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.
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