LAGGING INDICATORS IN A CELEBRITY MELTDOWN!

LAGGING INDICATORS IN A CELEBRITY MELTDOWN!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 4, 2009

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“Have you ever noticed lagging indicators control our lives? We are told unemployment is a lagging indicator, that it persists as we are in economic recovery. You don’t have a job and can’t pay your bills, but the government says ‘not to worry, the recession will soon be over, that good days are ahead!’

“Lagging indicators are not confined to economics. They relate to everything. You can’t breathe for the pollution but the Environmental Protection Agency publishes new standards on carbon dioxide emissions to ensure improved air quality, but you still drive your big car or truck, dispose of your wastes haphazardly, and fail to see yourself as a contributor to the problem.

“Lagging indicators common to a large segment of the population are emphysema and diabetes, which are primarily life style excesses, but do people change their behavior?

“Joblessness is a lagging indicator of insufficient and inappropriate education yet nearly half the ethnic population of the country represents the most egregious case of primary and secondary school dropouts.

“Lagging indicators explain the unexplainable. So, I ask myself as a writer why is this so? Is it because people worry more about how they are perceived than how they perceive themselves? Do they lack authentic identity? Do they expect someone else to pick them up and make them useful? Do they think they are owed a living? To me, WILL is the lagging indicator of a Republic on the brink of losing the idea of freedom and therefore its collective identity.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy.”

* * *

REFERENCE:

I shared my publishing woes with my readers, and they have responded. This is not surprising. Many are authors in their own right. They have encountered the barriers alluded to in that piece.

Some of these readers are academics and educators in such fields as sociology, psychology, management, languages, and the hard sciences, while others are writers as philosophers, novelists, journalists and entrepreneurs.

Optimists almost to a fault, they don’t see the lagging indicators driving them, and us, to extinction but rather see them as part of the ritualistic lexicon of our bureaucratic corpocracy. To my mind, these brave souls who write are uncelebrated, yet the last bastion of our survival. I hope for all our sakes that they are right in their optimism.

A READER WRITES:

Jim,

Sorry about the rejection of your most recent works. We both know that is the nature of the business. Critical reviews are meant to be critical and everyone has a perspective, it is not an objective world. Thank god.

About BK (Barrett-Kohler), there is no publisher I hold in higher esteem. I greatly admired Steve Piersanti and his team that makes the firm the best in my experience. I have also known Peter Block back to the time when we hired him at Searle in the 70's. I do believe he has one very good book in stewardship. Another B-K writer, Peter Koestembaum, is a wonderful man who like you makes his own road but lets his great mind lead him.

A BK book I strongly encourage you to read is one on our economic systemic debacle, David Korten's "Agenda for a New Economy.” It proposes how to FIX our mess not just complain about it. Though my retirement nest egg has shrunk, I understand why we seek to vilify the financial geniuses that created such a disaster for us.

We need to examine a political philosophy mouthed so effectively by a grade “b” actor, who a few decades ago seemed determined to lead us into destroying any government that might ask something more of us than our blood on a battlefield. Blood that I donated willingly but his recent follower into the White House never did.

Personally, I know my financial situation would be much better if my taxes had been raised enough to have a government that would watch over our super bright economic advisors that seemed to work the same miracle that Madoff promised.

Nothing is simple but clearly no one was looking out for the American public and yes any idiot must now recognize that an unconstrained economic machine only pays off for those who design and manage it.

Next time I do hope we have someone elected or appointed who cares about our economy and not self-interest being the route of all returns. Now if I tried to expand this I might have to write nearly as much as the fantasy writer Ayn Rand. At a younger age, I too nearly worshiped her. I read her words so many years ago and they spoke to my adolescent male ego, and then I grew up.

Maybe our country may also move towards maturity. With all you write, and perhaps particularly with what I sometimes don't agree with, you are helping us to grow up as a nation. I am optimistic but as I said in one of my last published articles I look to 2050 as the point in which I believe many of us will agree we are maturing as a people.


* * *

A READER RESPONDS TO THIS WRITER’S COMMENTS:

It's interesting the perspective people get. Your friend did not say if hiring Peter Block in the 1970's did his company any good. Peter Koestembaum is a friend of Peter Block's but in no way his mentor. He is a philosophy professor that sounds good and has a way with empathy phrases - like Peter Block.

Steve Piersanti of BK is a smart cookie but it seems now that he is too attached to what made him successful in the 1990s and cannot get with the 2010s fast coming up.

So we move on and learn again that each person sees the world, as they want it to be rather than what it is or might be in other people's eyes.

Keep trucking.


* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

These two responders are accomplished writers who stay the course as their lights direct them. I salute them and all who develop the domain of their own personal opinions. Too often what we think, believe, value and cherish are second or third hand opinions of commentators who bombard our senses on radio, television and the Internet, and to a lesser degree, in newspapers, magazines and books. I am not looking for confirmation. I am looking for open minds.

One writer, responding to my publishing woes, after my being rejected by Barrett-Kohler, sings the praises of this publisher, as well as a couple of authors in B-K’s camp. It is based on his experience and is privileged, and is taken in that sense. I am a person who is disinclined to look up to others or to send hosannas their way as I am more inclined to be suspect of their motivation, especially if they suggest how I think and feel, or should.

The other writer, reading these comments, took exception to the claims of the first writer, again, on the basis of his privileged information. He happens to be intimately aware of my published, and unpublished writings. Both have read me for years.

No surprise, the three of us are or have been academics with differing perspectives on that experience. One of the tenets of my faith is that if you cannot write well you are not likely to think well. I have found most academics do not write well. Instead, they climb into their esoteric stratosphere of academia above the common plain where most of us live and hope, and write to each other in isolation. It was their books that I had to read in my advanced education. Now, I stay clear of them at all cost.

Paradoxically, when most academics come off that esoteric plane, and attempt to connect with us, they invariably write down to us as if they know us, can smell our sweat from fear and work, and can walk in our shoes while never having visited our world except in algorithms. They have never been exposed to the terrors of the workplace where the draconian certitude of bosses rule. Bosses keep us in line by the power of the paycheck and the ability to demote or fire us.

HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elites), who do their case studies in empathetic understanding of CEOs and managers on the rise, have few clues as to the nature of our world. This has led them to leaderless leadership.

* * *

My writing is to people who have risen out of that stench, or are having difficulty climbing out of it now. I find myself alone, growing old, no longer a pretty boy, and seeing the Grim Reaper just ahead. I write out of a life that is running out of innings.

I have worked in the dirtiest most toxic places as an industrial day laborer in a factory as a boy. That boy rose from a working class family in a factory community to virtually every level of organization and he uses that as his template.

God gave him brains, good looks, height and good health. He was blessed with the accident of being born in the United States of America, where circumstances spelled “opportunity.”

He was also born at a time when the nation was in the Great Depression, which meant when he came of age, there weren’t many like him, making for little competition. It didn’t hurt that WWII had been successfully concluded and the world wanted to “buy American.”

He had the good sense to know he couldn’t take his brains for granted, couldn’t depend on handouts to break his fall, couldn’t look to others to cut a path for him to follow. He was on his own, and had the lights to know it, to use it, and to not look back.

He was also privileged to have lived in a country in which the war never touched the continental United States.

He saw it an advantage not having an economic cushion to break his fall should he fail, no one to provide him with money he did not earn. With the aid of academic college scholarships (declining athletic scholarships), and lucky to live in a community in which industries hired college students in the summer, living at home and saving every penny he earned, he received a college education without any college loans.

To this day he thanks God for being born in a time of compulsory military service. This found him in US Navy, where as an enlisted man he was introduced to members of society more underprivileged than he had ever been. He loved the navy, loved the discipline, loved its sophistication in training, and would come to wonder why society lagged behind such sophistication. It was military service that earned him the privilege to use the G.I. Bill to continue his education to a Ph.D.

* * *

All his publications come out of this acculturation. He doesn’t write someone else’s preamble but his own. It provided him with the perspective to publish most recently A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), which in a prophetic sense identifies why we are stuck and continue to be stuck, and shows that there is no indication of our finding our way out of this dilemma.

* * *

Long ago, way back in the days when I worked for Nalco Chemical Company, one of my colleagues said that I was prescient, that I could read the future with uncanny skill as it related to Nalco. Truth be told I wasn't prescient at all but had the faculty of taking disparate pieces of information and weaving them into a conceptual grid, which I am still doing, but without too many in the power grid paying me much mind.

The fact that I persist is not that I am particularly patient or especially masochistic. It is simply a lagging indicator of “what is” versus “what is presumed to be.” People in the trenches, where I live, understand what I am talking about, but unfortunately, most people running the show do not.

We people in the trenches are told these high rollers are villains. They are not. They have abandoned their individual centers and gotten caught up in the fiction of “doing well.” They are lost in that fiction, and have come to believe they are brilliant as well as deranged when they are neither. They are simply lost.

To make my point, all these complicated derivatives on Wall Street, and these complex statistical instruments painfully being deciphered by the government are ARITHMETIC.

The business of business is adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. But in a skin-deep culture, which is other-directed not self-directed, you can fog these numbers up to resemble Einstein’s world until they collapse around you in shame, as they have for Bernard Madoff.

I think God has a good laugh at our expense. After all, computers are based on two numbers, 0 and 1, and you can't get much more basic than that. But I drift.

When I wrote WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), there was one writer, Dr. Thomas Brown, who could see, flawed as the effort was, that I was on to something. Virtually everything in that book written nearly twenty years ago has come to pass. That includes the demise of General Motors. Dr. Brown was then editor of Industry Week, contributor to PBS "All Things Considered," and co-founder of PBS "Market Place."

He authored a series of "lessons learned" in pamphlet form for Barrett-Kohler, which I thought were outstanding. BK didn't find an audience. Dr. Brown went against the grain but empathetically not polemically, as I am inclined to do, and he, too, failed. I rest my case with B-K there.

* * *

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Laureate, is fond of referring to people in government and on Wall Street as being "smart," as if that has any meaning. We are told President Obama is “smart,” something FDR was not told. FDR was said to have had a first rate personality and a second rate mind. That said he led us out of the Great Depression and to victory in World War Two. Maybe we need more dumb people who do brilliant things and less brilliant people who do dumb things.

* * *

Nothing that has happened, is happening and will happen surprises me. We live in an age of celebrity. The audience gives celebrities their identity. It is Faust for real. Celebrities are in the pleasing business, or externally directed rather than internally controlled and self-directed. What is construed, as self-interest with scores of flatterers and idolaters satisfying the celebrity’s every wish, is actually self-deception bordering on self-annihilation. Celebrity behavior more resembles that of the spoiled child than the mature adult.

