A sulky leadership at this time, a likely recipe for doom

Sometimes the most innocuous things in life are pointers to real life situations, but the link is never easily discernible.

Take a magnet, for instance, it is simply described as a material that produces a magnetic field, but what I clearly remember from those many years when I was pretending to study physics is that magnets have two poles; the North and the South. My physics teacher only succeeded in making me understand that like-poles repel while opposite poles attract.