The uniform, the disruptive, & from Colditz to Mt Kenya
[ by Charles Cameron — out of the box thinking, the blues, prison escape literature and more ]
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As you’ll see by the time we get to the Colditz segment of this post, I’m not arguing that anyone should change out of uniform.
But oh yes, I do fish for eddies in the currents of words — or to put that the other way around, eddies in the currents of words tend to catch my eye, and when I read this paragraph in Kohlmann‘s Response to the Critics of Disruptive Thinking:
Jon Favreau, the head speechwriter for President Obama, was 27 when appointed. Aaron Schock, a Congressman from Illinois, is 30. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook when he was still an undergrad at Harvard. Tom Brady won multiple Super Bowls in his twenties. This is a remarkable list, with some household names. Yet, I must ask, where are our young strategic military geniuses in uniform?
it was that last word that grabbed my attention — because somewhere in the back of my mind I have this idea that there’s nothing uniform about genius: it’s supremely individual.
Besides, I’m 67.
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All of which brings me circuitously to Blind Lemon Jefferson and his Lock Step Blues:
Mean old jailor : taking away my dancing shoes
I can’t strut my stuff : when I got those lock-step blues
Again, I’m not claiming that “military” equates to “prison”, or that marching involves leg-irons… just hop, skipping and dancing from one thought to another, to see whether there’s a creative leap available…
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And indeed it seems there is.
Thinking about disruptive thinking and uniforms and, well, prison, finally put me in mind of the place where the uniformed are required by their own code to be disruptive — that is, when they’re in POW camps.
There’s a great deal of noise these days about outside the box thinking — as a synonym for creativity — but it has only now occurred to me as I’m writing this post that one of my very first boyhood obsessions was in fact a kind of training ground for thinking outside the box.
And the box in question was Colditz Castle, the POW camp where the Germans sent those who had already escaped from at least one such camp and been recaptured.
I don’t know Emily Short, but in a post at her Interactive Storytelling blog, she describes the German “idea of putting all the most clever and resourceful prisoners together in an old building riddled with hiding places and odd physical quirks” as “not the brightest”, and notes that “those imprisoned found an astounding number of escape possibilities”.
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