To sustain their celebrity, to keep their audience coming back for more, it becomes a grueling contest of will to fill that need at the depletion of their own center.

Since the need of the audience is insatiable, and since their total orientation is to please others at the expense of pleasing themselves, celebrities eventually become a figment of their own imagination, an icon, a legend, and no longer a person. Small wonder that Elvis Presley and now Michael Jackson have fallen on their medications trying to be what their audience defined them to be, and then resolutely attempting to meet those impossible demands. What does it mean to make millions or billions and never having had a life?

When what you think, believe, value and cherish comes from the outside, it means your identity is created by others and belongs to them, and that you are but an instrument of their will in its fulfillment.

This programmed identity comes in the form of compliments, honors, promotions, success, and fortune. None of it has real meaning if it depletes you as an individual and makes you a stranger to yourself.

It is why when someone tells me "how smart someone is" it sends up a red flag. The smartest kid I ever knew flunked out of college. Smart people are failing because they are trying to be smart rather than act effectively. They allow others to define them and then accept that identity as theirs, when it is at the sacrifice of their identity and often their rare talent. One of the most toxic illustrations of our collective societal insanity is “American Idol.” The fact that it is the most popular program on television is a lagging indicator of the state of our collective mental health.

Novelist Elmore Leonard says, "When you read something, and you say, 'that is really good writing,' the author is getting in the way of his story." President Barak Obama is getting in the way of his story as he feeds on the dribble from television commentators and Internet bloggers, which I understand he reads religiously. God help us if he becomes a celebrity president like JFK, and starts to believe his own celebrity defines him.

* * *

THANK GOD FOR DIFFERENCES!

THANK GOD FOR DIFFERENCES!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 21, 2009

“Management deals best with what it knows, which means people are often managed as things. People do not behave, react, or forgive the way things do, which is the basis of conflict. Relationships imply conflict. As sociologist Georg Simmel observed, conflict can be the very glue, which binds people to a task. Yet conflict is considered a pejorative. Disagreement is considered disruptive when it is a vital precursor to agreement. Managed conflict keeps the organization on course and is essential to its health.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Six Silent Killers” (1998), p. 119.

* * *

I was reading my third novel ("Train") by the excellent writer, Pete Dexter, an author who has won the National Book Award ("Paris Trout”), yet I could not find his books on the shelves of Barnes & Noble or Borders.

Thanks to the Internet I was able to order all his published works at discount prices, which made me wonder how could someone write so well, so honestly, and poignantly and not have an audience? I answered my own question.

It was another nail in the coffin of our barbaric times. But that is not why I am writing this today. I am writing about the marvel of television that despite all its inanities manages to connect us to "minds alive." Not everyone is asleep.

To take a break from reading, I checked the baseball games on television -- Reds and White Sox, Red Sox and Braves -- and at commercial break, I wandered over to C-Span. There I caught Jay Wesley Richards lecturing on his book, "Money, Greed and God" at the Enterprise Institute.

Richards, whose works I was not familiar, is an advocate of "intelligent design," which I only found out later looking him up on google. He is a young man with a point of view, an educated perspective, and a convincing way of presenting his argument. I thought, if I had known he was an apologist for "intelligent design," would I have listened to his ideas on capitalism (which he sees as the solution not the problem) or missed an opportunity to experience an engaged mind? I must confess I might have done so. It would have been my loss.

He covered a lot of territory that I have considered often with a different slant but honestly from his point of view. He reads Ayn Rand (on selfishness) the same way I've read her, but has a more sophisticated appreciation of greed and a more level interpretation of self-interest than I've been able to convey, although my sentiments are similar. I feel uncomfortable bringing a theistic point of view into my thinking although, I suspect, Richards has had similar training in that regard to my own.

I say this because he breaks down words into their Latin origins, as I do, and defines them in those etymological terms. For example, "altruism" does not mean "selflessness" but "other directed," from the Latin "alter." An individual doesn't abandon "self-interest," but is "other directed" to promote self-interest. This is consistent with Freud’s "quid pro quo," or something gained for something given. I feel self-interest is not only critical to success, but essential to survival.

Richards demonstrates more finesse than I've been able to display in making the connection, but we speak a similar language.

Looking him up on google, I learned that in January 2008 he had a debate with Christopher Hitchens on “intelligent design,” which must have been something. What an odd couple that must have been on stage, Richards, clean cut and well groomed, Hitchens the exact opposite. Hitchens is the darling of the liberals, and Richards, I would imagine, is relatively unknown by conservatives with the possible exception of Christian conservatives.

My point in writing this is that it is nice to see television sponsoring discussions of people of ideas, allowing them to have free reign in that climate. This may possibly reduce the shadow of existence a bit. We live in an age where people think to be heard rather than be heard to promote thinking, and authors write to attract an audience rather than have an audience discover itself through its authors. Despite appealing to the lowest common denominator, thanks to such programs, ideas have not died.

For example, Richards referred to a book about "bees," again a book with which I was not familiar, in which the author analyzed how combative, self-interested, and conflicting were these bees, but terribly productive. An experimenter introduced a chemical to make the bees less aggressive, and the hive fell apart.

I sat there and smiled to myself. Edward O. Wilson at Harvard has been telling us for years that the smallest creatures on earth, insects, behave precisely as man, or is it the other way around? Anyway, conflict has been a thesis in my books on OD. Conflict is the glue that holds an organization to its task. Harmony is what dissolves that cohesiveness. We have had sixty years of increasingly harmonious organizational life, giving workers everything but the kitchen sink, apologizing for their untoward behavior, and, thanks to human resources, have failed to learn what bees know intuitively.

We are so late smart when it comes to understanding what makes us tick and what does not. Remember this, whether you are an advocate of the theory of evolution or “intelligent design,” you can learn a lot about yourself, especially in the other camp. No one has a monopoly on ideas. No one.

Be always well,

Jim

ANNOUNCEMENT -- CHANGING FOCUS -- THE FUTURE IS NOW!

My literary agent has advised me that to improve traffic and traction on my blog I should send a paragraph or two of my missives to my emailers and include a link to my blog should they want to read the entire essay.

He suggests adding a "share this" button so visitors can share my articles with their friends or the entire missive -- there are over 400 complete missives posted on my blog.

I read and comment on books, articles and subjects as diverse as poetry and history to mathematics, from classical and current fiction, from the social and behavioral sciences to the physical sciences, from philosophy and theology to politics and current events, from management to culture and education.

I haven't as a rule sent out pieces on some of these disciplines, such as the curious world of chemistry and mathematics, but still have run into trouble with some readers when I describe my take on sensitive subjects such as religion, politics, patriotism, nationalism and economics.

Being an eclectic or catholic reader and thinker, I claim no expertise in any discipline other than the psychology of organizational development.

My agent wants me to "twitter" and, at this point, I have no idea what "twittering" is.

Some of you like my long essays, most of you don't, and many of you once they come to a sentence they don't like, hit the delete button. How do I know? You tell me.

That is the reader's right. It defeats my purpose of making connection, but it is okay. In any case, I don't plan to change my style.

My effort is to describe possible problems and let the reader work out the prescription for solving them. I am not a problem solving or solution guru, as I am not privy to all the variables that make up the reader's problem.

My sense is that we have too many solutions chasing too few problems, yes, I say "few problems."

If you look at a life, or a country, or a society, and really look at it, there are only a handful of problems. We have a mind, however, full of self-estrangement and conflict that chooses to invent problems exponentially, and throw up our hands finding them insoluble, which makes us vulnerable to "experts," when expertise is an oxymoron.

One reason I was successful as a young chemical sales engineer was that I worked out that I encountered no more than a half dozen problems again and again, developing an assortment of ways to deal with them.

It made my career very uncomplicated which everyone thought was lucky, that is, until they read CONFIDENT SELLING (1970), and found it had nothing to do with luck. What they saw as luck was simply focusing on the obvious and dispatching it, realizing that the biggest challenge was getting out of my own way.

I think that applies to life for everyone.

Be always well,

Jim

HAITI'S "DIRT COOKIES" -- A PASSIONATE AND THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE

HAITI’S “DIRT COOKIES” – A PASSIONATE AND THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 11, 2009

* * *

“We are but stewards of what we falsely call our own; yet avarice is so insatiable that it is not in the power of abundance to content it.”

Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.), Roman stoic philosopher

* * *

“Greed is a mindset and lifestyle obsessed with having. Frugality is a mindset and lifestyle obsessed with accumulating. With greed spending holds the interests at the expense of saving, with frugality saving holds the interests at the expense of spending. Compulsion is the shared common denominator. The person of greed is reviled the person of frugality is revered. Either extreme is endemic to a sick society.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy”

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

I hope you enjoyed your Alaskan trip. I understand you were not likely to maintain contact during that journey and hope you are reading this after your return.

While there have been some interesting threads on your blog lately, none has encouraged me to tappity-tap on the keyboard.

The commentary on torture, a truly hot-button subject, has no answer. Maybe it never will. The power elite because the truth, the whole truth, will remain hides this from us. This is as it always was, just as your attempts to clarify our desire for subjugation is aptly highlighted.

Humans desire to hide our eyes from the reality of our distasteful world is real. Let someone else deal with the dirt, as if we elect politicians to be our housemaids. Don’t show me the pile you’ve swept under the rug. Just make sure it’s gone by the time I return from (work, vacation, movie, ballgame, whatever.) And, don’t put it in the cookies.

Dirt cookies and MBAs have striking similarities in the hollow sustenance each provides.

I earned an MBA over two and a half years taking evening classes at the Loyola Graduate School of Business. Was I enhancing my capabilities, advancing my career, feeding my ego, or making and eating dirt cookies?

Loyola has been noted for its emphasis on business ethics. It amused me somewhat that in ethics class everyone seemed to know the right answer and engaged in high-minded, self-congratulatory discussions.

The same people, in other classes, seldom struggled to find an ethical balance in their solutions to case studies. Of course, you know what I did. Playing devil’s advocate for the sake of discussion in an ethics course taught by a Jesuit priest is not a road to success. He even pulled me aside after one class and said, “Young man, you had better change your ways.” He actually thought I believed the positions I would argue. Sorry for the digression. Here’s the point.

Was this learning? Or, was it dirt cookies? The similarity between tired women trudging up a hill to gather nutrient rich dirt, mixing it with fat then selling it to the hungry and MBA students dragging to class after a full day’s work, learning how to manipulate financial spread sheets and people, mixing in some ethics awareness, and then selling the package back to their employer or the highest bidder is striking.

There is some naiveté in thinking democracy would help either of these situations. There is no democracy in business. Our government has legislated human rights out of business. What happens in Haiti with the powerful capturing and holding onto “revenue” is no different than what happens in the corporate world. The economic order of the world today has been distorted to the point that parity is likely unattainable.

