FOOTPRINTS OF GREATNESS ON MY TURF!

FOOTPRINTS OF GREATNESS ON MY TURF!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2006



Frank Conroy, author of STOP-TIME (1977), and one of the writers who has participated at the University of Iowa's famous "writers workshop," a program I managed to take a few courses in despite being outside my chemistry major, writes in an anthology of "Writers on Writing" (2003) that he came across a passage in a book, and it sent him rushing to his home library.

It sounded vaguely familiar to something that he had written. Sure enough, he found the passage, and it was indeed similar. The passage was from his book STOP-TIME but it appeared in Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul's HALF A LIFE.

His first suspicion was that it had been lifted, but in further investigation he learned that in 1900 a very similar expression appeared in Henry James's SELECTED TALES.

"Stolen Words" is tricky territory as is "stolen ideas." There is little that can be said for either in the long run, other than that writers are readers, and readers are thinkers and invariably what comes out can and often is similar if not ironically nearly the same.

One time I was lecturing in Annapolis, and a man came up to me and showed me an illustration from a book, and said, "One of your illustrations appears here," then adding, "did you know that?" In fact, I didn't. The writer had given me credit without previously asking permission. It happens.

On another occasion, FORTUNE magazine had a cover story and featured article on my concept of "work without managers." This was also the title of one of my books. I wrote to the editor for an explanation why I was not given credit. I never heard back. Coincidence? Perhaps. Obviously, I wasn't in any position to pursue the matter and reluctantly chalked it up to imitation being the best form of flattery.

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) had created a minor stir and sold wildly the first two months out, due largely to the efforts of an editor of INDUSTRY WEEK and a contributor to NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO.

WWMs was published by THE DELTA GROUP FLORIDA, a small consulting firm, of which I am a senior partner. Unfortunately, the book lacked the sustainable publicity books require. An acknowledgment from FORTUNE would have helped. The book sold more than a thousand copies the first month out, nearly as many the second month, and then quickly died.

An "idea guy" is something like a songwriter. He gets these minor bumps of inspiration, commits them to print, and then allows the scavengers to pick up their essence in their larger digestive tracts with minimal nuance to their origin source.

It happens all the time. One cannot but be impressed to see songwriters and novelists, with their armies of copyright attorneys, handle with aplomb the flack of original producers. Dan Brown of "The Da Vinci Code" is currently in the midst of this attention, justifiably or not. Chances are he did some walking in someone else's footprints as writers and thinkers are bound to do. The problem is that people can become acrimonious when an author such as Dan Brown makes more than $20 million on a book in which large chunks first appeared elsewhere.

These thoughts came to me today as I read a syndicated columnist and a new book. It should be mentioned that the columnist has not stolen any of my words nor has the author of the book stolen any of my ideas. They both merely confirm ideas consistent with some of my themes, themes my Beautiful Betty says I repeat ad infinitum.

The first theme consistent with one of mine is from Thomas L. Friedman, author of THE WORLD IS FLAT (2005) fame, and seemingly ubiquitous as well as omniscient. He reports from India that both India and China are suddenly aware that they have become nations of engineers and MBAs programmed to conform to the dictates of an acquisitive culture, a culture they find terribly lacking in innovative or creative production.

Some years ago, I published an essay titled "The Soul of the Engineer," stating that engineering was a conformist discipline and reflected a conforming culture that lacked perspective on the nature of man and where man was going, and therefore was blindly engaging the future.

I suggested also that we were part of that same engineering culture and had an aversion to greatness. The unintended consequence of that aversion was that we had produced a one-dimensional society, taking comfort in all the toys we had created for justifying the respite from the demands and struggles of three-dimensionalism.

This theme was repeated in WWMs, indicating that engineers in quest for more filthy lucre added MBAs to their curriculum vitae. Because their singular focus was making money, I suggested that MBAs were the quintessential anathema to creativity and three-dimensionalism. I saw them as looking for someone to punch their ticket to the "good life."

The irony is that I get anywhere from two to five CVs each week from this sort believing, I suspect, because I am widely published that I am a "rich man," and am looking for someone to make me richer, and they of course have the credentials. I have an urge, which I have not yet expressed, to suggest that they consult my humanities reading list in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998) to budge them out of their one-dimensional status.

Now, it appears according to Friedman that both India and China are terrified of their growing armies of engineers and MBAs who do not have these what I have called "vocational degree skills" leavened with an appreciation of art, literature, music and the humanities.

India and China find their people with a growing dullness while failing to be good innovators, something that I experienced as an internal and external consultant to the complex organization in the United States and Europe.

It is no accident that an MBA is running the United States. Nor is it an accident that engineers are running our dual wars of Afghanistan and Iraq with little sense of innovation, culture, or the nature of common people whatever their religion or ethnicity.

An MBA mentality views the world as a "thing" to be managed, mobilized, motivated, and manipulated. It is a pincushion that has the "right buttons" to push to acquire the desired response. That simple.

What's more, nor is it an accident that most of our major American corporations are run by engineers and MBAs, who remain befuddled as foreigners invade their playground and their toys and perks are taken from them.

People are never one-dimensional, but often their rulers are. As a consequence, we have had a series of leaderless leaders in every aspect of our institutional life. What we sow, shall we reap.

In a spate of books, first mentioned in WWMs, and again in other books and articles, I could see where one-hundred-year-old companies were likely to bite the dust because of the debilitating weight of entitlement programs.

