Book Rant--Uh--Review

I love summer.  It’s all about the reading.  I just finished Lee Iacocca’s Where Have All the Leaders Gone?  For most of the folks who leave comments here, it’s preaching to the choir, but he sums things up so well, doesn’t pull any punches, hits every nail right on the head.  I wish I could get every conservative ideologue I know to read this book.  

This is what I loved about the book:  Iacocca is a businessman.  He likes money.  He knows how to make money.  He knows just how important capitalism is.  But he is not an ideologue.  He thinks for himself.  Of the twelve men who have occupied the oval office in his lifetime, he feels the best leaders were FDR, Truman, Reagan, and Clinton.  Interesting mix.  He raised money for George W. Bush’s campaign in 2000 and voted for Kerry in 2004.  As a man in the auto business, he pooh-poohed global warming, and in his book he publicly states that he was wrong.  This is a man who is not afraid to change his mind.  He reads, listens, bothers to be informed.

Where Have All the Leaders Gone? is smart, passionate, and nonpartisan.  On the one hand, he berates this nation’s leaders for ignoring the healthcare crisis, and on the other, he lets the unions have it for negotiating unrealistic compensation packages given the global nature of economics.  While he enjoys money and is proud of his success at Chrysler, he gives hell to greedy CEO’s who screw both their workers and their customers so they can have far more money than anyone needs.  (Oooh, is he pissed about what happened at Chrysler after he left, but he chose his successor and shoulders his part of the responsibility without flinching or blaming.)  He reminds the reader that before he asked the workers at Chrysler to make concessions, he agreed to take a salary of $1 a year, taking his real compensation in stocks.  That way, he had to actually be effective if he was going to make any money.  And oh boy, you should hear what he has to say about CEO’s who sell out and leave everyone else up a creek.

Of course, the thing I think is most important is how he ruthlessly and systematically shows that no one with a brain and/or a conscience should be able to tolerate the present state of politics in this nation right now, and he gives no quarter to either political party.  There were times as I was reading that I wanted to stand up and shout, “Preach, it brother!”

Sigh.  But he’s not running for president, nor is anyone like him.  My DH was just talking about the fact that Obama is losing more and more of his appeal as he allows his handlers to tell him how to be more political.  I don’t want a friggin’ politician!  I’ve had enough of those.  I want a damned statesman!  I don’t care what his or her religion is; I don’t even want to know.  I don’t care what party the person is from.  No party at all would be lovely.  I don’t want to be told what I want to hear.  I want to be told the truth.  

Lee Iacocca doesn’t just bitch about the major crises facing us: healthcare, Iraq, immigration, unemployment, education, global economic competitiveness, all that stuff.  He offers solutions—ones that are logical, well-thought-out, and simple (though definitely not easy—it’s gonna take every one of us working together).  Well, I’m ready to do the work for the first statesman who asks me to.  Sure, I’ll pay more at the pump to develop alternatives to our foreign oil dependence.  I’ll help pay the bill to make sure everyone has basic healthcare.  I already shell out exorbitant insurance premiums to pay skyrocketing medical costs, some of which cover emergency room fees for the indigent, anyway.  Sadly, an even bigger chunk of my premiums are for big salaries for insurance company CEO’s and marketing.  If I’m going to have to cough up the money, it might as well be spent efficiently.  What I am not happy about doing is borrowing money from other nations to pay for tax cuts, and I am really pissed off about my colleagues and I pouring our hearts and souls into educating teenagers so that Bush can toss them onto IED’s rather than admit that he lied and he screwed up and he’s created a mess he can’t begin to clean up no matter how many more of the kids we’ve invested ourselves in he sends into that meat grinder…gasp!

OK.  When I’m typing a sentence that rivals Hawthorne or Dickens in length and I have to gasp for air at the end of it, I’m getting a little too worked up for my own good.  (It says something, though, that my grammar check didn’t take me to task for the length.  I think it agrees.)  Then again, maybe I should get worked up to this point—daily.  Maybe everyone should.  Maybe then we’d flat-out demand that the 2008 hopefuls stop pussyfooting around and tell us what they hell they stand for and what the hell they will do if we entrust them with the highest office in our land.

Um…and read Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

tags: where have all the leaders gone  lee iacocca  politics  healthcare  iraq  education  economics  immigration  unemployment  ideologues