And, this is not a recent change. It has always been this way. There is less naiveté and more simplicity in thinking access to knowledge would make a difference. When one spends a majority of time in a survival mode - making dirt cookies or working to scrape together a few bucks to pay for dirt cookies; or dragging yourself to evening classes after a day of work hoping to “get ahead” – the real nurturing required to help a family grow is lost.

The ability to provide context for the awareness children gain from their window to the world is lost. Ted appears to be a bright man with some knowledge of the world, likely much more than I have. However, I think both you and he are missing the point or misunderstanding the context.

The thought that people of Haiti or those overpopulating any other resource poor island will ever be participants in a high-wage global economy let alone within the next decade is absurd.

There are millions of people here in our own country that will never realize that dream. And, we have tremendous resources. The reality is that some nations will always be handout cultures. And it will get worse. If projections are correct, in less than fifty years there will be 12 billion people on Earth. That is twice today’s population. Think of 3 billion people in China, 2.5 billion in India, 700 million in the US, and 17 million in Haiti.

Today, nearly two-thirds of Haiti’s population is employed in subsistence farming. What happens when 650 people per square kilometer becomes 1300? The same land that cannot feed the population now will have to feed twice as many people. Only 2% of its original forest cover exists today, meaning soil erosion will diminish further its ability to produce food. How will democracy and computers change this?

Humans are a parasite on the Earth. As with all parasites, they thrive unless checked eventually depleting the nutrients of the host faster than the host can regenerate them. Further, as the parasite overpopulates, it begins to choke on its own waste. Ideally, the parasite dies off before the host. But, more typically both
die.

Resource poor island nations are the “canary in the mine” for Mother Earth. We can’t save them. Their deaths are an alarm. We should heed it and learn from their bad examples.

I apologize for that last paragraph and its harsh attitude towards human life. Unfortunately, the lesson we should learn has not and never will be learned. To take the anti-Gekko approach, reversing a mantra of the Eighties, “Greed is bad.” Greed of the slave trade created Haiti and contributed to its over-populated, under-educated history.

Don’t be confused. Haiti throughout this discussion is a metaphor. The destitution represented by dirt cookies draws our attention away for the important broader issue. Focusing on raising-up the poor is a smokescreen. Nothing really changes until the economic order of the world changes.

This is why Obama has the right idea for the US. So what if this economic rescue will lead to higher taxes? Who gains from the rescue? We all get back some portion of our comfortable life-styles. Who gains the most from the rescue? The rich do. Who pays most of the taxes that will cover the debt used to finance the rescue? The rich and their rich children will. Who has been doing most of the complaining? The rich and their puppets in the media and right-wing talk radio do. Why? Because they want the US to become Haiti, with a majority of the nation poor and under their gilded thumbs, while all the wealth flows into their pockets. Greed is bad.

M

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

George Clooney in the 2009 film, “Michael Clayton” is asked if he is a miracle worker. He answers, “I’m not a miracle worker I’m a janitor. I clean up other people’s messes, and sweep them under the rug.”

You are not a janitor, and should be noted for speaking your mind. Moreover, there is no need to apologize for your metaphor of the parasite and its host, as it is an apt description of how we human beings are acting as parasites on our willing host, the planet earth, and that in the process we are killing our host, and therefore placing our own survival in considerable jeopardy.

The cartoon “Dilbert” by Scott Adams, which appears on the business page of The Tampa Tribune, has been bringing our attention recently to the insanity of our MBA culture, and by extension the duplicitous behavior of managers and human resources professionals in collusion in this chicanery.

“Dilbert’s” entertaining sting currently focuses on ground I’ve covered in books and articles, such as MBAs, skunk works, and now as I return from Alaska on Quality Control Circles, and the charade of leadership excellence. Here is one of the back issues of “Dilbert” saved for me:

FIRST SQUARE: Dilbert, the boss, and a female employee. The boss is speaking:

“Last week I attended the Circle of Excellence Conference for Managers.”

SECOND SQUARE: boss and female employee. Employee speaking:

“So, while we were doing actual work, you sat in a circle with a bunch of managers?”

THIRD SQUARE: Dilbert, the boss, and female employee.

Boss: “It wasn’t like that.”

Female Employee: “Oh, I think it was.”


“Dilbert” is popular, and is placed on the business page, I suspect, because it resonates with readers, but, alas, nothing changes.

* * *

Tom Brokaw wrote “The Greatest Generation” (1998), pointing out the sacrifices made, the courage displayed, and the resolve and determination exhibited by an entire generation to realize total victory and unconditional surrender of its adversaries in WWII.

What is not celebrated, but which David Halberstam addressed in “The Next Century” (1991) was the massive mobilization effort that took the United States from a handicapped military posture in 1942 (US soldiers were being trained with wooden rifles) to become the greatest military power in the history of mankind by 1944. This was achieved largely due to a superior management model. Halberstam writes:

"With our great assembly lines and our ever-expanding industrial core (and protected as we were by two great oceans in an age when weaponry could not yet cross an ocean), we became the industrial arsenal for the mightiest of war efforts. In 1942 and 1943 America alone produced almost twice as many airplanes as the entire Axis (German, Italy and Japan). In 1943 and 1944, we were producing one ship a day and an airplane every five minutes.” (p 59)

The management paradigm took off after the war with a momentum that made “management” the dominant profession of the twentieth century, as the nineteenth was “the engineer,” the eighteenth “the lawyer,” the seventeenth “the pilgrim,” the sixteenth “the theologian,” and the fifteenth “the explorer.”

See my missive on this typology posted on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) February 23, 2005 with the title, “Cold Shower 6: Advent of the Professional Worker, Vol. I, Article VI.” “The professional worker” was profiled as the dominant profession of the twenty-first century.

You are a professional, and your anxiety is noted. The professional worker has been limited, controlled, misdirected and exploited in an MBA culture dominated by an anachronistic management model. The corporation remains committed to this model, finding managers refusing to step aside and make way for the new leader, “the professional worker.”

Perhaps I am impatient. After all, management played surrogate parent to workers during the last half of the twentieth century, and continues to do so. This has produced a counterdependent worker, professional or otherwise, who reacts, rather than acts, and who is paid a dollar more an hour than to challenge atavistic management.

Consequently, even with all his education and expertise, “the professional worker” remains complacent, resigned, obedient and passive to a system that no longer exists.

As you know, I’ve described this in a series of books, but I cannot change it. Indeed, I have written volumes on the need for the mature adult worker to step forward to establish a culture of contribution. Despite management’s impotency and the opportunity for professionals in these trying times, professionals wait for a “miracle worker” when only janitors show up.

* * *

Your point is well taken that the “have nots” in Haiti and elsewhere are likely to grow in the next fifty years if humanity as parasite does not come up with a plan of population control, pollution control, and social justice.

It is a complicated problem because even with an army of miracle workers you cannot force people out of poverty. Mindset and lifestyle count here as in the most sophisticated of societies. You cannot coerce people out of their natural habitat as impoverished as it might be. The barrio is home to them despite the most grinding poverty.

Were $100 billion spent tomorrow in Haiti to provide potable water for all citizens, restore the forests, provide state-of-the-art farming methods, install modern sanitation, and develop a master plan of education, community development, and industrial development consistent with the climate, culture, and creative verve of the people, the results would not appear for several generation, and then only modestly.

Poverty is a mindset and as well as a human condition. Hunger cannot be obliterated by a constant supply of ships landing with food supplies. We have seen this drama repeated again and again in Africa where pirates interdict these supplies and then use them to buy arms, or demand exorbitant prices for what was meant to be free. Then too, such humanitarian efforts have been nullified by government corruption.

The most effective efforts have been by those in the Peace Corps, the International Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders, as well as religious and humanitarian groups that deal directly with the people at the level of consequences.

Imagine a veritable army of such people protected by the military to discourage hostile tribes from insinuating themselves in the effort. Idealistic? Of course. Yet grass root efforts have made an impact on Haiti, and other impoverished Third World countries.

Social justice starts with the:

(1) Creation of a climate of peace in freedom.

(2) Moves forward with having potable drinking water and modern sanitation.

(3) Continues with teaching people how to maintain potable water and sanitation.

(4) Educates people in the practice of good hygiene to ensure good health.

(5) Moves on to cultivate the land with adequate topsoil, fertilization, and irrigation.

(6) Provides farmers with education in modern farm technology including the proper use and maintenance of farm machinery.

(7) Demonstrates how to rotate crops and practice soil conservation.

(8) Establishes a reforestation plan, which means finding alternative energy sources including municipal power plants.

(9) Develops diversified industries that will support the population, and improve the quality of life.

(10) Creates an infrastructure and governance to implement and monitor these developments.

(11) Constructs continuing education facilities for all adults as well as schools for young people.


This agenda will take the next hundred years to achieve, but it can be done step-by-step leaving no citizen out of the intervention.

Notice I don’t speak of laptops and other electronics, which are the equivalent of placing ice cream on the dirt cookies at this stage. A primitive society must grasp the bottom rung of the ladder and hold on securely before it can pull itself out of the swamp of despair.

* * *

As for greed, it will always be with us. So often the compulsion for wealth possesses the person rather than the person taken possession of the wealth. This was apparently the case with Bernard Madoff and his $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Greed attracts greed and eventually nullifies itself, whereas the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett continue to accumulate wealth the hard way, by working for it.

Be always well,

Jim

FAT NATION, WHITE NOISE, SLOPPY LANGUAGE, AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS!

FAT NATION, WHITE NOISE, SLOPPY LANGUAGE, AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 11, 2009

REFERENCE: Reflections on an Alaskan cruise in late May and early June 2009.

* * *

“I just been on a trip to Minnesota, where I can kindly describe most of the people I saw as little houses.”

Anna Wintour, editor of VOGUE, on the prevalence of obesity in the United States as reported in Time (June 1, 2009).

* * *

“I had the advantage,” Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world, reflects on his success, “of living in a home where people talked about interesting things. I had intelligent parents and I went to decent schools. I didn’t get money from my parents, and I really didn’t want it. But I was born at the right time, and place. I won the ‘Ovarian Lottery’.”

“Making It,” an article by Sue Halpern in the NEW YOUR REVIER (May 28, 2009)

* * *

My life has been a trajectory in which, I suspect, in my idealism I have struggled rather fruitlessly to make reality conform to my ideals. My attempt, I suppose, has been to produce an arc of significance when experience resembles little more than a flat line. Somewhere in the corner of my mind, however, I am unwilling to abandon the belief life has purpose, and not simply an interval of inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.

This rather bleak assessment does not fill me with despair, as Robert “trucking on” Crumb might suggest, but makes me attentive to the little minds that guide my every move with their collective nonsense. I am speaking, of course, of the movers and shakers and shapers of my life, people who control all aspects of my culture.

