IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE
THE UNCERTAIN JOURNEY OF A BOOK INTO A POSSIBLE FILM
A COMMUNIQUE TO LOYAL SUPPORTERS OF THE BOOK
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2006
I am copying you that have been most supportive of my efforts as a writer. For those that I have failed to include, I apologize because I am deeply appreciative of the efforts of everyone.
This project of a possible film may come to nothing. I am referring to the possible filming of Clinton, Iowa in terms of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. I agree with my friend, Patricia Carstensen, "wouldn't it be something?"
Even if someone buys the rights to the book, it can be years or never that it actually becomes a film. If you think your life is plagued with uncertainty, it is nothing compared to the number of projects in Hollywood that are given considerable hype and never materialize into actual films.
A movie must make money, and it is my belief that this book could do just that because we are tired of the soulless scripts that fail to capture ordinary people as they are.
This book is about a blue-collar neighborhood's soul, and by extension the collective soul of the community at a time of the uncertainty of war, World War II.
God bless you one and all for everything.
I wrote the book but you with your purchases -- Billy McKinley and Joan Dunmore purchased so many books I lost count -- and your passionate support made the book resound in the Clinton climate. It failed to garner a national audience but that was a combination of my ineptitude and disinclination to be a marketing persuader.
On the local Clinton front, the organization skills of Ron McGauvran and Linda Casey and Carole Gilbert were simply awesome. They actually organized and hand delivered copies of the book, more than 500 in that initial period, to each individual household. 500 books are a lot.
I've made a practice of sending anything that has a possibility of deserving media attention to Scott Holland of the Clinton Herald. He is some reporter. He wrote a piece on me when I spoke before the Kiwanis Club of Clinton on "Leaderless Leadership," a theme of more than one of my books. He was the first reporter that ever got it right about my behavioral model. He listened, what every good reporter should do, and reported accurately.
I thank the late wonderful Sister Mary Louise that was pushing 100, but was always there for me on each of my visits. What a delight. She was a cousin of the late Sister Mary Cecile, who is prominent in the book.
I send kudos also to the late Robert "Ripper" Collins who was a source of encyclopedic knowledge. He and his brother, Thiel, have been lifelong friends, and always there for me when I needed them.
I developed a special relationship with the late Stanley Reeves. Stanley was my constant companion on those many research trips to Clinton. We often went to lunch together. He would tell me about first seeing me play basketball in a round robin tournament at Washington Junior High when I was eight years old. "I remember this tall blond kid," he said, "and when you called (to ask him about Clinton history) I was wondering if it was the same kid." It was.
Then there was Everett Streit. Long before the book came out, Everett wrote a series of editorials on my exploits as a writer. In one, he gave a preview of the book IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE only then its title was, "While America Slept."
My appreciation is for the Courthouse Tigers still around for their support: David Cavanaugh, Larry Jakubsen, Dick Tharp, Dick Crider, Phil Leahy, and of course, our coach, Gussie Witt, who claims he raised me over at the courthouse.
Dick Crider sent me a tape that was so well conceived in depth and breadth that I feel he missed his calling as a writer.
Dave Cavanaugh got on my case to quit collecting data "and write the damn book!"
My sister, Pat Waddell, was never a Courthouse Tiger, but she was always there for me in my many trips home.
Then, of course, there is my mother, who is central to the book's story, but didn't live long enough to see it in print. I hope she would have liked it, but I must admit I don't know if it would have been written so honestly if she had lived to its publishing.
Then there is Gary Herrity, who showed me a Clinton history slide show with his son, Kevin. It must have lasted at least three hours. It is good to see Gary is being recognized as the Clinton historian that he is.
Michael Kearney put me in touch with the library's (cellar) research section where I lived for many days in front of the microfiche machine. It was funny. When someone came in, I would have to get off the machine, and allow him or her to do their checking. Then I would be back on the machine. This on and off routine would go on for hours.
Then one day it was raining and no one interrupted me from about 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. A librarian lady came over to me, and said, "First of all we can't believe it (me being on the machine so long), and second we don't want to believe it, if that makes any sense." I wondered if they thought I was a homeless person.
I want to thank Joy Witt for her hospitality when I visited her in Decatur, Illinois. She is the widow of Bobby Witt, the inspiration for writing the book. Bobby was our leader at the courthouse, and an outstanding athlete in four sports, but yet he shared little of that with his Decatur family. It figures, as he was always modest to a fault.
The Decatur High School gym has been named in his honor. He is also in the Illinois Coaches Hall of Fame. Joy's daughter (she has another daughter and son) joined us for dinner, and I couldn't take my eyes off her, as she was the picture of her father.
I want also to thank Kate and the Guzzardo gang at the Hallmark Card & Gift Shop, Clinton's only bookstore, for their continuing support and risk taking by buying tons of this book. I attempted to get the book in other places in Clinton, including Wal-Mart, but to no avail.
And I want to thank the scores and scores of people that have come to Clinton book signings, standing in line as if I were a celebrity, which I am not. Among them was Sister Mary Helen, whom I write about in the book as one of my favorite nuns. She taught me in the fourth grade. She allowed me (being the talker that I am) to have a forum of five minutes and no more than ten minutes after lunch to discuss the latest Clinton Herald stories on the war. It worked. I was quiet the rest of the time.
As a boy, I always wondered if she had red hair under that habit. More than a half century later, she walks up to me at a Guzzardo book signing, no longer in the headdress of a nun, and says, "Do you know who I am?" Without hesitation, I said, "Sister Helen." One of the surprises was that I still retained a letter she had written my mother on my "spirited behavior" that "could get me in later trouble." I told her I am a pack rat in the closet of my mind as well as the clutter of my house. Try getting your mind around a 3,000 square foot house with more than 4,000 books, as is the case today.
Another nun, I always visit is my sixth grade teacher, Sister Mary Gertrude. Sister was a very young nun when she taught me at St. Patrick's, and she was from St. Patrick's, Missouri. She has been most kind to Beautiful Betty and me with wonderful cards and letters.
There are others that I have since become reacquainted with who best know me as "Rube" Fisher, after the catcher Rube Walker of the St. Louis Cardinals, and Rube Fischer (with a "c") of the New York Giants. Gussie Witt gave me that sobriquet and I have carried it with pride all my life.
Among the others are Alex Graves, a Courthouse Tiger, Billy Christensen, Tom Berdan, Del Ploen, my best friend, along with Billy McKinley, Billy Benson, who gave me a great interview, and also a former Courthouse Tiger. There is Lefty Ward, who like Dick Tharp, was born in the wrong era or would have been a major league pitcher.
The late deputy Ted Stamp, and the late sheriff Ky Petersen were instrumental in the life of the kids of the neighborhood. They have prominent places in the book for creating a place of recreation on the courthouse lawn. They knew nothing about social science, but a lot about energetic and mischievous kids, nipping it in the bud would constructive play.
Then there was the late and inimitable Lyle Sawyer who would run around the courthouse in 100-degree heat thirty years before jogging was an "in" sport.
To capture the soul of a place and space I chose real people in real time and real circumstances, writing my recollections as a novel, rather than as a biography. I have published well over a million words but this book is the soul of my work, and I hope it will survive me.
I'd like to mention others that have been helpful and supportive of this book including Mick and Lorie Cheramy, Gene "Oink" Steesen, Ray Gilbert, who is also in the Illinois Coaches Hall of Fame, the late Donnie Stamp, who sports writers called "the arm." We had a special connection: he pitched and I caught; we both played guard in basketball, me arching the ball to the ceiling with my shots, and his on a line like a bullet; he was quarterback on our high school football team, and I was one of his ends.
And a special thanks to Maureen Witt, the wife of Vernon Witt, who was Bobby's brother. She lives the life that we all dream of living consistent with our beliefs and values. There is a scene in the book when Vernon takes Bobby and me for an ice cream sundae as he is going off to war. It was at Rastrelli's, and now, writing these words again, I can still taste the sundae and feel the pride Bobby and I felt that day.
I share this with you because a writer is connected to many others and without them my kind of writer has nothing to write about. All of my writing, scholarly, or personal, philosophical or psychological is always based on experience supported by my training, and therefore interdependent with both.
More importantly, in this most competitive business of writing today, where marketing persuaders are attempting all kinds of subliminal games to march us to their products, the real connection I have as a writer is soulful meeting on common ground. This makes my writing and the reader extensions of each other, interdependent. In sharing my stories, I hope to lace them with their own.
Always be well and thank you one and all,
Jim
-----------------
Forwarded Message:
John,
I enjoyed our exchange.
Thank you for your quick response.
I am glad you are reading some of my stuff.
A breakthrough book, which some are now treating as a classic was "Work Without Managers" (1990). It was first self-published, but then picked up by CRC Press, having me rewrite it as "Six Silent Killers" (1998).
Not being cognizant of the ephemeral nature of media opportunity, I failed to take advantage of having the book reviewed on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and by such national magazines as Industrial Week. IW named it one of the ten best business books of the year, while Business Book Review Journal named it one of the four best.
When "Six Silent Killers" came out The Wall Street Journal gave it a "must read."
I have also been widely published in the AQP Journal, National Productivity Review, the Journal of Organizational Excellence, Leadership Excellence, and even The Reader's Digest to give you an eclectic sense of my publication history.
Leadership Excellence named me one of the ten most influential thought leaders.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE gives you a sense of my thought leadership development. I hope you find the time to read it. I would read the book before I handed it off to Mel Gibson's people.
Going from the reading to the film making often takes many years. It took me thirteen years to write it traveling to Clinton, Iowa a total of twelve times and interviewing hundreds, as well as living in the library with the microfiche machine going through Clinton Heralds.
One reader of the book said that it was a "Portrait of the Leader as a Young Man," a take off on James Joyce's biographical novel.
Amazon.com has the reaction of many readers in its comment review section.
It is obvious we are on the same page. It remains to be seen if we can get off on the same dime. To that possibility I wish us success.
Always be well,
Jim
PS All my books are in print except Confident Selling (Prentice-Hall 1970). It was in print for twenty years and then the copyright went over to me. I am looking to reissue it in an updated form along with Confident Thinking. I have written several manuscripts in recent years looking for publishers among which are:
Near Journey's End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent Man?;
Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land;
Who Put You In the Cage?
I am now working on my South Africa novel where I was an American corporate executive in the late 1960s to be titled Green Island in a Black Sea. This I offer in way of introduction.
-----------------
Forwarded Message:
Dr. Fisher,
Thanks for initiating a phone call.
It was a pleasure.
I am busy reading up on you and what you have done.
Our Jerusalem Project is July 24-August 13 with the tail end being a part of the Leadership Summit that is broadcast on satellite to leaders on the second weekend of August every year.
I will send you some curriculum offerings that we are working on for the 2 ½ weeks and then are developing a website for year round leadership developmet in the context of leadership development and reconciliation practices for the supposed clash of civilizations.
At the right time, a Mel Gibson contact may be in the offing.
So , stay close, my friend
John
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
BLIND SPOT! CHARLEY ROSE DEFROCKED!
BLIND SPOT!
CHARLEY ROSE DEFROCKED!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2006
“Not body enough to cover his mind decently with; his intellect is improperly exposed.”
Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845)
English cleric and mystic
“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”
Nikola Tesla, 1896
TO BE AND NOT TO SEE
I was watching Charley Rose, the likeable, engaging, empathic, mover and shaker interviewer of public television, when surprised at his lack of debt beyond celebrity consciousness.
Rose was interviewing a versatile film actor, Michael Caine, who was promoting his new film, “The Prestige.” The film deals with magic.
Caine casually mentioned Harry Houdini’s connection to the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Then with the same casual aplomb, he brought up the name of “Nikola Tesla” whose persona is featured in the film, reeling off Tesla’s scientific accomplishments. He learned of these while being interviewed by a Serbian reporter.
Rose confessed that he wasn’t aware of the connection between Houdini and Doyle, nor of their polarized views on mysticism. Even more astounding, he confessed never to having heard of Nikola Tesla. One wonders how that could be possible. Then again, it falls into place in a celebrity conscious culture that is skin deep.
Houdini and Doyle met in New York City. It was the early 1920s, the dawn of the Jazz Age. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was touring America to promote the Spiritualism in which he passionately believed. Houdini, the world famous magician, took personal and professional pleasure in debunking mediums. Yet, he secretly yearned for contact with the beloved soul of his deceased mother. This found these two idiosyncratic characters first clashing and then forming an intriguing bond. A tantalizing mystery novel, “Nevermore” (1994) by William Hjortsberg gives an insight into this relationship.
My antennae were undoubtedly alerted to Rose’s ignorance, as my favorite uncle was interested in mysticism. Like Doyle, he had an academically trained and rationally inclined mind, but with a difference. Doyle was a medical doctor; my uncle a professor of economics, and head of his department at the University of Detroit, and a personal friend of the clairvoyant and mystic, Edgar Cayce.
TESLA: THE MAN OF THE CENTURY OUT OF HIS TIME
More surprising was Rose’s failure to have any recollection or name recognition of Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943).
Tesla was born in Croatia and was a Serb. History is not always kind to its greatest contributors. This was the case of Tesla in the twentieth century.
He invented alternating current as opposed to Thomas Edison’s direct current. He also created the Tesla coil, which led to the Tesla turbine, and hydroelectric power. Meanwhile, patents in his name numbered in the hundreds.
Many saw him the “Leonardo of the twentieth century,” yet the Nobel Prize was repeatedly stolen from him. He became a rival to Edison over A/C versus D/C electricity.
With the backing of Westinghouse Corporation, Edison mounted a propaganda campaign to make alternating current appear dangerous. Dogs and cats, and even an elephant were electrocuted onstage to make the point, while Edison asked men in the audience if they wanted their wives to risk their lives every time they plugged in the iron.
The sad fact is that Edison’s argument was not only duplicitous, but also totally false. Tesla’s alternating current was safer than Edison’s direct current, as well as more efficient and easier to deliver. Eventually, after first opposing Tesla on a commercial basis, banker J. P. Morgan, the nineteenth century’s quintessential robber baron, backed Tesla’s technology. So, today, we have A/C electrical hook ups in the United States, while Europe still maintains the more cumbersome and expensive D/C electrical system.
Tesla, in his heyday, lived in New York City at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where he dined alone each night in the Palm Room. There, he engaged in a ritual that involved a stack of linen napkins, with which he wiped cleaned every piece of cutlery, china, and glass on the table. That done, he could not eat until he’d calculated the cubic capacity of each vessel and, by extension, the volume of food before him. Obsessive compulsive, to be sure, but this inclination translated into determination and a singular focus and became a bellwether to his work.
Hardly a recluse, however, he was wined and dined as a trophy guest by the rich and famous. He partied with the Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers, and was best friends with Mark Twain, as well as acquainted with famous scientists across the world. He also hosted these guests in his Manhattan laboratory, astonishing them with his demonstrations worthy of Dr. Frankenstein.
While Twain and other guests watched in amazement, Tesla would stand on an improvised platform, wreathed in lightning. He’d pace the lab with tubes of light that seemed to have no power source, while juggling balls of fire that left no marks on his clothes or skin.
Where Edison was a chubby plodder, who wore his wife’s smocks while at work, Tesla was elegant and thin, a six-foot-six genius who performed his experiments in the formal attire of waistcoat and tails.
Tesla was constantly courted than rejected for the Nobel Prize. It was Tesla, rather than Marconi, who first patented a method for wireless broadcasting (i.e., radio), but Marconi received the Nobel Prize for it. Wall Street financier J. P. Morgan invested $150,000 in Tesla’s broadcast center, but held 51 percent of Tesla’s radio patents for security that left him in the lurch when credit was to come for this great discovery.
It was Tesla who harnessed the power of Niagara Falls. He worked for years on ways of transmitting energy wirelessly across great distances, and claimed he could capture electricity – free energy – from “standing waves” at the earth’s core.
He even professed he could destroy the entire planet with this idea of free energy waves. Think about it. The earth is a bundle of different energies: thermal energy from the core; gravitational energy from the pull of the moon; geomagnetic forces; solar energy from the sun; Gamma rays from outer space; kinetic energy from the earth rotation around the sun and on its own axis.
Tesla believed the earth has a natural resonant frequency with the earth producing “standing waves,” waves that do not progress through space.
Like all waves, these are forms of energy, which he believed could be tapped. His “Wardenclyffe Tower" and power plant on Long Island was where he conducted some of these experiments in the early part of the century. If you can imagine, the tower was a skeletal wooden structure of about a hundred feet tall capped by a gigantic metal hemisphere that would gladden comic book lovers, as it created visions of “Buck Rogers in the Twenty-fifth Century.”
The research at the center had to stop because J. P. Morgan was financing the project. He pulled the plug on financing when he learned that the tower was not for radio waves. Tesla was planning on transmitting power from the earth and sending it “free” everywhere about the world without wires.
Tesla was doing this for mankind, but Morgan was only interested in profit. He had big investments in Westinghouse and General Electric. He had spent a fortune building electric grids – wires, meters, and poles – and wanted a return on his investment. Tesla told him he didn’t need any of this. That he could get power directly from the earth, amplify it, and beam it everywhere. “People,” Tesla said, “just need a cheap receiver to download the energy.” This would be like radio antennae.
Tesla also had the sobering sense that he could stop the world’s electrical systems completely and forever, creating a “back-to-the-future” scenario with this technology. Cars would not ever start again, computers would go dead, all electrical control systems would die, and on and on, until only primitive existence would exist.
John Case has just published a suspense novel with this possibility, “Ghost Dancer” (2007), leaning on Tesla’s science. Earlier, the sci-fi film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951) gave credence to the Tesla possibility. The film is an adaptation of Harry Bates’s short story “Farewell to the Master” and is obviously based on Tesla’s research.
The John Case novel deals with Tesla’s work in plasma physics. Tesla was constantly working on ways to transmit energy without conductive wires. He created a beam of energy, a beam of protons – this is what he was doing at Wardenclyffe – targeting the beam for a massive release of energy to create a big light show. It nearly destroyed a large building in the area. Case built his novel on this premise.
Regarding the sci-fi film, "The Day the Earth Stood Still, it has Michael Rennie coming from another planet to warm the people of the Earth to stop nuclear testing before the planet is destroyed. Rennie arranges a demonstration of his power by stopping all electrically dependent activity across the globe briefly.
Tesla’s idea is not as farfetched as it might seem at first glance.
A flashlight can explain the idea. All light is the same, a stream of protons, traveling at the speed of light. But shining a flashlight through the dark and it’s going only so far and then the beam falls apart. The beam “loses coherence.” It loses energy to friction. For the beam to reach a distant point and retain coherence is almost impossible. Tesla found a way to send a beam of energy as paired waves in a plasmoid sheath, which eliminated friction. This allowed the beam to reach the target with the energy intact. It was Tesla’s Holy Grail in plasma physics that he was working on when he ran out of funds. It so fascinated author John Case to make it the denouement of his novel.
There isn’t a major electronic invention of the twentieth century in which his footprints are not first upon the discovery ground. The irony is that he appeared on the cover of Time magazine (July 20, 1931)for all his successes, commemorating his seventy-fifth birthday, when he couldn’t pay his bills, and was living in relative obscurity and unpleasant circumstances.
Tesla’s work is evident in Einstein’s work in the splitting of the atom. From an electromagnetic spectrum, he saw energy in waves. His work is also evident in Roentgen’s discovery of the “X-ray.” Three years earlier, 1892, Tesla had detected “visible light, black light, and a very special radiation,” accidentally “X-raying” his foot.
With the radiation, he had made shadowgraph pictures on plates inside metal containers. In 1894, he carried out more revealing plates when fire broke out in his laboratory and destroyed his work. He was so curious when Roentgen’s discovery was announced that he contacted the man: “If you would only be so kind as to disclose the manner in which you obtained them (i.e., X-rays).” Roentgen didn’t reply. Later, it was revealed he used Tesla’s approach.
