WILLIAM FRANK BUCKLEY, JR., WHAT HE MEANS TO ME
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 28, 2008
“Charlie Rose: Would you like to be twenty again? William F. Buckley, Jr.: “Absolutely not." CR: Would you like to be twenty-five years younger? WFBJ: “Not at all." CR: Why? WFBJ: Because I'm tired. I’m tired of life. I’m ready to go.”
Charlie Rose on PBS television, December 8, 2007
I
William F. Buckley, Jr. died yesterday, February 27, 2008, at his desk working on a biography of his most cherished friend and the acolyte of his conscience, Ronald Reagan. Buckley was the sixth of ten children of a patrician Connecticut family in which his father was worth $10 million at his death.
William, Jr., named after his father, didn’t abuse his father’s wealth, or remove himself from the family’s deep devotion to the Roman Catholic Faith, or the conservative politics of his father’s Republicanism.
He went to Yale, wrote a book about “God and Yale,” and fifty-four other books of which a handful were spy novels. He had been an operative in United States Intelligence Service during World War II.
My first acquaintance with Buckley was reading op-ed columns written by him in newspapers in Indianapolis when I joined Nalco Chemical Company as a chemical sales engineer. It was September1958.
II
With a son, two, and a daughter of seven months, I entered a strange and foreboding world. My safe haven since college had been the chemical laboratory for which I had been trained. I took the job with Nalco under false pretenses, as I was to continue my education in theoretical chemistry at a major eastern university on a fellowship that was due to start the following fall. I had to make and save more money quickly in order to handle the expenses of such an adventure, as the academic stipend was not enough to pay for a family of four.
Theoretical chemistry appealed to me after the success of James Watson and his “double helix” fame of discovering the structure of DNA. It was also because I am something of a control freak and like to know exactly where I am, what I am about, with no surprises.
It never occurred to me that technical sales would be strung out into a three-year training program and that I would not be able to make commissions until after this period. I felt trapped in a situation of my own creation.
What also never occurred to me was that selling, especially technical sales, was constructed on the premise of complexity and superiority in which the seller was to play God as the omniscient one to the customer’s total ignorance. Given this premise, it was deemed necessary that three years were required for the seller to gain the encyclopedic knowledge of the customers business and the proper application of Nalco’s products.
Nor did it occur to me that this attribution of omniscience would find the people with whom I worked condescending to customers as if lucky to have them solving their problems.
Characteristically, when asked what I thought of this approach, I answered candidly. I told my management I wasn’t comfortable playing God, and that I noticed people I traveled with never sold anything to anybody, suggesting it wasn’t working.
So, here I was with two small children and a wife, making less than I had made in the laboratory, and in foreign territory away from the safety of the lab, told in a huddle between the district and area manager, that I wasn’t cut out for this work, and should look for another job. I had been with Nalco two months, one of which was in a company training program in which “how to sell” was never a subject.
As an expression of the company’s compassion, the district manager told me, I to be accounts to service as a chemical engineer with the added option of upgrading them and calling on competitive accounts in the area if I like. Both managers smirked with deep grins, as I was given these instructions. I was also given the drop dead date of my final paycheck: “You will be off the payroll in two months, so in your spare time you had better look for another job.”
I am an emotional guy, a big guy, and a guy that can get quite angry, but not a malicious guy or vengeful guy. It was scary when I went out on my own not knowing the products and having no idea how to sell them if I did know. It was “system selling,” not products, per se, and I was supposed to be an expert of all these systems.
For starters, I was handicapped. I am not a mechanical person in the least, but a guy that could manage chemical symbols pretty well. It was already apparent in my lab work that I was not good at setting up experiments, or improvising instrumentation that was not already available. I was a book chemist, not a lab chemist.
The symbols up to that point had been all chemical symbols, which I could move about with alacrity and panache. I was so good at it that I set the curve in practically every test I took in every course in my curriculum. Where I had trouble was in the laboratory, where I was asked to make things, as you do in such a major.
III
It was in this precarious state that I wandered unto an op-ed column by William F. Buckley, Jr.
Buckley is an Irish name as is Fisher. Both names are first taken to be English, but we share a common heritage. I liked that. I read him and was moved by his vocabulary. I had read the dictionary as if it were a novel before I was a teenager. There was one word he used, which I cannot recall at the moment that explained the entire article. One word! The word was most appropriate but a word with which I was not familiar. I loved it.
Buckley also wrote with such unabridged confidence that I found him exhilarating, plus he was not afraid of ideas that were outside the mainstream at the time. I came out of the university full of country bumpkin idealism as a Roman Catholic from an agricultural state in a Protestant dominated community, and Irish descendents who were more often complainers than contributors.
Here was a man from my heritage that was urbane, witty, affluent, positive, cocky, cerebral, intellectual, and with writing aplomb I had seldom encountered. He did it all without apology. He was from the Eastern establishment but not of it, a Renaissance man in a time of a non-intellectual bias with an anti-intellectual president, Dwight David Eisenhower in office.
I watched his “Firing Line” on television at a time when I seldom ever watched television at all, and collected the summaries of those programs, which I still have, and referred to in my most recent book (A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD AuthorHouse 2007).
It was watching those “Firing Line” programs that I came up with the idea of how to conduct myself in my limited time with Nalco. I would do it in a similar fashion to the way Buckley interviewed and treated his guests.
Buckley would probe them with a question, then sit back with that pencil between his middle finger and smile and let them seemingly take over when he was always in control. It had never occurred to me before that listening was such a powerful instrument in the human language. But here I saw it demonstrated. Buckley took his pompous all-knowing guests down to comprehensive level by this simple process. I said to myself, why can’t I use it? What have I got to lose? I’m going to be fired anyway.
So, I would enter these accounts with little knowledge or understanding of what Nalco did for them, and ask them to explain how Nalco’s products worked or failed to work. If they were not working as well as expected, what would they like to see Nalco do? The approach melted away antagonism and suspicion, and opened the way for conversation.
It was amazing. They would look at me to see if I was sincere. One of my most engaging qualities has always been my sincerity. Noting this, they would explain their systems, how they worked, what role Nalco’s products played in each case, and how satisfied or dissatisfied they were. They went out of their way to be obliging, to be the knowledgeable ones while I played student to them as teacher.
In almost every instance, they wanted to improve their systems. I would go back to my motel, being by nature a reader, I would peruse the comprehensive manuals Nalco had produced in succinct language, and find products that would better meet their needs. As a consequence, almost without effort, I would upgrade the value of the account by their initiative, and not mine.
Returning the next day, I would often sell the customer more expensive products, but products that would be more cost effective. For this attention, I upgraded all these accounts I was given by 100 percent or more. In addition, I started to call on competitor accounts in the area with this new knowledge of Nalco’s successes and failures, deducing that this must equally apply to competitor accounts as well.