I still hold to the value that only a reflected life is worth living, while being fully aware that reflection may impede that living because it is easier to be unconscionable and on automatic pilot, submissive and obedient than to challenge its authority. Culture has a constant cacophony of noise masquerading as news to so enjoin me to its beat.

It is impossible for me to watch this submissive self-destruction without like Chicken Little running around frantically crying, “the sky is falling,” when I see our collective heads buried in Don Delillo’s “White Noise” (1985), which he claims is our fear of death, when I contend it is more likely our fear of life.

* * *

The pleasure of a vacation is it eventually comes to an end. Traveling is tiring, sometimes boring, often disheartening as you see humanity up close and personal in all its nakedness.

Cruising with 2,000 like-minded souls, and another 1,000 serving us, I was reminded of Katherine Anne Porter’s novel, “Ship of Fools” (1962). The title was taken from the fifteenth century Latin moral allegory, which symbolized “the ship of the world on its voyage to eternity.” Porter’s book is based on her own trip from Mexico to Europe in 1941 during WWII, and is notable for its pessimistic view of humanity. It was later made into a successful 1965 film as a tragic comedy.

Nearly seventy years after Porter’s trip, I was entertained on a grand hotel at sea with a similar view of the human condition, but not in terms of stereotypical anti-Semitism, racism, or assumed superiority, but in the context of excess, superficiality and banality.

* * *

This more active observation of a cross-section of society was a product of circumstances. BB was suffering from a terrible cold during the cruise and relegated to limited activities. We were unable to attend a single show during the evening as BB lacked the energy and didn’t want to spread her cold.

Our compensation was having a lovely room with a private terrace to which we spent more time than we might have otherwise. The weather during the cruise was perfect with sunny days and moderate temperatures, and the most incredible view of nature. Alaska is priceless in its beauty, and a crown jewel of Nature’s Paradise.

We are television viewers, but thankfully carry only the minimum cable package, meaning we do not have access to a zillion channels being confined to the major television networks, the education channels, and a 24/7 news and weather channel. We have been spared having to watch the ongoing inanities of CNN’s “unnews” news, or the multiple sports channels, which continuously chortle the ungrammatical absurdities of former jocks and their adulating commentators, rehashing and reassessing sport events beyond the point of idiocy. It makes the head hurt, and so I hit the mute button and look only at the bottom score line to see how the Tampa Bay Rays and Chicago Cubs are doing, along with how the French Open is going, of course rooting for Federer.

I love baseball, and enjoy watching it, but BB prefers football and finds baseball slow and boring, and so I watch little, although baseball is seemingly on fifty channels.

How these sportscasters and sports analysts can hype contests on baseball diamonds, racetracks, golf courses, and basketball courts until the diet is indigestible is beyond me. Someone must be watching this stuff because players make it huge, which begs the question: is this how mindless and passive our collective existence has become?

* * *

Speaking of mindless, I was standing at the urinal in the Seattle airport, and there were guys on either side of me standing there, as if at the starting gate ready to start the race, only these horses were not paying attention to the releasing body fluids. They were totally preoccupied with their handheld electronic devices while taking a piss. It made me leery that their hoses might be misdirected, and so I quickly departed while both were still so engaged.

* * *

Years ago when I traveled the world to make a living, people in airport terminals were likely to be reading a book, magazine, or newspaper waiting for their next flight. Not anymore. No wonder these media outlets are in trouble. Being somewhat frugal, I would often pick up a discarded newspaper, magazine, or paperback book to read left behind. Commercial airlines in those days also distributed journals, newspapers and popular magazines to passengers once on board. Not any more. Today, travelers are buried in their laptops, cell phones, BlackBerrys or electronic games, while overhead CNN blares its incessant message in the terminal that no one hears, or is given the option of a film during the flight in which you pay for the rent of the ear phones.

* * *

CNN’s Campbell Brown and Larry King make news that makes me snooze. I can’t believe people watch them and their orchestrated dialectics. That is not to say they are any worse than Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, but come on now, do they preach to our common denominator or only perceive it as close to zero? I’m afraid they do.

I had never watched a Campbell Brown, Larry King, or any other CNN program before being confined to this cruise ship. CNN has clones of these two and so the beat goes on and on. More shocking is seeing people on these shows that I have read in book form, such as Fareed Zakaria. My wonder is why they appear. They must know the conversation will be banal, brusque, and meaningless. To add insult to injury these programs are repeated ad infinitum like the commercials they are. CNN is light years away from Jim Lehrer’s “News Hour,” and “Charlie Rose” on PBS, and these are commercial free broadcasts.

Then I chanced upon a program that was pathetic to the extreme. Parents of a young woman being held in custody in Florida awaiting trial on the alleged murder of her child were shown in split screen talking to their daughter.

“Is my granddaughter alive?” the grandmother asks. The young mother knows at this point that she is not, as do the viewers as the child’s body had been discovered in a shallow grave near the mother’s home some time ago.

The question must be asked: have we become so schadenfreude that we delight in the private miseries of others? Why do we have to broadcast the fact this young mother is a liar? Do we take satisfaction in that knowledge?

I don’t know if this young lady killed her daughter or not, but it was obvious she was lying to her parents like an Academy Award actress. Every time I came back to this program while surfing the channels the young lady was still lost in her lying.

That said whatever happened to due process, or being innocent until proven guilty? Why would the parents allow this invasive subterfuge? To my mind it is not far from the delight some people once derived from watching public executions. Whatever happened to the words, “He without sin cast the first stone?”

* * *

“You know what I am saying is true, you know, as you know we have all had experiences that, you know, we would like to forget if we could, but you know that is not possible because, you know, we have to hide from ourselves, you know, as much as from others, don’t you know?”

It is like the screeching sound of chalk across a blackboard every time I hear “you know,” which is meaningless, thoughtless, and utterly ridiculous. We all do it, and that includes the President of the United States. We are all guilty of flippancy and imprecise language.

I have noticed that “you knows” sneak into the conversation if ever so quietly of President Barak Obama when he is adlibbing his remarks.

“You knows” equally lace the conversations of Senators, Congressmen, churchmen, business executives, entertainers, while it is the essential pronoun of professional athletes. They can sneak ten “you knows” in a single sentence. No one seems able to speak American English in a simple declarative sentence without a collection of “you knows.”

If we cannot speak precisely, how can we expect to think precisely? Language has deteriorated to animal babble.

We live in a sloppy age of sloppy language, and massive contradictions.

(1) We have the precise language of mathematics in science where scientists cannot write comprehensively and understandably in the vernacular of the majority.

(2) Most CEOs of major corporations in the United States have engineering backgrounds supported by MBAs, neither of which prepares them for leadership, which is grounded in communications.

(3) Academics take pride in expressing themselves in code failing to realize everyone regardless of education understands truth revealed.

Scientists, CEOs and academics live in an isolated cultural world of jargon, which winds them into a zone of incomprehension. Paradoxically, writers on the periphery of science, business and technology have become their respective interpreters, or a power in their own right, as were the scribes more than 1000 years ago. Then, most rulers could neither read nor write, as they were too busy making war. Charlemagne in the ninth century was one of the first rulers to master these skills. Rulers were dependent on this special class of scribes to connect them to the people. It was the original power of the clerics and one of the reasons why the Catholic Church rose to such prominence.

In this sloppy age of sloppy language, it is why Rush Limbaugh can command $100 million a year broadcasting his nonsense, why Bill O’Reilly can claim he only speaks the truth when he wouldn’t recognize the truth if he went to bed with it, or why Campbell Brown, Larry King, et al, have the careers they have. This is the Age of Communication with the absurdity that Samuel Beckett predicted, an age in which we suffer from too much information and not enough common knowledge. We are all swimming in a tsunami of irrelevancies.

In my day, it was not “you know” that was so prominent, but “I think” this or that, when the person speaking wasn’t thinking at all. Saying the word sufficed for thought, which of course it didn’t. Thinking occurs when the mind is empty and quiet and mindless of itself. We sometimes call this contemplation. A quiet mind is not possible when a climate of noise where activity is synonymous with action, and action is synonymous with thinking. The result is what we have, or the haze in which we live.

A carryover from my day was the expression “to tell you the truth,” or “to be honest with you,” or “to be totally frank,” when truth, honesty or frankness were orphans from the exchange. When spoken, it should alert the listener to these red flags.

* * *

Anna Wintour’s remark (see above) that Minnesotans looked like “little houses” they were so fat could be extended to all the little houses on board this cruise ship, as well as what I had seen in the airports of Philadelphia, Seattle, Houston and Tampa.

We are a nation of little walking houses wherever you go. Our President of the United States is pencil thin but his electorate is so fat that many suffer an assortment of ailments prompting his major domestic policy to be health insurance reform.

Fatness is what drives health insurance cost sky high, not insurance companies. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman notwithstanding – who sees insurance companies as the evil instigators, and not gluttonous Americans as perpetrators – we don’t need the president to be the janitor to sweep the issue under the rug, or to clean house with insurance companies. The president would be more effective if he launched a campaign to get people to eat to live rather than live to eat. No one wants to admit it, but gluttony is what keeps our economy going, and insurance companies are not the culprits in this conspiracy. It is a cultural mind fault. Food is a drug more dangerous than any illicit substance, as more people die from indiscriminate eating than drug addiction. Check the records.

We are fond to make cigarette smoking and alcohol drinking as the main nails in our coffins, but where do you see television commercials addressing far more insidious killers that accompany obesity? The answer is “nowhere!”

Cruise ships attract fat people like a moth to light. That is because you can eat all you want on a cruise at any time, day or night, in a score of restaurants, or have constant room service without any additional cost for the cruise. It is heart attack heaven, and you don’t have to die to enjoy it.

Cruise passengers are drugged with food, and then when they hit the cities along the cruise they shop until they drop buying worthless trinkets that will be quickly forgotten once they are home. They are not aware of it but shopping is a form of the same addiction as it is a hunger that feeds on itself. Most of the stuff available in these tourist traps is junk like junk food, and so it goes.

I’ve done an unscientific study on this cruise, and have come to the conclusion from my observations of some 2,000 cruise guests, and some 1,000 cruise servers, that there is an observable striking paradox:

(1) Eighty (80) percent of the cruise guests are overweight to obese;

(2) Not a member of the cruise staff at any level in the hierarchy is less than in prime health including the ship’s captain.


I have also concluded, also unscientific, why this is so. Incidentally, members of the thousand-member crew are from thirty or more different countries with very few Americans among them.

