Let's not be average

What the hey! Contentious Introvert has become a dumping ground for any piece of prose that I've cobbled together at some point along the way. Ergo, I've pasted in, below, the FULL TEXT of an essay written for the Augsburg Echo, our local campus newspaper. I emphasize "full text." In their effort to make this piece fit into exactly two columns of newsprint, the editors decided to axe a few phrases and sentences--most notably, they didn't print the quotation that OPENS the piece! So, when reading it in the student newspaper, there's a reference to that quotation in the first paragraph--but there ain't no quotation! Some people must have thought that I was a little loopy--who is "Ledru-Rollin," they must have wondered. At least here, on my own blog, I can make sure that the 2 or 3 people who read this in the next 20 years will at least have the correct version. Ah, the sweet smell? taste? of vindication.

"LET'S NOT BE AVERAGE"

David Lapakko
Dept. of Communication Studies

“There go the people. I must follow them for I am their leader.” - Alexandre Ledru-Rollin

Contrary to popular belief, leadership is not all that it is cracked up to be. Yes, it has its perks, but the life of a leader can be both lonely and frustrating. It’s lonely because you can feel that no one understands you, yet you are responsible for things, and people think that you can make even more things happen because “you’re in charge.” And it’s frustrating because leaders are not as powerful as they would like to be; as Ledru-Rollin indicates, often you can only take people as far as they are willing to go. (I might like to assign six books and eight major papers in each of my courses, but that simply wouldn’t fly!)

Enter President Pribbenow. I don’t know that he feels especially lonely, but I’m sure he can feel the limits to his power. Heading up any organization is a bit like piloting a giant iceberg—you hope to nudge it a bit in the right direction, but the iceberg can be very obstinate. Yet in the midst of all this, people must try to lead. In that sense, I do not envy our President; he has a job that is inherently challenging.

Part of leadership is providing a vision, a mission, a set of goals. In a March “all hands” meeting held in the chapel, President Pribbenow tried to lay out such a vision. It was perhaps a bit much to process in a mere 30 minutes, but his PowerPoint presentation tried very hard to explain where the college is and where he wants it to be many years from now.

However, the President’s audience was not necessarily fixated on what the campus might look like in the year 2020; it’s probably good that it was on his mind, but it wasn’t on theirs. The concerns of faculty and staff are at the moment much more immediate. People have lost their jobs. Other people worry that they might lose theirs. Others sense that the “corporate” mindset has so overtaken more humane approaches to organizing that Augsburg will never be the same. And for a college that should be celebrating “abundance” (a popular word these days), it’s not clear how we are going to find enough money to construct a new science building, much less all the other buildings that are dreamt about in the future. These are the concerns of people on campus right here and now.

In his presentation, the President made more than one reference to his vision that Augsburg should be “nimble and entrepreneurial.” Don’t get me wrong, nimble is good. Entrepreneurial is good. But this is modern corporate business lingo; it’s not geared toward human relations. I can assure you that no one who feels happy and proud to work at Augsburg is going to say, “I love my job because we are so nimble and entrepreneurial.”

To his credit, the President does seem to realize that there are some fairly normal and inevitable tensions on campus, and disagreements about certain decisions—most notably, the decision to keep the college open between Christmas and New Year’s. And, he claims to be hearing and even listening to these concerns. The problem, however, is that listening can seem a little hollow if you aren’t prepared to do something meaningful in response. Near as I can tell, the President’s stance seems to be, “I am listening to you, and I respect your concerns, but I disagree with you, and so that’s that.”

In the case of our staff people, I believe that the President missed a great opportunity to score a few precious points. If he had started the March all-hands meeting with an announcement that he had re-considered the decision to keep the college open the last week of December, many might have felt even a bit triumphant. Symbolically, such a move would say to them, “I really do listen, and I really do care, and I am even willing to tacitly concede that I didn’t make the most appropriate decision.” In the end, no member of any community wants or expects their leaders to be perfect. What they expect—especially at a small Christian school where “caritas” is supposed to be more than a funny Latin word—is a culture and a climate that truly supports and celebrates the people who are here. “Nimble” and “entrepreneurial” can’t be the rallying cry, even if they are both virtues from a corporate perspective.