In the process of doing this, I called on a plant that was making home appliances, a factory covering seven acres, and so enormous that it gave me trepidations to show my card at the receptions desk. The account had been in Nalco’s competitor’s hand for many years, so long that Nalco no longer called on the account.
Using the same Buckley strategy that had been successful before, I sold the account in my first visit. It so happened that I came at a time when the plant was totally frustrated with our competitor, and was willing to try anyone or anything.
The problem for me was that I took a blanket order, meaning I was given a purchase order for a three month trial of Nalco chemicals in their system, when I didn’t know the systems, or the hundreds of Nalco products to choose from to apply to these systems.
My selling approach had been theoretical not application intensive. Nor did I have sufficient knowledge of Nalco’s mechanical systems (i.e. pumps, etc.) to choose much less install automatic feeding equipment in the optimum places. I had to call my district manager with my problem. He didn’t believe I had made the sale. He called the account to confirm and learned I had received a blanket order, which was rare in those days.
Having it confirmed, he had the area manager travel with me to set up the trial. The incredulity was palpable from Indianapolis to Nalco’s Chicago headquarters. How did he do it?
It didn’t end there, as two other sister plants in the city were automatically turned into Nalco accounts. I had sold more on that one visit than six other veteran sales engineers had sold in the entire year. No one understood my success, not even me, so it was hard for me to explain it to others. That said I started to get that opportunity.
Regional managers asked for me to be loaned to them to share my success during their regional meetings. I had to read selling books to come up with the vocabulary, knowing no one would believe the “William F. Buckley, Jr. story.” Such exposure made me a person of interest to senior management. This was in the days before human resources came up with the gimmick of “high talent.”
Soon I was made a manager, and then after only two more years in the field, promoted to the executive vice president’s staff, and from there made a vice president to facilitate the formation of a new company in South Africa. After completing that assignment, only thirty-five, and after only ten years with Nalco, I retired. The reason for retiring so young is another story. I plan to tell it in a novel I am now writing titled, GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA.
IV
In Buckley’s last program on “Charlie Rose,” he was asked about leadership. Rose was interested in leadership in the mega sense or at the geopolitical level. Buckley replied that leadership is a function of the situation. Rose replied, but isn’t it more a case of a transformational experience? Going through the crucible of experience? Buckley replied it was that, but it was a case of both not one or the other.
Hearing that from Buckley with that winkled grin and those knowing eyes, I got tears in my own. I knew he was no longer with us. Little me, a nobody in the firmament “out there” in the, then, television land, and now cyberspace, I could say, “both apply to me.”
It was the experience of “being fired,” and then finding the Buckley formula of listening that placed me in a situation that gave me a prominence I didn’t anticipate, nor certainly not my superiors. Going through the crucible of South Africa apartheid would also change my life forever, and find me writing these words.
I had been a student at Buckley’s knee. He helped me overcome my adversity and realize some measure of success. He hardened my determinism to be my own man on my own basis as the complete individual. Obviously, others helped as well but he was a force that I studied and admired.
My success at Nalco, and the fact that my third child was on the way, made it impossible for me to punish the family by taking that fellowship for chemistry. I instead stayed with Nalco through South Africa, then took a two-year sabbatical, read a lot of books and wrote one, CONFIDENT SELLING (Prentice-Hall 1970). That book was an elaboration of what I spoke about during those regional meetings when asked to explain how I sold.
Buckley taught me that you could have a strong point of view and yet not be intimidated or intimidating. I have not kept the Catholic faith as he did all his life. I wonder if he would have been able to think the same way after experiencing South Africa as I did. We will never know. South Africa did not add up to a balanced equation for me, and I have been struggling with that reality ever since.
He made me aware of the nature of leadership, not as a mega force but as a mini activity of individuals. It is how I came to believe we are all leaders or no one is. I have attempted to convey my fragmented philosophy in all my writings.
His legacy? I would imagine it is the conservative magazine he created, NATIONAL REVIEW. When you imagine a man of fifty-five weighty books being reduced to a single thing, it is humbly indeed. May his soul forever rest in peace, and thank you, Mr. Buckley for being you.
_______________
Dr. Fisher's essays are available on this blog for your free review and comment.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
THE ESCALATING COSTS OF THE CONQUEST OF NATIVE AMERICANS
THE ESCALATING COSTS OF THE CONQUEST OF NATIVE AMERICANS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 20, 2008
“The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every port of earth is sacred to us . . . So if we sell our land, you must keep it part and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers. Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? . . . This we know: The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”
Part of the famous letter Chief Seattle to the “white man” about selling the land to them.
“The medieval method of arguing the way to truth did not prepare Europeans for an extra continent. Nor did it help that primitive people discovered inhabiting this new continent, America, in early sixteenth century, were living in a relative state of harmony without the benefit or knowledge of progressive education, rule of law, politics, history, and of course, Christianity. It was clear to observers that these primitive people were surviving without European culture, happily so, thriving in voluntary, organized and functional societies of countless Indian nations and more countless tribes within these nations.
“Sixteenth century Europe was awash in utopian fervor looking for the cultural absurdity of an ideal society. Once word spread of the immaculate harmony of these primitives a world away, shock and awe led to mocking them, setting off the spread across Europe of radical concepts of free association. No longer should there be submission to the rule of law and authority, but communities should come together of their own free will and voluntarily agree to live in harmony sans laws. Europe, free association advocates insisted, should adopt what appeared to be the system of the American primitive tribes.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Nowhere Man” in “Nowhere Land” (2006 unpublished)
* * * * * * * * * *
I
What should we make of “Indian talk” from a Chief Seattle? Clearly he lost. Or what should we make of the reaction of European society after America was discovered with primitives living in harmony with nature?
To give you a sense of the impact on European intellectuals, one hundred years later or in the late seventeenth century, the British empiricist, John Locke (1632 – 1704) would come up with his theories of liberal democracy: "Two Treatises on Government" (1690). It was published anonymously. It constituted Locke’s reply to the patriarchal “Divine Right of Kings."
Locke’s work embodied the defense of natural rights and a justification for constitutional law, the liberty of the individual, and the rule of the majority. If the ruling body offends against natural law, he argued, it must be overthrown.
To show his debt to Native Americans, he claimed that all men are originally in a state of nature. He believed natural law provided certain rights to be gained by working for them.
The system of capitalism is an economic expression of Lockean principles, a system, of course, that provides goods and services for a financial profit. There was no such system or need for one with Native Americans. The cost of conquering the Indians leaves us where we are today.
