The New York Times has an unintentionally entertaining story about an essentially grim subject. The story by Elisabeth Bumiller talks about the near obsession among US military commanders to capture problems and solutions in PowerPoint presentations and a brewing backlash against the popular program.
This passage in particular sums up the mood in some sections of the US military about PowerPoint presentations.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable. The comment is worthy of reiteration because it is so fraught with irony. Talking about military strategy in a region where most military strategies have been historically known to fall apart the expression “bullet-izable” is so telling and appropriate and yet so ironic. I suspect this one will go down in dictionaries around the world as well as in popular lexicon.
This story reminds me of how in the 1990s when Indian political leader Chandrababu Naidu began using PowerPoint he was immediately hailed by the media as the pioneering new age politician who will solve all of the country’s problems merely because he used the Microsoft program. Another public figure who regularly used PowerPoint was missile scientist turned India’s President A P J Abdul Kalam. Naidu and Kalam were scene as the tech savvy duo who would transform the country. For many merely bulletizing the country’s enormous problems was solving them.
One never quite understood what was so tech savvy about PowerPoint. It was almost like saying that you are modern if you use a Gillette razor to shave.