Tesla had a hand is in quantum mechanics. Quantum theory is energy in waves. Matter, too, is in waves. Waves and particles are the same. We look at a glass. It seems solid, but inside the molecules of the glass are electrons in motion. So, we know the glass has resonant frequency, something Tesla discovered.
Excite an object, such as a glass, and the object vibrates at that frequency. Everything is like this. Like a tuning fork, you hit it and it sings, it vibrates, it oscillates at its own frequency.
Frequency in physics is number of waves per second. Resonant frequency is a bit more complicated, and this is why Tesla’s footprints are on Einstein.
If nothing is done to amplify the frequency, the frequency will vibrate slower and slower as the energy dissipates to what is called entropy. But if you add amplitude at the precise time the object could reach escape velocity then, well, it’s bye-bye world. Put another way, there is enough compact energy in a pencil, if released, to blow up a city. So, Tesla had a hand in the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
His footprints are on Gamma rays, microwaves, radio waves, infrared waves, light waves, neon lights, radar as well as X-rays. He constantly went back to his childhood for inspiration.
Inspired by the waterwheels he had played with as a child, he conceived a revolutionary prime mover called “the bladeless” turbine. He wrote:
“A long time ago I became possessed of a desire to produce an engine as simple as my induction motor; and my efforts have been rewarded. No mechanism could be simpler, and the beauty of it is that almost any amount of power can be obtained from it. In the induction motor I produced the rotation by setting up a magnetic whirl, while in the turbine I set up a whirl of steam or gas.”
Tesla had an old world childhood that did not prepare him for the high jinx and chicanery of his new adopted home in the United States. He was well educated as a physicist and electrical engineer at Graz, Prague, and Paris when he immigrated to the US at the mature age of 28 with an old world gentleman’s perspective. There would be little to discuss had he not patented nearly all his discoveries and inventions, but he did. Most remembered today is the Tesla coil, which led directly to radio transmission.
THE CONUNDRUM OF HISTORY
He worked for years for Thomas Edison, who stole many of his ideas and submitted them as his own to the patent office. This was not uncommon behavior of the great inventor. He was known in the trade for taking credit for the work of his people. It is one explanation for his hundreds of patents. Edison's biographers don’t mince words to the effect that he was a shrewd businessman and a predatory idea thief.
Marconi won the Nobel Prize for a patent that was once Tesla's, and then the patent office reverse itself. A similar situation happened with Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays, which Tesla had not only already proven, but Roentgen’s work followed precisely what he had previously done.
The New York Times announced on November 7, 1915 that Tesla had won the Nobel Prize for physics for “the transmission of electrical energy without wires, which affects present-day problems,” only to have it awarded to William Bragg of the University of Leeds for his work on the structure of crystals.
Ironically, Tesla was supposed to have shared that 1915 prize with Edison. Tesla was nominated again in 1937 and was expected to win, but didn’t. He took umbrage with this statement:
“In a thousand years, there will be many recipients of the Nobel Prize, but I have not less than four dozen of my creations identified with my name in technical literature. These are honors real and permanent, which are bestowed, not by a few who are apt to err, but by the whole world which seldom makes a mistake.”
This points to the fact that people who deserve recognition at the highest level in their time do not always receive it in their lifetime.
And then, as Charlie Rose demonstrates, can be responsible for all kinds of miracles of modern life and not be identified or associated with them, or remembered for them. Everyone knows of Edison and his work; few know of the greater man, Tesla.
I must confess I can identify with Tesla's aloneness if not his genius, with his solitary pursuit of his passions without distraction, with the sanctity of his mind as his proudest possession, and with his obsessions with his ideas. I am also moved by his quiet elegance, his idiosyncratic disregard for the opinions of others, and his philosophical recognition of human weakness and its inclination to use others and their ideas rather than to have the passion, persistence, energy, and will to create their own.
Another dimension of the conundrum of history is Tesla’s relationship to Mark Twain. I am confounded by it. Twain was always looking to “invest in a sure thing,” and for this found him nearly bankrupt on more than one occasion. He never invested in his friend, Tesla, who could have used the support, but treated him as an oddity of nature. Indeed, Twain turned down entreaties from Alexander Graham Bell to invest in his telephone.
As a writer, Twain is America’s finest. But we know him best for his humorous lectures. Hitting the road as a humorous kept his family in funds to compensate for his constant misadventures as a venture capitalist. It was his speaking tours about the globe that spread his name and charm, and for which he is best remembered and often quoted. Yet, Twain hated these excursions with a passion.
APOLOGIES TO CHARLIE ROSE
I never know for sure what is going to surface in these peripatetic walks. I have been an admirer of Charlie Rose for years, suffered the pain of his recent collapse when, apparently the picture of health, during work abroad, he became gravely ill. His erudition and gritty interviewing style has always pleased me. It is reassuring to see him back in the pink, and I wish him nothing but well.
His failure to know of Nikola Tesla offended my sensitivities and surfaced during this walk. We Americans have never been comfortable with genius. We want genius to be packaged like cereal in an appealing design with our heroes confined to resonating images. We don’t want them to be out of the main stream, too different, dare I say, odd? We pride ourselves on our individuality, but that individuality has extreme limits beyond which we can manage only begrudging tolerance. We want the product of genius but not the body and soul of it. We want someone with whom we can identify, a lothario like John F. Kennedy, a celluloid stud like John Wayne, or a cuddly genius like Einstein, who worked hard until thirty and coasted the rest of the way.
Tesla was never like any of them. He was so far ahead of his time that the best minds took him for a dreamer, labeling him a poet and visionary, which was a way to write him off and forget him when the big prizes were awarded. Our heroes today are the innovators who never invented anything. In fact, nothing actually new has been discovered in the electronic world that approaches the work of Tesla early in this past century.
So, I apologize to Charlie Rose for my rant. He is the quintessential American and demonstrates the surface brilliance that is so endemic to our society, and which we now find the world finally grasping as our appointed legacy.
* * * * * *
CHARLEY ROSE DEFROCKED!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2006
“Not body enough to cover his mind decently with; his intellect is improperly exposed.”
Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845)
English cleric and mystic
“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”
Nikola Tesla, 1896
TO BE AND NOT TO SEE
I was watching Charley Rose, the likeable, engaging, empathic, mover and shaker interviewer of public television, when surprised at his lack of debt beyond celebrity consciousness.
Rose was interviewing a versatile film actor, Michael Caine, who was promoting his new film, “The Prestige.” The film deals with magic.
Caine casually mentioned Harry Houdini’s connection to the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Then with the same casual aplomb, he brought up the name of “Nikola Tesla” whose persona is featured in the film, reeling off Tesla’s scientific accomplishments. He learned of these while being interviewed by a Serbian reporter.
Rose confessed that he wasn’t aware of the connection between Houdini and Doyle, nor of their polarized views on mysticism. Even more astounding, he confessed never to having heard of Nikola Tesla. One wonders how that could be possible. Then again, it falls into place in a celebrity conscious culture that is skin deep.
Houdini and Doyle met in New York City. It was the early 1920s, the dawn of the Jazz Age. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was touring America to promote the Spiritualism in which he passionately believed. Houdini, the world famous magician, took personal and professional pleasure in debunking mediums. Yet, he secretly yearned for contact with the beloved soul of his deceased mother. This found these two idiosyncratic characters first clashing and then forming an intriguing bond. A tantalizing mystery novel, “Nevermore” (1994) by William Hjortsberg gives an insight into this relationship.
My antennae were undoubtedly alerted to Rose’s ignorance, as my favorite uncle was interested in mysticism. Like Doyle, he had an academically trained and rationally inclined mind, but with a difference. Doyle was a medical doctor; my uncle a professor of economics, and head of his department at the University of Detroit, and a personal friend of the clairvoyant and mystic, Edgar Cayce.
TESLA: THE MAN OF THE CENTURY OUT OF HIS TIME
More surprising was Rose’s failure to have any recollection or name recognition of Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943).
Tesla was born in Croatia and was a Serb. History is not always kind to its greatest contributors. This was the case of Tesla in the twentieth century.
He invented alternating current as opposed to Thomas Edison’s direct current. He also created the Tesla coil, which led to the Tesla turbine, and hydroelectric power. Meanwhile, patents in his name numbered in the hundreds.
Many saw him the “Leonardo of the twentieth century,” yet the Nobel Prize was repeatedly stolen from him. He became a rival to Edison over A/C versus D/C electricity.
With the backing of Westinghouse Corporation, Edison mounted a propaganda campaign to make alternating current appear dangerous. Dogs and cats, and even an elephant were electrocuted onstage to make the point, while Edison asked men in the audience if they wanted their wives to risk their lives every time they plugged in the iron.
The sad fact is that Edison’s argument was not only duplicitous, but also totally false. Tesla’s alternating current was safer than Edison’s direct current, as well as more efficient and easier to deliver. Eventually, after first opposing Tesla on a commercial basis, banker J. P. Morgan, the nineteenth century’s quintessential robber baron, backed Tesla’s technology. So, today, we have A/C electrical hook ups in the United States, while Europe still maintains the more cumbersome and expensive D/C electrical system.
Tesla, in his heyday, lived in New York City at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where he dined alone each night in the Palm Room. There, he engaged in a ritual that involved a stack of linen napkins, with which he wiped cleaned every piece of cutlery, china, and glass on the table. That done, he could not eat until he’d calculated the cubic capacity of each vessel and, by extension, the volume of food before him. Obsessive compulsive, to be sure, but this inclination translated into determination and a singular focus and became a bellwether to his work.
Hardly a recluse, however, he was wined and dined as a trophy guest by the rich and famous. He partied with the Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers, and was best friends with Mark Twain, as well as acquainted with famous scientists across the world. He also hosted these guests in his Manhattan laboratory, astonishing them with his demonstrations worthy of Dr. Frankenstein.
While Twain and other guests watched in amazement, Tesla would stand on an improvised platform, wreathed in lightning. He’d pace the lab with tubes of light that seemed to have no power source, while juggling balls of fire that left no marks on his clothes or skin.
Where Edison was a chubby plodder, who wore his wife’s smocks while at work, Tesla was elegant and thin, a six-foot-six genius who performed his experiments in the formal attire of waistcoat and tails.
Tesla was constantly courted than rejected for the Nobel Prize. It was Tesla, rather than Marconi, who first patented a method for wireless broadcasting (i.e., radio), but Marconi received the Nobel Prize for it. Wall Street financier J. P. Morgan invested $150,000 in Tesla’s broadcast center, but held 51 percent of Tesla’s radio patents for security that left him in the lurch when credit was to come for this great discovery.
It was Tesla who harnessed the power of Niagara Falls. He worked for years on ways of transmitting energy wirelessly across great distances, and claimed he could capture electricity – free energy – from “standing waves” at the earth’s core.
He even professed he could destroy the entire planet with this idea of free energy waves. Think about it. The earth is a bundle of different energies: thermal energy from the core; gravitational energy from the pull of the moon; geomagnetic forces; solar energy from the sun; Gamma rays from outer space; kinetic energy from the earth rotation around the sun and on its own axis.
Tesla believed the earth has a natural resonant frequency with the earth producing “standing waves,” waves that do not progress through space.
Like all waves, these are forms of energy, which he believed could be tapped. His “Wardenclyffe Tower" and power plant on Long Island was where he conducted some of these experiments in the early part of the century. If you can imagine, the tower was a skeletal wooden structure of about a hundred feet tall capped by a gigantic metal hemisphere that would gladden comic book lovers, as it created visions of “Buck Rogers in the Twenty-fifth Century.”
The research at the center had to stop because J. P. Morgan was financing the project. He pulled the plug on financing when he learned that the tower was not for radio waves. Tesla was planning on transmitting power from the earth and sending it “free” everywhere about the world without wires.
Tesla was doing this for mankind, but Morgan was only interested in profit. He had big investments in Westinghouse and General Electric. He had spent a fortune building electric grids – wires, meters, and poles – and wanted a return on his investment. Tesla told him he didn’t need any of this. That he could get power directly from the earth, amplify it, and beam it everywhere. “People,” Tesla said, “just need a cheap receiver to download the energy.” This would be like radio antennae.
Tesla also had the sobering sense that he could stop the world’s electrical systems completely and forever, creating a “back-to-the-future” scenario with this technology. Cars would not ever start again, computers would go dead, all electrical control systems would die, and on and on, until only primitive existence would exist.
John Case has just published a suspense novel with this possibility, “Ghost Dancer” (2007), leaning on Tesla’s science. Earlier, the sci-fi film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951) gave credence to the Tesla possibility. The film is an adaptation of Harry Bates’s short story “Farewell to the Master” and is obviously based on Tesla’s research.
The John Case novel deals with Tesla’s work in plasma physics. Tesla was constantly working on ways to transmit energy without conductive wires. He created a beam of energy, a beam of protons – this is what he was doing at Wardenclyffe – targeting the beam for a massive release of energy to create a big light show. It nearly destroyed a large building in the area. Case built his novel on this premise.
Regarding the sci-fi film, "The Day the Earth Stood Still, it has Michael Rennie coming from another planet to warm the people of the Earth to stop nuclear testing before the planet is destroyed. Rennie arranges a demonstration of his power by stopping all electrically dependent activity across the globe briefly.
Tesla’s idea is not as farfetched as it might seem at first glance.
A flashlight can explain the idea. All light is the same, a stream of protons, traveling at the speed of light. But shining a flashlight through the dark and it’s going only so far and then the beam falls apart. The beam “loses coherence.” It loses energy to friction. For the beam to reach a distant point and retain coherence is almost impossible. Tesla found a way to send a beam of energy as paired waves in a plasmoid sheath, which eliminated friction. This allowed the beam to reach the target with the energy intact. It was Tesla’s Holy Grail in plasma physics that he was working on when he ran out of funds. It so fascinated author John Case to make it the denouement of his novel.
There isn’t a major electronic invention of the twentieth century in which his footprints are not first upon the discovery ground. The irony is that he appeared on the cover of Time magazine (July 20, 1931)for all his successes, commemorating his seventy-fifth birthday, when he couldn’t pay his bills, and was living in relative obscurity and unpleasant circumstances.
Tesla’s work is evident in Einstein’s work in the splitting of the atom. From an electromagnetic spectrum, he saw energy in waves. His work is also evident in Roentgen’s discovery of the “X-ray.” Three years earlier, 1892, Tesla had detected “visible light, black light, and a very special radiation,” accidentally “X-raying” his foot.
With the radiation, he had made shadowgraph pictures on plates inside metal containers. In 1894, he carried out more revealing plates when fire broke out in his laboratory and destroyed his work. He was so curious when Roentgen’s discovery was announced that he contacted the man: “If you would only be so kind as to disclose the manner in which you obtained them (i.e., X-rays).” Roentgen didn’t reply. Later, it was revealed he used Tesla’s approach.
Tesla had a hand is in quantum mechanics. Quantum theory is energy in waves. Matter, too, is in waves. Waves and particles are the same. We look at a glass. It seems solid, but inside the molecules of the glass are electrons in motion. So, we know the glass has resonant frequency, something Tesla discovered.
Excite an object, such as a glass, and the object vibrates at that frequency. Everything is like this. Like a tuning fork, you hit it and it sings, it vibrates, it oscillates at its own frequency.
Frequency in physics is number of waves per second. Resonant frequency is a bit more complicated, and this is why Tesla’s footprints are on Einstein.
If nothing is done to amplify the frequency, the frequency will vibrate slower and slower as the energy dissipates to what is called entropy. But if you add amplitude at the precise time the object could reach escape velocity then, well, it’s bye-bye world. Put another way, there is enough compact energy in a pencil, if released, to blow up a city. So, Tesla had a hand in the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
His footprints are on Gamma rays, microwaves, radio waves, infrared waves, light waves, neon lights, radar as well as X-rays. He constantly went back to his childhood for inspiration.
Inspired by the waterwheels he had played with as a child, he conceived a revolutionary prime mover called “the bladeless” turbine. He wrote:
“A long time ago I became possessed of a desire to produce an engine as simple as my induction motor; and my efforts have been rewarded. No mechanism could be simpler, and the beauty of it is that almost any amount of power can be obtained from it. In the induction motor I produced the rotation by setting up a magnetic whirl, while in the turbine I set up a whirl of steam or gas.”
Tesla had an old world childhood that did not prepare him for the high jinx and chicanery of his new adopted home in the United States. He was well educated as a physicist and electrical engineer at Graz, Prague, and Paris when he immigrated to the US at the mature age of 28 with an old world gentleman’s perspective. There would be little to discuss had he not patented nearly all his discoveries and inventions, but he did. Most remembered today is the Tesla coil, which led directly to radio transmission.
THE CONUNDRUM OF HISTORY
He worked for years for Thomas Edison, who stole many of his ideas and submitted them as his own to the patent office. This was not uncommon behavior of the great inventor. He was known in the trade for taking credit for the work of his people. It is one explanation for his hundreds of patents. Edison's biographers don’t mince words to the effect that he was a shrewd businessman and a predatory idea thief.
Marconi won the Nobel Prize for a patent that was once Tesla's, and then the patent office reverse itself. A similar situation happened with Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays, which Tesla had not only already proven, but Roentgen’s work followed precisely what he had previously done.
The New York Times announced on November 7, 1915 that Tesla had won the Nobel Prize for physics for “the transmission of electrical energy without wires, which affects present-day problems,” only to have it awarded to William Bragg of the University of Leeds for his work on the structure of crystals.
Ironically, Tesla was supposed to have shared that 1915 prize with Edison. Tesla was nominated again in 1937 and was expected to win, but didn’t. He took umbrage with this statement:
“In a thousand years, there will be many recipients of the Nobel Prize, but I have not less than four dozen of my creations identified with my name in technical literature. These are honors real and permanent, which are bestowed, not by a few who are apt to err, but by the whole world which seldom makes a mistake.”
This points to the fact that people who deserve recognition at the highest level in their time do not always receive it in their lifetime.
And then, as Charlie Rose demonstrates, can be responsible for all kinds of miracles of modern life and not be identified or associated with them, or remembered for them. Everyone knows of Edison and his work; few know of the greater man, Tesla.
I must confess I can identify with Tesla's aloneness if not his genius, with his solitary pursuit of his passions without distraction, with the sanctity of his mind as his proudest possession, and with his obsessions with his ideas. I am also moved by his quiet elegance, his idiosyncratic disregard for the opinions of others, and his philosophical recognition of human weakness and its inclination to use others and their ideas rather than to have the passion, persistence, energy, and will to create their own.
Another dimension of the conundrum of history is Tesla’s relationship to Mark Twain. I am confounded by it. Twain was always looking to “invest in a sure thing,” and for this found him nearly bankrupt on more than one occasion. He never invested in his friend, Tesla, who could have used the support, but treated him as an oddity of nature. Indeed, Twain turned down entreaties from Alexander Graham Bell to invest in his telephone.
As a writer, Twain is America’s finest. But we know him best for his humorous lectures. Hitting the road as a humorous kept his family in funds to compensate for his constant misadventures as a venture capitalist. It was his speaking tours about the globe that spread his name and charm, and for which he is best remembered and often quoted. Yet, Twain hated these excursions with a passion.
APOLOGIES TO CHARLIE ROSE
I never know for sure what is going to surface in these peripatetic walks. I have been an admirer of Charlie Rose for years, suffered the pain of his recent collapse when, apparently the picture of health, during work abroad, he became gravely ill. His erudition and gritty interviewing style has always pleased me. It is reassuring to see him back in the pink, and I wish him nothing but well.
His failure to know of Nikola Tesla offended my sensitivities and surfaced during this walk. We Americans have never been comfortable with genius. We want genius to be packaged like cereal in an appealing design with our heroes confined to resonating images. We don’t want them to be out of the main stream, too different, dare I say, odd? We pride ourselves on our individuality, but that individuality has extreme limits beyond which we can manage only begrudging tolerance. We want the product of genius but not the body and soul of it. We want someone with whom we can identify, a lothario like John F. Kennedy, a celluloid stud like John Wayne, or a cuddly genius like Einstein, who worked hard until thirty and coasted the rest of the way.