II
The Indian or “primitive” culture as we prefer, in very general terms, involves a deep connection with nature and an understanding and respect for the inexorable cycle of life. Man is but a part of Nature and the cosmos. Man does not live by reason alone, but by intuition, imagination. Logic is not stressed as the path to wisdom. Emotions play a more important role. The expression of feelings doesn’t make a man weak.
There is no debate about the existence of God, no ontological argument, no inductive and deductive proofs about the Immovable Mover. The “Force” of Nature is a given, as well as the fact that there is a spirit world that coexists with the realm of physical reality.
There is order to the cosmos with higher powers (gods) at the top of the hierarchy followed by man, animals, and inanimate natural objects. All are part of God.
There is no debate or conflict between Rationalism and Empiricism. The world is neither an idea in the mind of man nor only understood through sensory experience. There is no Kierkegaard “either/or,” or conflict of opposites that permeates Western thought. No dualism in Native American culture.
III
The seamless harmony and flow of Nature is at the heart of its philosophy. Death is not an end; it is simply part of life and a journey into a new phase of existence of the spirit, although this belief is also true of religious people from all cultures. There is a healthy mind-body-spirit connection that is now more accepted in other societies and cultures. A human is one organism, not separate parts, and disease of the soul can become disease of the body. This is the basis of holistic medicine, which has grown in popularity in the West.
Mankind, then, is just part of a harmonious whole, not as the exalted center of the thinking universe, or as a malignant accident of nature. Sunrises, sunsets, and the changing of the seasons measure time, not clocks. Time is simply the life process. Of course, in this age of electronics and the Internet, Native Americans have had to adopt Western ways. The West, however, has never ceased to be intrigued by the philosophies and traditions of Native Americans. Nor have they been successful in burying them.
Native Americans are not a monolith. There are more than 700 nations, and many more tribes within these nations. Although there is diversity, there are common cultural philosophies.
IV
Traditional Native Americans believe whatever name or characteristics people give the Creator, they are all referring to the same deity. Christians, Muslims, Jews and Native Americans are what God made them.
Where Native Americans differ, they do not see themselves stained with Original Sin nor do they see themselves as inherently wicked needing to be saved. After all, they say, how can that be when God made you? So, they don’t need a Savior to redeem them.
Native Americans know mainly of their shared beliefs through oral storytelling rather than dogma or didactic lecturing. They don’t need an arm waving, histrionic and threatening rhetorical messenger to remind them of their sins and damnation. They know Nature gives and takes, and is a challenge to their existence from time to time as it is with every living thing. They take comfort in their oral tradition, and history, mythology, spirituality and philosophy that enlighten and entertain against this reality.
These stories describe a world where animals and humans are equals in the cycle of life. Animals, though hunted and killed, are revered for their sacrifice, and their spirits worshipped because without them humans would perish.
There is no sense, as in Genesis, that mankind was meant to have dominion over the earth and to subdue it, and the other creatures of the earth. The Native American sense of time is also based on natural rhythms of the seasons, cycles of the moon, and their own body clocks.
V
Native Americans don’t talk of a heaven and hell, but of other places of existence replete with spiritual life, and constant interaction between these other worlds. Spirit guides visit humans, and humans can, if they know how, visit other dimensions in astral projection.
VI
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) incorporated a good deal of native spirituality into his paradigms.
Native Americans often have converted to Christian faiths only to eventually return to shamanic religious practices. Jung explained this in his psychiatric terms as the Shadow surfacing.
The Shadow is a person’s dark side, which remains suppressed after years of parental and societal pressure. It is a combination of Freud’s Id (our impulsive side) and Superego (our judgmental or moral side).
Jung claimed social conditioning creates a “good side,” compliant and passive, while containing a “bad side,” lustful and aggressive. Western culture and Christianity could be something strange to the natural culture of Native Americans. The more they strain to assimilate into the wider culture, in this case the American culture, the more likely their dark side will appear. Once it does, Jung suggested most people, no matter their ethnicity, are inclined to project negative shadow elements on people that they dislike or fear.
Native American Indians know that when they have dislike for someone for no reason at all it is perhaps because they see aspects of themselves in that person. It is as if they see their soul reflected back to them as a shadow of themselves.
Jung used this phenomenon in his therapy. He encouraged his clients to own their own shadows, and not try to bury them. Burying them never works. The shadow will be heard, usually when least expected. Similar to Native American philosophy, Jung believed we must own our shadow and integrate it on the path to Wholeness.
VII
A common tradition among Native Americans is the belief in the “Medicine Wheel.” The symbol of the wheel represents the cycle of life, both macrocosmically (the world) and microcosmically (the individual). The four spokes of the wheel are the four directions of the compass. Each direction has its own philosophy, a symbolic animal, and a color.
EAST is the beginning because the sun rises in the east. The color is gold, and the animal is the golden eagle. The philosophy is one of seeing the world as it really is with clarity and without illusions.
SOUTH is the color green, and the symbolic animal is the mouse. The mouse represents the striving and curious nature that is to be encouraged. The mouse is shrewd, savvy and dogged explorer.
WEST is where the sun sets, and the color is black. The animal is the bear. The bear is a nocturnal creature and hibernates in a cave. The bear is the symbol of introspection. Most of our minds are subconscious, and traverse darkened realms, as the bear prowls the night indulged in introspection to find illumination. This indicates a highly sophisticated understanding of the human mind.
NORTH represents winter, and the color is the white of the snow. The totem animals are the wolf and the buffalo. These animals represent intelligence and insight, things that often come too late in the winter of our lives.
Native Americans believe, should you reach the center of the wheel where the spokes meet, you will have perfect balance. This is similar to Jung’s notion of individuation in which there is the successful integration of all the disparate aspects of our body, mind, and spirit.
VIII
Some Native Americans regard a criminal as a sick person, not an evil person. What the sick person needs is healing rituals and ceremonies and rehabilitation until well. A repeated offender, who fails to respond to this wellness regime, and is deemed beyond redemption while remaining a threat to the lives of tribe members, is quickly dispatched.
IX
Everyone and everything are connected. Everything has to go somewhere. Nature knows best. We cannot change Nature. There is no free lunch.
Humans are just one small part of the cosmic picture. The cycle of life is one of constant change. But it is not one of chaotic or meaningless change. Everything that is happening is happening for a purpose. Nothing diminishes the purpose even if we have no sense of what that purpose maybe.
People have a body and live in the real world, but they also have a spirit and there is a spiritual world that is as real as the world we see and experience with our five senses.
We are on earth to learn. Learning requires a balance between the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of Nature. The spirit will give us help if we ask. We are meant to achieve maximum human potential and the only sin against God is our failure to use whatever gifts God has given us for our own good and the good of the community.
I share this with you as I reflect on two renditions of this and other related ideas that I have learned from Native Americans. It seems to me we are slipping over the precipice into the void of dangling participles.