My determinations:

(1) If you were born in the early years of the Great Depression, you find most women are slim and most men are slim as well;

(2) If you were born in the latter years of the Great Depression, you find most women are bordering on fat, while most men have a 34-36 inch waist and a 55-inch belly;

(3) If you were born in the early years of the Baby Boom, you find many women surprising stout but not fat, but nearly all the men with high “beer” bellies and low waists several inches smaller;

(4) If you were born in the late stages of the Baby Boom, you find many women statuette while nearly all the men have protruding bellies and under developed bodies;

(5) Children of early and late Baby Boomers are nearly all fat, as well as showing a palpable arrogance bordering on petulance that gives them the look of being needy and weak;

(6) If you were born in the 1970s to the 1980s, women are surprisingly fit, men are equally fit, but their children are fat;

(7) If parents are fat, regardless of when they were born, it appeared almost axiomatic that all their children were fat as well as their children and grandchildren.

Of the two thousand aboard, the few African Americans on board were likely to be overweight, as were the majority of white Americans. Oriental Americans were almost to a person trim and healthy, as were many other foreigners. Hispanics, like white Americans were likely to be overweight to obese. Europeans, especially those of Latin extraction were usually found to be trim, especially the French.

* * *

BB has a stressful job as business manager of a Jewish Day School, and was hoping for a respite from that ordeal on this holiday, only to find herself sick with this cold and continually coughing. I marveled at her patience, as I am an absolute pain when sick. BB, on the other hand, could not have been a better gamer under the circumstances. She went ashore visiting every town on the cruise, took some 500 pictures with her wonderful new camera, and never complained during the whole ordeal.

What I learned about my wife is that she operates on the premise of mind over matter. She managed to keep her wits about her and to have a reasonably good time, although she missed the cruise shows that she loves, and went on only one tour. It was, as always, a joy to be with her.

* * *

Many people go on holiday to meet and commiserate with strangers. I do not. I am most comfortable in the company of BB, or at home in my study, surrounded by the thousands of dead authors who are my most intimate companions. If this sounds sick, or you feel sorry for me, don’t! Privacy is a natural aspect of my temperament as it has been for countless souls over time that appreciates the reflective and contemplative life. I have been fortunate to have such a life now.

My only regret is that I had not started sooner. Privacy and semi-seclusion is common to many writers, after all, writing is a singular profession. It is the necessary climate to create and record stories and observations lodged in your heart. One day I suspect I will be a dead author in someone’s library as the many dead authors surround me now. My talent, if that is the correct word, is that I write out of my own conscience and experience as clearly and as comprehensively as I am able.

* * *

You will note my reference to Warren Edward Buffet at the beginning of these reflections. Buffett, who soon will turn 79, is the second richest man in the world, and the world’s most astute investor in history. Forbes magazine estimates his current net worth at more than $37 billion dollars, much of which is to be turn over to the Bill and Kathy Gates Foundation, as he has great faith in their humanity and philanthropic ventures.

Beyond that, the similarity between Great Depression Buffett and Baby Boomer Gates come to an end, and the reason for its inclusion here. I sensed that I saw many potential “Bill Gates” on this cruise, but, alas, no “Warren Buffetts.”

Despite his extreme wealth, Buffett still lives in the five-bedroom house where he has lived for the last 52-years. He pays himself a salary of $100,000 and manages to save more than 10 percent of it each year. More remarkable, should a call be placed to his residence or business, chances are he will answer. He still drives his American made automobile, which is more than a decade old.

To put this in perspective, Bill Gates, who has managed to be the richest or second richest man in the world most of his adult life, lives in a 66,000 square-foot house with six kitchens, and cutting edge electronics. Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia has twenty-six bathrooms and as many bedrooms in his mansion, reminiscent of J. Paul Getty’s. Getty installed coin pay telephones in his mansion to control the phone abuses of his guests, which of course Gates has not had to suffer, as conventional phones are no longer relevant. Bernard Madoff had a Mercedes, Lexus, Range Rover and a Cadillac fleet. Mark Cuban has a Gulfstream V jet, while the King of Morocco wears $50,000 vicuna suits.

Buffett and Getty are of the Great Depression era, while these other wealth creators are early or late Baby Boomers. In any case, frugality is Buffett’s brand name. His personal disregard for money, as such, is real. He is not greedy, but is good at what he does, measuring and managing the Berkshire Hathaway fund. To give you a sense of this, an early investment of $10,000 in this fund when he first formed is worth more than $100 million today. Is Buffett a genius?

Not according to Malcolm Gladwell, author of “Outliers” (2009). According to him, success cannot be explained by what a person is “like,” but only by where that person is “from.”

Buffett is a Midwesterner from Nebraska. People in the Midwest are not impressed by wealth or brilliance or even success, but with the person. Gates, on the other hand, comes from the West where daring and show and flamboyance register traction. Successful people are expected to demonstrate their brilliance and separation from the rank and file.

Gates early career involved exploiting the works of others for which he was and to this day is constantly being sued. This is not the case with Buffett. Wealth creation for him began around the age of six. He started buying packs of gum and selling them to the neighbors for a few pennies’ profit. He switched to Coke, which he peddled door-to-door in the summer, then to “pre-owned” golf balls.

His first visit to Wall Street was at the age of ten. It was around then that he bought three shares of stock for $35 and sold them for $40, which unfortunately soon reached a value of $200. He read a book at eleven that suggested 100 ways to make a $1,000, which gave him a goal – to make $1 million by the age of 35. When he reached that age, he was worth $5 million.

For Buffett, making money was not a means to an end but a vocation. Getting money interested him more than having money, or spending money. Money is an intellectual pursuit evaluating a company’s assets, exploring and buying undervalued businesses (Dairy Queen for instance), and studying the relationship of companies’ management to shareholders. To summarize, he sees the market as his servant and not his master (see “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder, 2009; “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell, 2009; and “Making It” by Sue Halpern, The New York Review, May 28, 2009)

* * *

Another reason I was watching so much television is because I only brought three books plus recent copies of “Smithsonian” magazine articles I had not yet read, along with the latest issue of “The New York Review.”

I am a fan of Robert Littell and was especially mesmerized with his most recent book, “The Stalin Epigram” (2009). It is based on historical fact but a fictional rendering of the life of Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century.

Mandelstam was twice imprisoned, tortured and twice sent to Siberia, mainly for the writing but not publishing “The Stalin Epigram,” where he died at the age of 47 (1891 – 1938). This is his epigram to the dictator Stalin:

“We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer.

His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders –
Fawning half-men for him to play with.

They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,

One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin,

And every killing is a treat
For the broach-chested Ossete.”

The novel is cleverly built around Mendalstam’s naïve and suicidal gesture in a climate of unfreedom. The Soviet Union was feeling a mounting threat from the West. The Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler was on the rise. Stalin was naturally paranoid, had no tolerance for dissension, and was particularly intimidated by intellectuals. This gives you a sense of the conflict and intrigue.

It gave me pause. Given my turn of mind in his time and place, confessing to being equally naïve, I, too, would have perished at an early age. God Bless America!

* * *

Pete Dexter’s novel “Brotherly Love” (1991) was a new experience for me, as I had not read the author before. Charlie Rose on PBS asked Elmore Leonard, the premiere mystery writer, “Whom do you read?”

“Pete Dexter,” he answered matter-of-factly.

I have enjoyed Leonard’s tight prose so thought I might enjoy Dexter’s. I had no idea what a treat “Brotherly Love” would be. He is by far the best writer I have read in some time. His economy of style, crispness of dialogue, episodic development, and characterization lodge in the mind long after the book is finished.

I find myself wanting to rewrite what I have already written of GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA and dividing the chapters, as did Littell with various people speaking, and to wax less eloquent and concentrating more in telling the story as does Dexter.

Elmore Leonard says, “When the reader senses ‘this is really good writing,’ the author has failed. ‘Good writing’ has gotten in the way of the story.”

Dexter doesn’t get in the way of his story but yet his writing is superb.

The author had a life-changing experience in 1981 when thirty drunken Philadelphians, armed with baseball bats, and upset with one of his recent columns about a drug deal gone wrong, beat him severely.

Dexter was hospitalized with a broken back, pelvic fracture, brain damage, and knocked out teeth. Once he recovered after a long convalescence, he turned from being a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News to a novelist writing “God’s Pocket” (1984), and the National Book Award for fiction in 1988 of “Paris Trout.”

I have on order “Deadwood” (1986), “The Paperboy” (1995), “Train” (2003) and “Paris Trout” (1988). I suspect I’ll have more to say when I’ve read these books. I recommend “Brotherly Love” (1991) for anyone who enjoys good writing, mystery pathos, pace, plot, and surprise.

* * *

The third novel I read was “Cold Company” (2002) by Sue Henry. During our first trip to Alaska in 2002, I came across a book by the author in Haines City, and learned that she wrote exclusively about Alaska through the characters of Jessie Arnold, a dogsled driver and Phil Becker, a Canadian Monty Police Officer in homicide.

BB and I fell in love with Alaska on that 2002 excursion, which motivated me to read Henry’s books. They have provided me with a window into the soul and substance of the forty-ninth state, while being entertained with a thriller.

Alaska has only three-to-four months of mild weather, and we happened upon Alaskan weather at its best with mild to warm temperatures, no rain, and sparkling sunshiny days and spectacular nights. We chose a late May and early June visit thinking the weather would be ideal, and it was. The ship’s captain said it rained every day during the previous cruise.

* * *

In the airports of Tampa, Philadelphia, Seattle and Houston, I checked out the books on sale at the various outlets. Now, I read hundreds of books every year and seldom read a book on the bestseller list so I should not register surprise when I see few books to my taste. It was a puzzle, however, a kind of chicken and egg perplexity, as I perused these book titles.

Did these outlets create the bestsellers or did bestsellers create these outlets?

I say this in all seriousness as virtually every kiosk had the same fifty to one hundred titles at every terminal.

A long time ago, Joseph Kennedy, the father of JFK, recognized this phenomenon, purchasing thousands of copies across the nation of his son’s alleged book “Profiles In Courage” to secure its bestseller status. He accomplished his objective and then some. The double irony is that Ted Sorenson ghostwrote the book, and the late president won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1956. It represents the contrived status of this industry, and would become a reflection of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s public life, which historians still treat in hagiographic terms.

* * *

The last day at sea BB was well enough to attend the art auction. We are modest collectors of original art, and enjoy the Park West professionals who lecture and sell art on these cruises. There had been other art lectures and auctions on this cruise, but I refused to attend without BB. As expected, we found something “we must have,” and made the purchase. As I told my high school classmate, Ron McGauvran, when he visited us in January 2009, our more than 4,000 books hold our modest home together, and our art collection is perhaps of more value than our house, which is an exaggeration but not a blatant one.