Tesla was never like any of them. He was so far ahead of his time that the best minds took him for a dreamer, labeling him a poet and visionary, which was a way to write him off and forget him when the big prizes were awarded. Our heroes today are the innovators who never invented anything. In fact, nothing actually new has been discovered in the electronic world that approaches the work of Tesla early in this past century.
So, I apologize to Charlie Rose for my rant. He is the quintessential American and demonstrates the surface brilliance that is so endemic to our society, and which we now find the world finally grasping as our appointed legacy.
* * * * * *
Friday, December 08, 2006
A RANT NOW AND THEN IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL!
A RANT NOW AND THEN IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL!
Oppose not rage while rage is in its force, but give it way a while and let it waste.
Shakespeare
In the mood of Shakespeare's sentiment, my rant suffices to satisfy my anger. It is in expressing what is eating into us that we release its venom to an ephemeral state.
It is like the angry letter never sent, or the rant that is directed at four naked and silent walls.
I chose instead to send this to the Editor-in-Chief of the IOWA ALUMNI MAGAZINE for the slight. Why? Because many far more gifted than I am have suffered for similar exclusions. How did I feel after writing this? Amused and light hearted. There is a certain heady freedom in playing the heavy. We are programmed to abide our passions and to behave, and thus be consumed by them. A long time ago, I rejected such programming.
______________________________
I received my issue of the IOWA ALUMNI MAGAZINE (December 2006) today and there is a prominent review of Bill Bryson's new book THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID.
The book is written in the style of the humorous and internationally acclaimed travel writer that Bryson is, but I wager to say it lacks the depth, ambiance, character, sense of place that my earlier book IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (AuthorHouse 2003) had.
As I've said, perhaps too many times, I have not understood why my book has not been reviewed more extensively. I thought it was because it was a PRINT ON DEMAND book, or God forbid to say, "a self-published book."
With eight books to my credit and new ones coming out, and more than 300 articles published in respected journals, periodicals, newspapers, and a constantly visited website (www.fisherofideas.com), and having written extensively in my corporate and academic appointments, I am not new to the printed word.
But I increasingly wonder if it is because it is clearly the book of an Irish Roman Catholic boy, immersed in the trauma, faux pas, and confusion of coming to terms with his religion, his time (WWII) and his increasingly disparity with his country and culture. It is an honest book as memory will allow of a child of his times. It is perhaps for this reason that it was included in Senator Edwards' book HOME (November 2006).
We are a celebrity culture skin deep, and I am neither a celebrity nor a skin deep person. In every other sense, I am quite ordinary, and that is the sum and substance of what is deep and meaningful. I raise my voice here, when everyone is high on the Holiday Season, wondering at this fact.
Perhaps it is too heavy a book in the sense that it brings up real issues that not only gnaw at the psyche but disturb the central chemical factory of the bone marrow. It is a period piece but generic to young people of every time if differing circumstance.
I am, and this may sound self-serving, but I don't care, as good a writer in every since of the word that Bryson is, but I am clearly a spec of dust off the polished brogues of James Joyce, no doubt about that.
One of my lifelong friends, who has a son-in-law in the book business, claimed in a cursory review of the book that there was not enough about a character that the narrator especially respected.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE was about a time and place and circumstance seen through the narrator's eyes, and not about this or that character. It was written in the Joycean tradition, but without pretense of genius.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE has had a parochial audience, and even you might say, a proprietary one, namely, Clintonians from Clinton, Iowa, and by extension, about the globe.
I thank God for that audience, but it deserved and deserves a much wider audience, not because I wrote it, but because it captures something that will never be again. Clinton, Iowa in 1941 - 1947 was small town America and as American as America ever was.
I predict on this day, December 7, 2006, precisely 65 years after Pearl Harbor and the start of WWII, a day that shook the narrator to his bone marrow, and made him a preteen age student of that war through the pages of THE CLINTON HERALD, that long after Bryson's book is forgotten, this book will be read. Why?
Because it is a book of the heart and not the head; of the spirit and not the fancy. Humor is of the head to calm the heart. This book is of the heart with the full scope and pain and confusion of that heart through the eyes of an Irish Roman Catholic boy.
I took every honor that an academic scholar could take at Iowa (Phi Eta Sigma, Omicron Delta Kappa, Phi Beta Kappa, Suma Cum Laude, Merit Scholarship, Academic Athletic Trophy) and my book got mention only in the "People" section of the 1950s of the IOWA ALUMNI MAGAZINE. No review or acknowledgment of the book I sent.
Something is wrong with this picture, and it is my nature to express it in the first person rather than have it boil me alive.
Always be well,
Jim
Oppose not rage while rage is in its force, but give it way a while and let it waste.
Shakespeare
In the mood of Shakespeare's sentiment, my rant suffices to satisfy my anger. It is in expressing what is eating into us that we release its venom to an ephemeral state.
It is like the angry letter never sent, or the rant that is directed at four naked and silent walls.
I chose instead to send this to the Editor-in-Chief of the IOWA ALUMNI MAGAZINE for the slight. Why? Because many far more gifted than I am have suffered for similar exclusions. How did I feel after writing this? Amused and light hearted. There is a certain heady freedom in playing the heavy. We are programmed to abide our passions and to behave, and thus be consumed by them. A long time ago, I rejected such programming.
______________________________
I received my issue of the IOWA ALUMNI MAGAZINE (December 2006) today and there is a prominent review of Bill Bryson's new book THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID.
The book is written in the style of the humorous and internationally acclaimed travel writer that Bryson is, but I wager to say it lacks the depth, ambiance, character, sense of place that my earlier book IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (AuthorHouse 2003) had.
As I've said, perhaps too many times, I have not understood why my book has not been reviewed more extensively. I thought it was because it was a PRINT ON DEMAND book, or God forbid to say, "a self-published book."
With eight books to my credit and new ones coming out, and more than 300 articles published in respected journals, periodicals, newspapers, and a constantly visited website (www.fisherofideas.com), and having written extensively in my corporate and academic appointments, I am not new to the printed word.
But I increasingly wonder if it is because it is clearly the book of an Irish Roman Catholic boy, immersed in the trauma, faux pas, and confusion of coming to terms with his religion, his time (WWII) and his increasingly disparity with his country and culture. It is an honest book as memory will allow of a child of his times. It is perhaps for this reason that it was included in Senator Edwards' book HOME (November 2006).
We are a celebrity culture skin deep, and I am neither a celebrity nor a skin deep person. In every other sense, I am quite ordinary, and that is the sum and substance of what is deep and meaningful. I raise my voice here, when everyone is high on the Holiday Season, wondering at this fact.
Perhaps it is too heavy a book in the sense that it brings up real issues that not only gnaw at the psyche but disturb the central chemical factory of the bone marrow. It is a period piece but generic to young people of every time if differing circumstance.
I am, and this may sound self-serving, but I don't care, as good a writer in every since of the word that Bryson is, but I am clearly a spec of dust off the polished brogues of James Joyce, no doubt about that.
One of my lifelong friends, who has a son-in-law in the book business, claimed in a cursory review of the book that there was not enough about a character that the narrator especially respected.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE was about a time and place and circumstance seen through the narrator's eyes, and not about this or that character. It was written in the Joycean tradition, but without pretense of genius.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE has had a parochial audience, and even you might say, a proprietary one, namely, Clintonians from Clinton, Iowa, and by extension, about the globe.
I thank God for that audience, but it deserved and deserves a much wider audience, not because I wrote it, but because it captures something that will never be again. Clinton, Iowa in 1941 - 1947 was small town America and as American as America ever was.
I predict on this day, December 7, 2006, precisely 65 years after Pearl Harbor and the start of WWII, a day that shook the narrator to his bone marrow, and made him a preteen age student of that war through the pages of THE CLINTON HERALD, that long after Bryson's book is forgotten, this book will be read. Why?
Because it is a book of the heart and not the head; of the spirit and not the fancy. Humor is of the head to calm the heart. This book is of the heart with the full scope and pain and confusion of that heart through the eyes of an Irish Roman Catholic boy.
I took every honor that an academic scholar could take at Iowa (Phi Eta Sigma, Omicron Delta Kappa, Phi Beta Kappa, Suma Cum Laude, Merit Scholarship, Academic Athletic Trophy) and my book got mention only in the "People" section of the 1950s of the IOWA ALUMNI MAGAZINE. No review or acknowledgment of the book I sent.
Something is wrong with this picture, and it is my nature to express it in the first person rather than have it boil me alive.
Always be well,
Jim
Thursday, December 07, 2006
WRITER'S REFLECTIONS ON HIS PERIPATETIC WALK!
Writer’s Reflections on His Peripatetic Walk
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2006
“Someone always seems to come through for you. Serendipity registers; nonetheless the batteries of faith, along with some assembly, are required.”
Ken Shelton, author, publisher
(Responding to one of my rants of exclusion)
Life is a strange accident. I have been tightening up my updated and revised book, CONFIDENT SELLING, published nearly forty years ago to make it more reader-friendly without changing its central thrust.
At the same time, I’ve written a completely complementary tract, CONFIDENT THINKING. This is the other side of the coin of confidence.
As there are two sides to a coin, confidence is the other side of the coin of fear. We know a lot about fear. We know little about confidence other than its charismatic version, which is essentially skin-deep.
We are a skin-deep society and it is one of the reasons we are always so surprised when troubles beneath the surface disturb our tranquility.
Someone has written me that my writing is like my peripatetic walks, spontaneous. I take that as a compliment. If true, it means that I do, indeed, walk in the footsteps of Aristotle without the troubling comparison in profundity. Our connection, alone, is in the spirit of the walk. This is when the mind and the heart and the spirit merge into a common embrace, sometimes coalescing into little dewdrops of insight.
It is kind of amazing how these insights ping your conscious mind out of the blue. You best let them form into collective droplets. Then the mind’s eye, as if it were a microscope, can discern what the visible mind cannot.
In any case, I like these books. I like them a lot. I think they should prove very useful to a person like myself when I was in my early thirties.
I was inordinately successful but yet dismally conflicting. Life made no sense to me because I was reading the script handed to me and not creating my own. I was living a lie, and justifying the lie because for all intent and purposes I was moving with the lie, which was the fabric of my imitative and competitive society and times. I was a hollow man and a Teflon character supported by the lie of success, while being the envy of my peers. I had everything and nothing at all.
It is my testimony to that critical 30-something period that my obsessive-compulsive preoccupation was a measured response to that mood. I will finish these books this week; turn them over to my agent and go on from there. Writing is not a means to an end for me. Writing is very much an end in itself.
How could someone so ordinary be so blessed? It is a good question that I have answered flippantly, “Because I work harder than everyone else.” This is true and it is not true because some work much harder than I did, and do, but not in my zone or not with the attention to the nuances that register with me, alone. I became perspicacious before I knew what the word meant, learning to look for answers in my own experience and not that of others. I found joy in being my own best friend.
SATISFACTION IN BEING GIVEN A “HEADS UP!”
A smile comes to my face when I think of the young book editor of “The Des Moines Register,” Sue Curry. Now, I’m going to contradict myself. I don’t like my writing to be ignored. Contradiction is critical to my character. Ask my wife.
When I was selected as one of the sixty contributors to Senator John Edwards’ book HOME, I sent her tons of information and photographs for a piece on IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, from which my contribution was taken.
She promptly advised me that my mention in her newspaper would be limited. I have no trouble with candor. It is the way to the heart of the matter. Cando epitomizes confidence and competence. She was not afraid to take on the ugly bear, me, who could not understand how an Iowan, me, again, and one of only 30 “common folks” selected from more than 2,000 nominated was not getting more attention.
Ms Curry demonstrated the politeness and temerity to tell me the lay of the land. She is new in her job and should do well because she shows a confidence and honesty that is far removed from the nation of Teflonia to which we are both citizens.
Subsequently, a featured piece was done on this book in the IOWALIFE section of the same newspaper (November 29, 2006) in which a nice quote is taken from my contribution to the book. I would not have known about this were this section not sent to me anonymously.
I suspect it came from Ms Curry. That represents service above and beyond what is expected in a job, something extra that need not be done and has little chance of recognition but which demonstrates both CONFIDENT SELLING and CONFIDENT THINKING.
The way she dealt with me was absolutely “right on.” She told me up front; gave me a “heads up.” I am a person who doesn’t like surprises. Her response couldn’t have been more temperamentally suited for my mindset.
When you have little clout, and an opportunity comes like the Edwards book, you have no idea of how the material will be treated, or if it will be representative of your work. I am a person who also likes control. Such a situation and circumstance increase the level of my anxiety. I must admit that the four-page spread with pictures of my boyhood home and the courthouse were beyond my most exhilarated expectations. Serendipity truly is coin to my fountain.
ABOUT THIS BUSINESS OF WRITING
I am a blue-collar person with a Ph.D. if that makes any sense at all. My da was a brakeman on the railroad. While I’ve departed from that first home economically and intellectually, I’ve never left it psychologically.
You could call it serendipity that I am a writer, but on closer examination, you might see that I am still a blue-collar worker like my da. Writing is a craft not unlike carpentry or plumbing or that of an electrician or an assembly worker, all of which go into the craft of writing if metaphorically.
Writers are readers and reading is a tactile process. Beyond the pleasure of having a book in your hands, reading and writing are physical work like farming in my native state of Iowa, or perhaps gardening, the growing of things from the tiny seed to the fully blooming plant. However, as novelist Truman Capote cautions, writing a novel is like creating a giant redwood and then reducing it to an acorn of a book.
My home is virtually a library with books and bookcases in practically every room, nook and cranny, literally so, to the tune of more than 4,000 books. I am lucky that my wife, Beautiful Betty, is also a reader.
It always amuses me that people say in this electronic age that readers of books are anachronistic, that music and e-stores are the future. Yet, in fact, more than 400,000 new books are printed every year, while giant bookstores are being built every day, and music superstores, only a few years old, are going out-of-business.
That said you don’t become a writer because it is easy. Writing is a struggle every day. I have been engaged in this struggle, hitting that wall, for more than 37 years. If you are a person interested in the word for its own sake, you don’t do it because you have to; you do it because you need to. The satisfaction, the reward, and the blessings are from the writing itself.
Writing is a wonderful connection to make between the floating mind and moving fingers with black symbols on a legal pad or notebook with a pencil or pen, a typewriter, or a computer. Somehow ideas in your mind translate on to paper with some consistency with what you think, feel, believe and value at that moment.
God played one little trick on us as writers. I have to claim indolence in response to this trick. The greatest clarity of my thoughts comes when I am about to go to sleep. I’m at that point when sleep is about to enfold that wonderful ideas visit me in content and context with conceptual clarity. Invariably, I say to myself, because they are so vivid, I shall remember them in the morning, but seldom do.
I believe the most honest profession of all is that of the writer, and the most honest writer of that profession is not the journalist, not the historian, not the philosopher, not the scientist, not the theologian, but the novelist. He writes about the way we really are often getting through his own personal biases and hang ups to tell stories that resonate with our actual experience past, present and future.
The novelist manipulates the symbols, suppresses or exaggerates his biases, transmutes or sublimates his passions to make contact first with himself, and incidentally with the reader. Often, the consequences of a story are so dramatic as to epitomize a condition leading to monumental change.
Such was the case with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. When president Lincoln met her, he said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War.”
As with all books, they either come out of one’s own experience, something read in the newspaper as was often the case with Dostoyevsky, or inspired by another book or pamphlet. The latter was the case with Stowe.
Josiah Henson, a slave, born in Maryland in 1789, wrote a widely read autobiography pamphlet. But he was far from an “Uncle Tom.” He actually served as the manager of a plantation before he escaped to Canada and freedom. Once free, he started a profitable sawmill and founded a trade school for blacks, whites and Indians. He also helped more than 100 slaves escaped to Canada. An interesting aside, when he traveled to England, and met the Archbishop of Canterbury, the churchman was so impressed with his speech that he asked him what university he attended. Henson answered, “the University of Adversity.”
Continuing my point that novels have changed society, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was not so much literature as a polemic against slavery. It was a literary attempt to change public opinion rather than to entertain, which it did. Therefore, it was propaganda and not written for pleasure.
Now nothing is ever cut and dried or simply a matter of good intentions, nor was this the case with Stowe. She was haunted by a severe sense of personal loss over the death of her child, which she brilliantly conceived as a byproduct of slavery. Irrational? Yes. But the passion of irrationality often leads to a rational perspective. She built her story on the genuine skeletal structure of Josiah Henson, and the nation was aroused. Meanwhile, buried was a more compelling conflict between the federal government and states’ rights, which to this day has been blurred by this book and Lincoln’s mastery.
I have come to think, and this is the basis of the first and last freedom of CONFIDENT THINKING, to the conclusion that we write most perceptively and most clearly when we write to ourselves. If the reader can make connection, all the better. But to write to an audience is to prostitute a wonderful talent. That is my view, and that is what I am thinking as I walk today.
AN AFTERTHOUGHT ON WRITING
You don’t have to be a published writer to consider yourself a writer. People who have never published a word have shown me their poetry, for example, and I am always astonished by how good most of it is. I’m sure they think I’m putting them on when I tell them it is quite moving. Then the next question is, “Do you think it is publishable?” I smile inwardly but try to hide it not wanting to appear disrespectful. But I am the last person in the world to ask that question. When they think “publishable,” they automatically hear the cascading sound of dollars falling from heaven.
Writers get paid at about the same rate as the laborers they are, near or at the bottom of the food chain. The blue-collar analogy is not poetic license. It is the way it is. Most writers, given the hours they put into their craft, would love to be paid the minimum wage. Ask their mates if you want corroboration.
Writing is my therapy. It is my medicine. It is the cigarette that I have never smoked, the liquor I’ve never consumed, and the drugs I’ve never taken. It is my elixir. It puts me in balance or at least the semblance of balance. Messiness doesn’t suit me at all. Writing works because it restores a sense of order against the frightening disorder and chaos of nature, human and otherwise. I am not interested in being right, which is the gauge of science. I am interested in transcending right, which is the gauge of literature.
So, I write sometimes in anger, sometimes in sarcasm, often with cynical detachment, sometimes with brutal honesty, and sometimes so obtusely that only God and I understand, and I’m not so sure about God.
I’m sharing this with you only to let you know that my satisfaction is not whether or not I have clout, but to possess the freedom beyond it.
That freedom I have purchased by making choices that have given me the socioeconomic wherewithal to write what moves me and not be badgered to write to a prescription, an audience or a prevailing point of view.
I have managed by something approaching serendipity to escape the clutches of those with clout. I have not needed to compromise my authenticity or to dangle obsequiously in compliance beholding to the wishes of those with clout as sycophant.
The only way to explain this is in the words of author Ken Shelton, “Somebody, somewhere always seems to come through for you. Serendipity registers.”
It is what author Shelton leaves out where the message can be found. It is the case in all writing. Meaning is not in the words but between the words.
Left out is the fact that the providers of my serendipity did so in support of their own self-interest and not by any guiding magnanimity. That is why it is good and real. I am not driven by consumer demand or consumer attention, while that may very well be the case of my serendipitous benefactors.
Take Senator John Edwards and his book HOME. I am honored to be serendipitously included, while knowing that he may be fixing to run for the presidency in 2008. Where is one of the first primary caucuses? Iowa, of course. I rest my case, and I hope you will as well.
* * * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2006
“Someone always seems to come through for you. Serendipity registers; nonetheless the batteries of faith, along with some assembly, are required.”
Ken Shelton, author, publisher
(Responding to one of my rants of exclusion)
Life is a strange accident. I have been tightening up my updated and revised book, CONFIDENT SELLING, published nearly forty years ago to make it more reader-friendly without changing its central thrust.