I developed one rendition of this problem in NEAR JOURNEY’S END? CAN PLANET EARTH SURIVE SELF-INDULGENT MAN? (2004)
When I could find no publisher, I rewrote it in terms of the same three participles: Past Imperfect, Present Perfect, and Future Perfect.
The second rendition was NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND (2006). This is a take off on the meaning of “utopia,” which is essentially "nowhere."
Native Americans have never worried about utopia or dystopia, or of Sir Thomas More, Ayn Rand or George Orwell and their respective versions of this idea. We brought our cultural plague to Native Americans. Despite this insult, they attempted to teach us how to be good stewards of the earth. We have been poor learners.
___________________________________
Dr. Fisher is an organization/industrial psychologist and former international corporate executive who lives in Tampa, Florida and writes in this genre. He is currently working on a novel of South Africa.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 20, 2008
“The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every port of earth is sacred to us . . . So if we sell our land, you must keep it part and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers. Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? . . . This we know: The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”
Part of the famous letter Chief Seattle to the “white man” about selling the land to them.
“The medieval method of arguing the way to truth did not prepare Europeans for an extra continent. Nor did it help that primitive people discovered inhabiting this new continent, America, in early sixteenth century, were living in a relative state of harmony without the benefit or knowledge of progressive education, rule of law, politics, history, and of course, Christianity. It was clear to observers that these primitive people were surviving without European culture, happily so, thriving in voluntary, organized and functional societies of countless Indian nations and more countless tribes within these nations.
“Sixteenth century Europe was awash in utopian fervor looking for the cultural absurdity of an ideal society. Once word spread of the immaculate harmony of these primitives a world away, shock and awe led to mocking them, setting off the spread across Europe of radical concepts of free association. No longer should there be submission to the rule of law and authority, but communities should come together of their own free will and voluntarily agree to live in harmony sans laws. Europe, free association advocates insisted, should adopt what appeared to be the system of the American primitive tribes.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Nowhere Man” in “Nowhere Land” (2006 unpublished)
* * * * * * * * * *
I
What should we make of “Indian talk” from a Chief Seattle? Clearly he lost. Or what should we make of the reaction of European society after America was discovered with primitives living in harmony with nature?
To give you a sense of the impact on European intellectuals, one hundred years later or in the late seventeenth century, the British empiricist, John Locke (1632 – 1704) would come up with his theories of liberal democracy: "Two Treatises on Government" (1690). It was published anonymously. It constituted Locke’s reply to the patriarchal “Divine Right of Kings."
Locke’s work embodied the defense of natural rights and a justification for constitutional law, the liberty of the individual, and the rule of the majority. If the ruling body offends against natural law, he argued, it must be overthrown.
To show his debt to Native Americans, he claimed that all men are originally in a state of nature. He believed natural law provided certain rights to be gained by working for them.
The system of capitalism is an economic expression of Lockean principles, a system, of course, that provides goods and services for a financial profit. There was no such system or need for one with Native Americans. The cost of conquering the Indians leaves us where we are today.
II
The Indian or “primitive” culture as we prefer, in very general terms, involves a deep connection with nature and an understanding and respect for the inexorable cycle of life. Man is but a part of Nature and the cosmos. Man does not live by reason alone, but by intuition, imagination. Logic is not stressed as the path to wisdom. Emotions play a more important role. The expression of feelings doesn’t make a man weak.
There is no debate about the existence of God, no ontological argument, no inductive and deductive proofs about the Immovable Mover. The “Force” of Nature is a given, as well as the fact that there is a spirit world that coexists with the realm of physical reality.
There is order to the cosmos with higher powers (gods) at the top of the hierarchy followed by man, animals, and inanimate natural objects. All are part of God.
There is no debate or conflict between Rationalism and Empiricism. The world is neither an idea in the mind of man nor only understood through sensory experience. There is no Kierkegaard “either/or,” or conflict of opposites that permeates Western thought. No dualism in Native American culture.
III
The seamless harmony and flow of Nature is at the heart of its philosophy. Death is not an end; it is simply part of life and a journey into a new phase of existence of the spirit, although this belief is also true of religious people from all cultures. There is a healthy mind-body-spirit connection that is now more accepted in other societies and cultures. A human is one organism, not separate parts, and disease of the soul can become disease of the body. This is the basis of holistic medicine, which has grown in popularity in the West.
Mankind, then, is just part of a harmonious whole, not as the exalted center of the thinking universe, or as a malignant accident of nature. Sunrises, sunsets, and the changing of the seasons measure time, not clocks. Time is simply the life process. Of course, in this age of electronics and the Internet, Native Americans have had to adopt Western ways. The West, however, has never ceased to be intrigued by the philosophies and traditions of Native Americans. Nor have they been successful in burying them.
Native Americans are not a monolith. There are more than 700 nations, and many more tribes within these nations. Although there is diversity, there are common cultural philosophies.
IV
Traditional Native Americans believe whatever name or characteristics people give the Creator, they are all referring to the same deity. Christians, Muslims, Jews and Native Americans are what God made them.
Where Native Americans differ, they do not see themselves stained with Original Sin nor do they see themselves as inherently wicked needing to be saved. After all, they say, how can that be when God made you? So, they don’t need a Savior to redeem them.
Native Americans know mainly of their shared beliefs through oral storytelling rather than dogma or didactic lecturing. They don’t need an arm waving, histrionic and threatening rhetorical messenger to remind them of their sins and damnation. They know Nature gives and takes, and is a challenge to their existence from time to time as it is with every living thing. They take comfort in their oral tradition, and history, mythology, spirituality and philosophy that enlighten and entertain against this reality.
These stories describe a world where animals and humans are equals in the cycle of life. Animals, though hunted and killed, are revered for their sacrifice, and their spirits worshipped because without them humans would perish.
There is no sense, as in Genesis, that mankind was meant to have dominion over the earth and to subdue it, and the other creatures of the earth. The Native American sense of time is also based on natural rhythms of the seasons, cycles of the moon, and their own body clocks.
V
Native Americans don’t talk of a heaven and hell, but of other places of existence replete with spiritual life, and constant interaction between these other worlds. Spirit guides visit humans, and humans can, if they know how, visit other dimensions in astral projection.
VI
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) incorporated a good deal of native spirituality into his paradigms.
Native Americans often have converted to Christian faiths only to eventually return to shamanic religious practices. Jung explained this in his psychiatric terms as the Shadow surfacing.
The Shadow is a person’s dark side, which remains suppressed after years of parental and societal pressure. It is a combination of Freud’s Id (our impulsive side) and Superego (our judgmental or moral side).
