AUDIENCE RECOGNITION: KNOW THE ROOM

Albert Einstein had audience recognition with his letter in 1939.

His audience?

Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States.

He knew the room.

It was one person.

 

F.D. Roosevelt,
President of the United States,
White House
Washington, D.C.

Sir:

Some recent work by B.Perni and I. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uran- iun may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the im- mediate future.

Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration.

I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:

 

He closed with this:

 

I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over.

That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsücker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin where some of the
American work on uranium is now being repeated.
Yours very truly,
* osuntein
(Albert Einstein)

 

With his letter, Einstein kicked off the Manhattan Project, which led to the nuclear age, and the hopes and wishes of every alert person on earth that atomic weapons would never be used again.

Fingers crossed here on boomerpdx.

 

We’re All Part Of Einstein’s Audience

If these guys do their jobs no one gets nuked.

They are the audience for a twitchy man talking about toughness, readiness, loyalty, and other topics these guys embody, which the speaker doesn’t.

Broadcasting on television puts us in the audience for twitchy’s dance stepping pep-talk for men and women who give orders, sign orders, and give junior officers the pep to get it done.

The man on stage is a former junior officer reborn as a motivational speaker charged with understanding world situations, what to do, and how to do it.

Could be a tough room.

 

Part of Army bootcamp training in 1974 was getting captured in the woods at night and force-marched to prison camp. Then trying to escape.

So far, so good.

Four of us snuck out into the night, just before the sirens sounded and firing flares hanging from swinging parachutes distorted tree shadows into moving objects.

We ran and ran under the canopy of tree tops, hiding in bushes with each flare in the air.

After ten minutes out one guy sat on a log that jumped up and ran away. It spooked everyone. Did it really happen?

Later that night, with everyone sitting on the ground back at prison camp, the company captain stood up in his tiger stripes and paint and asked, “Which one of you sat on me out there?”

How you would answer, or not answer, defines character.

 

Your Unknown Audience Recognition

Like any normal baby boomer blogger I enjoy imparting the wisdom of the ages for the rising generations who may see troubling images they don’t understand.

Add older generations who forgot, and my own generation who choose alternate facts based on doing their own research.

In general, we see a group hanging, a collective execution.

Everyone is wearing coats and shoes, which tells us something.

Compositionally, the photographer chose a particular angle running down the horizontal center of the image. The guys are front and center.

With that said, who are they?

With their matching military-styled tunics, or overcoats, we can guess the hanged men had been following orders from their leader, who lost his job and got replaced by their opponent, who didn’t like the orders they’d been following

With the audience in the far background behind a fence, I get a sense of death camp and these people were in charge.

If you feel following orders may get you in trouble, don’t do it.

The hanged men could not be equally deserving. Some had to be worse than others, but you can’t hang a guy twice.

How did it work out at the end of the day?

That depends on the drop. Long drop for a quick snap of death; short drop for fifteen minutes of kicking and clawing.

Either way, if it were you, if you got drafted into the service of evil, but you were not evil, you still get the rope.

Know your audience.

 

PS:

One day you sit in court confident of your case.

“Following orders. I was following orders. Nothing more than my duty as a soldier.”

“Befehle befolgen. Ich habe Befehle befolgt. Nichts weiter als meine Pflicht als Soldat.”

 

PSS:

Part of the drill is being a good listener and paraphrasing an order back for confirmation.

At My Lai: Sir, you want me to empty my weapon into a ditch full of people. Sir, that is an illegal order and I cannot follow it.

By 1974 we learned to not follow illegal orders by repeating them back.

Drill Sergeant: Some motherfucking butter-bar bitch cannot put you in that situation. Those people will be haunted by their compliance instead of manning the fuck up and showing they had not been trained by some ass-kissing suck-up humping a leg for a promotion he can strut to his new daddy.

Pull that trigger on those people and the sound will echo in you the rest of your life. It might be the last sound you hear when year after year guilt stacks up in the part of your brain you tried to forget about.

 

Practice audience recognition when you’re in front of the room, and when you’re in the middle.

Every call to action isn’t for you, so don’t follow illegal orders.

Don’t do that.

See you tomorrow.