* * *

In our shrinking world, I suppose I should not have been that surprised that the young lady who sold us the artwork shared a natural bond. She had an accent and I asked her where she was from. “South Africa.” I asked her where in South Africa. “Johannesburg.” I told her I lived there in the late 1960s facilitating the formation of a new conglomerate. She asked me where I lived. “Rosebank.” She looked at me and said, “Rosebank is a most impressive section of the city.” I then described our estate, mentioned my modest roots and the fact I was writing a novel about the times. I got a hard kick under the table from BB. I asked her later, “What was that for?”

“You always give more information out than you should.”

I know that is fair, and I’m glad she keeps me in check.

But I do believe there is something to this “six degrees of separation,” which claims a person is one step away from each person they know, and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on earth.

This idea was popularized by a play written by John Guare, and has now spread to websites, and books, including salient treatments by the eminent OD psychologist Stanley Milgram, along with the extrapolations of mathematicians Manfred Kochen and Ithiel de Sola Pool in the book “Contacts and Influences” (1978).

The young lady, an Afrikaner, understood her country’s history and could follow the outline of my story in a time more common to her grandparents. BB forgives me my occasional excesses when I meet a person of interest, as otherwise I seldom talk to strangers. She also knows when I do, like now, I transport myself back in time, in this case forty years, and talk as if it were yesterday. Memory is an aid to a writer, but it is in everyone’s possession. It is also common for an introvert to step out of character with a rush when so exhilarated.

* * *

Since we have been home, BB has downloaded on her computer some 500 pictures she had taken on this cruise, many from our private patio on the ship as we traveled through Alaska’s breathtaking Inside Passage.

She also managed to take pictures when we stopped at the various port cities. The pictures are special. I suggested we should publish a book of at least one hundred of these photographs along with brief commentaries to go with the pictures, but she demurred, “Wait on that!”

I wish all my readers could see these 500 photographs because BB is an astute observer and creative composer. The viewer of the pictures feels he is actually there. For example, in Prince Rupert, Canada, we sat on the lawn of a high school and watched a pickup volley ball game of high school boys and girls, in rotating teams, enjoying a sunny afternoon of sport and camaraderie now that school was out. BB caught players spiking the ball and making spectacular saves. Many of the young people were Orientals and of small stature, but possessed amazing vertical leaping ability. We spent more than an hour being so entertained.

* * *

Malcolm Gladwell remarks in the “Outliers” that people who have truly succeeded have invested a minimum of 10,000 hours of not only hard work, but also much harder work than normal. He profiles the Beatles, Bill Gates, Bill Joy (of Sun Microsystems) and Tiger Woods, who all started early and all worked extraordinarily hard and always with purpose.

I started late as a writer, am unlikely to live to complete my 10,000 hours of hard work, but I do persist. I plan on writing a piece on “10,000 Hours” sometime in the future. It is an interesting benchmark.

* * *

HAITI'S "DIRT COOKIES" -- A RESPONSE

HAITI’S “DIRT COOKIES” – A RESPONSE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 28, 2009

“The truly sublime is always easy, and always natural.”

Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), English statesman

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Jim:

Powerful. THIS type of issue is why I started a think tank. Our preliminary steps may take us a while before we are in a position to address issues of global importance, but we'll get there!

Haiti is heartbreaking. While he is far from an idol of mine, I have cautious hope that Bill Clinton's appointment this week as UN representative to Haiti will help shed light on that troubled land, and bring it greater aid. Last year, I was on the board for a time with a nonprofit that was bringing laptops and education to orphans at a poor school in Haiti. I know the argument well that they don't need computers, they need food that isn't mud, but I counter that they need both - metaphorically speaking, they need fish to eat today, right now, but also fishing lessons so they can feed themselves with high-wage participation in the global economy in 10 years when these children are old enough to work in a meaningful career.

Anyway, I digress. My reply today is not about education, but fixing a broken culture - and I ask, is it even possible, and if so, where would "we" start? (I put "we" in quotes because, as you'll see below, one of my questions is, can well-meaning outsiders give freedom as a gift?)

I read recently that Haiti has been gauged by international bodies that monitor such things to siphon over 99% of its foreign aid to corrupt government officials and criminals. Basically, when a country or nonprofit gives money to Haiti's government, that money ends up in Switzerland and the Caymans, not with the poor it is intended to help. Direct aid to grass roots groups on the ground in Haiti, for instance from a US Rotary club to a Haitian Rotary club, seems to be the only effective method of delivery.

First question for an (amateur) armchair economist: Is corruption culturally based, and so inescapable?

Next, to address your comments on the failings of Democracy in Haiti. This same problem seems endemic to nations to which participative government is new, and not culturally based. Modern Democracy started in England in the 12th Century. The American Colonies were steeped in it from the very beginning. When the French gave it a try in 1789, they had much less luck - there was no tradition of Democracy there at all, on any level in their society. They finally have it down, but it took them most of a century. Russia is exhibiting the same growing pains today: from the Czars to the Communists, they never had one minute of freedom or participative government on any level of their society until 1989-91, when all of a sudden: ta-da! The communists closed up shop. In the case of Haiti, they may have had some form of so-called Democracy for generations, but the reality is that when the population is uneducated and cowed by violence and the officials corrupt, Democracy is a sham.

I believe firmly that the only legitimacy in government comes from the people. To probably misquote Churchill (sorry, Jim - I know he's not your favorite), Democracy is the worst possible system - except for all the others. So question #2, something I have wondered about my entire life: Is there a bridge form of government that can step in to introduce a nation to Democracy slowly and less painfully, or do Peoples simply need to take their lumps and experience all the horrors of fledgling Democracy on their own? We Anglo cultures had close to a millennium to ease into it, and there was still a lot of strife along the way. The fact may be that modern nations don't have that luxury. I honestly don't have an answer for this dilemma.

This brings us to a question (#3) that has been in the media plenty in recent years: can the UN or the US or anyone successfully "impose" freedom and Democracy on a nation that it "liberates?" We haven't had much luck in the past, but occasionally it has worked. We set up Democracy in our three defeated adversaries, the Axis nations, after WWII - Germany and Japan especially were authoritarian cultures as well as autocracies, and yet they have taken to Democracy quite well. South Korea is another example.

I don't believe it possible to help a nation such as Haiti in any meaningful way through aid alone, although they desperately need that so people do not continue to die of starvation, malnutrition, and disease. In order to have real impact, Haiti needs to free itself of corruption in its society - not just its government, but also its culture, which (as in many Third World cultures) tolerates graft, nepotism, and the like.

I think the long-term cure to Haiti's ills lie in Democracy and fairly regulated Capitalism. You don't get those in a cultural vacuum.
Ted
* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I am off to Alaska so I cannot give a long reply to your thoughtful response to this missive.

Edmund Burke is quoted as he had it right. I’ve often thought of Burke’s reflection with regard to the Post-WWII work of General Douglas McArthur in Japan and South Korea.

Imagine what the world would be like today if the good general had acted after that bloody war, which the Empire of Japan precipitated with its bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, as the Bush Administration has acted after 9/11.

General MacArthur was first in his class at West Point; George W. Bush was a “gentlemen ‘C’ student” at Yale. Intelligence is a powerful problem solving toolkit. Brains recognize problems can be controlled but not solved, as they are constantly maturating into new challenges. MacArthur put this mechanism in place.

MacArthur was arrogant, self-absorbed, opinionated, difficult, stubborn, a visionary, and a loner. We don’t elect people to high office like him. If you are thinking of General Eisenhower, think again, as Eisenhower was a similar student to Bush, and a personality and a presence.

Emperor Hirohito’s people treated him as a god. General MacArthur, who had spent much of his career in the Far East, was aware of that precedence and the subtleties in the Japanese culture. He used this knowledge, building a democratic republic infrastructure while maintaining the emperor as the titular head of the government and of the Japanese people.

This was 1945, a time of reconstruction of a defeated and decimated people and nation. The young emperor had already been on the throne for more than 20 years.

In 1921, at the age of twenty, he had already broken with tradition by being the first crown prince to leave his native shores, having been recalled from a six-month European tour in which he spent time with Edward VIII, the Prince of Wales to take control of the government from his mentally unstable father.

While touring Europe, Hirohito developed a taste for Western golf and bacon-and-egg breakfasts. In his 63-year reign, Japan went from a xenophobic nation and insular island kingdom to a modern world power, interrupted of course by the terrible defeat in WWII.

MacArthur, who professed always to be his own man, resisted the many voices who were calling for having Emperor Hirohito tried as a war criminal. He fortunately prevailed.

MacArthur didn’t change the culture he used it. He didn’t subjugate the Japanese people to draconian restrictions but introduced them to Western ways, including baseball. He systematically and strategically brought them along incrementally, not shutting down their war producing factories, but transforming them by bringing in American and European experts to convert them to peacetime purposes.

It was MacArthur, after all, who set in place the climate for W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker to make Japan, Inc. the most powerful and most quality driven manufacturing center in the world.

To be fair, the Japanese were a vigorous people, and after a fashion, became responsive to this general’s vision, perception, understanding, and natural affinity for all things Japanese. He even spoke the language, which is the only way to truly enter another’s culture.

As I’ve said often, we are in a time of leaderless leaders. We were fortunate to have such leaders as General Douglas MacArthur, General George Marshall, and General Omar Bradley, as well as General Eisenhower, and of course, FDR during that challenging time.

You are correct. You build from within, not from without, and you build in the people’s timeframe, not yours, and the infrastructure that is created is natural to the people, not an imposition or denial of what is natural to them. Japan is a group culture. MacArthur epitomized individualism to the nth degree, and yet he adapted his intervention to accommodate the Japanese to what was natural for and to them, and not to his own lights.

* * *

HAITI'S "DIRT COOKIES"

HAITI’S “DIRT COOKIES”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 28, 2009

* * *

“Values, everyone has values, some are quite honorable, others quite despicable, but we all have values. Values dictate the way we behave or misbehave. Some values are of the brave, others of the bully, and some are of people who simply don’t give a shit.

“Sociologists tell us in South America the chief crimes are against property, especially that of the church and the oligarchy. The majority in many of these countries has little and feels the church is complicit with the ruling class in this state of affairs, and so it wreaks havoc on both.

“The chief crimes in the United States are against people. America is the murder capitol of the world with the largest per capita incarceration of murderers of any country on the globe. The trend in this melting pot of cultures is to intra-ethnic violence, that is, Blacks murdering Blacks, Hispanics murdering Hispanics, Orientals murdering Orientals, and Whites murdering Whites. Whatever we may hate, it is apparent we take it out on our own kind.

“In the land of plenty, wholesale murder has become epidemic as loose federations of young people commonly known as “gangs” are on the attack. Gang Wars are common in our major cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, Seattle and San Francisco where killing is an incidental affair. Chicago, alone, has more than 100,000 in gangs with more than 2,000 gang style murders to date in the last decade. Gangs are active in selling and distributing illegal drugs, prostitution, brutalizing neighborhoods, fighting over street corners for drug traffic, and terrorizing the general population.