Jung claimed social conditioning creates a “good side,” compliant and passive, while containing a “bad side,” lustful and aggressive. Western culture and Christianity could be something strange to the natural culture of Native Americans. The more they strain to assimilate into the wider culture, in this case the American culture, the more likely their dark side will appear. Once it does, Jung suggested most people, no matter their ethnicity, are inclined to project negative shadow elements on people that they dislike or fear.
Native American Indians know that when they have dislike for someone for no reason at all it is perhaps because they see aspects of themselves in that person. It is as if they see their soul reflected back to them as a shadow of themselves.
Jung used this phenomenon in his therapy. He encouraged his clients to own their own shadows, and not try to bury them. Burying them never works. The shadow will be heard, usually when least expected. Similar to Native American philosophy, Jung believed we must own our shadow and integrate it on the path to Wholeness.
VII
A common tradition among Native Americans is the belief in the “Medicine Wheel.” The symbol of the wheel represents the cycle of life, both macrocosmically (the world) and microcosmically (the individual). The four spokes of the wheel are the four directions of the compass. Each direction has its own philosophy, a symbolic animal, and a color.
EAST is the beginning because the sun rises in the east. The color is gold, and the animal is the golden eagle. The philosophy is one of seeing the world as it really is with clarity and without illusions.
SOUTH is the color green, and the symbolic animal is the mouse. The mouse represents the striving and curious nature that is to be encouraged. The mouse is shrewd, savvy and dogged explorer.
WEST is where the sun sets, and the color is black. The animal is the bear. The bear is a nocturnal creature and hibernates in a cave. The bear is the symbol of introspection. Most of our minds are subconscious, and traverse darkened realms, as the bear prowls the night indulged in introspection to find illumination. This indicates a highly sophisticated understanding of the human mind.
NORTH represents winter, and the color is the white of the snow. The totem animals are the wolf and the buffalo. These animals represent intelligence and insight, things that often come too late in the winter of our lives.
Native Americans believe, should you reach the center of the wheel where the spokes meet, you will have perfect balance. This is similar to Jung’s notion of individuation in which there is the successful integration of all the disparate aspects of our body, mind, and spirit.
VIII
Some Native Americans regard a criminal as a sick person, not an evil person. What the sick person needs is healing rituals and ceremonies and rehabilitation until well. A repeated offender, who fails to respond to this wellness regime, and is deemed beyond redemption while remaining a threat to the lives of tribe members, is quickly dispatched.
IX
Everyone and everything are connected. Everything has to go somewhere. Nature knows best. We cannot change Nature. There is no free lunch.
Humans are just one small part of the cosmic picture. The cycle of life is one of constant change. But it is not one of chaotic or meaningless change. Everything that is happening is happening for a purpose. Nothing diminishes the purpose even if we have no sense of what that purpose maybe.
People have a body and live in the real world, but they also have a spirit and there is a spiritual world that is as real as the world we see and experience with our five senses.
We are on earth to learn. Learning requires a balance between the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of Nature. The spirit will give us help if we ask. We are meant to achieve maximum human potential and the only sin against God is our failure to use whatever gifts God has given us for our own good and the good of the community.
I share this with you as I reflect on two renditions of this and other related ideas that I have learned from Native Americans. It seems to me we are slipping over the precipice into the void of dangling participles.
I developed one rendition of this problem in NEAR JOURNEY’S END? CAN PLANET EARTH SURIVE SELF-INDULGENT MAN? (2004)
When I could find no publisher, I rewrote it in terms of the same three participles: Past Imperfect, Present Perfect, and Future Perfect.
The second rendition was NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND (2006). This is a take off on the meaning of “utopia,” which is essentially "nowhere."
Native Americans have never worried about utopia or dystopia, or of Sir Thomas More, Ayn Rand or George Orwell and their respective versions of this idea. We brought our cultural plague to Native Americans. Despite this insult, they attempted to teach us how to be good stewards of the earth. We have been poor learners.
___________________________________
Dr. Fisher is an organization/industrial psychologist and former international corporate executive who lives in Tampa, Florida and writes in this genre. He is currently working on a novel of South Africa.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
THE GENESIS OF A THINK TANK, NOT ALWAYS SMOOTH SAILING!
THE GENESIS OF A THINK TANK, NOT ALWAYS SMOOTH SAILING
Reference: As a founding member of THE NAPLES INSTITUTE, conversations between members can set off sparks. What follows is a reaction to a piece by a fellow member. He was sharing how a family friend rose from humble beginnings to some wealth, and his own personal connection in that drama from being a boy of three until the present, nearly forty years later. We are working out the bugs as to what THE NAPLES INSTITUTE proposes to be as a "think tank." This is my reaction to my colleagues defense of his family friend.
START WITH A DEFINITION OF WHO WE ARE
This is touching and personal, but I am still mystified as to what THE NAPLES INSTITUTE is meant to stand for:
(1) Is it to be a think tank to manufacture ideas, or
(2) Is it to spawn millionaires and billionaires, or
(3) Are we to be about wealth creation or
(4) Are we to be about ideas meant to influence people to accept their freedoms and the responsibilities that they entail, or
(5) Are we to be an extension of your interventions into neglected communities?
Notice I’ve not mentioned an “enlightened leadership” foundation. There are enough of those. If our pandemic of leaderless leadership is any indication, they still have not touched the surface of their mission. No, I think a clash of ideas with no single thrust but around a common theme is more appropriate.
There is a Talmudic saying:
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself only, what am I? If not now -- when?"
I WHAT DO PEOPLE WANT?
That is the conundrum of life in which you share quite beautifully the nature of yours, and as I have often done, I share the nature of mine.
They are both subjective truths that are relevant to each of us, individually. In getting beyond ours, we open others to discovering their own. To my mind, it is all about freedom, something that terrifies us, and which few of us practice in its most elemental form, while projecting the blame for our angst everywhere but where it belongs -- with us!
We want comfort not conflict, security not opportunity, safety not challenge, someone to think for us not to think for ourselves. We are attracted to the cage, and it is of our own making, while conning ourselves to believe that "we are free!"
The world is turning a corner that I see very clearly and wonder if others do as well. That corner is less interested in wealth creation than better asset distribution so that people, for starters, can have safe drinking water and adequate plumbing to combat disease.
You give an example of rags to riches. That is a Horatio Alger story, a good story, a personal story, and one that resonates with you. I don't happen to think most of us can identify with Warren Buffet, nice as he is, or Bill Gates, as generous as he is now that he is wealthy. They are like Rock stars in a celebrity universe that doesn’t interest much less touch us.
II THE IDOLS OF OUR WAYS ARE NOT NEW
So late we learn. Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626) took to science to get away from idolatry. He came up with impediments preventing people of his times from seeing things clearly and called them "idols":
(1) Idols of the tribe. Bacon was referring to the sense of self-importance some people have of their place in the scheme of things. Hollywood actors, who mouth other people's lines, think their opinions count for more than Joe Blow working in a diner.
