WALKING BACK THE DOG AND THE QUESTION OF IMMIGRANTS!

WALKING BACK THE DOG AND THE QUESTION OF IMMIGRANTS!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2006


There is an expression in spy novels, which Robert Littel has used as the motive for a novel, which is "walking back the dog." The idea is to find the spy and bring him back home.

My use is a bit different, but not really. To walk back the spy you must first find him. My interest is finding the source of our present madness. To bring the spy back home you must first find how he got lost in the shuffle. This is not too dissimilar to our current exaggerated reaction to migrant workers.

My intention is not to minimize the inconvenience caused by the difficulty of assimilation, but it is intended to point out that illegals are not the “bad guys.” It is all a matter of how we have been programmed to relate to the problem and by whom.

Edward de Bono, the psychologist that has a whole island to himself, has exposed the limitations to traditional Western by-the-numbers cognitive reasoning and critical Socratic thinking. This is better known as deductive cause and effect analysis. De Bono challenges this mindset with what he calls, "lateral thinking." This is more commonly known as, "thinking outside the box."

I've always had a problem with the expression “thinking outside the box,” as it implies the brain functions in a mechanical box. We now call this a computer. Neither the brain as a box nor the computer think although many so addicted would dispute this. They process information, and the information they process is information already known, ergo, critical thinking.

De Bono espouses to creative thinking. This is the discursive world of contradiction and conceptual, self-organizing, provocative, subjective and perceptual contemplation. It is a world in which I feel most comfortable. My mind rambles over these circuitous elements as I reflect on the many, and I say many responses to my comments to Joseph Brown's column in the Sunday Tampa Tribune, “Rotten Oranges Show Our Work Ethic” (July 23, 2006), or the plight of migrant workers.

In the motive of walking back the dog, I came face-to-face with a consistent preoccupation of mine, corporate society. You would think that having been lifted from the bosom of my feudal lair in working class America into the rarefied air of the mountaintop of corpocracy that I would have become a true believer. It didn’t happen.

You see I never was comfortable making huge amounts of money playing to the tune of the captains of industry.

Early on, remembering where I came from and who I was I never could escape the awareness of my own skin and that the collective presence of my ancestors. They never had my advantages; never wined and dined with royalty in South Africa; never had people carry their bags and bow obediently before them as if they were indeed special. Not only was I never comfortable with this treatment I was embarrassed by it. I always saw these invisible people serving me, people nobody else seemed to notice, because they wore the chagrin countenance of my own ancestors in similar roles.

Yet, there was a side of me that wanted to believe I was actually appreciated as a person, that people in corpocracy valued me not so much for what I did but for what I was. That blew up in my face when I retired the first time in my thirties after experiencing South Africa.

Only a matter of months after that departure, I was in New York City meeting with my Prentice-Hall publisher regarding my first book. It was early 1970. I called on my former company's regional office, the same people who had wined and dined my family with great attention before making connecting flights overseas. Now, no one had time to have lunch with me. I was not relevant; no longer had clout. I was again a non-person, dead in the corporate vernacular.

You experience such things when you are young and idealistic, and they shake your foundation a little, but you are resilient. Later, however, when you have had time to reflect on all you have seen, witnessed and done, when age has matured you like a fine wine, you come to wonder why "Corporate America" has been such an exploiter.

Everywhere you have worked in the world you have seen the land left barren and poisoned for the attention, and the people exploited. This is not the society you were taught you belonged to in school. You were never told that Corporate Society was the religion of the land, the politics of the country, and the god of the American soul.

With age and time and reflection, you have grown to know it is true as you walk back the dog. It is the "Corporate America" to which you belong. You cannot escape it. It is another cast system in which everyone thinks they are free and that those appointed to lead them know best. My family was one of the corporate vassals, and obligingly so, and their son was elevated to a prince, but only as long as he kept the faith as a true believer.

None of this reached my awareness as a grammar school, high school, or indeed, college student. My heart and soul were dedicated to progress that had a face like my face, spoke my language, and believed as I was programmed to believe.