At the same time, I’ve written a completely complementary tract, CONFIDENT THINKING. This is the other side of the coin of confidence.
As there are two sides to a coin, confidence is the other side of the coin of fear. We know a lot about fear. We know little about confidence other than its charismatic version, which is essentially skin-deep.
We are a skin-deep society and it is one of the reasons we are always so surprised when troubles beneath the surface disturb our tranquility.
Someone has written me that my writing is like my peripatetic walks, spontaneous. I take that as a compliment. If true, it means that I do, indeed, walk in the footsteps of Aristotle without the troubling comparison in profundity. Our connection, alone, is in the spirit of the walk. This is when the mind and the heart and the spirit merge into a common embrace, sometimes coalescing into little dewdrops of insight.
It is kind of amazing how these insights ping your conscious mind out of the blue. You best let them form into collective droplets. Then the mind’s eye, as if it were a microscope, can discern what the visible mind cannot.
In any case, I like these books. I like them a lot. I think they should prove very useful to a person like myself when I was in my early thirties.
I was inordinately successful but yet dismally conflicting. Life made no sense to me because I was reading the script handed to me and not creating my own. I was living a lie, and justifying the lie because for all intent and purposes I was moving with the lie, which was the fabric of my imitative and competitive society and times. I was a hollow man and a Teflon character supported by the lie of success, while being the envy of my peers. I had everything and nothing at all.
It is my testimony to that critical 30-something period that my obsessive-compulsive preoccupation was a measured response to that mood. I will finish these books this week; turn them over to my agent and go on from there. Writing is not a means to an end for me. Writing is very much an end in itself.
How could someone so ordinary be so blessed? It is a good question that I have answered flippantly, “Because I work harder than everyone else.” This is true and it is not true because some work much harder than I did, and do, but not in my zone or not with the attention to the nuances that register with me, alone. I became perspicacious before I knew what the word meant, learning to look for answers in my own experience and not that of others. I found joy in being my own best friend.
SATISFACTION IN BEING GIVEN A “HEADS UP!”
A smile comes to my face when I think of the young book editor of “The Des Moines Register,” Sue Curry. Now, I’m going to contradict myself. I don’t like my writing to be ignored. Contradiction is critical to my character. Ask my wife.
When I was selected as one of the sixty contributors to Senator John Edwards’ book HOME, I sent her tons of information and photographs for a piece on IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, from which my contribution was taken.
She promptly advised me that my mention in her newspaper would be limited. I have no trouble with candor. It is the way to the heart of the matter. Cando epitomizes confidence and competence. She was not afraid to take on the ugly bear, me, who could not understand how an Iowan, me, again, and one of only 30 “common folks” selected from more than 2,000 nominated was not getting more attention.
Ms Curry demonstrated the politeness and temerity to tell me the lay of the land. She is new in her job and should do well because she shows a confidence and honesty that is far removed from the nation of Teflonia to which we are both citizens.
Subsequently, a featured piece was done on this book in the IOWALIFE section of the same newspaper (November 29, 2006) in which a nice quote is taken from my contribution to the book. I would not have known about this were this section not sent to me anonymously.
I suspect it came from Ms Curry. That represents service above and beyond what is expected in a job, something extra that need not be done and has little chance of recognition but which demonstrates both CONFIDENT SELLING and CONFIDENT THINKING.
The way she dealt with me was absolutely “right on.” She told me up front; gave me a “heads up.” I am a person who doesn’t like surprises. Her response couldn’t have been more temperamentally suited for my mindset.
When you have little clout, and an opportunity comes like the Edwards book, you have no idea of how the material will be treated, or if it will be representative of your work. I am a person who also likes control. Such a situation and circumstance increase the level of my anxiety. I must admit that the four-page spread with pictures of my boyhood home and the courthouse were beyond my most exhilarated expectations. Serendipity truly is coin to my fountain.
ABOUT THIS BUSINESS OF WRITING
I am a blue-collar person with a Ph.D. if that makes any sense at all. My da was a brakeman on the railroad. While I’ve departed from that first home economically and intellectually, I’ve never left it psychologically.
You could call it serendipity that I am a writer, but on closer examination, you might see that I am still a blue-collar worker like my da. Writing is a craft not unlike carpentry or plumbing or that of an electrician or an assembly worker, all of which go into the craft of writing if metaphorically.
Writers are readers and reading is a tactile process. Beyond the pleasure of having a book in your hands, reading and writing are physical work like farming in my native state of Iowa, or perhaps gardening, the growing of things from the tiny seed to the fully blooming plant. However, as novelist Truman Capote cautions, writing a novel is like creating a giant redwood and then reducing it to an acorn of a book.
My home is virtually a library with books and bookcases in practically every room, nook and cranny, literally so, to the tune of more than 4,000 books. I am lucky that my wife, Beautiful Betty, is also a reader.
It always amuses me that people say in this electronic age that readers of books are anachronistic, that music and e-stores are the future. Yet, in fact, more than 400,000 new books are printed every year, while giant bookstores are being built every day, and music superstores, only a few years old, are going out-of-business.
That said you don’t become a writer because it is easy. Writing is a struggle every day. I have been engaged in this struggle, hitting that wall, for more than 37 years. If you are a person interested in the word for its own sake, you don’t do it because you have to; you do it because you need to. The satisfaction, the reward, and the blessings are from the writing itself.
Writing is a wonderful connection to make between the floating mind and moving fingers with black symbols on a legal pad or notebook with a pencil or pen, a typewriter, or a computer. Somehow ideas in your mind translate on to paper with some consistency with what you think, feel, believe and value at that moment.
God played one little trick on us as writers. I have to claim indolence in response to this trick. The greatest clarity of my thoughts comes when I am about to go to sleep. I’m at that point when sleep is about to enfold that wonderful ideas visit me in content and context with conceptual clarity. Invariably, I say to myself, because they are so vivid, I shall remember them in the morning, but seldom do.
I believe the most honest profession of all is that of the writer, and the most honest writer of that profession is not the journalist, not the historian, not the philosopher, not the scientist, not the theologian, but the novelist. He writes about the way we really are often getting through his own personal biases and hang ups to tell stories that resonate with our actual experience past, present and future.
The novelist manipulates the symbols, suppresses or exaggerates his biases, transmutes or sublimates his passions to make contact first with himself, and incidentally with the reader. Often, the consequences of a story are so dramatic as to epitomize a condition leading to monumental change.
Such was the case with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. When president Lincoln met her, he said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War.”
As with all books, they either come out of one’s own experience, something read in the newspaper as was often the case with Dostoyevsky, or inspired by another book or pamphlet. The latter was the case with Stowe.
Josiah Henson, a slave, born in Maryland in 1789, wrote a widely read autobiography pamphlet. But he was far from an “Uncle Tom.” He actually served as the manager of a plantation before he escaped to Canada and freedom. Once free, he started a profitable sawmill and founded a trade school for blacks, whites and Indians. He also helped more than 100 slaves escaped to Canada. An interesting aside, when he traveled to England, and met the Archbishop of Canterbury, the churchman was so impressed with his speech that he asked him what university he attended. Henson answered, “the University of Adversity.”
Continuing my point that novels have changed society, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was not so much literature as a polemic against slavery. It was a literary attempt to change public opinion rather than to entertain, which it did. Therefore, it was propaganda and not written for pleasure.
Now nothing is ever cut and dried or simply a matter of good intentions, nor was this the case with Stowe. She was haunted by a severe sense of personal loss over the death of her child, which she brilliantly conceived as a byproduct of slavery. Irrational? Yes. But the passion of irrationality often leads to a rational perspective. She built her story on the genuine skeletal structure of Josiah Henson, and the nation was aroused. Meanwhile, buried was a more compelling conflict between the federal government and states’ rights, which to this day has been blurred by this book and Lincoln’s mastery.
I have come to think, and this is the basis of the first and last freedom of CONFIDENT THINKING, to the conclusion that we write most perceptively and most clearly when we write to ourselves. If the reader can make connection, all the better. But to write to an audience is to prostitute a wonderful talent. That is my view, and that is what I am thinking as I walk today.
AN AFTERTHOUGHT ON WRITING
You don’t have to be a published writer to consider yourself a writer. People who have never published a word have shown me their poetry, for example, and I am always astonished by how good most of it is. I’m sure they think I’m putting them on when I tell them it is quite moving. Then the next question is, “Do you think it is publishable?” I smile inwardly but try to hide it not wanting to appear disrespectful. But I am the last person in the world to ask that question. When they think “publishable,” they automatically hear the cascading sound of dollars falling from heaven.
Writers get paid at about the same rate as the laborers they are, near or at the bottom of the food chain. The blue-collar analogy is not poetic license. It is the way it is. Most writers, given the hours they put into their craft, would love to be paid the minimum wage. Ask their mates if you want corroboration.
Writing is my therapy. It is my medicine. It is the cigarette that I have never smoked, the liquor I’ve never consumed, and the drugs I’ve never taken. It is my elixir. It puts me in balance or at least the semblance of balance. Messiness doesn’t suit me at all. Writing works because it restores a sense of order against the frightening disorder and chaos of nature, human and otherwise. I am not interested in being right, which is the gauge of science. I am interested in transcending right, which is the gauge of literature.
So, I write sometimes in anger, sometimes in sarcasm, often with cynical detachment, sometimes with brutal honesty, and sometimes so obtusely that only God and I understand, and I’m not so sure about God.
I’m sharing this with you only to let you know that my satisfaction is not whether or not I have clout, but to possess the freedom beyond it.
That freedom I have purchased by making choices that have given me the socioeconomic wherewithal to write what moves me and not be badgered to write to a prescription, an audience or a prevailing point of view.
I have managed by something approaching serendipity to escape the clutches of those with clout. I have not needed to compromise my authenticity or to dangle obsequiously in compliance beholding to the wishes of those with clout as sycophant.
The only way to explain this is in the words of author Ken Shelton, “Somebody, somewhere always seems to come through for you. Serendipity registers.”
It is what author Shelton leaves out where the message can be found. It is the case in all writing. Meaning is not in the words but between the words.
Left out is the fact that the providers of my serendipity did so in support of their own self-interest and not by any guiding magnanimity. That is why it is good and real. I am not driven by consumer demand or consumer attention, while that may very well be the case of my serendipitous benefactors.
Take Senator John Edwards and his book HOME. I am honored to be serendipitously included, while knowing that he may be fixing to run for the presidency in 2008. Where is one of the first primary caucuses? Iowa, of course. I rest my case, and I hope you will as well.
* * * * * *
Friday, December 01, 2006
"We had to destroy the village to save it."
"We had to destroy the village to save it."
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2006.
These were the words of a senior officer in Viet Nam that reverberate to the present.
Sociologist Philip Slater has pointed out that we are a violent society and have been since our earliest moments, a frontier society if you will, that hides behind the sobriquet of "progress." So,
· We destroy the environment to save it.
· We invade a country and destroy its infrastructure to make it free and self-sustaining.
· We brutalize loved ones to get them to conform "for their own good."
· We create mega corporations in violation of the idea of free enterprise while professing to save it.
The mission of mega corporations is to improve the economy and living standard of the average citizen by destroying mom and pop businesses forever.
· We destroy initiative and creativity in the interest of promoting education.
· We establish an educational system in operant conditioning program learning in which grades is the focus and learning is an unintended consequence.
· We make education an industry with a factory mentality that extends from preschool to graduate school education and fail to see the violence to the human spirit that is done in the process of making us robotic.
· We seem always amazed when the solutions to our problems generate even more violent problems.
We fail to see the thinking that went into the problem solving was the problem. There isn't a major problem where this is not the case.
· We insist that problems can be solved. Problems are never solved. Problems can only be temporarily controlled.
We are ignorant of the violence of change and wonder why it is so crushing.
· We emphatically insist on establishing stability, predictability and control when for all this attention we repeatedly generate chaos, confusion and conflict.
· We have killed spontaneity, and spontaneity is the fuel of initiative. Innovation is not originality but its step cousin.
We applaud science when it has spent its efforts mainly refining what was discovered a century ago.
· We celebrate innovation in its quest for new toys of technology that drive us socially further apart as we are inevitably driven closer together by sheer numbers.
· We spend literally billions on negative campaigning to be elected to public office because positive campaigning doesn't work. Hate sells and bromides please vacuous minds.
· We are a society of laws and not men, and claim to be governed by due process in which the accused are innocent until proven guilty. But once the accused are awarded the Scarlet Letter by the media, it remains on one's forehead for the rest of one's life.
· We take pride in big being better and being number one being best, failing to see the violence in this. Neither has a center because once the focus is a matter of pride the center is destroyed.
· One of the most destructive mindsets of all is patriotism. True believers drive it with a herd mentality.
· A president once said, "The only thing to fear is fear itself," when fear is the only thing that motivates us.
· We are appalled when a child in the ghetto kills another child for his designer sneakers when that killer child has learned covetousness by television's subliminal stimulation in the continuing violence of want, and from the betrayal behavior of those around him.
· Cynicism is a virus of violence.
Sarcasm is a disease of envy and jealousy.
· We award those the most that contribute the least to society, athletes, entertainers, celebrities, and wonder why we are mired in apathy on the one hand and celebrity worship on the other. There is no greater violence than a second hand life, or living vicariously through the actions of others.
We are a spectator society in the coliseum of our passive perspective with the Roman gladiators now the members of violent sports offered as distractions and for our self-indulgent and mindless entertainment.
· We conveniently think color is the most dissembling violence when color is only secondary to our separation by cultural bias. We are intimidated by difference.
· Those who rise to the top in institutional corpocracy are no threat to those already there. This is axiom. They speak in the same tongue of platitudes and doublespeak.
leadership has far less to do with competence than comfort and connection. The violence of this to the fabric of society has proven devastating.
· We are afraid of ideas so ideas are in short supply.
· When you seek excellence, piggybacking on those already excellent, you fail to create excellence. Excellence cannot be sought. It must be created in the context and culture in which it may operate.
· Competition is a violent and imitative act. The focus is on an outside authority and source. Competition makes for zombie and second-rate copies. It is why our cities all look alike; we all dress alike; speak alike; act alike; and wonder why we are all bored alike with each other.
Danger attracts sleepwalkers in an effort to wake them up from sleep. What could be more inane and purposeless than a television survival contest when eating worms is par for the course?
· When the parent to the man is not an adult than the world is conceived in the irresponsibility and unaccountability of the child. It is a world of autistic violence.
· When a company attempts to save itself by destroying half its workforce, it is guilty of most of the above. Corporate carnage has been the primary strategic plan of most major corporations in an era of a dearth of ideas.
· Dumb animals respond to one-minute management because they have the intelligence of instinct, which is mainly robotic. When man is trained in the same fashion, he becomes an interchangeable part and as robotic as the dumb animal that he most resembles.
· Terrorism is palpable violence which is not new but has been a factor since the beginning of man's earliest days. The motivation for terror is fear and hatred of the strong by the weak. It is driven by pride with a willingness to sacrifice the village to save it.
· Terrorism throughout time has found the terrorized meeting terrorism with terror in retaliation, often with language to hide the fact. It finds the weak and the strong meeting on a common ground of insanity, where war become normalcy and destruction considered the root to peace.
· We have conquered nature but have not discovered the intelligence in our many millenniums to know man. Man remains forever unknown, forever a plethora of oxymorons: cruelly kind, stupidly intelligent, tolerantly biased, peaceably violent, benign neglect.
This was on my mind when I could not sleep and so I wrote it down without editing or apology. A mind on fire is a mind of limited duration, and with that in mind I share these thoughts for whatever they are worth.
Always be well.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2006.
These were the words of a senior officer in Viet Nam that reverberate to the present.
Sociologist Philip Slater has pointed out that we are a violent society and have been since our earliest moments, a frontier society if you will, that hides behind the sobriquet of "progress." So,
· We destroy the environment to save it.
· We invade a country and destroy its infrastructure to make it free and self-sustaining.
· We brutalize loved ones to get them to conform "for their own good."
· We create mega corporations in violation of the idea of free enterprise while professing to save it.
The mission of mega corporations is to improve the economy and living standard of the average citizen by destroying mom and pop businesses forever.
· We destroy initiative and creativity in the interest of promoting education.
· We establish an educational system in operant conditioning program learning in which grades is the focus and learning is an unintended consequence.
· We make education an industry with a factory mentality that extends from preschool to graduate school education and fail to see the violence to the human spirit that is done in the process of making us robotic.
· We seem always amazed when the solutions to our problems generate even more violent problems.
We fail to see the thinking that went into the problem solving was the problem. There isn't a major problem where this is not the case.
· We insist that problems can be solved. Problems are never solved. Problems can only be temporarily controlled.
We are ignorant of the violence of change and wonder why it is so crushing.
· We emphatically insist on establishing stability, predictability and control when for all this attention we repeatedly generate chaos, confusion and conflict.
· We have killed spontaneity, and spontaneity is the fuel of initiative. Innovation is not originality but its step cousin.
We applaud science when it has spent its efforts mainly refining what was discovered a century ago.
· We celebrate innovation in its quest for new toys of technology that drive us socially further apart as we are inevitably driven closer together by sheer numbers.
· We spend literally billions on negative campaigning to be elected to public office because positive campaigning doesn't work. Hate sells and bromides please vacuous minds.
· We are a society of laws and not men, and claim to be governed by due process in which the accused are innocent until proven guilty. But once the accused are awarded the Scarlet Letter by the media, it remains on one's forehead for the rest of one's life.
· We take pride in big being better and being number one being best, failing to see the violence in this. Neither has a center because once the focus is a matter of pride the center is destroyed.
· One of the most destructive mindsets of all is patriotism. True believers drive it with a herd mentality.
· A president once said, "The only thing to fear is fear itself," when fear is the only thing that motivates us.
· We are appalled when a child in the ghetto kills another child for his designer sneakers when that killer child has learned covetousness by television's subliminal stimulation in the continuing violence of want, and from the betrayal behavior of those around him.
· Cynicism is a virus of violence.
Sarcasm is a disease of envy and jealousy.
· We award those the most that contribute the least to society, athletes, entertainers, celebrities, and wonder why we are mired in apathy on the one hand and celebrity worship on the other. There is no greater violence than a second hand life, or living vicariously through the actions of others.
We are a spectator society in the coliseum of our passive perspective with the Roman gladiators now the members of violent sports offered as distractions and for our self-indulgent and mindless entertainment.
· We conveniently think color is the most dissembling violence when color is only secondary to our separation by cultural bias. We are intimidated by difference.
· Those who rise to the top in institutional corpocracy are no threat to those already there. This is axiom. They speak in the same tongue of platitudes and doublespeak.
leadership has far less to do with competence than comfort and connection. The violence of this to the fabric of society has proven devastating.
· We are afraid of ideas so ideas are in short supply.
· When you seek excellence, piggybacking on those already excellent, you fail to create excellence. Excellence cannot be sought. It must be created in the context and culture in which it may operate.
· Competition is a violent and imitative act. The focus is on an outside authority and source. Competition makes for zombie and second-rate copies. It is why our cities all look alike; we all dress alike; speak alike; act alike; and wonder why we are all bored alike with each other.
Danger attracts sleepwalkers in an effort to wake them up from sleep. What could be more inane and purposeless than a television survival contest when eating worms is par for the course?
· When the parent to the man is not an adult than the world is conceived in the irresponsibility and unaccountability of the child. It is a world of autistic violence.
· When a company attempts to save itself by destroying half its workforce, it is guilty of most of the above. Corporate carnage has been the primary strategic plan of most major corporations in an era of a dearth of ideas.
· Dumb animals respond to one-minute management because they have the intelligence of instinct, which is mainly robotic. When man is trained in the same fashion, he becomes an interchangeable part and as robotic as the dumb animal that he most resembles.
· Terrorism is palpable violence which is not new but has been a factor since the beginning of man's earliest days. The motivation for terror is fear and hatred of the strong by the weak. It is driven by pride with a willingness to sacrifice the village to save it.