(2) Idols of the Cave. This is the idea of ethnocentrism where a country such as the United States projects its model of economics and politics on Third World countries irrespective of the in situ cultures. Bacon saw a more cynical factor surface in his times. The privileged few thought they could live the good life on the backs of the poor as their divine right. One hundred years later it led to the American and French Revolution.
(3) Idols of the Marketplace. Since the world of business speaks American, the US peddles its products and services without having a clue to the cultures it serves, and is therefore constantly compromised by them. It was the same in Bacon’s day.
(4) Idols of the Theatre. Bacon was talking about the faulty construction of ideas. We in America buy the sobriquet of "lone superpower" and then stumble about the globe on faulty premises and even more faulty perceptions. We like to throw such words as "brilliant" and "genius" and "great" about our leaders and thinkers, which reveals the inherent flaws in our culture.
III WALKING AS A BOY AMONG GIANTS
We are still surfing on economic waves that bless our shores, but we are not necessarily the model for the future of the world much less our own American destiny.
I don't write to be admired. I write to get people on the same page and off the dime doing what they do best in an effort to get the ball rolling toward self-acceptance and self-reliance.
My books and articles are not translated into other languages, but they are meant for peoples of all cultures. Many of these cultures are repressive cultures. It may be that people in these repressive cultures, if they were totally honest, want gain without pain, comfort without conflict, and authority without having to think, which they already have.
I don't have any wealth creating models in my background but I do have a slender connection to idea models.
My one uncle, whom I've written about rather extensively, took Ph.D.'s in economics and psychology after having had to quit high school as a sophomore to help support his two sisters and five brothers after his mother died.
He did four years of high school and four years of college in four years. He taught at St. Ambrose University (Davenport, Iowa), DePaul University (Chicago) and Detroit University (Detroit), all Catholic institutions, the latter a Jesuit university.
He maintained an office as a management consultant and psychologist in the Fisher Building in Detroit across the street from the General Motors Building. He was a consultant for years to the envy of his academic colleagues.
I spent my summers with him at Higgins Lake in central Michigan along with his son, Robert, who died last year, and his personal secretary who traveled with him and who was an outstanding athlete. My uncle's wife died when Robert was born.
My uncle was an intellectual, and one summer when Robert and I were arguing baseball, he decided that he would give seminars at our meals on the great religions of the world.
That happened during summers from my age of 12 to 15, after which I was too active in sports to take these summer vacations any longer.
I tell you this because, unknown to me at the time, these ideas stuck. I became interested in the philosophy of religion and in great religious leaders and philosophers.
My uncle knew many esoteric authors personally: Edgar Casey (the prophet) and Dr. Smiley Blanton (author of LOVE OR PERISH), and Arnold Hutschnecker (author of THE WILL TO LIVE). He introduced me to them at his seminars. He gave seminars in Detroit to the general public on "How to Think," and the "Decline of Our Western Culture." I was then a boy of ten or twelve, and would assist with Robert handing out programs. I always marveled at the confidence of these friends of my uncle.
My mother, his sister, was a reader but much more down to earth. She was also his favorite and the youngest of his siblings while he was the second oldest. The other five brothers all were laborers in Clinton, Iowa factories or railroad workers.
My da, who only went to the seventh grade and was intimidated by books and ideas, wanted me to quit high school after my sophomore year. "But da," I said, "I am an 'A' student." He said, "What has that got to do with the price of bread?"
My mother saw that I was kept in school. She also went to all my football, basketball, baseball games and track meets. My da never attended any of these events. One time the newspaper had me on the "3 A's and B" honor roll in high school when I had four "A's". My mother called the newspaper for a retraction on the front page for the error. My da was embarrassed.
I was an all-state (honorable mention) football player, and played four years of varsity basketball. I received letters-of-intent in football from Northwestern (Chicago), Notre Dame (South Bend), Purdue (Lafayette) and Iowa (Iowa City). My da didn't want me to play college sports, and I wasn’t too interested myself. College athletics are a most demanding job leaving little time for academic study. I was going to college to become educated, not a better athlete.
Athletic scholarships in those days covered books, tuition and boarding. I instead took an academic scholarship that covered tuition only. I kept it all five years of my time at Iowa despite carrying a full load in chemistry, physics, mathematics and other sciences.
I come out of the brutal clay of failed Irish potato farmers, grubby and grimy factory workers, and a community that looked mainly to high school sports for its entertainment of the day. My sadness is that there were many bright students that never received the kind of support athletes received, and moved naturally into predictable and safe careers.
My high school basketball coach was like a surrogate father to me from the age of ten or eleven. He would come over to the courthouse to watch us play baseball (see IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE). I loved and respected him. He once said, "You're a reluctant athlete. I wish you were as interested in basketball as books." My football coach was not as empathetic. He never spoke to me after high school when I didn't play college football.
IV THE NATURE OF MY HARDWIRING
Like you and your inclinations, and me in mine, the die was clearly cast early in our lives.
The difference is you are in the exploratory period that I was in during the 1970s after coming back from South Africa. I was looking for an anchor. It has taken me this long to realize there isn’t one nor should there be. So, we best go with the flow.
The past thirty years I've been in this discovery mode, which I have shared with my readers, hoping that they benefit. I am on a discovery mission to create an understanding of the world I have experienced that may prove helpful to others in the process of discovering and then creating theirs.
Simply put, I am an autodidact when it comes to philosophy. There is not a lot of room with chemistry, physics, mathematics, tons of labs, and languages, outside of a few required core courses, for much philosophy exposure in a scientific curriculum.
However, I did take electives in "understanding fiction" and "understanding poetry," along with a graduate seminar in "Shakespeare.” That is how I got exposure to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The University of Iowa is a haven for writers.
That said you are the writer and thinker you are, and I am the writer and thinker I am. Both are relevant to our times. You may be less conflicting than I am because I am clearly a Catholic thinker with a renegade spirit.
Catholicism believes in religious dogma (with the pope infallible as custodian of dogma), which must be mediated by the middleman that is the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Catholicism has thirteen layers of hierarchical authority, which, incidentally, as once did the secular complex organization until recently.
Protestantism believes religion should be directly between the individual and God with no middleman. Strangely, the "Protestant Work Ethic" has created all these layers of management not unlike the Roman Church with the concomitant pittfals.
This is the reason for my writing, WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990).
V KIERKEGAARD - A PARADOX IS A CONTRADICTION THAT APPEARS NOT TO BE CONTRADICTORY
If you examine my writing, I hold a critical eye up to the complex organization, which has created an army of middlemen between work and workers and has taken for itself most of the economic pie in non performance jobs.