All went well until I worked for “Corporate America” outside the United States, and then it started to nip away at this ideal image. Always, I would rationalize to protect my comfort, and it worked until I experienced South Africa and apartheid, and then reality came crashing through. I’ve never been the same since, and that was thirty-seven years ago. I tried to regain my faith in Corporate Society by going back to school, only to find the university was the training ground for Corporate Society. This had escaped my consciousness when I was young and thrilled as a working class boy with the chance to go to college.

My mind is a kind of mind that records, stores, collates and ultimately retrieves experiences long ago placed in those confines. These experiences haunt me still.

My work took me to South America and Jamaica, to the bauxite refineries and chemical plants of those countries. It took me as well to Beirut, Baalbek, Port Said, Istanbul, throughout Europe and Africa, and of course the United States.

Walking back the dog I find the source of the words and ideas that I have been programmed to repeat and live by are not my own. My conscious and subliminal mind is a product of Corporate Society. Incredibly, my salvation has been that I was a pre-television depression era baby that has known scarcity, a child of the trusting midwest, close to the earth, close to nature, where people are people and what you see is usually what you get.

That was true until “Corporate America” took it over. Now, midwestern folks are spread out across the world and seem to echo Corporate Society sentiments. It would appear they are true believers of its message as if its language is the same as their own. I say this reading their missives on immigrants and illegals. The midwestern conscience is almost gone. Corporate Society has amalgamated it into its own. The midwest even looks and feels and acts like every other place. It now would appear Corporate Society has won, but has it?

"Corporate America" has managed to direct the focus away from itself by the promulgation of its dogma of progress. The main hook to its ambivalent message is “our standard of living.” The great puppeteer cleanses or taints our collective conscience with the promise or takeaway of jobs. Everyone needs jobs so what is so bad about that?

The planet is dying and it has been orchestrated by Corporate Society progress.

How often we have heard this said, and how often we have ignored it. “Corporate America” has made it a bland and boring charge. Obese America on a full belly shows little interest and less regard for the exploitation elsewhere of people, places, spaces and events.

Knowledge of the unfortunate enters our consciousness only in the cold medium of television and we can always change channels without burning our fingers. We think these people envy us when all they want is to live in peace with family and friends in the culture and tradition of their ancestors with enough to sustain them, but even that is placed in constant jeopardy as well as their lives.

When "Corporate America" goes too far, exploits too much, and leaves too little, either people will become desperate and take impossible risks, as illegals do, or they will become implacable enemies, as the jihad terrorists have become.

I have heard it all. Illegals are ruining our Corporate Society. But who ruined the illegals? Who exploited the countries from which the illegals keep coming? Who set this whole process in motion?

If you are a student of history, you know our "great corporate presidents" created the world we live in now, beginning with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. We have never lost their momentum as the baton has been passed from one to the other.

My da worked paycheck to paycheck and never made it to the end of the pay period with a penny. In fact, bill collectors were our most frequent callers on our three-party telephone line, allowing gossipy neighbors to get an ear full. Were it not for the kindness of creditors, I don't know if we would have always had food on the table. So, I can identify with desperate people who will go anywhere to find legitimate work even if it means crossing a border illegally.

Why should anyone be in such desperate circumstances in a world of plenty? Why should there be borders between indigenous people? Western man prides himself in being so cultured, so advanced, so technically sophisticated, but Western man cannot handle the simple problem of immigration and illegals.

Illegals were around during my growing up period, nobody seemed to mind. That was before we became a self-indulgent society; before lifestyle excesses made hospital insurance such an expense; before people felt compelled to spend more than they made; before differences were so threatening; before our generous spirit was supplanted by corporate greed. Now, we all want to have six-figure incomes and live in gated communities, safe and secure from a threatening outside world being bombed into oblivion.

We have bought the “Corporate America” mantra of progress as our most important product. It has produced generation after generation of spoiled brats, workers suspended in terminal adolescence, and leaderless leaders. In another sense, progress has resulted in concrete smothering our fertile fields to be lost to agriculture for eternity. It is the same for the air we breathe, the waters we drink, and the delicate ecology that surrounds us.