· Terrorism throughout time has found the terrorized meeting terrorism with terror in retaliation, often with language to hide the fact. It finds the weak and the strong meeting on a common ground of insanity, where war become normalcy and destruction considered the root to peace.
· We have conquered nature but have not discovered the intelligence in our many millenniums to know man. Man remains forever unknown, forever a plethora of oxymorons: cruelly kind, stupidly intelligent, tolerantly biased, peaceably violent, benign neglect.
This was on my mind when I could not sleep and so I wrote it down without editing or apology. A mind on fire is a mind of limited duration, and with that in mind I share these thoughts for whatever they are worth.
Always be well.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
EMBRACING THE WIND -- SAGA OF AN INVISIBLE THOUGHT LEADER!
THEDELTAGRPFL@cs.com wrote:
Note to Emailers:
My agent thinks my two recently completed manuscripts, CONFIDENT SELLING** and CONFIDENT THINKING together should be a blockbuster. We shall see. Since I have done little else the last several months then work on them 60 to 70 hours a week, I gave pause to vent my frustration in this missive to him. Call it what you like, but it felt good to get it off my chest. Almost euphoric. Be always well.
Jim
**Confident Selling was first published in 1971 and became an international best seller. This is a totally revised and updated version of the original text, but with the same premise, which is that the problem with selling is not the buyer, but the seller. Once the seller overcomes his fears by embracing them, the rest is easy, and success is assured.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Ned,
I think I've finally written a combination of books, and like you say, which complement each other and may prove useful to people in all walks of life.
We, too, complement each other. I know industry from a cadre of positions in the corporation: from six summers in a chemical processing factory (food industry) in virtually every phase of the operation as a laborer in a workforce of some 2,000.
I was one of the most respected summer workers, getting the most hours, and not afraid of any kind of work. I've written about the valuable lessons it taught me about labor and management. It also gave me a vivid appreciation of the factory process, philosophically, psychologically and economically. It is the basis of my three cultures: comfort, complacency and contribution.
When I graduated from Iowa, I wrote to the company for a recommendation, and Standard Brands Inc., now ADM, said they would match or exceed anyone that made me an offer.
I worked there as a chemist. I followed this with two years in the Navy as a white hat on the Flag Ship of the Mediterranean fleet, the USS Salem (CA-139), so I've got the military perspective, too. Thanks to it, I acquired the GI Bill which made it possible to get my Ph.D.
The rest of the story is pretty well documented in my writing: from chemical sales engineer with Nalco to area manager in the field, then as a corporate executive trouble shooter about the globe for Nalco to facilitator of the formation of a new company in South Africa.
At that point, during my best wage-earning years, I took a two-year sabbatical. I went back to school for the next six years, and got my Ph.D. in organizational/industrial psychology. I know academia up close and personal, too. Factory process is clearly in evidence if the conflicts are not more petty. Henry Kessinger once summed it up very well: "The reason academic infighting is so bitter is that the stakes are so small."
Concomitantly, I had a ten year stint as an adjunct professor to several universities, up and down the East coast, including one with AMA Professional Institute, doing extensive OD consulting as well.
Then, I went back in industry with Honeywell (USA) as an OD psychologist, and then with Honeywell Europe as Director of Human Resources Planning & Development.
So, I've spent my time in the laboratory of experience on all phases of the modern workforce from being a day laborer to a working bee both in line (sales and R&D) and staff (OD psychologist and corporate executive and internal-external consultant), not to mention a student (undergraduate and graduate level) and academic (adjunct professor).
I write from that all inclusive range and perspective. I don't know of a thought leader in the country that can match my eclectic background.
And yet, to this date, I am virtually unknown. So, well CS/CT change all that? The question is academic because in any case:
(a) We are all in the selling business; and
(b) The biggest sale we ever have to make is on ourselves. The rest is gravy.
These two books: CS &CT, as you point out, address that problem.
If we can ever find a publisher, perhaps the one that publishes Steven Covey, we could sell the book in bulk to corporations.
The other thing I envision is that it could be made into a training program in which trained professionals could deliver the course across the globe, not just in the USA.
I wrote a book for Honeywell on train-the-trainer, and it was so well received that a professor (psychology) at the University of Tampa wanted to use it as a text. Honeywell refused because it was proprietary material. Honeywell was not in the publishing business.
In any case, I wouldn't have gotten a dime out of it inasmuch as I signed that authority away when I joined Honeywell, as I had done the same thing with Nalco.
I mention the latter because I wrote CONFIDENT SELLING for my people when with Nalco but in an abbreviated form. Still, it was essentially the same book. As I've said before, I wrote the book in six weeks, sent it off to Prentice-Hall and it was accepted the first week P-H received it. I hadn't mentioned that I had written the book in outline form long before it was published as a book.
Two things that come to mind of recent memory that tell me we are on to something.
(1 ) I attended a concert at my grandson's exclusive private school, Tampa Preparatory, and a series of "young scholars" gave their take on what they thought and what was important, then the director of the school, along with other faculty members gave their two cents.
I looked to BB, and whispered in her ear, "What does that sound like?" She smiled, "Your book." I corrected her. "My books!" She shrugged her shoulders as if to say, "Whatever."
I don't know what you mean by 10-10. You must accept that I don't know your end of the business. You are my agent, but I look to you also to be my business manager. Down the road if we need a public relations person, it will be as much your call as mine. If I create a syllabus and have a training program to license this material to others, I will want your input and advice on what would be the best deal.
We have been starving in the literary sense for so long that whatever is offered the tendency might be to jump. As I said before, I will not give up the copyright to either book. I've done that before, and lost. The residuals to CS/CT are where the money will be made, not on the initial printings.
(2) The timing of these books is right. The current major feature of Time magazine is on worrying about the wrong risks in which people consume their energy locked in the past (with nostalgia) or focused on the future (with trepidation). CS/CT are about what you can and should do right now (with gusto)!
Finally, I don't want publicity for publicity sake. I want to sell books. We both deserve that. We have treaded water long enough.
Be always well,
Jim
__________________________________________________
Note to Emailers:
My agent thinks my two recently completed manuscripts, CONFIDENT SELLING** and CONFIDENT THINKING together should be a blockbuster. We shall see. Since I have done little else the last several months then work on them 60 to 70 hours a week, I gave pause to vent my frustration in this missive to him. Call it what you like, but it felt good to get it off my chest. Almost euphoric. Be always well.
Jim
**Confident Selling was first published in 1971 and became an international best seller. This is a totally revised and updated version of the original text, but with the same premise, which is that the problem with selling is not the buyer, but the seller. Once the seller overcomes his fears by embracing them, the rest is easy, and success is assured.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Ned,
I think I've finally written a combination of books, and like you say, which complement each other and may prove useful to people in all walks of life.
We, too, complement each other. I know industry from a cadre of positions in the corporation: from six summers in a chemical processing factory (food industry) in virtually every phase of the operation as a laborer in a workforce of some 2,000.
I was one of the most respected summer workers, getting the most hours, and not afraid of any kind of work. I've written about the valuable lessons it taught me about labor and management. It also gave me a vivid appreciation of the factory process, philosophically, psychologically and economically. It is the basis of my three cultures: comfort, complacency and contribution.
When I graduated from Iowa, I wrote to the company for a recommendation, and Standard Brands Inc., now ADM, said they would match or exceed anyone that made me an offer.
I worked there as a chemist. I followed this with two years in the Navy as a white hat on the Flag Ship of the Mediterranean fleet, the USS Salem (CA-139), so I've got the military perspective, too. Thanks to it, I acquired the GI Bill which made it possible to get my Ph.D.
The rest of the story is pretty well documented in my writing: from chemical sales engineer with Nalco to area manager in the field, then as a corporate executive trouble shooter about the globe for Nalco to facilitator of the formation of a new company in South Africa.
At that point, during my best wage-earning years, I took a two-year sabbatical. I went back to school for the next six years, and got my Ph.D. in organizational/industrial psychology. I know academia up close and personal, too. Factory process is clearly in evidence if the conflicts are not more petty. Henry Kessinger once summed it up very well: "The reason academic infighting is so bitter is that the stakes are so small."
Concomitantly, I had a ten year stint as an adjunct professor to several universities, up and down the East coast, including one with AMA Professional Institute, doing extensive OD consulting as well.
Then, I went back in industry with Honeywell (USA) as an OD psychologist, and then with Honeywell Europe as Director of Human Resources Planning & Development.
So, I've spent my time in the laboratory of experience on all phases of the modern workforce from being a day laborer to a working bee both in line (sales and R&D) and staff (OD psychologist and corporate executive and internal-external consultant), not to mention a student (undergraduate and graduate level) and academic (adjunct professor).
I write from that all inclusive range and perspective. I don't know of a thought leader in the country that can match my eclectic background.
And yet, to this date, I am virtually unknown. So, well CS/CT change all that? The question is academic because in any case:
(a) We are all in the selling business; and
(b) The biggest sale we ever have to make is on ourselves. The rest is gravy.
These two books: CS &CT, as you point out, address that problem.
If we can ever find a publisher, perhaps the one that publishes Steven Covey, we could sell the book in bulk to corporations.
The other thing I envision is that it could be made into a training program in which trained professionals could deliver the course across the globe, not just in the USA.
I wrote a book for Honeywell on train-the-trainer, and it was so well received that a professor (psychology) at the University of Tampa wanted to use it as a text. Honeywell refused because it was proprietary material. Honeywell was not in the publishing business.
In any case, I wouldn't have gotten a dime out of it inasmuch as I signed that authority away when I joined Honeywell, as I had done the same thing with Nalco.
I mention the latter because I wrote CONFIDENT SELLING for my people when with Nalco but in an abbreviated form. Still, it was essentially the same book. As I've said before, I wrote the book in six weeks, sent it off to Prentice-Hall and it was accepted the first week P-H received it. I hadn't mentioned that I had written the book in outline form long before it was published as a book.
Two things that come to mind of recent memory that tell me we are on to something.
(1 ) I attended a concert at my grandson's exclusive private school, Tampa Preparatory, and a series of "young scholars" gave their take on what they thought and what was important, then the director of the school, along with other faculty members gave their two cents.
I looked to BB, and whispered in her ear, "What does that sound like?" She smiled, "Your book." I corrected her. "My books!" She shrugged her shoulders as if to say, "Whatever."
I don't know what you mean by 10-10. You must accept that I don't know your end of the business. You are my agent, but I look to you also to be my business manager. Down the road if we need a public relations person, it will be as much your call as mine. If I create a syllabus and have a training program to license this material to others, I will want your input and advice on what would be the best deal.
We have been starving in the literary sense for so long that whatever is offered the tendency might be to jump. As I said before, I will not give up the copyright to either book. I've done that before, and lost. The residuals to CS/CT are where the money will be made, not on the initial printings.
(2) The timing of these books is right. The current major feature of Time magazine is on worrying about the wrong risks in which people consume their energy locked in the past (with nostalgia) or focused on the future (with trepidation). CS/CT are about what you can and should do right now (with gusto)!
Finally, I don't want publicity for publicity sake. I want to sell books. We both deserve that. We have treaded water long enough.
Be always well,
Jim
__________________________________________________
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
STRANGE REACTION TO A BOOK ABOUT AMERICAN HOMES!
When I was selected as one of 60 out of thousands to be included in a book about homes of Americans during their youth, it never occurred to me that the senator and his wife, and their assembled crew on this project, would be the focus.
I thought the homes of people from all socioeconomic, political, ethnic, cultural, religion, occupational, regional, and name identity, from famous to unknown, would be the focus. I was wrong. People think it is a hagiography to the senator and his kind.
You can't get much lower in the food chain than I am, the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad from a small river town called Clinton, Iowa.
I have heard such comments: "I'm a Republican," with a smile, meaning, I couldn't touch this book. Another person looked at me, "Are you one of them," meaning am I a Democrat. Another person said, "I don't like John Edwards and his politics." I made no attempt to explain the book was not about politics but about American homes of, ah, forget it. And these are just the polite comments.
For those of interests, I was raised in a very devote Catholic home, whereas I am now very much still a Catholic, but a secular catholic at that. My home was one in which my parents voted the straight Democratic ticket and voted in virtually every election at whatever level it was, and I've followed that tradition. I am a registered Republican that votes Democratic as much as Republican, and so I guess I am somewhat of an independent. I have enjoyed a certain affluence, but grew up in a home that failed to make it from paycheck to paycheck. I have never forgotten that I am a lower class kid from a blue collar family. Never. I have lived a life that is like that Forest Gump character in the movie, seemingly always somewhere in the world that the serendipity of circumstances puts me where the action and the names of my times are showing up. Just a for instance, when I was a young chemist with Standard Brands, and the company sent me to a Food Technology Convention in Chicago, I was standing beside Adlai Stevenson waiting for the elevator to take me up to my room in the Palmer House in Chicago, when the television cameras blinded me, a secret service guy pushed me aside, and not gently, and Democratic presidential hopeful Stevenson was given a private elevator. And that is only the tip of the iceberg about such experiences.
So, I don't put people higher than I am or lower than I am, and I don't judge them by whether they are red or blue (politically), or white or black, red or yellow (ethnically), Catholic, Protestant, Hindus, Islam, Buddha, or any other persuasion.
So, if you think I have some difficulty with people judging a book about homes in terms of politics, you've got it right. Nor do I lead with the idea I am an American. I am a man who happens to be an American and I respect other men and women that happen to be of other national connections by the accident of their birth.
For me it is not an "either/or" world, but a world of you "and" me. It is not big you and little me, or big me and little you, but of you and I trying to do the best we can with what we've got and the chances we have had and what we have done with them.
I cannot at this late stage in my life understand sectarianism, violence or otherwise, local or international, and yet I know it keeps the pot boiling. I will not change this. Certainly, Senator John Edwards won't change this. I don't know him, will most likely never meet him, but if you read the book you'll see that he and the other 59 entries have paid their dues, and didn't have the time to wonder about much of anything else but making the most of their circumstances.
Be always well,
Jim
Reference: The book is HOME: THE BLUEPRINT OF OUR LIVES, HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. I have a four-page article with a picture of the home of my youth along with a picture of the courthouse. My piece was taken from my book IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (AuthorHouse 2003).
I thought the homes of people from all socioeconomic, political, ethnic, cultural, religion, occupational, regional, and name identity, from famous to unknown, would be the focus. I was wrong. People think it is a hagiography to the senator and his kind.
You can't get much lower in the food chain than I am, the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad from a small river town called Clinton, Iowa.
I have heard such comments: "I'm a Republican," with a smile, meaning, I couldn't touch this book. Another person looked at me, "Are you one of them," meaning am I a Democrat. Another person said, "I don't like John Edwards and his politics." I made no attempt to explain the book was not about politics but about American homes of, ah, forget it. And these are just the polite comments.
For those of interests, I was raised in a very devote Catholic home, whereas I am now very much still a Catholic, but a secular catholic at that. My home was one in which my parents voted the straight Democratic ticket and voted in virtually every election at whatever level it was, and I've followed that tradition. I am a registered Republican that votes Democratic as much as Republican, and so I guess I am somewhat of an independent. I have enjoyed a certain affluence, but grew up in a home that failed to make it from paycheck to paycheck. I have never forgotten that I am a lower class kid from a blue collar family. Never. I have lived a life that is like that Forest Gump character in the movie, seemingly always somewhere in the world that the serendipity of circumstances puts me where the action and the names of my times are showing up. Just a for instance, when I was a young chemist with Standard Brands, and the company sent me to a Food Technology Convention in Chicago, I was standing beside Adlai Stevenson waiting for the elevator to take me up to my room in the Palmer House in Chicago, when the television cameras blinded me, a secret service guy pushed me aside, and not gently, and Democratic presidential hopeful Stevenson was given a private elevator. And that is only the tip of the iceberg about such experiences.
So, I don't put people higher than I am or lower than I am, and I don't judge them by whether they are red or blue (politically), or white or black, red or yellow (ethnically), Catholic, Protestant, Hindus, Islam, Buddha, or any other persuasion.
So, if you think I have some difficulty with people judging a book about homes in terms of politics, you've got it right. Nor do I lead with the idea I am an American. I am a man who happens to be an American and I respect other men and women that happen to be of other national connections by the accident of their birth.
For me it is not an "either/or" world, but a world of you "and" me. It is not big you and little me, or big me and little you, but of you and I trying to do the best we can with what we've got and the chances we have had and what we have done with them.
I cannot at this late stage in my life understand sectarianism, violence or otherwise, local or international, and yet I know it keeps the pot boiling. I will not change this. Certainly, Senator John Edwards won't change this. I don't know him, will most likely never meet him, but if you read the book you'll see that he and the other 59 entries have paid their dues, and didn't have the time to wonder about much of anything else but making the most of their circumstances.
Be always well,
Jim
Reference: The book is HOME: THE BLUEPRINT OF OUR LIVES, HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. I have a four-page article with a picture of the home of my youth along with a picture of the courthouse. My piece was taken from my book IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (AuthorHouse 2003).
Thursday, November 09, 2006
THE OPEN LETTER TO THE DES MOINES REGISTER & THE DANCE OF THE CLOUT AND CLOUTLESS
THE DES MOINES REGISTER OPEN LETTER
&
THE DANCE OF THE CLOUT AND CLOUTLESS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2006
Several of you have emailed me and asked if I received a reply from The Des Moines Register to my open letter. It is now past two weeks and the answers is “no.” Nor did I expect to hear from this newspaper.
What generated this open letter was the review of Des Moines native Robert Bryon’s new book on growing up in the 1950s in Des Moines.
I was somewhat incensed because the newspaper didn’t give me as much as a mention for my book growing up in Clinton, Iowa during the Second World War titled In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (AuthorHouse 2003).
Incidentally, I copied all the newspapers mentioned in the piece. Nothing from them as well. You readers know that whenever I use your name in an email you will be copied. That behavior is a product of my upbringing as my da said to me, “Jimmy, if you can’t say what is on your mind to a person’s face best that you keep it to yourself.”
He also said, “The best way to look at life is as if whomever you’re talking about is standing right behind your shoulder.”
It was those two messages that have proven both reassuring and somewhat disparaging. I have found people would rather not know what you think about them than know for certain where you stand. When I was in graduate school as a mature student, 38, after I retired the first time, it was the 1970s and someone came up with the theory that students should evaluate professors as professors evaluated students.
It was that old great deception of the clout and cloutless in happy union.
I had a four-point in my graduate course work, but evaluated one professor rather harshly, and none of them even close to four-point territory with the exception of one. He was all about business and could care less what I thought of him.
Having been a corporate executive, I had little stomach for professors who didn’t do their homework and treated students as their personal friends at the expense of focusing on the subject matter. I wasn’t in school for a holiday. Obviously, these professors wanted to appear student-centered with positive student evaluations as if they were campaigning for office, something of which I was familiar with in the corporation.
In any event, my seminar professor said to me one day, “You write so well I’m going to give a pass on having you write a paper, let’s go to lunch and discuss the subject.” We went to lunch, the subject never came up, and I got an “A” in the course. In the essay portion of the student evaluation, I mentioned this, and then went to the professor, and told him so.
The rest of the story is that the professor was on my committee, which nearly resulted in failing my orals. You need a passing grade on them as well as your written work. It was hell, but I created the hell for myself, and knew it. Were it not for another professor who programmed me to respond to the questions asked in my orals mechanically and succinctly, I doubt if I would have made it. More than one-third of ABD’s (all but dissertations) complete the course work required but never receive the degree because they cannot write. My problem is I cannot keep my mouth shut.
THE DANCE OF CLOUT AND CLOUTLESS
With that in mind, I am not surprised I haven’t heard from The Des Moines Register or any of the other newspapers mentioned in my open letter.
You see the world is divided into those with clout and the cloutless. That’s the world we live in. It is not a Democratic and Republican world, not a liberal and conservative world, not a good and evil world, not a wise and ignorant world, nor indeed, not a competent and incompetent world. It is a world of clout, alone.