“Meanwhile, there are millions, who lack the luxury of any kind of crime as their chief value is to find something to eat to stave off hunger and live for one more day. Values are not always a theme of justice.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., from, "Fragments of a Philosophy”

* * *

Sometimes I am saddened, not because readers are critical of some of my missives but because they take umbrage at my lack of optimism. “Were you born pessimistic,” as one person wrote, “or did you take an oath of pessimism?”

The answer of course is “no, I did not,” but what is apparent is that my missive ran into that reader’s value system, as my missive put the reader on the defensive about her values. Life is not a bowl of cherries, especially when people don’t even have cherries to eat to keep them alive.

* * *

Visit one of the worst slums in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti at lunchtime, and you are likely to see the people eating “dirt cookies” to keep them alive. People here control their hunger pangs with these cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau, seasoned with butter or vegetable shortening and salt.

The mud has been long prized by women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium, as the dirt is alleged to be rich in minerals. Children like the buttery, salty taste of the “dirt cookies,” but when they have them three times a day often complain of stomach cramps after living on such a constant diet.

Food prices have soared in Haiti because of high oil prices, while the land is often parched with need of fertilizer and irrigation, which has resulted in this island nation being mainly dependent on imports. To register a sense of this, at the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice sell for 60 cents, beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up a similar rate, even the price of the yellow dirt or clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now cost $5. Still, at 5 cents a piece the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples.

Eighty percent of the people of Haiti live on less than $2 a day as a tiny elite controls the economy, as has in perpetuity. Making and selling these cookies is the only income for the majority of the Haitian women who commonly have five or more mouths to feed at home.

The “dirt cookie” industry is a simple one. Merchants truck the dirt from the central town of Hinche to the La Saline marketplace, a maze of tables of vegetables and meat swarming with flies stand next to Haitians bagging mounds of the dirt into cloth bags. Women buy the dirt, and then process it into “dirt cookies” in places such as Fort Dimanche, a nearby shantytown.

Carrying buckets of dirt and water up ladders to the roof of the former prison for which the slum is named, they strain out the rocks and clumps on a sheet, and then stir the dirt and water into a sludge adding shortening and salt. Then they pat the mixture into mud cookies and leave it to dry under the scorching hot midday sun.

The finished cookies are carried in buckets to the market or sold on the streets. What is not sold is brought home to feed the many children of these women.

Haitians are so poor and have so little real food that they make and eat “dirt cookies” without another thought, as it holds off starvation. The “dirt cookies” have a smooth consistency, but suck up all the moisture in the mouth as it touches the tongue and then leaves an unpleasant taste of dirt that lingers.

While the dirt may contain parasites and deadly toxins, it can strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb of women to certain diseases claims a study of “geophagy,” which is the scientific name for dirt eating.

* * *

I can remember when I was a boy of five or six, after a hard summer rain, playing in the soft soil and making mud pies, and even tasting them, and spitting out the slimy mud and shaking my head in disgust. Ugh!

Imagine my reaction when learning seven decades later that “dirt cookies” is a food source and viable industry in this poorest country in our hemisphere. This is not a hoax. This is real, and this is going on today in Haiti. (World Focus, WUSF – PBS Television, May 27, 2009, and go to www.google.com and click on “Dirt Cookies of Haiti” for more detailed information).

* * *

Now, how can such poverty exist is this hemisphere with the United States of America the richest most powerful nation in the world?

Haiti is a country, which has been in constant civil strife and social turmoil for most of my life. It is a forgotten country. Meanwhile, American superpower has not been able to do anything about it. Pervasive starvation exists right under our very noses. This is our Darfur, our Somalia, and our Angola. We sit down to dinner, eat heartily, and throw more food away than we eat, while not so far away the breakfast, lunch and dinner in the slums of Haiti are “dirt cookies.” There go I but for the grace of God.

* * *

Do I have an answer? No.

But there are people in government that do, people with expertise in the area of starvation who could do something. But I know the reason why they don’t. Power deals with power to protect its power and the accretion of its power, entertaining nothing that might threaten the erosion of that power whether it be the power of a great or humble nation. Power is guided by quid pro quo, and power always bows to power but not necessarily to the needs of the people. Power dispenses its power only when the impact and most favorable consequences of that power are germane and consequential.

Read Haitian history on www.google.com, and you will see the United States has supported puppet Haitian dictators, only to be surprised how corrupt they turned out to be. The US has armed the police and army, and learned only to its chagrin how they in turn brutalized the people. The US has supported free elections of an electorate largely illiterate but cunningly escorted to the polls and manipulated to vote their benefactors’ conscience, which was the hunger for power. Former President Jimmy Carter has been duped into legitimizing this charade, as have other well-meaning idealists and humanitarians.

Elections are not free when the electorate is not a constitutional power base. Elections can be free but are reduced to being meaningless if there is no infrastructure to carry out the will of the people for civility, social justice, peace and prosperity.

Haiti is a colonial error of commission and omission, which has maintained a power elite studiously dedicated to a weak infrastructure. Consequently, Haiti is not the fabled Atlantis that allegedly sunk to the bottom of the sea. Haiti is real, palpable and observable. The problem is Haiti has simply disappeared from the radar of the world’s conscience, as if it never existed sharing something of the legacy of Atlantis.

* * *

"TORTURE" -- GUILT & SHAME AND IMBECILIC ADOLESCENCE!

“TORTURE” – GUILT & SHAME AND IMBECILIC ADOLESCENCE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 24, 2009

“Though it sleep long, the venom of great guilt, when death or danger, or detection comes, will bite the spirit fiercely.”

Shakespeare

“I regard that man as lost, who has lost his sense of shame.”

Plautus (427 – 184), Roman comic poet

* * *

REFERENCE:

Responses keep coming in on my missive on “Torture.” This is such a case.

A READER WRITES:

Jim,

Another hit! I have "enjoyed" a lifelong love/hate relationship with guilt - in Freudian terms, I'm sure I have an overdeveloped Superego. Whenever I speak on this topic with Jews or Catholics, they seem to believe that their religion/subculture invented guilt. I explain it to them thus:

The Jews invented guilt. The Catholics institutionalized it. The Puritans turned it into a national pastime.

The problem may be that it is no longer most Americans' pastime - guilt, and its neurotic motivating power, has left our national psyche.

We're better adjusted as individuals - people like me who feel guilty despite having done little wrong and plenty right: what's healthy about that? But as a collective whole?

Possibly not so good. Look at Wall Street. Look at the Bush Administration's patent lack of remorse, as evinced by Cheney on national TV lately. I think a good, healthy dose of guilt might indeed be good form, to paraphrase Mr. Salvater.

Ted

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Ted,

When guilt is rationalized categorically, referencing Jews, Catholics and Puritans in terms of guilt, my wonder is if it doesn’t take the sting out of personal identification, and therefore meaningful reflection.

I can see the advantage of such usage as a seminar leader, public speaker, indeed, as an intellectual entertainer, but does the effort register with any moral impact? Or does such reference simply distance the intended audience from a sensitivity to personal guilt and shame?

My sense is it disperses guilt and shame and nullifies the personal impact. When I’m making such references, I want the reader to reflect, “Is he speaking to me?” I am indeed!

My missives are an invitation for the reader to ponder what I am pondering, but from his perspective, not mine. I am self-engaged but addressing him.

Someone wrote that “you are always talking about yourself,” as if I should apologize or be self-conscious for doing so. My predilection has precedence.

In the Irish Roman Catholic Church, the priest reads the Epistle before he reads the Gospel at Sunday Mass. The Epistle is a moral missive in support of the Gospel. Since a little boy, Epistles have given me conceptual understanding of moral principles, and have dictated the style of my missives.

I tell empirical stories, and that is what Epistles are, stories, not to pump up my sails, but to put wind in the reader’s. What follows is consistent with that practice.

GUILT AND ITS REPRIEVE -- A PERSONAL INCIDENT!

When quite young, highly successful, but also naïve, I had a vision of building a medical and professional complex in Marion County, Indianapolis, where I was a chemical sales engineer for Nalco Chemical Company. I was also active in community affairs, among which was Secretary of the Zoning Board of Appeals for Lawrence Township, appointed by the mayor of the City of Lawrence, a personal friend.

The City of Lawrence was a burgeoning suburb of Indianapolis on the northeast side of the county with a 27-acre parcel of land that I thought ideal for my project. I shared the idea with a Nalco veteran, who had been with the company in its early days, and was relatively affluent.

“I’ve never taken a chance in my life. I want to get in on this,” he said passionately. "Secure the deal and I'll write a check for the balance." Naively, I took him at his word.

The land was owned by one of the major real estate developers in Indianapolis, and had a sales price of $30,000. I had previously commissioned an architect and had complete drawings of how the project would look when completed. I contacted the developer's attorney, gave him a deposit of $3,000 on Friday, and signed papers to pay the remaining $27,000 on the following Monday, once my partner released the funds.

Over the weekend, my partner got cold feet, and backed out. It was January 1964, and that $3,000 in 2009 dollars would be more than $30,000 today. It was my complete savings at the time. What to do?

On Monday, I went to the offices of the attorney for the developer located on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis, and immediately became weak in the knees once inside its imposing mahogany walls. A secretary ushered me into an even more impressive sanctuary where the attorney sat.

The secretary brought in all the documents I was to sign and gave them to the attorney, a well-dressed man, who waved me to sit down across from him, and said with a broad smile, “Let’s do it!”

“I don’t have the money,” I blurted out without preamble. The two of them looked at me as if I was joking. They could tell by my expression I was in deep agony and sincere. Without saying a word, they waited for me to explain. “My partner backed out,” I said matter-of-factly as if this was sufficient explanation.

“You know this is a serious breach of contract?” the attorney said.

“Yes sir.”

He looked at me a long time, dismissed the secretary, and then dialed a number. He was calling the developer. The attorney explained the situation. He turned his chair so that his back was toward me as he talked. Then he spun around. “Is there any chance you can raise the money?”

Two things kicked into my mind simultaneously. They expected I had a backup plan, which I didn’t, but they wanted to get rid of the land! “Could I talk to the developer?” I asked. The attorney handed me the phone.

The developer said, “You’re out $3,000, son, and you’re wasting everybody’s time.” He then went on to vent his spleen. I listened. I didn’t interrupt. He was obviously not having a very good day, and I had made it worse. Then what I expected came. “That is, you’re out the three grand if you don’t have another proposal.”

