A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD -- "this & that"

A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD - this & that

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.© April 2007

"Very few men are wise by their own counsel, or learned by their own teaching; for he that was only taught by himself had a fool to his master."

Ben Jonson

One time an executive that I had mentor when he was a budding student confessed to me when he was elevated to CEO to a Fortune 500 company, "I always wanted to own a red corvette. So, when I finally reached this pentacle of success, I indulged myself and went out and bought one. Imagine my surprise when it seemed that at every stoplight I saw another red corvette when previously I can't recall seeing any."

It is like that when you write a book, especially a book such as A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. Stories and television programs bombard your senses reinforcing what you have said, giving you the distinct feeling that you are not alone in saying these things, and what's more, can take little comfort in the fact, as saying them doesn't change anything. People do.

Last night (April 25, 2007) I watched the stimulating PBS program of "Bill Moyers' Journal." It addressed the subject of "buying the war." The war in question was the Iraq War and "weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)."

The program demonstrated how fear tactics worked as well on journalists as they did on the public with the iterative mantra: "the smoking gun and the mushroom cloud."

Sadam Hussein was supposed to have chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction as well as being in the process of developing a nuclear bomb, none of which proved to be true. But the mantra was effective because fear does not have to be supported by facts, and most people alive know the "smoking gun and mushroom cloud" is reminiscent of WWII and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War.

Several prominent writers and journalists were interviewed among them Walter Isaacson, current author of the superb "Einstein" and former CEO of CNN as well as Dan Rather . Isaacson said that "thumb suckers and pundits" had replaced journalists because journalists pounding leather on the beat across the world cost money.

Rather, who had been known as a liberal skeptic, admitted that he caved into the times when Colin Powell, the most respected man in the military and in the Bush administration pleaded the US case before the United Nations.

"He (General Powell) had been in Viet Nam, Desert Storm, he knew war up close and personal," Rather said, "and I trusted the man." Rather was also caught up in the dilemma that if you were patriotic you had to support the war even if you questioned the rhetoric.

The most damning revelation of the program was that the two most respected newspapers in the United States, The Washington Post and The New York Times would give front-page coverage to Bush administrative "leaks." Then, on Sunday television news programs, these same Bush officials would quote these stories as confirmation of the facts they were then presenting to a national Sunday television audience. These "facts" often proved bogus to the extreme - a variation of "catch 22."

The exception was the "Ritter Syndicated News Service," a service outside the Washington, DC beltway, and one that was also outside the surreal world of Washington "make believe." As I show in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, it is "outsiders" that get us off the dime and unstuck, and it has always been so.

One of the most moving clips of the program was that of senator Ted Kennedy . His speech before the senate in opposition to the preemptive war proved prophetic. Virtually everything he said, in retrospect, has come true, including the quagmire that the US is now in.

As one analyst put it, "over the period of 9/11 to the war in 2003, more than a million words were printed by The New York Times. Of senator Kennedy's speech, it printed only 36 words."

Another interesting development was that of Phil Donohue. He had a show on MSNBC, which was canceled when he put a critic of the war on his show along with an advocate. He was told that that was an unsatisfactory case of two liberals against one conservative, him being the other liberal. The sentiment after 9/11 was such that no negative opinion was apparently acceptable. Moyer reflected, "It was a case of patriotism." Donohue added "and also a case of business."

Perhaps the most embarrassing moment was a clip of an Oprah Show in which she had some two Kurdish expatriates giving their opinions on why the war was necessary and, again, indicating that they knew with certainty that Hussein had WMDs. A young lady in the audience suggested that she thought they were expressing opinions but were providing no hard evidence to confirm their suspicions. Oprah immediately shut her down going to a commercial. It was not pretty.

One of the more humorous moments, if there can be such a thing in something as consequential as this review, was the British government's publication of pictures that suggested that uranium enrichment facilities did, in fact, exist in Iraq. It turned out that the pictures were lifted from an American student's work at Oxford on his Ph.D. Where did the student get these pictures? From the Internet? He threatened to sue the British government for plagiarism.

Back to my thesis of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, or the more things go around they come around, illustrating our stuckness, it was indeed Bill Moyer, himself, who was press secretary to president Lyndon Baines Johnson who provided that president with his spin to the press. This reached a crescendo when the sham of the Gulf of Tonkin Bay Resolution was first manufactured, and then presented to Congress, with congress voting to escalate the war in Viet Nam.