Those that have clout, or want it, or are intimidated by it behave in one manner and those that do not have it behave in another manner. It follows that the somebodys with clout are clueless about the cloutless because they are only concerned with those that can hurt them, which they take to be those with clout.
I am dictating this on my peripatetic walk the day after the massacre of the Republican Party by the Democratic Party, which has risen up at this mid-term election to take over the majority in Congress of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
What is the first item on the agenda of our Republican president’s news conference? It is the ditching of his Secretary of Defense, something he swore he wouldn’t do only last week. Secretary Rumsfeld has been made cloutless by the clout of the Democratic Party’s success.
It is the nature of our society, but it is not only the nature of our society but also the nature of civilization.
There are those with clout and those without clout. I happen to be cloutless. I’ve been cloutless ever since I left the corporation. In the corporation, in my day, position power, alone, determined whether you had clout or not. It had nothing to do with competence or incompetence. People did what you told them to do because you had clout even if it meant walking off the cliff to their doom. Nor did clout have anything to do with leadership. Quite the contrary.
If you think this is an exaggeration, try convincing me cloutless people in Enron didn’t feel someone was amiss.
I made my living as an organization-industrial psychologist talking to these people to find out what was going on. I never learned it from the brass. Never. But the cloutless knew but did nothing for the simple reason they saw themselves as cloutless.
One of the great deceptions I encountered was the cloutless projecting their competence into those with clout who were incompetent.
You could be incompetent and beyond your depth, but people without clout would listen to you because of your clout. They would rationalize your leadership as wise when it clearly wasn’t, knowing in their bones this to be the case. Why?
It is easier for the cloutless to remain silent and submissive and compliant than to state their case or concerns, or, indeed, show their anger.
The problem with this is when the cloutless refuse to be upfront about how they feel, this is inevitable:
· Compliance will be doubtlessly established. Compliance is always the effect of veiled coercion. This is so because suspicions have not been satisfied, anger neither dealt with nor dissipated, and so decorum and politeness is but a charade. Compliance is a reaction to clout demonstrating the nature of cloutlessness.
This is not unlike the relationship of the master and the slave, which are only the extremes of clout and cloutlessness.
Once you are programmed into cloutlessness you react as I am reacting here to my sense of the fact. It will be interesting to see how the Democrats react to their new situation of having the clout after and absence of more than a decade.
When you are cloutless, it is easy to do as I did, write a letter and state my case, and then take comfort in the quiet that greets it, knowing that nothing will happen. The complaint is an end in itself, something the Democrats know well. It shows my weakness and not my strength. Now, I get around this in writing books and articles and emails and blog commentaries, which are sometimes written in anger, sometimes in sarcasm, sometimes in cynical detachment, and sometimes even in scholarship.
Should you feel my cloutlessness, take comfort in the case of Clarence Earl Gideon. He proves the cloutless can also have their day.
GIDEON’S TRUMPET
Gideon was a drifter who was charged in a Florida State court with breaking into a poolroom. Gideon was indigent, and asked the trial court to appoint an attorney to assist him in his defense. At the time, only an indigent person facing the death penalty in Florida would qualify to have an appointed attorney to his case.
Gideon’s request was denied. He represented himself and was found guilty, and sentenced to five years in prison. While in prison, he sent a handwritten petition to the United States Supreme Court seeking a review of his conviction. The bulky package was almost discarded, as it did not appear as a legal document or petition.
The Supreme Court read Gideon’s petition and agreed to review the case. Since Gideon was penniless, the Supreme Court agreed to appoint a lawyer to represent him. It appointed Abe Fortas as his attorney.
Justice Douglas described Fortas’ oral argument in the Gideon case as the best he heard in his 36 years on the Supreme Court bench.
The Gideon vs Wainwright 1963 Supreme Court decision affirmed that every person charged with a serious criminal offense is constitutionally entitled under the fourteenth amendment to the assistance of a lawyer, and if he is poor, that it is the duty of the state to hire and furnish him with defense counsel to represent him in court.
Here is a case of a cloutless person with little education and no money changing the law of the land. Now, persons charged with capital crimes automatically are furnished pro bono representation. Moreover, subsequent court rulings in the Supreme Court have expanded the rights of the indigent.
Anthony Lewis wrote a wonderful book about this titled “GIDEON’S TRUMPET” (1964) in which he writes, “In the morning mail of January 8, 1962, the Supreme Court of the United States received a large envelope from Clarence Earl Gideon . . .” The rest is history.
So, cloutless, take heart, there is always a chance to make history.
Be always well,
Jim
&
THE DANCE OF THE CLOUT AND CLOUTLESS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2006
Several of you have emailed me and asked if I received a reply from The Des Moines Register to my open letter. It is now past two weeks and the answers is “no.” Nor did I expect to hear from this newspaper.
What generated this open letter was the review of Des Moines native Robert Bryon’s new book on growing up in the 1950s in Des Moines.
I was somewhat incensed because the newspaper didn’t give me as much as a mention for my book growing up in Clinton, Iowa during the Second World War titled In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (AuthorHouse 2003).
Incidentally, I copied all the newspapers mentioned in the piece. Nothing from them as well. You readers know that whenever I use your name in an email you will be copied. That behavior is a product of my upbringing as my da said to me, “Jimmy, if you can’t say what is on your mind to a person’s face best that you keep it to yourself.”
He also said, “The best way to look at life is as if whomever you’re talking about is standing right behind your shoulder.”
It was those two messages that have proven both reassuring and somewhat disparaging. I have found people would rather not know what you think about them than know for certain where you stand. When I was in graduate school as a mature student, 38, after I retired the first time, it was the 1970s and someone came up with the theory that students should evaluate professors as professors evaluated students.
It was that old great deception of the clout and cloutless in happy union.
I had a four-point in my graduate course work, but evaluated one professor rather harshly, and none of them even close to four-point territory with the exception of one. He was all about business and could care less what I thought of him.
Having been a corporate executive, I had little stomach for professors who didn’t do their homework and treated students as their personal friends at the expense of focusing on the subject matter. I wasn’t in school for a holiday. Obviously, these professors wanted to appear student-centered with positive student evaluations as if they were campaigning for office, something of which I was familiar with in the corporation.
In any event, my seminar professor said to me one day, “You write so well I’m going to give a pass on having you write a paper, let’s go to lunch and discuss the subject.” We went to lunch, the subject never came up, and I got an “A” in the course. In the essay portion of the student evaluation, I mentioned this, and then went to the professor, and told him so.
The rest of the story is that the professor was on my committee, which nearly resulted in failing my orals. You need a passing grade on them as well as your written work. It was hell, but I created the hell for myself, and knew it. Were it not for another professor who programmed me to respond to the questions asked in my orals mechanically and succinctly, I doubt if I would have made it. More than one-third of ABD’s (all but dissertations) complete the course work required but never receive the degree because they cannot write. My problem is I cannot keep my mouth shut.
THE DANCE OF CLOUT AND CLOUTLESS
With that in mind, I am not surprised I haven’t heard from The Des Moines Register or any of the other newspapers mentioned in my open letter.
You see the world is divided into those with clout and the cloutless. That’s the world we live in. It is not a Democratic and Republican world, not a liberal and conservative world, not a good and evil world, not a wise and ignorant world, nor indeed, not a competent and incompetent world. It is a world of clout, alone.
Those that have clout, or want it, or are intimidated by it behave in one manner and those that do not have it behave in another manner. It follows that the somebodys with clout are clueless about the cloutless because they are only concerned with those that can hurt them, which they take to be those with clout.
I am dictating this on my peripatetic walk the day after the massacre of the Republican Party by the Democratic Party, which has risen up at this mid-term election to take over the majority in Congress of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
What is the first item on the agenda of our Republican president’s news conference? It is the ditching of his Secretary of Defense, something he swore he wouldn’t do only last week. Secretary Rumsfeld has been made cloutless by the clout of the Democratic Party’s success.
It is the nature of our society, but it is not only the nature of our society but also the nature of civilization.
There are those with clout and those without clout. I happen to be cloutless. I’ve been cloutless ever since I left the corporation. In the corporation, in my day, position power, alone, determined whether you had clout or not. It had nothing to do with competence or incompetence. People did what you told them to do because you had clout even if it meant walking off the cliff to their doom. Nor did clout have anything to do with leadership. Quite the contrary.
If you think this is an exaggeration, try convincing me cloutless people in Enron didn’t feel someone was amiss.
I made my living as an organization-industrial psychologist talking to these people to find out what was going on. I never learned it from the brass. Never. But the cloutless knew but did nothing for the simple reason they saw themselves as cloutless.
One of the great deceptions I encountered was the cloutless projecting their competence into those with clout who were incompetent.
You could be incompetent and beyond your depth, but people without clout would listen to you because of your clout. They would rationalize your leadership as wise when it clearly wasn’t, knowing in their bones this to be the case. Why?
It is easier for the cloutless to remain silent and submissive and compliant than to state their case or concerns, or, indeed, show their anger.
The problem with this is when the cloutless refuse to be upfront about how they feel, this is inevitable:
· Compliance will be doubtlessly established. Compliance is always the effect of veiled coercion. This is so because suspicions have not been satisfied, anger neither dealt with nor dissipated, and so decorum and politeness is but a charade. Compliance is a reaction to clout demonstrating the nature of cloutlessness.
This is not unlike the relationship of the master and the slave, which are only the extremes of clout and cloutlessness.
Once you are programmed into cloutlessness you react as I am reacting here to my sense of the fact. It will be interesting to see how the Democrats react to their new situation of having the clout after and absence of more than a decade.
When you are cloutless, it is easy to do as I did, write a letter and state my case, and then take comfort in the quiet that greets it, knowing that nothing will happen. The complaint is an end in itself, something the Democrats know well. It shows my weakness and not my strength. Now, I get around this in writing books and articles and emails and blog commentaries, which are sometimes written in anger, sometimes in sarcasm, sometimes in cynical detachment, and sometimes even in scholarship.
Should you feel my cloutlessness, take comfort in the case of Clarence Earl Gideon. He proves the cloutless can also have their day.
GIDEON’S TRUMPET
Gideon was a drifter who was charged in a Florida State court with breaking into a poolroom. Gideon was indigent, and asked the trial court to appoint an attorney to assist him in his defense. At the time, only an indigent person facing the death penalty in Florida would qualify to have an appointed attorney to his case.
Gideon’s request was denied. He represented himself and was found guilty, and sentenced to five years in prison. While in prison, he sent a handwritten petition to the United States Supreme Court seeking a review of his conviction. The bulky package was almost discarded, as it did not appear as a legal document or petition.
The Supreme Court read Gideon’s petition and agreed to review the case. Since Gideon was penniless, the Supreme Court agreed to appoint a lawyer to represent him. It appointed Abe Fortas as his attorney.
Justice Douglas described Fortas’ oral argument in the Gideon case as the best he heard in his 36 years on the Supreme Court bench.
The Gideon vs Wainwright 1963 Supreme Court decision affirmed that every person charged with a serious criminal offense is constitutionally entitled under the fourteenth amendment to the assistance of a lawyer, and if he is poor, that it is the duty of the state to hire and furnish him with defense counsel to represent him in court.
Here is a case of a cloutless person with little education and no money changing the law of the land. Now, persons charged with capital crimes automatically are furnished pro bono representation. Moreover, subsequent court rulings in the Supreme Court have expanded the rights of the indigent.
Anthony Lewis wrote a wonderful book about this titled “GIDEON’S TRUMPET” (1964) in which he writes, “In the morning mail of January 8, 1962, the Supreme Court of the United States received a large envelope from Clarence Earl Gideon . . .” The rest is history.
So, cloutless, take heart, there is always a chance to make history.
Be always well,
Jim
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE DES MOINES REGISTER
October 25, 2006
OPEN LETTER TO THE DES MOINES REGISTER
Reference: Iowa authors
Cross Reference: Book Review & Profile - Robert Bryson - Book, "Thunderbolt Kid"
Iowa Life Section: Des Moines Sunday Register, October 15, 2006
A businessman from Clinton, Iowa sent me a copy of your review of Mr. Bryson new book. I'm happy for Mr. Bryson, who is an established writer and humorous, who writes about the 1950s growing up in Iowa, while I write about the 1940s growing up in the same state. Historians now say that the 1940s were a major transitional period in our culture, which speeded up during the 1950s and beyond.
As an Iowan, I graduated from the University of Iowa, Phi Beta Kappa, won three major letters in sports there, had an executive career with Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, and have had over 300 published articles from learned journals to popular magazines and newspapers such as Reader's Digest, The Wall Street Journal and Industry Week, and seven books in my discipline of organization/industry psychology, yet when I published my first novel, In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written As A Novel (authorHouse 2003), with real names of real people in real circumstances, and real situations, it was as if I were one hand clapping in the forest.
It so happened that my preteen years from eight to twelve years-of-age paralleled the war years of World War II. I grew up in the industrial river town of Clinton, Iowa that sits on the snout of Iowa where the Mississippi River makes a violent bend. It was that narrow passage that proved providential in the early twentieth century. Clinton became the "sawdust capital" of the world, for it wasn't economical to float logs from Wisconsin and Minnesota beyond it.
Clinton went from boom to bust in just a few short years, but reinvented itself during the Great Depression to be a fully industrialized community as the United States entered WWII, and became a major contributor to that war effort.
My book was meant to be a snapshot of that time, place, and circumstance through the impressionistic eyes of a pre-teenager "who was coming of age "in the shadow of the courthouse" (our playground) while his nation struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb." The book, then, was the story of that boy coming of age in this violent world, a world that now consumes us.
I sent a book to your newspaper, and didn't receive as much as a courtesy form letter in reply stating that "we don't review self-published books."
AuthorHouse published the novel. I am not a novice writer but a novice novelist, to be sure. The book has still managed to find a small audience with several posting their comments on Amazon.com. But other than that, it has not had any national exposure.
It is sad when it is so hard for a native Iowan to generate any kind of response from the media of his state. Your newspaper is not the only one that has ignored me. I sent books also to the Daily Iowan, the newspaper of my university, and to several other newspapers across the state without as so much as an acknowledgement. I also sent books to The Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and Washington Post with the same non-reply. I even sent a copy to John Kerry when he was at the Iowa Caucus, and was talking so positively about Iowa. The irony is that his running mate, John Edwards, is coming out with a book in which a piece from mine is to be included.
A friend of mind contacted the Davenport daily, and the book reviewer there said the newspaper didn't review self-published books. Then she added, "If we start publishing reviews of those books, my lord, there'll be a deluge." It was as if we self-published authors were a pariah. It seems to me with over 100,000 books published by mainline publishers, and only a handful of those books being reviewed this logic leaves something to be desired.
There were exceptions. My hometown newspaper, The Clinton Herald, did everything possible to make my book a success. They gave it front page and editorial coverage; published letters-to-the-editor endorsing the book, and even sent reporters to cover me when I was speaking on various subjects. In addition, the local radio station KROS gave me interviews, and spot announcements when I was speaking or available for book signings. And finally, National Public Radio's Rock Island, Illinois affiliate interviewed me, and made spot announcements when I was in the Davenport area.
If I sound angry, I'm not; disappointed, yes. I have learned that I am in a media age and without the wherewithal or the inclination to self-promote I am relegated to the also ran. Even Oprah, who claims to have such an egalitarian spirit, never answers my mail, nor, indeed, intercessors to her in my behalf. Again, I know there are limits of time, as well as tastes, and this is a discretionary problem. I don't expect to be treated differently. But earlier, some forty years ago, when I first started to write, I could expect at least a form letter reply.
Now, I am a man in my seventies and still writing, but realize that the hourglass sands are quickly spilling through. So, I write this letter not expecting a reply but for the satisfaction of getting it off my chest.
If I may, I do want to mention something about the book and why I am glad I wrote it. Early in the twentieth century, a young Irish priest by the name of Father James Murray came to Clinton. He built a school, church, and rectory. It was St. Patrick's School in the shadow of the courthouse, which I attended.
Father Murray then built a convent to house the nuns to teach the children. Then he built a college to educate the nuns, and a boarding school for the students. He wasn't done. He built a hospital, and a retirement home.
The Davenport Diocese razed these landmarks a few years ago. Now, the school, church and rectory exist only on the cover of my book and in the memory of that young boy, and all those who populate his story. The college of the Sisters of St. Francis is now a secular university, only the hospital and retirement home still stand.
I have had a long and productive life working in South America, across the United States and Europe and in South Africa. Always, I took with me the lessons learned at St. Patrick's that Father Murray had the foresight to build. I have several college degrees, and yet when I look back to the greatest influence of my life, it was those eight years spent in that small school.
I tried to bring this to life in my clumsy way in my book, not in celebration of religion, but to capture something of the essence of the influence of good discipline and instruction from people who cared. Since I am trained as an organization psychologist, I'm sure I've leavened my memory with the imprint of that training and perspective. My purpose was to establish a connection with a time, a place, and a circumstance that is now history, and I fear largely forgotten.
And so I end my rambling with this comment: giants do not make society but giants are made by society. In between, are all the little people like myself, amateurs, who will not and cannot and need not play to a discipline or profession or a particular audience when they are trying simply to produce a three-dimensional picture of the reality that memory can recall.
Be always well,
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
6714 Jennifer Drive
Temple Terrace, FL 33617-2504
(813) 989 - 3631
Email: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com
Website: www.fisherofideas.com
OPEN LETTER TO THE DES MOINES REGISTER
Reference: Iowa authors
Cross Reference: Book Review & Profile - Robert Bryson - Book, "Thunderbolt Kid"
Iowa Life Section: Des Moines Sunday Register, October 15, 2006
A businessman from Clinton, Iowa sent me a copy of your review of Mr. Bryson new book. I'm happy for Mr. Bryson, who is an established writer and humorous, who writes about the 1950s growing up in Iowa, while I write about the 1940s growing up in the same state. Historians now say that the 1940s were a major transitional period in our culture, which speeded up during the 1950s and beyond.
As an Iowan, I graduated from the University of Iowa, Phi Beta Kappa, won three major letters in sports there, had an executive career with Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, and have had over 300 published articles from learned journals to popular magazines and newspapers such as Reader's Digest, The Wall Street Journal and Industry Week, and seven books in my discipline of organization/industry psychology, yet when I published my first novel, In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written As A Novel (authorHouse 2003), with real names of real people in real circumstances, and real situations, it was as if I were one hand clapping in the forest.
It so happened that my preteen years from eight to twelve years-of-age paralleled the war years of World War II. I grew up in the industrial river town of Clinton, Iowa that sits on the snout of Iowa where the Mississippi River makes a violent bend. It was that narrow passage that proved providential in the early twentieth century. Clinton became the "sawdust capital" of the world, for it wasn't economical to float logs from Wisconsin and Minnesota beyond it.
Clinton went from boom to bust in just a few short years, but reinvented itself during the Great Depression to be a fully industrialized community as the United States entered WWII, and became a major contributor to that war effort.
My book was meant to be a snapshot of that time, place, and circumstance through the impressionistic eyes of a pre-teenager "who was coming of age "in the shadow of the courthouse" (our playground) while his nation struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb." The book, then, was the story of that boy coming of age in this violent world, a world that now consumes us.
I sent a book to your newspaper, and didn't receive as much as a courtesy form letter in reply stating that "we don't review self-published books."
AuthorHouse published the novel. I am not a novice writer but a novice novelist, to be sure. The book has still managed to find a small audience with several posting their comments on Amazon.com. But other than that, it has not had any national exposure.
It is sad when it is so hard for a native Iowan to generate any kind of response from the media of his state. Your newspaper is not the only one that has ignored me. I sent books also to the Daily Iowan, the newspaper of my university, and to several other newspapers across the state without as so much as an acknowledgement. I also sent books to The Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and Washington Post with the same non-reply. I even sent a copy to John Kerry when he was at the Iowa Caucus, and was talking so positively about Iowa. The irony is that his running mate, John Edwards, is coming out with a book in which a piece from mine is to be included.
