I saw the film An Inconvenient Truth this weekend--the film that features Al Gore's moving presentation on Global Warming. His reasoned case is the most powerful I've seen; so rarely am I so moved by the urgency of a plea--not even the weepy Sally Struthers could get me to immediately ask the question, "How can I help?"
Several things struck me about this film. One was the comprehensiveness of Gore's arguments. He approached Global Warming from the standpoint of its many myriad effects--the new, shrunken global landscape of earth with a 20-foot sea-level increase and the proliferation of diseases developing from shifting ecosystems, to name a few. Much of his research was backed by his own investigation. He attended several of the expeditions, studied under an environmental science pioneer, and put his own feelers out to determine the veracity or underlying assumptions behind several arguments. Most importantly, he provided more than political diatribes that the public has learned to shut off. He leveraged his humility, humor, and passion to scare, then inspire and mobilize, the public.
I am convinced he could never have done this in office. And herein lies the paradox of leadership.
After watching the movie in its entirety, to the very last film credit, I turned to my pal,
Britt, who'd seen the film with me, and said, "I never knew that Al Gore was so passionate about the environment!" I'm one of the many who only think about politics during major elections and who read about punctuated periods of politicians' lives, like when they pass bills or run for office. I voted for Al Gore because I'm a Democrat, not for any deeper-seated reason, like because I aligned with his personal values, economic policy, or thought he was a particularly appealing person. I bought into the image the media had created for him, that of a somewhat soul-less, overly intellectual type that sacrificed human connection for his arcane curiosity and desire to win.
I was sad when Gore lost the election in 2000, but now I'm not sad at all. He's been freed to pursue his political destiny on a level that will allow him to achieve his goal. On this level I was shivering in an overheated theater I felt his message so viscerally.
The film made clear that, throughout his political career, Gore had been trying to pursue pro-environmental legislation. He became interested in the Global Warming issue in college, when his professor, an esteemed expert, performed rigorous testing in the 1950s and 60s but was ignored by the political establishment. The film cut to scenes of a younger, less trustworthy Gore in a legislative hearing, trying to extract the truth from a government compensated research bureaucrat. It was apparent that the Inconvenient Truth was not suddenly made convenient to Gore because he felt he needed a public rebirth on par with one of Madonna's. He'd always plowed through this issue, sometimes slowly and imperceptibly, only now he's given himself permission to be seen as a man on a mission.
In "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore has the look of a man who's been through something big and awful and has come out the other side. Have you ever seen newsreel footage of the young Franklin D. Roosevelt before he contracted polio and contrasted it with the later Roosevelt of history? The young Roosevelt looks like a slick ambition machine, to whom nothing bad has ever happened. The older Roosevelt looks just as shrewd and calculating, but with a look in his eyes that suggests that now he knows why he's being shrewd and calculating. Well, Gore, who saw his life ambition turn to ashes thanks to a faulty ballot in Palm Beach County, has that look, and it's there for everyone to see in "An Inconvenient Truth."
What is the look? It's the look of no fear. It's the look of someone who understands that it's not all about him, and so he can finally relax and be himself. This makes him the ideal conduit for the global warming message.
Gore has made the transition from politician to conduit, one that sounds unglamorous but affords him the respect that he couldn't corral in 2000. He has the selflessness of a leader who no longer anticipates the limelight. As LaSalle suggests, I believe this change has occurred from a natural distillation process into humility that often occurs after extremely adverse--and public--events. Yet I think there's another dynamic in play as well--a decompression of sorts that occurs when one has been pulled out of the limelight. Public leadership in politics, business, sports, you name it, is a lofty calling, but that calling can threaten to dilute your original purpose--the same purpose defining why you became a public leader in the first place.
In addition to a sense of knowing, I saw a sense of relief in Gore's eyes--relief that he could get back on his unadulterated path toward an issue that could very well deem every other political issue insignificant. Gore's presentation had been honed over the course of six years and had data up to this year. We can see the degradation of the ozone layer in real time. The power of such detailed, nonpartisan information socks the gut much harder than any rambling lectures he provided as a politician. As Vice President, Gore was criticized for being disinterested, the Veep more comfortable having his nose in a book than in front of constituents. And yet here we celebrate Gore's persistent inquiry. This quality, that he's now able to exhibit freely, is what makes his arguments so believable.
I used to question Gore's passion for politics when I considered his tangents on technology and his early training in journalism. Was having a political profession just a way to tie up the threads of his disparate backgrounds and continue his family's political legacy? Yet, in the film all of these threads tied together--the hardnosed investigative skills, the experiential knowledge of the backstage political process and how it bends the truth, the inbred desire to serve the public.
Gore was often criticized as being a cardboard leader, humorless, and out of step with real conversations. In this film he's funny, he's self deprecating, he's disclosing, he's inspiring the conversation. The film takes you to Gore's family farm and through the numerous tragedies in what many of us have assumed was a charmed, lacquered life and see that items that ran off the front page of the paper had affected him more than the press could see. The passing of Gore's older sister, who died of lung cancer, manifested in him a desire to act on the truth, even when the lies were sheltering him. Gore's family had been growing tobacco for generations; tending to it was a pleasurable part of Gore's childhood. The family ignored reports about the harmful effects of smoking but were forced to acknowledge the consequences with Nancy's death and stopped growing the crop.
This film resonates with me as a human, an American, and as an entrepreneur. I never ran for public office, but by being a co-founder of a company I have been thrust into a decisionmaking role, and I've felt the inevitable pull toward a more public, less-focused way of being. Part of my realm is far less self absorbed--I'm no longer the solo practitioner sauntering to her laptop to do battle with her own demons of inadequacy, but I'm also no longer completely committed to the grassroots-level issues that I sought to illuminate when I left the corporate world to write. I feel that tug every day. We're a privately owned and funded company, but we still have "constituents" in the form of bloggers, advertisers, press--all of whom we serve. It's a calling I've asked for, and not without knowing that other threads of meaning will have to be severed, and hopefully reconnected at some other point in time.
I left the movie theater with a renewed sense of civic responsibility, yes, but also with a renewed respect for Al Gore's journey to a seasoned leader. The subconscious means by which I've valued others' leadership has come closer to the surface of my mind. While I admire people like Bono, who leverage their success to accomplish globally relevant objectives, I see the value of leaders like Gore and Jimmy Carter, who saw the opportunity lying beneath the ebbing tide of their power. They saw the paradox in their former power, which touched so many, but often too lightly. On the flipside, I fear for unintentional leaders like Al Franken, who may lose his effectiveness if he's elected to public office because he'll lose his mobility, his candid moments--the ones that say far more than a State of the Union address--the grip that someone gets on The People's psyche because they are on their level. This is a balance we agonizingly try to maintain with BlogHer, as we grow an organization that aims to reach women globally and yet singly.
Still I wouldn't suggest that any leader working on a global level forego that transition; it's a necessary step, I think, to shed the ego in this way and emerge as an effective person. But it's a transformation that can only be appreciated in hindsight.
Jory,
Great post. In researching leadership I found a great summary if its principles is to "Be Know Do". Comparing this to our experiences with Al Gore's public life, you've shown that he *knows* his stuff, and even *does* quite a lot, but rarely did we see him *be* it. Now that he's able to show it, he's much more credible as a leader.
I've summarized the Be Know Do principle in a recent blog at: http://djhowatt.blogspot.com/2006/06/leadership_04.html
Let me know what you think.
DJHowatt
Posted by: DJHowatt | June 05, 2006 at 04:29 PM