For me, what can and does make Augsburg special has nothing to do with being entrepreneurial. It may seem inconsequential, but I feel most proud of this place when I consider the individual people who are here. For example, as many of us know, there is a gregarious fellow who eats in the dining commons every day but is neither a student nor an employee; that he is welcome here makes me proud. Among our students is a woman who was actually willing to donate a portion of her liver to a total stranger; that makes me proud. In our copy center is a woman who will perform amazing 55-word stories for you on command; I’m proud to know her, too. In the end, it all comes down to people--not blueprints, floor plans, or an array of PowerPoint slides.

The modern organizational world—including Augsburg’s--is quite friendly on a superficial level, but underneath it all is a sort of dehumanization and dysfunction that can be so suppressed that we hardly realize it is there. Rather than trying to merely reflect the standard practices of the corporate world, Augsburg, as an educational institution grounded in the liberal arts and the Christian church, has the opportunity to create an organizational culture and climate that can rise above the rest. What we want is for people to feel privileged to even be in this environment—to feel that they are the luckiest employees on the planet. That’s a lofty goal, but one that is worth pursuing, right along with tons of money to build the new science building; the two goals are not necessarily incompatible.

I would also remind the President that when it comes to “human resources,” we have a lot of them on this campus, and they can potentially be very helpful to him and to the college. We have our Enormous Cash Cow, the Department of Business Administration, staffed with many people who have considerable business acumen. We have an MBA program and an MAL program that prepare graduate students for leadership in the 21st century; people on this campus teach about leadership and management every single day. And (dare I say it?) we have a Department of Communication Studies that devotes itself to the construction and interpretation of symbols and messages, whether those messages are one-to-one, one-to-many, verbal or nonverbal, written, oral, or electronic. Although many on campus already feel burdened in their work, they would also be flattered to be invited to come to the table and share their perspectives on issues facing the college. Obviously, nobody has all the answers, nor even necessarily the same answers, but we have helpful resources right here on campus.

Leadership is seldom easy. Augsburg’s leadership over the years has hardly been inept or mean-spirited. But now and in the past, I am keenly aware of what is possible, and I don’t want the college to settle for what’s “normal.” If you want to talk “vocation,” one part of our vocation should be to feel a calling to transform our world of work and let that transformation be a model for others to admire and to emulate.

STILL raising your body's light vibration!

Since my colleague Kristen Chamberlain (of "Showering With Sharks" blog fame) is writing about food these days, I thought I'd follow her lead--although all of this may fall into the "more than you really want to know" category!

For 16 months in the late '70s (Kristen was not yet even a gleam in her mom and dad's eyes at that time), I lived in Venice, California, a half-block off of the Pacific and an amazing display of humanity on parade. While in L.A., I dined at a "natural foods" restaurant in the Topanga area, which is not far from Malibu and resonates with "new age/hippie" vibes. The establishment was called The Inn of the Seventh Ray. The menu was so pretentious and bizarre that I took one home with me, wrote an article about the place, mailed it to the (then) Minneapolis Tribune--and lo and behold, they published it in the food section of the paper on October 19, 1978. (I even got 30 whole bucks for that piece!) Included above the article was a cartoon by a staff artist--it showed two of the Inn's patrons floating away from their table; they are both almost out of the frame. One says to the other, "Quick John! Spit out that artichoke and grab a leg of lamb!" (Why, you ask? Keep reading!) Here's the Tribune article in its entirety:

MYSTICAL L.A. RESTAURANT EMPHASIZES 'LIGHT VIBRATION'

By David Lapakko

"We at the Inn of the Seventh Ray believe in giving you the purest of nature's energized foods--with a dash of esoteric food knowledge thrown in to raise your body's light vibration."

So begins the menu at a Topanga natural foods restaurant, where the New Era of Food Consciousness seems to have advanced to a stage of mundane earnestness befitting southern California.

The Topanga area, on the western edge of Los Angeles, is known for its devotion to the mystical. The night of my visit, a bookstore nearby featured an autograph session with a distinguished but obscure author who possessed nothing less than heavy karma. His trip? Praying with two loved ones in a triangular formation, which releases simply magical energies. "Wow--this stuff is really advanced!" someone marveled while flipping through the pages of his latest work.