Corporate spin believes you can have your cake and eat it, too, and we are desperate to believe. Drill for oil along the Florida Gulf Coast, no problem! Picture drilling rigs as sculptured gardens surrounded by singing birds and dancing fish. Paint the sky in cosmetic blue with velvet clouds filtering a joyous sun. Translated, “Radical change won’t happen on my watch, buster.”

"Walking back the dog" I see "Corporate America" has been duplicated in "Corporate Europe" and now in "Corporate China," and on and on and on. As bad as it is, it is going to get much worse and I won’t be around to experience it, but many reading this will be.

My wonder is when the equivalent of the French "Reign of Terror" will visit Corporate Society. Then, I realize, “My God, it is already here!” What other way can we explain the motivation of the jihads, the state of the world now?

If you cannot learn the motivation of your enemies, how can you ever negotiate a peace with them politically? Corporate Society wishes to paint everything in terms of black and white with the enemy always totally black and Corporate Society always totally white. Not true.

Corporate Society has become leaderless, thoughtless and directionless and for it we are meant to pay for its excesses again and again. We the people first pay with the lives of our young who are programmed to fight corporate wars to protect corporate interests, and then to endure corporate malfeasance resulting in the loss of jobs necessary to bail corporate society out of its difficulties. Notice how a company’s stock goes up every time a corporation cuts 30,000 or 40,000 jobs.

What does that tell you? Walking back the dog it tells you the need for the bailing out had little to do with you, and a lot to do with the incompetence of corporate leadership of Corporate Society.

That said Corporate Society has managed to orchestrate paranoia and fear so that war has become a normal means of economic correction but which is espoused always as something else. Mexicans crossing the border illegally did not create the many fiascos of the past decade or so across Corporate Society’s foreign policy.

Still, if hospitals close, and schools cannot meet the needs of the people that flood into the state, and real-estate values plummet, and taxes increase, of one thing you can be certain, Corporate Society will not be the fall guy. It knows how to play the blame game and what better target than a desperate people.

Orchestrate the social drama so we are against these people. Play on our biases, our stereotypes, emphasize the criminal minority, play on our weaknesses, but by all means be sure to avoid our strengths, our generous and loving souls, make us see what we are giving up, not what we are sharing, feed our nationalism, demean our humanism, ensure that we continue to believe Corporate Society knows best even when it knows nothing at all.

Discover this orchestration and you will become aware of walking back the dog.

So, an oil company makes $10 billion in quarterly profits, and the gas price shoots through the ceiling, who’s to blame? The terrorists of course. Who exploited the people before terrorists had a foothold in such societies? And why are there terrorists now? Walk back the dog and you will see a corporate face.

We forget we are a violent society, and have been violent since our beginning. We have been terrorists. Ask the British. We are still violent. Not only do more murders occur in our society than anywhere, but also more people are incarcerated than anywhere else, yes, even in the most primitive societies there is less violence.

Corporate Society has fed greed and self-indulgence while providing blinders to what goes on in half of the rest of the world. Bombs and bullets aside, which solve nothing, and rain down in well known places, there are many people elsewhere who attempt to survive on a dollar a day or less while rogue governments often supported by corporate interests rape, plunder, kill and destroy what little they have.

When I say I wonder what it would have been like had I been born black, I can say the same thing if I had been born Mexican or Indian or any other indigenous people that has been exploited.

Complacency has been encountered wherever I have gone. You could say it has made me angry. You could even say it has driven me to be a writer. I had to laugh the other day when I read Wiley's "Non Sequitur" cartoon. It showed an author with a noose about his neck behind a desk with copies of his book prominently displayed with a sign of equal prominence, “Meet the Author of: DEALING WITH DISILLUISON 1 - 3 today.” No one is there to buy his book, only a woman is reading among book stacks totally unconscious of his presence. The area is roped off to guide prospective book purchasers to the author, but no one is in line. I know the feeling.

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Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: www.fisherofideas.com He has just completed a book, not yet published, titled, “Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land,” which deals with the subject of Corporate Society among other subjects.