Kierkegaard is right when he says there is "objective truth" and "subjective truth."
Objective Truth, according to him, is something that is true whether you know it or believe it, while Subjective Truth may be true for me but not for you. Krishnamurti said the same thing.
THE GROUP CREATES OBJECTIVE TRUTHS.
The Catholic Church, or the gang of clerics, is an objective truth factory. There we have all the dogmatic "Thou shalts." Opinions of the group, however, are usually wrong.
We managed our society with polls and look at the shape society is in. Polling is a major industry, which even became more major in this electronic age. We seldom read a book; go to a film, or restaurant, much less send our kids to a college that doesn’t have the seal of approval of the "Top Ten."
OBJECTIVE TRUTHS ARE WHAT WE OURSELVES THINK.
People of objective truth are suspicious of groupthink. They are mavericks. They base what they think and believe from sensory experience and what they read and observe that confirms such subjectivity.
When I was with Honeywell, "brainstorming" was big. This is groupthink taken to the absurd.
It is the reason why writers of provocative ideas become the focus rather than what they say.
The messenger is killed before the message is perceived.
The very legitimate filter of suspicion we all have and should use is directed at the credibility of the messenger rather than the credibility of the message.
The filter asks: what are his or her credentials, how does she or he fit in the scheme of things; what university did he or she attend; and what jobs has she or he held? The message is lost. The exploiters of this advantage are everywhere with uncanny success.
Only this past weekend I went to Sam's Club, Walmart, and Barnes & Noble, looking at the books on display at the three places as BB shopped.
Sam's Club had ten books and Walmart had five books prominently displayed --- all national best sellers. Barnes & Noble had all of these best sellers displayed in a tapestry of books in front as you come in the door.
I smiled to BB. "The self-fulfilling prophecy works here, too."
"What?"
"You can't help but be a best seller if the only books displayed prominently are best sellers."
"Oh."
"That's all, oh?"
She looks at her list. "You going to buy a book?"
I smiled again, thinking, BB you are so precious. You keep me tethered.
* * *
"If you show it, it will sell." This is "groupthink" worthy of readers. It is a catholic tradition spawned by the Catholic mystique. It is something the Roman Catholic Church slid into Western culture without anyone noticing.
VI TO HAVE A FRIEND YOU MUST BE A FRIEND TO YOURSELF
My Catholic education taught me discipline, completing my work, punctuality, to value reading (we had to make 18 book reports each year in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade), the power of myth and the intoxication of rites of passage and ritual.
Now, an old man, although I don't attend Mass, the Church knows it still owns me.
One of the objectives of my writing, and the reason I desire to be part of the think tank, is not to do wonderful humanitarian things for everybody, but to encourage people to think on their own.
People are perfectly capable of thinking given the inclination. But that means swaying them to think differently than their neighbors; to decide things for themselves; and then to have the integrity to stand up for what they believe despite the inevitable pressure to conform to groupthink.
Erich Fromm wrote a wonderful and perceptive book called "Escape From Freedom" (1941). We are, most of us, afraid to live an uncompromising life. It is a scary prospect. A think tank can nudge us in the right direction.
We are afraid not to belong, not to be accepted, not to be recognized, not to be noticed, when we don't belong to ourselves, don't accept ourselves as we are, don't take honest pleasure in our little victories, and fail to be self-aware, and therefore aware of others. Think of it. Each of these is a wall of our own cage. No wonder we have a sense of anxiety. No wonder we are afraid of freedom.
The Catholic Church builds on this angst. It is why I wrote THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).
There is only one posted review of THE TABOO on www.amazon.com, and that reader trashes the book.
She was looking for a book on how to be self-assertive. In other words, how to give as well as she got, not to have a meeting of the mind with herself.
True to objective truth, she attacked the author, not his message. She was in form and a predictable member of groupthink. Yet, I applaud her for going to the effort of expressing her anger so that everyone could see it. That was a step in the right direction. She may not have noticed but she was demonstrating the spirit of the book she trashed.
VII MAYBE I SHOULD BE A BUDDHIST
I will close this with: my first introduction to Jean Paul Sartre was reading his play, "No Exist," in the original French in college. I was never much of a French student, but he got my attention.
Wow! Did he ever! Sartre claimed we were condemned to freedom, and I think he has a point. But we don't want its responsibility, which I think is also true.
We conform to the comforts we derive from being subsumed under a structured culture because our culture is a refuge from freedom: in the home, community, at school, and in our work and play.
My focus in my books and articles has been on the professional worker. I attempt to rally him or her against this dread of authenticity in a world of inauthentic camp followers, cookie-cutter ciphers, true believers, bureaucrats, and automatons.
The score so far is "Them - 40,000 -- Fisher - 4 (but who’s counting?)." Maybe I should become a Buddhist.
Be always well, and keep thinking and believing and growing,
Jim
PS In 1440 Johannes Gutenberg, a gold smith and gem cutter, got the date of the fair wrong and found himself in the hapless position of all his wares to sell and no market. He needed to get the word out quickly, and perfected a movable type cast in metal that could be evenly spaced and set on a printing press. The rest is history. He revolutionized the world for the next nearly 600 years. What will the world be like 600 years from now with the Internet? LOOKING BACKWARD (1888) by Edward Bellamy, a medical doctor, envisioned a Utopian society in the year 2000, or 112 years after he published his book. Maybe in a few hundred more years, who knows?
_________________
Dr. Fisher books mentioned here are available on this website or from your Internet provider.
Reference: As a founding member of THE NAPLES INSTITUTE, conversations between members can set off sparks. What follows is a reaction to a piece by a fellow member. He was sharing how a family friend rose from humble beginnings to some wealth, and his own personal connection in that drama from being a boy of three until the present, nearly forty years later. We are working out the bugs as to what THE NAPLES INSTITUTE proposes to be as a "think tank." This is my reaction to my colleagues defense of his family friend.
START WITH A DEFINITION OF WHO WE ARE
This is touching and personal, but I am still mystified as to what THE NAPLES INSTITUTE is meant to stand for:
(1) Is it to be a think tank to manufacture ideas, or
(2) Is it to spawn millionaires and billionaires, or
(3) Are we to be about wealth creation or
(4) Are we to be about ideas meant to influence people to accept their freedoms and the responsibilities that they entail, or
(5) Are we to be an extension of your interventions into neglected communities?
Notice I’ve not mentioned an “enlightened leadership” foundation. There are enough of those. If our pandemic of leaderless leadership is any indication, they still have not touched the surface of their mission. No, I think a clash of ideas with no single thrust but around a common theme is more appropriate.
There is a Talmudic saying:
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself only, what am I? If not now -- when?"
