in the days after September 11, 2001, in Manhattan, when I got to see first-hand how the Red Cross ministered to volunteers by putting them through emergency training sessions, even though doing so was a net drain on resources — there was nothing useful that a thousand raw volunteers could do except feel better that they were doing something, and that’s the service the Red Coss provided to them.

Monster.com’s 1999 Superbowl ad featured kids talking about what they wanted to do when they grew up: “I want to claw my way up into middle management!” At the time, I shuddered. Because I was a programmer (well, a coder), and I thought that middle managers were the useless buffoons who wore short-sleeved dress shirts, polyester sansabelt slacks, and drove uninteresting cars. Now, I know the truth: middle managers are the incredibly useful buffoons who wear short-sleeved dress shirts, polyester sansabelt slacks, and drive uninteresting cars. (Actually, that’s not quite true: fully 66% of the people who have ever worked for me have been, at some point, involved in a punk-rock band, and two people on my team right now have one-letter names; letters down towards the end of the alphabet, which makes us sound like a dangerous, nerdy spy organization. Which we are, you know.)

So, what’s my point? Now that I’m in upper-middle management, a hugely important part of my job is trying to convince the folks that work for me — emerging managers — not just that their job is useful (it’s pretty immediately apparent that somebody who actually, you know, knows what the schedule is supposed to be is a VIP), but that middle management is a kind of holy, life-affirming activity that spreads joy and peace, and lets everyone go home on time so that they can do the fun, easy things in life (like love) and the fun, hard things in life (like buy groceries for the baby and wash the kitchen floor and try to make intelligent conversation) and that middle management is so hard because it’s so important, and that what I anxiously scan resumes for these days is the unwritten message “brings order from chaos; brings understanding from confusion; brings lovely, completed objects from a churning sea of uncertainty.” Damn it, THAT’S the middle manager’s job description.

And it’s, you know… hard.