Eating in Topanga has become really advanced, too, as the Inn of the Seventh Ray testifies. The menu tells us that "the lightest and least dense foods are listed in order of their esoteric vibrational value for your experimentation." The meaning of that sentence, despite a fairly rigorous five years at Macalester College in St. Paul, still eludes me. But then, Topanga deals in more than mere education: "Awareness" seems to be "what's really happening."

I was able to surmise, however, that vegetables are less dense than meats, for they are listed first on the Inn's menu. "Five Secret Rays," at the top, are vegies from the Inn's "master steamer." "Artichoke Queen of Light," the next entree, verges on the gastronomically sublime: It is "a green crown of starry organic gems with the center removed and replaced with a culinary masterpiece of white fire tofu and sesame seed filling laced with ginger and sprinkled with the freshest of chives--very high and light."

The "Gold Chalice," next on the bill of fare, raised my food consciousness to the pinnacle of nirvana: "a cup of acorn squah filled to the lip with Saint Germain's own alchemy-blend of the freshest of herb stuffing with an unusual base of millet and steamed in our master's own steamer to an exact alchemical formula for transmutation into gold energy."

Believe me--I wish I were only making all this up.

I finally settled for the "Om-ri-tas," largely because it came "direct from the violet planet, a spaceship of nature's perfect vessel." This translated to half an eggplant stuffed with olives, nuts, and "unusual cheeses," which were all carefully married in a white wine sauce--"for your transportation."

The next morning, I discovered that the "Om-ri-tas" was not so carefully married to my gastrointestinal tract.

Prices at the Inn are not out of line for Los Angeles, in other words, occasionally higher than the Twin Cities. But if my wallet stood in the way, the management offered this consolation: "It will cost slightly more, but we believe in the long run it will be much less expensive and your body will work more efficiently and we hope your consciousness will become awakened."

Altogether, the Inn of the Seventh Ray makes Minneapolis' Prashad Kitchen (3515 W. 44th St.) seem like just another branch of Mickey's Diner.

But that is because no place can compete with the Inn when it comes to cosmic food awareness. As the front of the menu proclaims: "Dining creekside in old Topanga next to the mother flow of water at the Inn of the Seventh Ray is a unique and different experience. We want you to rest unhurried and soak up Saint Germain's violet ray, and to experience a timelessness of what can be the coming culture of the Golden Age."

Now that's dining experience too heavy for words.

David Lapakko is a free-lance writer from Los Angeles.

End of story, right? No way, Jose. Just tonight it occurred to me: whatever happened to the Inn of the Seventh Ray? I was there almost 30 years ago! Surely this place must have bitten the cosmic dust by now, somehow vibrating itself into oblivion. So, I went to yahoo search and discovered that the Inn is still around, with all of its charm! Whoda thunk it? Not only that, but when I went to the Inn's website (yes, everybody has a website these days), I found the following information (emphasis added):

"The property was discovered by the present owners and restored to it’s [sic] natural beauty, Over the passing years the restaurant has become known as one of the places to go. We, at the Inn, believe in giving you the purest of Nature’s foods, energized as a gift from the sun with a dash of esoteric food knowledge and ancient mystery school wisdom tossed in for your seasoning and pleasure. It may just raise your body’s light vibration and the extra work may cost you a few pennies more, but we believe in the long run, this way of living and eating may prove less expensive. Your body elemental, that selfless, shy, invisible little fellow who works so hard to keep the oft mistreated human machine going, will jump with joy for your choice of this eating establishment. He prays and hopes you will return soon to make this a pleasant ritual with each return being a new celebration in honor of taking a small step on the path of good dinning [sic] and good doing." [sic, sic, sick!]

Yes, some things have changed there. The photos on the website make it look a little more "upscale" than I remember. And they're serving some new entrees, such as "Handcrafted Vegan Mascarpone Ravioli," "Black Trumpet Dusted Ahi Tuna" (didn't know trumpets could even DO that!), and "Pomegranate Lacquered Muscovy Duck Breast." Suffice it to say that this place is still out of my league; I may never achieve the state of enlightenment that would enable me to eat there on a regular basis. But nonetheless, it all brought back fond memories.