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
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