Twenty years ago these programs were approaching levels of the national debt. And what were companies getting for this attention? They were certainly not getting productive employees, but were in the process of creating welfare companies.

Today, this is a Western society problem across the United States and Europe. Those first insights as ideas came to me in the form of warnings some sixteen years ago. They are in print in books and articles from that time hence. Yet, I take no comfort in this for now they are the bitter fruit of that prophecy, which has turned rancid in my mouth.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Regarding another one of my ideas -- I am speaking of my Near Journey's End project, now being reworked as Technology the New Religion of Nowhere Man -- Michael Grunwald has written a watershed work titled THE SWAMP: THE EVERGLADES, FLORIDA AND THE POLITICS OF PARADISE (2006).

Not surprisingly, as with my book project, he quotes Genesis, and the verse: "And they shall have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

It is the "conquest of nature" theme that makes "progress are most important product." Progress has killed the environment, which I see as an evil with which we refuse to deal. Grunwald is more diplomatic, but only barely. His book, like mine, is about the raping of the environment or about hubris and its unintended consequences.

My project is more directly about our "cut and control" philosophy of progress where every gain loses something in the process that can never be retrieved.

THE SWAMP deals only with the Everglades, but it is a theme repeated ad nauseam across time and the world. Look at what is happening in India and China, where more than forty percent of the world's population live, and tears come to the eyes. Look at Russia and Eastern Europe, and many of the same sins are being repeated. Hubris is a disease many times more threatening than bird flu because it is treated as political rhetoric rather than as ecological reality.

It was and is the belief of Western man that nature could and should be conquered. Now, in the case of the Everglades, the state of Florida and the federal government are having second thoughts. They are in fact attempting to reverse a policy of 130 years of draining what was considered a wasteland instead of an ecological paradise.

Can you imagine who has raped this environment with the greatest of efficiency?

Engineers! It was not until the late 1940s that the Everglades would finally be subjugated to near extinction. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers -- the same engineers that misconstructed the levies of New Orleans - became what Grunwald refers to as "America's shock troops against nature."

These engineers were given the job to drain the swamp after a 1947 flood that wiped out homes, farms, and businesses in South Florida.

These doyens of efficiency created the most elaborate water control system ever built, in fact the largest earth-moving project since the Panama Canal. Through an elaborate system of canals, dikes, spillways, and pumps, the corps of engineers transformed the upper Glades into an agriculture district, the central Glades into giant reservoirs, and the eastern Glades into suburbs and farms.

The project ensured the success of the sugar industry, and enabled the massive post-WWII population growth in South Florida.

It was also an ecological "cut and controlled" disaster. Polluted waters from sugar cane fields and cattle ranches have replaced the Glades' native saw grasses with cattails and other invasive species of plants.

To control flooding, massive amounts of polluted fresh water are now pumped out to brackish St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers estuaries. These once prolific aquatic nurseries are in ecological meltdown.

So, those who once were commissioned to destroy -- the U.S. Corps of Engineers -- are invited back 50 years later to undo what they have done. Grunwald is an optimist and thinks it is possible. I do not. If anything, I see the corps's meddling will make matters worse as they are politically in bed with sugar producers and cattle ranchers, not to mention urban developers.

Then today in THE TAMPA TRIBUNE appears the headline story, "Florida's Vanishing Heartland."

Suburbia is cutting into the farmland of Hillsborough County, and pushing the cattle into smaller and smaller grazing areas along side housing developments. My daughter, who lives in the county, fears the orange groves, which grace hundreds of acres, may be turned into housing developments. The county has grown 133,000 in the past five years. As one farmer puts it, "We can plant tomatoes, or we can plant Yankees." The reality is already apparent and it's not tomatoes.

xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Last night on the television news, an elderly woman, who lives in a mobile home park, tells the reporter her park is being sold to make way for condominiums. Mobile home owners never own the land upon which these dwellings sit. These postage stamp sites are going up and up in value to the delight of park owners, but not to their residents. "Where will I live," this lady wonders, her voice under control, but her eyes telling a different tale, "when there is no place for less than $100,000?" Good question.

In a separate story, like a giant predatory animal creeping close to the ground, homeowners near downtown Tampa have reason to fear that the public good will supplant their private rights. In "cut and control" justification "to become a great city," yet another downtown Tampa developmental project is looking with lustful eyes at modest homes within its sights as condiment to their avarice dream of further expansion.

It is that old "eminent domain" statue which gave cities nearly carte blanche last year with the Supreme Court's decision in Kelo vs. City of New London.

The unforgiving excess of eminent domain has happened in my hometown in the neighborhood of my birth, South Clinton, Iowa. The entire area has disappeared with "cut and control" efficiency as Clinton's major employer, ADM Corporation, stretches its corporate body across the land for yet another commercial venture. People have to have jobs to work and live, true, but one wonders where the humanity figures in the process.

In recent times, I have seen the death of my neighborhood, and the disappearance of my church, school and rectory of my formative years. The irony is that one hundred years from now perhaps the only knowledge of St. Patrick church, school and rectory may be preserved only in my book IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003). That gives one pause.

xxxxxxxxxxxxx

This is my turf. I am a scribbler of a certain passion, and a few ideas. Some of them on occasion appear in others' works, but at least they are receiving attention. Yet, I see little change. So, why do I write? Good question.