To this day, I hate talking on the phone. I screen all my calls, and only answer about 5 percent of them. If I can’t see you, I can’t read you. I was reduced to thinking with my gut, but boldly. “Sir,” I said, “I made this contract in good faith, but my partner got cold feet. I don’t think you want to take my $3,000. I think you want to sell the land.”

I could hear his breathing. “Here is my proposition,” I said off the top of my head breathing equally hard myself. “I would like you to give me a year’s extension and . .”

“What the hell are you talking about? I’m not giving any goddamn extension much less a year.”

“Sir, hear me out," I said evenly. He was breathing hard again. Somehow that increased my boldness. “I get paid every three months. I will send you a check for $2,000 each quarter over the next four quarters, or until I find a buyer for the land. If I don’t sell the land by that time, you will have $11,000, and I will be out that amount.” I thought for sure he’d say you have a month, take or leave it, but to my surprise he said,

“You’re willing to take that risk?”

“Sir, I’m a salesman, and a very good one. I am if you’re willing to trust me.” He was.

* * *

Over the next three quarters, there were several bites on the land but no one could come up with the amount needed – I was selling the land for $33,000 and wouldn’t budge on the price.

Then early in the fourth quarter a buyer materialized who needed the land immediately. He was an industrialist with a major contract from Korea, and had to build a facility with a railroad spur and easy access to metropolitan suppliers for components. He agreed to the $33,000 price, but we quickly ran into a glitch. His lawyers discovered the land was zoned suburban commercial (SC), not suburban industrial (SI). A road had to be cut through the property and “SC” required a 15-foot setback on either side of the road whereas “SI” required 5 feet. They needed the latter or the deal was off.

There was no time to go through the lengthy process of rezoning, but I was in a position to cut through red tape and have the Director of the Marion County Zoning Board, whom I knew rather well, change the land’s zoning from “SC” to “SI,” for an “honorarium,” as he put it.

Once again, I was on the horns of a dilemma. I confess I considered paying him the bribe, justifying it on the basis of what a huge loss it would be to my family if I didn't. My wife knew nothing of this whole business, so I agitated alone. In those days, before they locked up Catholic churches, I would sit in their musty dark silence wherever I was, and think. I did that now.

Part of my mind thought, no one will ever know, as I was aware of how poorly records were kept in 1964 in the county’s archives, as on occasion as Secretary of Zoning Board of Appeals for Lawrence Township I had researched them.

Then, it dawned on me. “I would know,” and I would know that my success was a fraud. I went back to the industrialist that day and told him it was not possible to change the zoning.

* * *

If matters were not complicated enough, they became more complicated. I was promoted area manager in the Industrial Division for Nalco heading up the office in Louisville, and forced to relocate almost immediately, meaning leaving Indianapolis where the land I was attempting to sell was located.

Depressed, and nearly certain that I had not only lost my initial investment in this land deal of $3,000, but compounded that loss with an additional $6,000 already, and possibly, a total of $8,000 if I didn’t find a buyer in final two weeks before Christmas. No one I was certain would be thinking of buying land during the Christmas holidays.

I was wrong. A week before Christmas, I had to leave Louisville and return to Indianapolis to meet a horse breeder from Ocala, Florida, who wanted to take a look at the land.

My heart sunk when I met this man. He was tall, round, scruffy and disheveled with rough hands, ruddy complexion, and the look of an out of work farmer. It was his eyes, however, that were different. They were executive eyes, decisive eyes, eyes that had no time for small talk.

I still remember his reaction when he saw the land. “I’ll take it,” and then he asked, “What you asking for it?” I told him. “Fine," he said, "Got to be back in Lexington tomorrow, can we do this today?”

I called the developer’s attorney, and surprised him once again. “I’ve got a buyer, and I’m bringing him to the office now.” We did the deal. It was the week before Christmas.

The rest of the story is equally bizarre and provides another instance of my naiveté. I was so overwhelmed with the whole affair that in January 1965, I received an additional check for $3,000 having overpaid the builder for the land. I had forgotten that I had charged $33,000 and only contracted to pay $30,000 for the land.

SHAME AND ITS VICISSITUDES

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003), I expressed my confusion as a boy with the jubilation that followed the hundreds of thousands of civilians who perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the dropping of the atomic bomb. I wrote:

“On Monday, August 7, 1945, I read in The Clinton Herald that yesterday ‘President Truman reveals a U. S. Army Air Force bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.’ I never heard of such a bomb or such a place. On Thursday, I read that the day before, Wednesday, August 9, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Each bomb, according to The Herald, was a single missile 2,000 times the blasting power of the largest bomb used previously in the war. I try to fathom this destructive power and the reason for it.

“I listen to my da’s railroad buddies celebrating these bombings with a kind of excitement I hadn’t heard before. ‘Understand it leveled Hiroshima to the ground, and all their papier-mâché huts with it,’ says one. ‘Not a Jap standing,’ says another. ‘Did even a better job at Nagasaki,’ says a third. ‘Heard on the radio tens of thousands killed and tens of thousands more critically wounded in both attacks,’ says a fourth, ‘and we didn’t lose a flier.’ Finally, my da concludes, ‘Won’t be long now.’

“Thank God for that!” they echo as one.

“Does Japan have that huge an army in those two cities?” I ask innocently, seeing the only justification for such an attack. All eyes turn to me in stunned silence. Usually, they don’t even notice me. Then they break into uproarious laughter. Their eyes go watery. Fists to the eyes stay their tears; legs kick the floor until the house shakes, and some even hold their stomachs in raucous hilarity. I didn’t mean to be funny. What’s so funny about tens of thousands of people dying? Does war make people like that?

"I ask my mother who is in the kitchen reading. She says, ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ I ask my da after his railroad buddies leave. He says simply, “It saved thousands of American lives.’ Both answers are inadequate.” (pp 301 – 302)

Six decades later, I am still perplexed at the demonstration of such glee. Silently, I sought refuge then at the Clinton Public Library to read about these two cities. I didn’t understand shame but I think my young mind embodied it.

My da caught me crying, shook his head in disgust, and told my mother to handle me. War before that incident was like a game, like playing cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, not real, but the pictures in the newspapers made it real.

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There was an Indian Reservation not far from my home called “Tama,” which my da took me to a couple of times. I considered us poor, but I couldn’t understand how Indians could live in even more deplorable conditions. When I asked my da, he simply answered, “They’re Indians,” as if that explained the situation.

All my growing up period I never read about Indians except the romanticized version of the first Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims, and later, the many triumphs of Americans over Indians in battle, and the atrocities of Indians against settlers. Even “Custer’s Last Stand” had the dramatic appeal of a fallen hero, a possible presidential candidate cut down in the full flush of life, and not that of an incompetent leader.

Then, too, the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez was romanticized in the books I read in my growing up period, failing to mention how he ruthlessly destroyed the Aztec culture in the sixteenth century, and laid to waste Aztec cities and temples of exquisite architecture. Little note was taken of Aztec advances in such fields as astronomy and the arts.

One of my early hero’s was President Andrew Jackson, who soared to prominence on the battlefield and as advocate of the common man. Yet, it wasn’t until my college student days that I became aware of the Indians’ “trail of tears” as he moved Indian nations east of the Mississippi River to the far west, thus destroying their ancient homelands and culture while desecrating their sacred grounds.

President after president throughout American history have signed and broken treaties with Indians, at will, because they could. Yet, there have been no national monuments to this shame.

We have essentially erased the Indian culture from the face of the United States. So, today, there is no Indian tradition, only Indian reservations like “Tama,” and Indian casinos spread across the length and breadth of the country. There is no national holiday dedicated to the Indian culture, yet this continent belonged to the American Indians long before Europeans made it their home.

We are all well aware that six million European Jews perished in Nazis concentration camps during WWII. We also know that more than 58 million perished in that war launched by Hitler six years after the Reichstag fire, which gave the Nazis a pretext to destroy the government and impose its will on the German people.

Nazis did this with democratic elections, elections that for the first time used modern technology and the media to manipulate the will of the people with the invention of contrived scapegoats of the Jews and the WWI Treaty of Versailles.

It is more than sixty years since that shameful period in human history. Since then Germany has been working through its past, attempting to conquer the past through painful self-examination, which has dominated political and cultural life in Germany since the end of World War II.

If you have had the opportunity to visit Germany in recent years, you have seen, as I have, the monuments to the Holocaust in Berlin. The German people are just now, more than six decades later, beginning to come to terms with the Nazis, while imploring the world to believe the genuine sincerity of their shame.

It is time for Americans to get started on what we have done to American Indians and to African Americans. President Harry S. Truman would not outlaw lynching in his administration because he didn’t believe it was prudent to do so at the time. Monuments and museums to the Holocaust are everywhere in Germany, especially in the major cities. Where are the monuments and museums to lynching, or to the eradication of Indian culture in the United States?

It is time for the Roman Catholic Church to apologize for its laxity in World War II for the behavior of Pope Pius XII with regard to the Jewish Question. The oblique apologies of Pope Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI are not sufficient. Where is the shame?

We know of the scandals of American Catholic priests and their sexual abuse of children, and the millions of dollars the church have had to pay the victims. We also know there was massive cover-up for decades. Not until the problem could no longer be contained did the Church act, and then reluctantly. Prior to that sex offending priests were rotated and cavalierly placed in harm’s way of children with imperious contempt. Where is the shame?

Now we learn that tens of thousands of Irish children were sexually, physically and emotionally abused by nuns, priests, and others over sixty years in hundreds of church-run residential schools meant to care for the poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted, according to a report released from Dublin last week. The New York Times reports:

“The 2,600-page report paints a picture of institutions run more like Dickensian orphanages than 20th century schools, characterized by privation, and cruelty that could be both casual and choreographed. A climate of fear, created by pervasive punishment, permeated most of the institutions, the report says. In the boys’ schools, it says, sexual abuse was endemic.”

Where is the shame?

Sometimes I wonder if we have traveled through all these centuries into modernism and post modernism only to find ourselves in Paradise Lost chasing money until it has no meaning, experiencing discomfort with society which has no substance, feeling psychological urges for a strong father figure, when he has long ago abandoned us, retreating into our primal desires with reckless abandon, which makes heaven a hell, and a hell of heaven, as Milton might say.

Without guilt and shame, conscience and caring, there is no sensitivity to our common humanity as these are its boundaries.

Viewed from that context, I fear we Americans are inclined to intellectualize our pain and shame, dissipating it into rhetoric rather than action. We are an unusual society. You say we are more mature. I flinch at that suggestion, as I couldn’t imagine us to be more imbecilic adolescent.

We cower in the cave of fear and paint it with our faint hopes. Not until we face and absorb our negative history can we count ourselves among the grown ups. If there is no sensitivity to evil, then there is no place for good. There is only room for hollow men.

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