A friend of mind contacted the Davenport daily, and the book reviewer there said the newspaper didn't review self-published books. Then she added, "If we start publishing reviews of those books, my lord, there'll be a deluge." It was as if we self-published authors were a pariah. It seems to me with over 100,000 books published by mainline publishers, and only a handful of those books being reviewed this logic leaves something to be desired.
There were exceptions. My hometown newspaper, The Clinton Herald, did everything possible to make my book a success. They gave it front page and editorial coverage; published letters-to-the-editor endorsing the book, and even sent reporters to cover me when I was speaking on various subjects. In addition, the local radio station KROS gave me interviews, and spot announcements when I was speaking or available for book signings. And finally, National Public Radio's Rock Island, Illinois affiliate interviewed me, and made spot announcements when I was in the Davenport area.
If I sound angry, I'm not; disappointed, yes. I have learned that I am in a media age and without the wherewithal or the inclination to self-promote I am relegated to the also ran. Even Oprah, who claims to have such an egalitarian spirit, never answers my mail, nor, indeed, intercessors to her in my behalf. Again, I know there are limits of time, as well as tastes, and this is a discretionary problem. I don't expect to be treated differently. But earlier, some forty years ago, when I first started to write, I could expect at least a form letter reply.
Now, I am a man in my seventies and still writing, but realize that the hourglass sands are quickly spilling through. So, I write this letter not expecting a reply but for the satisfaction of getting it off my chest.
If I may, I do want to mention something about the book and why I am glad I wrote it. Early in the twentieth century, a young Irish priest by the name of Father James Murray came to Clinton. He built a school, church, and rectory. It was St. Patrick's School in the shadow of the courthouse, which I attended.
Father Murray then built a convent to house the nuns to teach the children. Then he built a college to educate the nuns, and a boarding school for the students. He wasn't done. He built a hospital, and a retirement home.
The Davenport Diocese razed these landmarks a few years ago. Now, the school, church and rectory exist only on the cover of my book and in the memory of that young boy, and all those who populate his story. The college of the Sisters of St. Francis is now a secular university, only the hospital and retirement home still stand.
I have had a long and productive life working in South America, across the United States and Europe and in South Africa. Always, I took with me the lessons learned at St. Patrick's that Father Murray had the foresight to build. I have several college degrees, and yet when I look back to the greatest influence of my life, it was those eight years spent in that small school.
I tried to bring this to life in my clumsy way in my book, not in celebration of religion, but to capture something of the essence of the influence of good discipline and instruction from people who cared. Since I am trained as an organization psychologist, I'm sure I've leavened my memory with the imprint of that training and perspective. My purpose was to establish a connection with a time, a place, and a circumstance that is now history, and I fear largely forgotten.
And so I end my rambling with this comment: giants do not make society but giants are made by society. In between, are all the little people like myself, amateurs, who will not and cannot and need not play to a discipline or profession or a particular audience when they are trying simply to produce a three-dimensional picture of the reality that memory can recall.
Be always well,
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
6714 Jennifer Drive
Temple Terrace, FL 33617-2504
(813) 989 - 3631
Email: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com
Website: www.fisherofideas.com
Monday, November 06, 2006
WHAT MAKES THEM RIGHT?
WHAT MAKES THEM RIGHT?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2006
I am in the process of writing a book on CONFIDENT THINKING, when a constant reader of my stuff asks, “What makes you think these guys are right?”
Since he had not read my book, I wasn’t certain of the origin of his remark. What do you mean, right? And whom are you talking about? I asked.
“Well, you’re always making such a case we’re the voice of our own authority, and then you spiel off these authority figures who have influenced you in your writing, so I want to know what makes you think they’re right?”
I am not a glib guy who can talk in sound bites so I dodged the question suggesting he take another look at what I’ve said.
On my walk today, however, I pondered his question: what makes them right?
I think the basic reason is because my teachers told me they were right; that if their words were between printed pages they must have something to say that I should pay attention to, and I did, religiously so.
I assumed, on that basis, that my teachers were wise and so I accepted the wisdom of these teachers. I would imagine it set a pattern in my hard wiring.
When I got older, and read liberally about these people that my teachers presented to me, I discovered I had a selective memory. What I remembered as true was chiseled into conforming shape, taunted by my reason, pulled together by my appetites, haunted by my fears, and beckoned into acceptance by my promise. Self-forgetting was as important a part of my programming as self-remembering.
I would remember those that appealed to my particular experience, mindset and fancy as they resonated with me, and would conveniently forget about those that did not. The others were buried in my unconscious, or were they? I say that because a writer goes to his own graveyard to find where his secrets are interred.
That is perhaps the key to our vulnerability: what we are programmed to believe and think we know is not necessarily how things are but how we choose to see them.
Digging deeper, I found my questioner had a legitimate concern. What makes them right? Or are they? Or are they attempting to make their problems our problems; their ghosts our ghosts; their longing for the eternal tomorrow ours as well; indeed, their God our God.
THIS BUSINESS OF TRUTH
I concluded that the reason I thought they were right is because they thought they were right, and since I felt comfortable thinking as they did, I was sure they were right with no more proof than my own credulity.
I failed to understand that truth sometimes changes as fast as the weather, being sublime today and trivial tomorrow, or that their truth may not be my truth or my truth, theirs. That truth may be limited by my ability and willingness to see what I can and will see against what others can and will see. And then there is the whole matter of my cultural lens versus their cultural lens.
There is “their truth” and there is “my truth,” and since I only know them through their writing and not working with them, or conversing directly with them, as many of them, perhaps most of them are now deceased, I must weigh their merits in the sublime light of my own experience. It is not at all simple to understand the simple truth of a thing because the weakness of my soul protects me from simple truth. I bury it in my complexity and think it is safely beyond excavation.
It is well for us to remember this when gauging the merits of truth as expressed by others. Obviously, they are believers of the truth as they know it, and doubtless there is a point to believe as they believe because they are persuasive.
Do they lie to me? Do they lie to themselves? I don’t know. But if they do lie to me, they lie loudest to themselves. And the bigger the lie everyone believes it the more.
Do they make connection with me? And if so, why?
Again, it is a matter of them first making connection with themselves, otherwise it is impossible to make connection with me. Stated another way, for them to be genuine, they first must see themselves as being authentic to themselves.
What does being authentic mean?
They must speak to my soul by revealing their own. Otherwise, it is just the cacophony of words juxtaposed to each other in meaningless babble. Be weary of those who would have you renounce your idols, whatever they may be, because their fervor suggests the assertion rather than the denial of theirs.
Idols are idols no matter what name we give them. The iconoclast is often more idolatrous than the idol worshiper.
This is apparent when those that preach from the high and mighty moral ground are found to have feet of clay. How could it be otherwise? Why should we expect them to escape life’s most basic appetites while they seem obsessed with them? The irony is that they demonize sins of the flesh and fall into profligacy, while having us believe they have escaped such sins. No matter what the “sin” is the more you think about it the more it owns you.
It is a weakness of the mind to take up their cause as they attempt to persuade us that they suffer “for” something when they suffer only “from” something. They are running away and they want us to join them in their flight. They want to convince us that they see the light when they only feel the heat. They want us to believe they are special, indeed, chosen as our emissaries, when they fear being ignored. The more they are obsessed with human ugliness the more they are possessed by it.
The escape is to recognize we have a capacity for evil as well as good, and evil is not somebody else’s problem that we can slough off in sanctimonious rhetoric, but we must deal with it ourselves, and quietly alone.
Are the truth tellers driven by fear and guilt?
There is always that possibility as the guilty are wont to be afraid, and they who are afraid often feel guilty. The question that always must be asked is this:
· Are they making their fear our guilt or their pride our fear?
There is fear and intolerance in pride. It is uncompromising. The less self-confident we are the more imperative is the need for pride.
The core of pride is self-rejection. Yet, the self is all we have. To renounce it is to reject the real; to unburden us from life and its troubles. It is no accident that the core of salvation hawkers is pride and it is generated by self-hatred.
We are imperfect but perfectible, and don’t reach perfection by denying our reality, our sensuality, our passion, our longing for connection, are desire to be useful, are need to be accepted, and the pursuit of love in the business of working and living.
It is a sickness of a time when there is an eagerness to unite as true believers in a cause against the self, when the self is the only thing that is ours; to identify ourselves with a mythical or ideal self that is espoused by a leader, a holy cause, a race, religion, a party, a nation, a truth, proclaiming in our loss of identity a new found uniqueness beyond our experience; something worth dying for but not necessarily worth living with.
The proud so often are ready to die for freedom but not willing to live within constraints. We have seen the results of unlimited individual freedom in decades of chaos, confusion, debauchery, licentiousness, brutality, bestiality, and a desolate sameness across the population. Such living has produced the sexual revolution and free love only to make the normal weird and the weird normal, and for the disease of self-hate to spread to a societal epidemic in drug addiction, AIDS, and other societal dysfunctions.
When a society commands discipline, controls its appetites, and is strict but not draconian, creativity and originality thrive. We are not in such a climate.
In a climate of unlimited freedom, imitation runs amuck with a sameness and uniformity that is not unlike tyranny. Rebels once flaunted tattoos now everyone does. This is but a symptom of a society devoid of spontaneity retreating into inanimate inventions in a mechanistic retreat from the self. These inanimate tools have become toys of distraction to burned-out mediocre individuals who imitate the hard wiring of the inventors.
We can see through the veiled intentions of society only when we are able to see through our own. This is difficult because we are programmed to be self-ignorant; to yield to extremism because we doubt being capable of growing without their blessings.
Who are these extremists?
They are the sophists, priests, gurus, demagogues, evangelists and theocons who would have us be guided by their ghosts or gods instead of by our own empirical experience.
Both Faith and intimidation are instruments to compromise self-respect. Intimidation crushes the autonomy of self-respect, while Faith obtains this advantage without a struggle. Its persuasive tools are our vulnerable appetites, hidden fears and prideful vanities.
THE SOURCE OF BELIEF
One of the interesting things about education, about enlightenment, about everything that we believe is true is that somebody at some time or other wrote it down.
Subsequently, somebody or several somebodys thought they got it right. That is true of the Old Testament and the New Testament of the Bible, the Jewish Talmud, the Koran, the Tao, the Upanishads, and all the other religious writings. Religion is a cry for light in the darkness, or to put it another way, a cry for knowing beyond what can be known. It is safe territory for the charlatan and extremists of similar cloth.
Something they said, or something they implied but didn’t necessarily say, or something that somebody they had seen and we have designated as wise, and they wrote down what they remembered of that occasion as they remember what that person had said was true, and so we have come to accept it as so.
We are told the wisdom of humility and the renunciation of pride, but what is humility but the substitution of one pride for another?
Religion treats the self as full of sin, but what is sin but the self trying to find its way in the darkness, not shrinking from the darkness as religion would have the self do, but finding out for itself as any animal finds out by living.
If there be sin, it is not sin as described by religion but the sin of pride, of taking ourselves too seriously, and assuming too many responsibilities that leave little time for living, and living is what life is all about, not the postponing of it for another place called “heaven.” The earth can be either a heaven or a hell depending on the choices we make, but it is all we know for sure, and that certainty is suspect even then.
Life is a comedy and often a tragic comedy but that is only because it lacks humor.
Without a sense of humor, there cannot be a sense of proportion, without a sense of proportion, there cannot be a sense of balance, without a sense of balance there can be neither good sense nor genuine intelligence, nor, indeed, moral integrity. The humor is in the self looking at itself in the mirror with a knowing smile and not disgust.
And who is most likely to do that? The nonconformist.
That is why the most stable person in society is always the nonconformist. He doesn’t get caught up in the trite, trials and tribulations of his time, nor does he become an automatic push-button to consumer demands.
The nonconformist is his own agent knowing that the greatest liberty is not unbridled freedom, but freedom in which the individual demonstrates self-restrain, knows when to withdraw or retreat, and when to abstain from the madness of his time. He is of a common type throughout the centuries. Now, the nonconformist must survive push-button theocratic technology by not deifying it. It is a technology that has no feel for people as persons, or the means by which they grow and develop, and therefore spawns unintended consequences.
We can turn our conditioning on its head by engaging only in competition with ourselves and not with others. In that manner, we are able to see progress and regression, derive satisfaction and come to appreciate the leavening effect of disappointment in the scheme of things. It leaves us unimpaired by our faults and false steps, while bringing us to accept others as we find them. Embracing his resistance is the nonconformist credo.
On the other hand, to be preoccupied with other people and what they are or aren’t doing is to represent a total retreat from the self. The basic attempt to compare and compete with others represents a breathless race to get ahead by running away from ourselves.
Why do we run?
Our God has changed. Once the God we believed in was far off in Heaven, never to be seen, only to be felt, intangible. It was the God we had much faith in because we believed in the unknown and the unknown was the ever-retreating future beyond our vision. The ancient Jews had faith in such an invisible God, and were possessed of a vivid faith in the future. I was blessed with that faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition of Irish Roman Catholicism. There was no need of proof, no need of tangible evidence, no need to question the future. I was at home in the present because I had faith in the future.
Then the postmodern world rolled in on the wings of science that has been gaining momentum for 500 years. Like the primitives of thousands of years ago, somehow a more tangible palpable God was demanded by science. The future was now and thus a lack of faith in the future of the intangible God.
Science had a noble cause, to push back ignorance and explore our internal and external universe systematically and objectively. It shouldn’t have overwhelmed us, but it has, leaving us hopeless and empty, and paradoxically, creating a reemerging need for the worship of idols. Only a tangible God or gods will now suffice.
Where does that leave us in this godless or god changing age?
The word is vulnerable. There is mania, a fanaticism to predict everything because we have no faith in anything. We crave security, a rigid routine, and predictable indices as a defense against the future.
We cannot even trust ourselves with elections. There must be hundreds or even thousands of polls to tell us how we think so when we vote we can have the reassurance of voting rightly.
We live in an era without patience; without a temperament for delayed gratification. Everything must be now. We want a definitive answer when American troops are to leave Afghanistan and Iraq even if no such answer is possible. We want to find out how events are going to turn out before they occur. We all have Tarot card minds.
We don’t want to think. We want to be told how to think. Religion once provided this sanctuary. Science is fumbling because it is outside its retinue.
Traditional religion is anachronistic, discredited, but that has not changed the religious impulse. We are still concerned about our immortal souls. Science may try to isolate the soul, calculate its DNA, but we all know the 64 grams are real, and that when we die, this weight leaves our temporary home of the body to find its home in the future.
Now, no church is home as it once was during this rental period of life. Now, the only home is the self who must find some way to save its soul. The weight of this is so great that we blind our minds by retreating into the religion of work, business, politics, literature, art, sex, celebrity, sport, or acquisition. We make progress our beatific vision as if it has permanence.
IN A SIMPLER TIME
I was reared Irish Roman Catholic. From my earliest days, I was told in the words of the Baltimore Catechism, which were truth incarnate to my impressionistic mind, that the Roman Catholic Church was the only true church established by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and no other church shall stand before her.
When I’m five-years-old, I heard this. I’m six-years-old, I hear it again. I’m seven-years-old, and I hear it once more, making my First Holy Communion, dressed in white, with white shirt and tie, white pants, and white shoes with a little black prayer book with a picture in it of Jesus Christ who is blond, blue-eyed, fine boned, and handsome. Since I have similar looks, family and friends celebrate me as purity personified, and I believe it. Pretense is an indispensable step in the attainment of genuineness. It is a form into which genuine inclinations flow and solidify, and I would come to carry such baggage.
This experience was idyllic except for my First Confession, which was not holy, and not reassuring but quite the contrary. Reality contaminated the self of my assumed holiness.
Then, when I’m twelve-years-old, I hear it again as I am confirmed as a “Solider of Jesus Christ” in the Roman Catholic Church.
So, I have had succession of reinforcements of an idea, which I have accepted as true without qualification. Since I accepted it as true, I practice it as the truth. I don’t question it. I don’t question the pope when he says he is infallible in his encyclicals relating to doctrines of faith or morals. His word is the word of the church and the word of the church is by extension the word of our savior, Jesus Christ. It is so simple, so easy and comforting to believe.
The church says that Blessed Virgin Mary was born without Original Sin (Immaculate Conception) on her soul, and I believe; the church says that Jesus was born of a Virgin Mary, and I believe. The church says I cannot eat meat on Friday without sinning, so I don’t eat meat on Friday. The church says I must fast before receiving Holy Communion, so I fast from food or drink the night and morning before I receive this Sacrament. I must go to confession before I go to Holy Communion in order not to have mortal sin on my soul, and so I do.
The church is very ambiguous and vague as to what mortal sin is, but the safe thing is to consider almost everything a sin, so going to confession and confessing all these remembered sins is the safe thing to do, otherwise going to communion with mortal sin on your soul means you will roast forever in eternal hell. And I believe this to be true.
It is a mortal sin to miss mass on Sunday; it is a moral sin to lie; there are more egregious sins but lying is a sin a seven-year-old can understand, also swearing or taking the Lord’s name in vain, or even saying some words you hear your parents say such as damn or hell or shit or goddamn.
My hard wiring has always had a question mark when it came to sin. When I made my First Confession, and the priest thought I wasn’t cooperating, he told me I had made a “bad confession,” as he gave me my absolution and penance. I was to say the rosary, the complete Sorrowful Mysteries, when most kids got three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys and were done with it.
I was so ashamed and mortified that I never told anyone about this, not even my mother. I thought she would think that I was damned for sure.
I’ve been trapped in my Catholicism now in my seventh decade having had made a bad confession in my first. Somehow that small question mark that was so tiny when I was a boy has grown taller than the Empire State Building, yet quite remarkably, I am a Roman Catholic writer who has made little progress beyond that seven-year-old boy with my catechistic mind.
My Catholicism is no longer expressed as a believer as it has gone beyond belief to touch the bedrock of my soul. And that is to make connection with myself. I have not found answers but I understand the questions more clearly.
What do I mean by that?
I am no longer afraid to think, to express my mind clearly and directly, and to state emphatically such things, as that life has no purpose other than to be lived to the fullest. That doesn’t mean cheaply but wisely.
Purpose and worth, I have discovered, are illusions that subjugate the will to a set of duties that pile duty on duty until there is an unalloyed submission to someone’s nebulous idea of performance.
Working becomes an end all, leaving no time to live, but only to exist on someone else’s arbitrary schedule. We see this in the perennial student; in the pyramid-climbing executive; in the workaholic, in the social and political climbing celebrity, in the public seeking philanthropist, and all others whose god is some type of performance.
Performance has become the most fashionable exit ramp to self-knowing and the quickest on ramp to self-delusion. It is the social disease of our time, which has become treated as an expression of normalcy.
THE ANTITOXIN TO THE SOUL
The best way to guard against doing harm to others is to introduce them to themselves. It is an antitoxin of the soul. Where there is self-knowing even the most poisonous impulses can be held in check. It would be better to see the world run by men who set their hearts on toys but do not try to kid themselves about it, than by men animated with lofty ideals whose dedication makes them ruthless taskmasters.
Make no mistake, noble attributes such as courage, honor, duty, loyalty and faith can be transmuted into ruthlessness, as many reading this can attest. Self-knowing combined with self-acceptance stands apart from such evil as such a self cannot lie to itself without being conflicting.
That means that what we consider self-evident truths may not be in the eyes of others:
“Everyone in the world wants to live in the United States.”
That is not true. If people had jobs, if people could support their families where they live, in the culture of their birth, in the climate of their heritage, in the comfort of their own home, there would be little interest to move to the United States. If we are honest with ourselves, we can see this is consistent with the way we feel about being Americans.
“America is the greatest idea that has ever been created.”