Historians now dispute the legitimacy of the grounds for this resolution. North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in North Vietnam.

President Johnson immediately ordered retaliatory air strikes on Hanoi-Haiphong. Congress then quickly approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 7, 1964), authorizing the president to take "all necessary measures" to win in Vietnam. This allowed for the war expansion ultimately to 525,000 men on the ground, and the fiasco that followed. Another demonstration of stuckness.

THAT WAS THEN THIS IS TODAY (APRIL 26, 2007)

Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell today (April 26, 2007 in The Tampa Tribune) sees Virginia Tech and Columbine shootings as carry over guilt from the 1960s.

Sowell does make a valid point that since then the intelligentsia has depicted American society in collective rather than individual terms.

This resonates with Moyers' "buying the war," as he shows how politicians repeat the same lie until it has the ring of truth and then is accepted as such. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD , it is shown that we have been programmed to look for authority for our individual destiny outside ourselves rather than trusting ourselves to have discriminating minds and therefore relevant views to accurately access the reality of our experience.

As Sowell correctly points out, with this rationale if we find ourselves lacking, it is society's fault.

To put this in some context, I have often had people come up to me when I have spoken, and say, "I'd have done what you have done if I had had better teachers."

In my whole lifetime, I think I have had about five prominent teachers and two were my parents and one was a coach, leaving only two others.

The best teacher I ever had was myself as student. I had the benefit of coming from a poor family and if I didn't do it on my own it wouldn't get done. I had no safety net, no financial support system to fall back on, and consequently, I am as frugal today as if I didn't have two dimes to rub together.

Therefore, I agree with Sowell that banning or restricting guns is not necessarily going to solve the problem of Virginia Tech or Columbine. His answer is that we have to find our way to individual responsibility from collective responsibility, and I concur.

George F. Will, the pedantic journalistic pundit that loves to use remote language to illustrate the quality of his thought (such as using "ineluctable" instead of inevitable) has a column in the same newspaper. He, who was incidentally duped by the Bush administration's WMDs argument for war, takes the complementary position to Sowell's. He sees collective responsibility or commercial culture dictating the future. China is used as an example.

Will does have a point. People do tend to think the collective of capitalism in China as the eventual corrective if not the cure to communism. I remember when I worked in South Africa a businessman suggested that commercial culture was the answer to the problems of the world. The late great senator Patrick Moynihan wouldn't have agreed. He once said Westerners are likely to be more impressed in China with the absence of flies than the absence of freedom.

We should read Sowell and Will, Moyer and me, or anyone else, and see how the information fits with our own experience and the shape of our mind.

Someone noted that it took millions of years to reach 3 billion souls in the world, and only 50 years to double that amount. We are moving faster and faster as we inevitably move closer and closer together. It is so easy to forget that half that world of six billion souls doesn't have a cell phone nor do they make as much in a month's time as its upkeep of that electronic wonder. It should give pause.

Eric Hoffer once said the most revolutionary thing is to feed a starving man a crumb of bread. That starving man is close by if not at our door, and we have to start thinking in terms of inviting him to dinner and at our table as an equal.

Finally, an aside, Tim Russert of "Meet the Press" is an engaging fellow and kind of an inside-outsider. I say that because he mentions with pride that he is a "blue collar guy," having come from that kind of family in New England.

He said something on the Moyer program that resonated with me in my organizational development (OD) work.

"If you want to know what is going on, really going on in an organization, you have to talk to the people doing the work, the workers and managers where the action is."

Moyer said, "Why don't you have those people on your show?"Russert smiled, "First of all they wouldn't want to be on my show to save their life. And secondly, it would put their jobs in jeopardy."

I have written several books directed to top management on this very subject, attempting to explained to them that the spin they get from their direct reports, human resources, and consultants is all self-serving, as Moyer explained is the case in Washington, DC.

It was my job to go talk to these people and then to formulate what they said into a narrative or remedial recommendation. This was then presented to top management. The ideas I expressed were never my own, but always those of the people in the trenches (see WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A View From The Trenches 1990). Most of the time, these data were ignored, and so on a smaller scale, chaos reign supreme. This was not unlike the case presented in "buying the war" in Bill Moyer's Journal alluded to here. Go figure!

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