Delivered at a head-spinning pace, “Ya Got Trouble” seems like it could have only emerged out of the righteous precincts of mid-century America.
An article in last Wednesday’s New York Times reported that the Broadway show Beetlejuice will be evicted from the Winter Garden Theater in June to make way for a revival of The Music Man. Apparently, the producers of the weird and ghoulish Beetlejuice feel like they cannot move the expensive sets and still recover their $21 million in costs. And it’s not certain any theater is actually available. The owner of the Winter Garden believes a splashy Music Man will be a bigger draw.
There’s nothing especially wrong with Meredith Wilson’s hopelessly square but entertaining musical. It is an antique built on a familiar kind of middle American monoculture. Robert Preston did his best to breathe life into a long Broadway run and the successful 1962 film.
But I have a compromise that should please everyone. Simply merge the shows.
There’s no reason the two casts and a few script doctors can’t come up with a new production that combines the best of both. The Music Beetle, perhaps. Or maybe Beetleman. The combined show would probably be a little more hip and a lot of more fun.
Problem solved.
As you can see, I’m good with titles. It’s what follows that’s hard.
There is actually a point to all this. Taken as a whole, The Music Man is full of perhaps too many trombones and more four-part harmony than might be good for a person. But it does offer one song that’s destined for the ages. Wilson hit a rich vein of Americana with the rapid-fire ‘patter’ song, “Ya Got Trouble.” Wilson’s home of Mason City Iowa was a pretty tranquil place. But at least he knew how people loved to parade their righteousness. It’s a perfect evocation of an American hustler in full flight: filled with trumped up worries that would excite the fantasies of folks in the play’s fictitious River City. Delivered at a head-spinning pace, “Ya Got Trouble” seems like it could have only been sung and believed in small-town mid-century America. The fun of the song is that Americans know a lot about pitches for things that are probably more evocative than true. Peddling fear can also be profitable. It’s a perfect representation of the sell-at-any-cost spirit that helped build the country.
I’m thinkin’ of the kids in the knickerbockers Shirt-tail young ones, peekin’ in the pool Hall window after school, ya got trouble, folks!
The popular historian Daniel Boorstin wrote a great deal about hustlers in America who were constantly on the make (The Americans: the Democratic Experience, 1974). He was right to note that it was a particular American type. Many went on to be innovators or builders of business empires. Others were charlatans. Surely the contestants on CNBC’s Shark Tank are heirs to this tradition. So, I fear, is our President.
Congress is the best example of the price we can pay when the rewards of public performance are greater than those of private negotiation.
Most Americans continue to focus on the broken Presidency. Even so, no one looking for a model of governmental efficiency would get much comfort from a good look at the American Congress. Its twin failures to produce effective public policy and work with the President offer cautionary truths about how not to communicate to produce effective action.
The impeachment process is an aberration, if a necessary one. But the bipartisanship that characterized the Nixon impeachment is missing. It’s also true that this President does not think of himself as a true partner with the Congress. That’s obvious now, but even in prior years he showed little interest in helping to shape legislation.
All these caveats don’t fully explain why the two deliberative bodies within the Capitol are examples that no country wants to emulate. And there are a few more. There is some cooperation at the staff level, and examples of effective bi-partisan cooperation are occasionally on display, as with the passage of several jobs and tax bills in 2012 and 2015, and in recent bipartisan condemnation of the President’s withdrawal of support for the Kurds in Syria. But the oft-heard cliche is now true: Congress is a broken institution with public approval ratings to match.
While this branch of the federal establishment was not designed to work with the efficiency of a parliament, where a head of government is chosen from the party that wins a plurality of seats, congressional dysfunction now leaves so much on the table that needs to be addressed: everything from immigration reform to timely allocations of funds for infrastructure improvements. We knew this institution was in deep trouble recently when in 2013 a sizable number of members were ready to risk a government default and the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency: all for the purpose of pressing a dubious ideological point.
Members note that they no longer the case that they socialize after work or even share a meal while in session.
What’s wrong? What best practices for communicating in organizations are routinely ignored? Briefly, some of the overwhelming problems on Capitol Hill have their origins in two ineffective communication patterns.
The first is that the body is obviously and hopelessly organized into factions—notably parties, special interest caucuses, and their media—making it likely that members will only work in groups rather than as a whole. Since most of the process of legislating is done away from the floors of the House and Senate, it falls to party leaders, whips and members to work out in private and with their own caucuses what they will accept by way of a legislative agenda. Differences of opinion have fewer chances to be moderated in environments that would encourage conciliation. The founders feared this hyper partisanship for good reason. Indeed, Senate Leader Mitch McConnell moves so cautiously in his narrow partisan lane that it can be hard to tell if his image on a screen is a still photo or video.
This problem is compounded by a long tradition of individual offices set up as separate fiefdoms and spread over four buildings on the east side of the capitol. One wonders how different legislative life would be if the 100 members of the Senate worked in the conditions known to most of white-collar America: in the same ‘cubicle farm’ spread over one floor. Support staffs who enable the isolation of members could be moved to lower floors. This would encourage more discussion across party lines and more functional coalition-building.
A second problem is the changing character of those seeking high public office. In the age of the internet and 24-hour news there seems to be more interest in the expressive possibilities of serving in public office than actually doing the work of governing. The requirements to continually raise campaign funds and screen time are all-consuming.
In the lore of Congress there has always been an expectation that the “show horses” would sometimes win out over the “work horses.” A retired Lyndon Johnson once complained to a CBS producer about the “pretty boys” created by the growth of television. The former Senate Majority leader’s point was that visual media gave rise to a new breed of members more interested in the theater of politics than finding ways to bridge differences.
Congress is simply the best example of the price we can pay when the rewards of public performance are greater than those of private negotiation. So it offers some cautionary reminders to the rest of us working in complex bureaucracies. First, we can’t afford to isolate ourselves from others we expect to sign on to our initiatives. Leading effectively still means using communication to build and sustain relations with those who have different views. In addition, since its a solid axiom that we more easily find comity in small groups, trying to forge leadership from large bodies needs to be seen for the problem it frequently is: the organizational equivalent of trying to get even a few dozen college professors to form a single straight line.