No question the democratic republic of the United States is one of the greatest political experiments in man’s history. Equally true, it has been severely tested in its 230-years. Should the reader examine that idea, he would find it has had its episodes of tyranny. The presidency of Andrew Jackson was somewhat tyrannical, as were that of Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War, and more recently that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in World War Two.
Americans were stripped of many of their freedoms in those periods “for their own good.” We are in an equally challenging time with the presidency of George Bush and the “war on terror.” It is an idea that is now in a precarious state. So, it is dangerous to take comfort in patriotism by slamming the door on those that don’t buy into the political rhetoric of the neocons and theocons of the time.
Ask Japanese Americans who were sent off to internment camps during the Second World War about democratic freedoms. They were stripped not only of these freedoms, but also of all their wealth and possessions by FDR who operated very much as a dictator towards them in that Great War. Paranoia has always been a problem of the American soul especially in times of crises. The Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941, and therefore all Japanese; even Japanese Americans who had been in the United States for generations were suspect.
When it comes to “what makes them right,” it would be well to be a “doubting Thomas.” Isn’t it interesting that the Gospel of St. Thomas has never been included in either the Catholic Vulgate or the King James Bible, yet it exists, and was written in the same period as the other Four Gospels.
Was I a doubting Thomas with that First Confession? I don’t know, but it seemed to have marked me for being a bit of a rascal, always wondering and asking why.
What makes them right?
We do!
We do it by omission or commission, by acquiescence or acclamation, by retreating into our fears or ignoring our instincts.
The wisdom of others is only valid if it touches our souls. We are in the world but apart from it. If the wisdom of others is not compatible with our blood, then we must have the courage to reject it. The soul recognizes rightness if we would but listen to it. Know that the lowest to the most exalted struggle with this same reality and no one, absolutely no one has special purchase of it.
* * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2006
I am in the process of writing a book on CONFIDENT THINKING, when a constant reader of my stuff asks, “What makes you think these guys are right?”
Since he had not read my book, I wasn’t certain of the origin of his remark. What do you mean, right? And whom are you talking about? I asked.
“Well, you’re always making such a case we’re the voice of our own authority, and then you spiel off these authority figures who have influenced you in your writing, so I want to know what makes you think they’re right?”
I am not a glib guy who can talk in sound bites so I dodged the question suggesting he take another look at what I’ve said.
On my walk today, however, I pondered his question: what makes them right?
I think the basic reason is because my teachers told me they were right; that if their words were between printed pages they must have something to say that I should pay attention to, and I did, religiously so.
I assumed, on that basis, that my teachers were wise and so I accepted the wisdom of these teachers. I would imagine it set a pattern in my hard wiring.
When I got older, and read liberally about these people that my teachers presented to me, I discovered I had a selective memory. What I remembered as true was chiseled into conforming shape, taunted by my reason, pulled together by my appetites, haunted by my fears, and beckoned into acceptance by my promise. Self-forgetting was as important a part of my programming as self-remembering.
I would remember those that appealed to my particular experience, mindset and fancy as they resonated with me, and would conveniently forget about those that did not. The others were buried in my unconscious, or were they? I say that because a writer goes to his own graveyard to find where his secrets are interred.
That is perhaps the key to our vulnerability: what we are programmed to believe and think we know is not necessarily how things are but how we choose to see them.
Digging deeper, I found my questioner had a legitimate concern. What makes them right? Or are they? Or are they attempting to make their problems our problems; their ghosts our ghosts; their longing for the eternal tomorrow ours as well; indeed, their God our God.
THIS BUSINESS OF TRUTH
I concluded that the reason I thought they were right is because they thought they were right, and since I felt comfortable thinking as they did, I was sure they were right with no more proof than my own credulity.
I failed to understand that truth sometimes changes as fast as the weather, being sublime today and trivial tomorrow, or that their truth may not be my truth or my truth, theirs. That truth may be limited by my ability and willingness to see what I can and will see against what others can and will see. And then there is the whole matter of my cultural lens versus their cultural lens.
There is “their truth” and there is “my truth,” and since I only know them through their writing and not working with them, or conversing directly with them, as many of them, perhaps most of them are now deceased, I must weigh their merits in the sublime light of my own experience. It is not at all simple to understand the simple truth of a thing because the weakness of my soul protects me from simple truth. I bury it in my complexity and think it is safely beyond excavation.
It is well for us to remember this when gauging the merits of truth as expressed by others. Obviously, they are believers of the truth as they know it, and doubtless there is a point to believe as they believe because they are persuasive.
Do they lie to me? Do they lie to themselves? I don’t know. But if they do lie to me, they lie loudest to themselves. And the bigger the lie everyone believes it the more.
Do they make connection with me? And if so, why?
Again, it is a matter of them first making connection with themselves, otherwise it is impossible to make connection with me. Stated another way, for them to be genuine, they first must see themselves as being authentic to themselves.
What does being authentic mean?
They must speak to my soul by revealing their own. Otherwise, it is just the cacophony of words juxtaposed to each other in meaningless babble. Be weary of those who would have you renounce your idols, whatever they may be, because their fervor suggests the assertion rather than the denial of theirs.
Idols are idols no matter what name we give them. The iconoclast is often more idolatrous than the idol worshiper.
This is apparent when those that preach from the high and mighty moral ground are found to have feet of clay. How could it be otherwise? Why should we expect them to escape life’s most basic appetites while they seem obsessed with them? The irony is that they demonize sins of the flesh and fall into profligacy, while having us believe they have escaped such sins. No matter what the “sin” is the more you think about it the more it owns you.
It is a weakness of the mind to take up their cause as they attempt to persuade us that they suffer “for” something when they suffer only “from” something. They are running away and they want us to join them in their flight. They want to convince us that they see the light when they only feel the heat. They want us to believe they are special, indeed, chosen as our emissaries, when they fear being ignored. The more they are obsessed with human ugliness the more they are possessed by it.
The escape is to recognize we have a capacity for evil as well as good, and evil is not somebody else’s problem that we can slough off in sanctimonious rhetoric, but we must deal with it ourselves, and quietly alone.
Are the truth tellers driven by fear and guilt?
There is always that possibility as the guilty are wont to be afraid, and they who are afraid often feel guilty. The question that always must be asked is this:
· Are they making their fear our guilt or their pride our fear?
There is fear and intolerance in pride. It is uncompromising. The less self-confident we are the more imperative is the need for pride.
The core of pride is self-rejection. Yet, the self is all we have. To renounce it is to reject the real; to unburden us from life and its troubles. It is no accident that the core of salvation hawkers is pride and it is generated by self-hatred.
We are imperfect but perfectible, and don’t reach perfection by denying our reality, our sensuality, our passion, our longing for connection, are desire to be useful, are need to be accepted, and the pursuit of love in the business of working and living.
It is a sickness of a time when there is an eagerness to unite as true believers in a cause against the self, when the self is the only thing that is ours; to identify ourselves with a mythical or ideal self that is espoused by a leader, a holy cause, a race, religion, a party, a nation, a truth, proclaiming in our loss of identity a new found uniqueness beyond our experience; something worth dying for but not necessarily worth living with.
The proud so often are ready to die for freedom but not willing to live within constraints. We have seen the results of unlimited individual freedom in decades of chaos, confusion, debauchery, licentiousness, brutality, bestiality, and a desolate sameness across the population. Such living has produced the sexual revolution and free love only to make the normal weird and the weird normal, and for the disease of self-hate to spread to a societal epidemic in drug addiction, AIDS, and other societal dysfunctions.
When a society commands discipline, controls its appetites, and is strict but not draconian, creativity and originality thrive. We are not in such a climate.
In a climate of unlimited freedom, imitation runs amuck with a sameness and uniformity that is not unlike tyranny. Rebels once flaunted tattoos now everyone does. This is but a symptom of a society devoid of spontaneity retreating into inanimate inventions in a mechanistic retreat from the self. These inanimate tools have become toys of distraction to burned-out mediocre individuals who imitate the hard wiring of the inventors.
We can see through the veiled intentions of society only when we are able to see through our own. This is difficult because we are programmed to be self-ignorant; to yield to extremism because we doubt being capable of growing without their blessings.
Who are these extremists?
They are the sophists, priests, gurus, demagogues, evangelists and theocons who would have us be guided by their ghosts or gods instead of by our own empirical experience.
Both Faith and intimidation are instruments to compromise self-respect. Intimidation crushes the autonomy of self-respect, while Faith obtains this advantage without a struggle. Its persuasive tools are our vulnerable appetites, hidden fears and prideful vanities.
THE SOURCE OF BELIEF
One of the interesting things about education, about enlightenment, about everything that we believe is true is that somebody at some time or other wrote it down.
Subsequently, somebody or several somebodys thought they got it right. That is true of the Old Testament and the New Testament of the Bible, the Jewish Talmud, the Koran, the Tao, the Upanishads, and all the other religious writings. Religion is a cry for light in the darkness, or to put it another way, a cry for knowing beyond what can be known. It is safe territory for the charlatan and extremists of similar cloth.
Something they said, or something they implied but didn’t necessarily say, or something that somebody they had seen and we have designated as wise, and they wrote down what they remembered of that occasion as they remember what that person had said was true, and so we have come to accept it as so.
We are told the wisdom of humility and the renunciation of pride, but what is humility but the substitution of one pride for another?
Religion treats the self as full of sin, but what is sin but the self trying to find its way in the darkness, not shrinking from the darkness as religion would have the self do, but finding out for itself as any animal finds out by living.
If there be sin, it is not sin as described by religion but the sin of pride, of taking ourselves too seriously, and assuming too many responsibilities that leave little time for living, and living is what life is all about, not the postponing of it for another place called “heaven.” The earth can be either a heaven or a hell depending on the choices we make, but it is all we know for sure, and that certainty is suspect even then.
Life is a comedy and often a tragic comedy but that is only because it lacks humor.
Without a sense of humor, there cannot be a sense of proportion, without a sense of proportion, there cannot be a sense of balance, without a sense of balance there can be neither good sense nor genuine intelligence, nor, indeed, moral integrity. The humor is in the self looking at itself in the mirror with a knowing smile and not disgust.
And who is most likely to do that? The nonconformist.
That is why the most stable person in society is always the nonconformist. He doesn’t get caught up in the trite, trials and tribulations of his time, nor does he become an automatic push-button to consumer demands.
The nonconformist is his own agent knowing that the greatest liberty is not unbridled freedom, but freedom in which the individual demonstrates self-restrain, knows when to withdraw or retreat, and when to abstain from the madness of his time. He is of a common type throughout the centuries. Now, the nonconformist must survive push-button theocratic technology by not deifying it. It is a technology that has no feel for people as persons, or the means by which they grow and develop, and therefore spawns unintended consequences.
We can turn our conditioning on its head by engaging only in competition with ourselves and not with others. In that manner, we are able to see progress and regression, derive satisfaction and come to appreciate the leavening effect of disappointment in the scheme of things. It leaves us unimpaired by our faults and false steps, while bringing us to accept others as we find them. Embracing his resistance is the nonconformist credo.
On the other hand, to be preoccupied with other people and what they are or aren’t doing is to represent a total retreat from the self. The basic attempt to compare and compete with others represents a breathless race to get ahead by running away from ourselves.
Why do we run?
Our God has changed. Once the God we believed in was far off in Heaven, never to be seen, only to be felt, intangible. It was the God we had much faith in because we believed in the unknown and the unknown was the ever-retreating future beyond our vision. The ancient Jews had faith in such an invisible God, and were possessed of a vivid faith in the future. I was blessed with that faith in the Judeo-Christian tradition of Irish Roman Catholicism. There was no need of proof, no need of tangible evidence, no need to question the future. I was at home in the present because I had faith in the future.
Then the postmodern world rolled in on the wings of science that has been gaining momentum for 500 years. Like the primitives of thousands of years ago, somehow a more tangible palpable God was demanded by science. The future was now and thus a lack of faith in the future of the intangible God.
Science had a noble cause, to push back ignorance and explore our internal and external universe systematically and objectively. It shouldn’t have overwhelmed us, but it has, leaving us hopeless and empty, and paradoxically, creating a reemerging need for the worship of idols. Only a tangible God or gods will now suffice.
Where does that leave us in this godless or god changing age?
The word is vulnerable. There is mania, a fanaticism to predict everything because we have no faith in anything. We crave security, a rigid routine, and predictable indices as a defense against the future.
We cannot even trust ourselves with elections. There must be hundreds or even thousands of polls to tell us how we think so when we vote we can have the reassurance of voting rightly.
We live in an era without patience; without a temperament for delayed gratification. Everything must be now. We want a definitive answer when American troops are to leave Afghanistan and Iraq even if no such answer is possible. We want to find out how events are going to turn out before they occur. We all have Tarot card minds.
We don’t want to think. We want to be told how to think. Religion once provided this sanctuary. Science is fumbling because it is outside its retinue.
Traditional religion is anachronistic, discredited, but that has not changed the religious impulse. We are still concerned about our immortal souls. Science may try to isolate the soul, calculate its DNA, but we all know the 64 grams are real, and that when we die, this weight leaves our temporary home of the body to find its home in the future.
Now, no church is home as it once was during this rental period of life. Now, the only home is the self who must find some way to save its soul. The weight of this is so great that we blind our minds by retreating into the religion of work, business, politics, literature, art, sex, celebrity, sport, or acquisition. We make progress our beatific vision as if it has permanence.
IN A SIMPLER TIME
I was reared Irish Roman Catholic. From my earliest days, I was told in the words of the Baltimore Catechism, which were truth incarnate to my impressionistic mind, that the Roman Catholic Church was the only true church established by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and no other church shall stand before her.
When I’m five-years-old, I heard this. I’m six-years-old, I hear it again. I’m seven-years-old, and I hear it once more, making my First Holy Communion, dressed in white, with white shirt and tie, white pants, and white shoes with a little black prayer book with a picture in it of Jesus Christ who is blond, blue-eyed, fine boned, and handsome. Since I have similar looks, family and friends celebrate me as purity personified, and I believe it. Pretense is an indispensable step in the attainment of genuineness. It is a form into which genuine inclinations flow and solidify, and I would come to carry such baggage.
This experience was idyllic except for my First Confession, which was not holy, and not reassuring but quite the contrary. Reality contaminated the self of my assumed holiness.
Then, when I’m twelve-years-old, I hear it again as I am confirmed as a “Solider of Jesus Christ” in the Roman Catholic Church.
So, I have had succession of reinforcements of an idea, which I have accepted as true without qualification. Since I accepted it as true, I practice it as the truth. I don’t question it. I don’t question the pope when he says he is infallible in his encyclicals relating to doctrines of faith or morals. His word is the word of the church and the word of the church is by extension the word of our savior, Jesus Christ. It is so simple, so easy and comforting to believe.
The church says that Blessed Virgin Mary was born without Original Sin (Immaculate Conception) on her soul, and I believe; the church says that Jesus was born of a Virgin Mary, and I believe. The church says I cannot eat meat on Friday without sinning, so I don’t eat meat on Friday. The church says I must fast before receiving Holy Communion, so I fast from food or drink the night and morning before I receive this Sacrament. I must go to confession before I go to Holy Communion in order not to have mortal sin on my soul, and so I do.
The church is very ambiguous and vague as to what mortal sin is, but the safe thing is to consider almost everything a sin, so going to confession and confessing all these remembered sins is the safe thing to do, otherwise going to communion with mortal sin on your soul means you will roast forever in eternal hell. And I believe this to be true.
It is a mortal sin to miss mass on Sunday; it is a moral sin to lie; there are more egregious sins but lying is a sin a seven-year-old can understand, also swearing or taking the Lord’s name in vain, or even saying some words you hear your parents say such as damn or hell or shit or goddamn.
My hard wiring has always had a question mark when it came to sin. When I made my First Confession, and the priest thought I wasn’t cooperating, he told me I had made a “bad confession,” as he gave me my absolution and penance. I was to say the rosary, the complete Sorrowful Mysteries, when most kids got three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys and were done with it.
I was so ashamed and mortified that I never told anyone about this, not even my mother. I thought she would think that I was damned for sure.
I’ve been trapped in my Catholicism now in my seventh decade having had made a bad confession in my first. Somehow that small question mark that was so tiny when I was a boy has grown taller than the Empire State Building, yet quite remarkably, I am a Roman Catholic writer who has made little progress beyond that seven-year-old boy with my catechistic mind.
My Catholicism is no longer expressed as a believer as it has gone beyond belief to touch the bedrock of my soul. And that is to make connection with myself. I have not found answers but I understand the questions more clearly.
What do I mean by that?
I am no longer afraid to think, to express my mind clearly and directly, and to state emphatically such things, as that life has no purpose other than to be lived to the fullest. That doesn’t mean cheaply but wisely.
Purpose and worth, I have discovered, are illusions that subjugate the will to a set of duties that pile duty on duty until there is an unalloyed submission to someone’s nebulous idea of performance.
Working becomes an end all, leaving no time to live, but only to exist on someone else’s arbitrary schedule. We see this in the perennial student; in the pyramid-climbing executive; in the workaholic, in the social and political climbing celebrity, in the public seeking philanthropist, and all others whose god is some type of performance.
Performance has become the most fashionable exit ramp to self-knowing and the quickest on ramp to self-delusion. It is the social disease of our time, which has become treated as an expression of normalcy.
THE ANTITOXIN TO THE SOUL
The best way to guard against doing harm to others is to introduce them to themselves. It is an antitoxin of the soul. Where there is self-knowing even the most poisonous impulses can be held in check. It would be better to see the world run by men who set their hearts on toys but do not try to kid themselves about it, than by men animated with lofty ideals whose dedication makes them ruthless taskmasters.
Make no mistake, noble attributes such as courage, honor, duty, loyalty and faith can be transmuted into ruthlessness, as many reading this can attest. Self-knowing combined with self-acceptance stands apart from such evil as such a self cannot lie to itself without being conflicting.
That means that what we consider self-evident truths may not be in the eyes of others:
“Everyone in the world wants to live in the United States.”
That is not true. If people had jobs, if people could support their families where they live, in the culture of their birth, in the climate of their heritage, in the comfort of their own home, there would be little interest to move to the United States. If we are honest with ourselves, we can see this is consistent with the way we feel about being Americans.
“America is the greatest idea that has ever been created.”
No question the democratic republic of the United States is one of the greatest political experiments in man’s history. Equally true, it has been severely tested in its 230-years. Should the reader examine that idea, he would find it has had its episodes of tyranny. The presidency of Andrew Jackson was somewhat tyrannical, as were that of Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War, and more recently that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in World War Two.
Americans were stripped of many of their freedoms in those periods “for their own good.” We are in an equally challenging time with the presidency of George Bush and the “war on terror.” It is an idea that is now in a precarious state. So, it is dangerous to take comfort in patriotism by slamming the door on those that don’t buy into the political rhetoric of the neocons and theocons of the time.
Ask Japanese Americans who were sent off to internment camps during the Second World War about democratic freedoms. They were stripped not only of these freedoms, but also of all their wealth and possessions by FDR who operated very much as a dictator towards them in that Great War. Paranoia has always been a problem of the American soul especially in times of crises. The Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941, and therefore all Japanese; even Japanese Americans who had been in the United States for generations were suspect.
When it comes to “what makes them right,” it would be well to be a “doubting Thomas.” Isn’t it interesting that the Gospel of St. Thomas has never been included in either the Catholic Vulgate or the King James Bible, yet it exists, and was written in the same period as the other Four Gospels.
Was I a doubting Thomas with that First Confession? I don’t know, but it seemed to have marked me for being a bit of a rascal, always wondering and asking why.
What makes them right?
We do!
We do it by omission or commission, by acquiescence or acclamation, by retreating into our fears or ignoring our instincts.
The wisdom of others is only valid if it touches our souls. We are in the world but apart from it. If the wisdom of others is not compatible with our blood, then we must have the courage to reject it. The soul recognizes rightness if we would but listen to it. Know that the lowest to the most exalted struggle with this same reality and no one, absolutely no one has special purchase of it.
* * * * *
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