Quote:It is embarrassing to be lost. It is even more embarrassing for a leader to be lost. And what's really really embarrassing to all concerned is when national and transnational corporate leaders attempt to tackle a major disaster and are found out to have been issuing marching orders based on the wrong map. Everyone then executes a routine of turning toward each other in shock, frowning while shaking their heads slowly from side to side and looking away in disgust. After that, these leaders might as well limit their public pronouncements to the traditional "Milk, milk, lemonade, round the corner fudge is made." Whatever they say, the universal reaction becomes: "What leaders? We don't have any."

Getting lost can be traumatic for the rest of us too. When we suddenly realize that we don't know where we are, urgent neural messages are exchanged between our prefrontal cortex, which struggles to form a coherent picture of what's happening, our amygdala, whose job is to hold on to a sense of where we are, and our hippocampus, which motivates us to get back to a place we know as quickly as we possibly can. This strange bit of internal wiring explains why humans who are only slightly lost tend to trot off in a random direction and promptly become profoundly lost. After these immediate biochemical reactions have run their course, we go through the usual stages of:

1. denial—"We are not lost! The ski lodge is just over the next ridge, or the next, or the next..."
   
2. anger—"We are wasting time! Shut up and keep trotting!"
   
3. bargaining—"The map must be wrong; either that or someone has dynamited the giant boulder that should be right there..."
   
4. depression—"We'll never get there! We're all going to die out here!" and
   
5. acceptance—"We are not lost; we are right here, wherever it is. We better find some shelter and start a campfire before it gets dark and cold."
   

Some people don't survive, some do; the difference in outcome turns out to have precious little to do with skill or training, and everything to do with motivation—the desire to survive no matter how much pain and discomfort that involves—and the mental flexibility to adjust one's mental map on the fly to fit the new reality, and to reach stage 5 quickly. Those who go on attempting to operate based on an outdated mental map tend to die in utter bewilderment.

Quote:Gilligan Andrew, “Whitehall Gets Slick after BP,” The Sunday Coalitiongraph, 30 May 2010, p.3

A secret Whitehall subcommittee, named after some or other poisonous snake to convey the illusion of guile and deadly efficiency, has concluded its meetings on the full ramifications for Britain of BP’s ongoing travails in the Gulf of Mexico. Calling upon some of the finest minds in British diplomacy, spying and finance, the think-tank has produced a set of proposals for discussion by the full cabinet at some unspecified point this week, informed sources inform me via a plain brown envelope left with yesterday’s morning milk delivery.

Topping the agenda is the recommendation that the new government appoints, as a matter of urgency, a new ambassador to Washington where, it is widely agreed, a vigorous pounding for all things British is sure to follow. “We need a very special kind of diplomatist for these very special circumstances,” a senior Whitehall source said yesterday. “We need, in short, a most enormous arse to soak up the punishment and say precisely nothing. We believe we have just the man to begin the process of relubricating the wheels of Anglo-American comity.”

The arse in question

The man in question is believed to be Sir Denzil Tooth, the solicitor-general-turned-MP for Craven Cottage, as the Fulham constituency is affectionately known within Metropolitan police vice squad ranks. Tooth was forced to return to the back benches in Mrs Thatcher’s last cabinet following “a ghastly misunderstanding” in Soho’s infamous London Rubber Emporium, where he was accused of shoplifting while under the influence of excessive quantities of talc. His tired and emotional plea to the magistrate’s court – “I want the finest punishments known to humanity, I want them here, and I want them now!” – remains a favourite of the London legal circuit, several of whose members witnessed the entire shocking incident at first hand, albeit through a veil of pain, upside down, and a giant nappy, respectively.

Consigned to the back benches, Tooth dedicated himself anew to the three governing passions of his life: architecture, good food and the Church of England’s outreach initiative to the urban youth of Thailand. “I’m off to inspect a Bangkok erection” became a familiar refrain, as he dashed off, at short notice, to offer relief – and Otto’s Idea of the Holy – to his unofficial flock. This punishing schedule took its inevitable toll, according to colleagues, who soon noticed an alarming change in his appearance. “His entire torso and head disappeared among mounds of buttock fat,” one admirer explained. “He became a giant bottom.”

The human wedge

The challenge confronting HMG is a daunting one, another informed source informed me. “As 9/11 confirmed, the average Yank will believe anything and has the memory of gnat. But there are intelligent, unscrupulous types, mostly of the legal, political and financial varieties, who will use this little local difficulty to suggest, quite erroneously, that we have destroyed the Atlantic, and covered a lot of corpulent hicks in a thick, black rain of death. We need to drive a wedge between the gullible and the cynical. Tooth is a very large part of that wedge. What’s more, he’s as fat as they are, which must count for something.”

A second element to the subcommittee’s proposed strategy involves the BBC and the British Council. Speakers are to be selected and financed to tour the States, there to make provocative speeches in improbable places. It will be the BBC’s task to ignore these speeches in toto. Sir Reginald Pike-Darkness and Monsignor Maurice Gamp are believed to head the list of intellectual provocateurs designed to bring the boil of anti-British sentiment to a pussy head. “When it reaches a strained and swollen acne of anger, we shall lance it with the sword of sycophancy and a wad of cash,” explained the informed source. “But the eruption will take place in the backwoods, and no one who matters in New York or Washington will feel a thing. You see at once the strategy’s genius.”

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