I WHAT DO PEOPLE WANT?
That is the conundrum of life in which you share quite beautifully the nature of yours, and as I have often done, I share the nature of mine.
They are both subjective truths that are relevant to each of us, individually. In getting beyond ours, we open others to discovering their own. To my mind, it is all about freedom, something that terrifies us, and which few of us practice in its most elemental form, while projecting the blame for our angst everywhere but where it belongs -- with us!
We want comfort not conflict, security not opportunity, safety not challenge, someone to think for us not to think for ourselves. We are attracted to the cage, and it is of our own making, while conning ourselves to believe that "we are free!"
The world is turning a corner that I see very clearly and wonder if others do as well. That corner is less interested in wealth creation than better asset distribution so that people, for starters, can have safe drinking water and adequate plumbing to combat disease.
You give an example of rags to riches. That is a Horatio Alger story, a good story, a personal story, and one that resonates with you. I don't happen to think most of us can identify with Warren Buffet, nice as he is, or Bill Gates, as generous as he is now that he is wealthy. They are like Rock stars in a celebrity universe that doesn’t interest much less touch us.
II THE IDOLS OF OUR WAYS ARE NOT NEW
So late we learn. Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626) took to science to get away from idolatry. He came up with impediments preventing people of his times from seeing things clearly and called them "idols":
(1) Idols of the tribe. Bacon was referring to the sense of self-importance some people have of their place in the scheme of things. Hollywood actors, who mouth other people's lines, think their opinions count for more than Joe Blow working in a diner.
(2) Idols of the Cave. This is the idea of ethnocentrism where a country such as the United States projects its model of economics and politics on Third World countries irrespective of the in situ cultures. Bacon saw a more cynical factor surface in his times. The privileged few thought they could live the good life on the backs of the poor as their divine right. One hundred years later it led to the American and French Revolution.
(3) Idols of the Marketplace. Since the world of business speaks American, the US peddles its products and services without having a clue to the cultures it serves, and is therefore constantly compromised by them. It was the same in Bacon’s day.
(4) Idols of the Theatre. Bacon was talking about the faulty construction of ideas. We in America buy the sobriquet of "lone superpower" and then stumble about the globe on faulty premises and even more faulty perceptions. We like to throw such words as "brilliant" and "genius" and "great" about our leaders and thinkers, which reveals the inherent flaws in our culture.
III WALKING AS A BOY AMONG GIANTS
We are still surfing on economic waves that bless our shores, but we are not necessarily the model for the future of the world much less our own American destiny.
I don't write to be admired. I write to get people on the same page and off the dime doing what they do best in an effort to get the ball rolling toward self-acceptance and self-reliance.
My books and articles are not translated into other languages, but they are meant for peoples of all cultures. Many of these cultures are repressive cultures. It may be that people in these repressive cultures, if they were totally honest, want gain without pain, comfort without conflict, and authority without having to think, which they already have.
I don't have any wealth creating models in my background but I do have a slender connection to idea models.
My one uncle, whom I've written about rather extensively, took Ph.D.'s in economics and psychology after having had to quit high school as a sophomore to help support his two sisters and five brothers after his mother died.
He did four years of high school and four years of college in four years. He taught at St. Ambrose University (Davenport, Iowa), DePaul University (Chicago) and Detroit University (Detroit), all Catholic institutions, the latter a Jesuit university.
He maintained an office as a management consultant and psychologist in the Fisher Building in Detroit across the street from the General Motors Building. He was a consultant for years to the envy of his academic colleagues.
I spent my summers with him at Higgins Lake in central Michigan along with his son, Robert, who died last year, and his personal secretary who traveled with him and who was an outstanding athlete. My uncle's wife died when Robert was born.
My uncle was an intellectual, and one summer when Robert and I were arguing baseball, he decided that he would give seminars at our meals on the great religions of the world.
That happened during summers from my age of 12 to 15, after which I was too active in sports to take these summer vacations any longer.
I tell you this because, unknown to me at the time, these ideas stuck. I became interested in the philosophy of religion and in great religious leaders and philosophers.
My uncle knew many esoteric authors personally: Edgar Casey (the prophet) and Dr. Smiley Blanton (author of LOVE OR PERISH), and Arnold Hutschnecker (author of THE WILL TO LIVE). He introduced me to them at his seminars. He gave seminars in Detroit to the general public on "How to Think," and the "Decline of Our Western Culture." I was then a boy of ten or twelve, and would assist with Robert handing out programs. I always marveled at the confidence of these friends of my uncle.
My mother, his sister, was a reader but much more down to earth. She was also his favorite and the youngest of his siblings while he was the second oldest. The other five brothers all were laborers in Clinton, Iowa factories or railroad workers.
My da, who only went to the seventh grade and was intimidated by books and ideas, wanted me to quit high school after my sophomore year. "But da," I said, "I am an 'A' student." He said, "What has that got to do with the price of bread?"
My mother saw that I was kept in school. She also went to all my football, basketball, baseball games and track meets. My da never attended any of these events. One time the newspaper had me on the "3 A's and B" honor roll in high school when I had four "A's". My mother called the newspaper for a retraction on the front page for the error. My da was embarrassed.
I was an all-state (honorable mention) football player, and played four years of varsity basketball. I received letters-of-intent in football from Northwestern (Chicago), Notre Dame (South Bend), Purdue (Lafayette) and Iowa (Iowa City). My da didn't want me to play college sports, and I wasn’t too interested myself. College athletics are a most demanding job leaving little time for academic study. I was going to college to become educated, not a better athlete.
Athletic scholarships in those days covered books, tuition and boarding. I instead took an academic scholarship that covered tuition only. I kept it all five years of my time at Iowa despite carrying a full load in chemistry, physics, mathematics and other sciences.
I come out of the brutal clay of failed Irish potato farmers, grubby and grimy factory workers, and a community that looked mainly to high school sports for its entertainment of the day. My sadness is that there were many bright students that never received the kind of support athletes received, and moved naturally into predictable and safe careers.
My high school basketball coach was like a surrogate father to me from the age of ten or eleven. He would come over to the courthouse to watch us play baseball (see IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE). I loved and respected him. He once said, "You're a reluctant athlete. I wish you were as interested in basketball as books." My football coach was not as empathetic. He never spoke to me after high school when I didn't play college football.
IV THE NATURE OF MY HARDWIRING
Like you and your inclinations, and me in mine, the die was clearly cast early in our lives.
The difference is you are in the exploratory period that I was in during the 1970s after coming back from South Africa. I was looking for an anchor. It has taken me this long to realize there isn’t one nor should there be. So, we best go with the flow.
The past thirty years I've been in this discovery mode, which I have shared with my readers, hoping that they benefit. I am on a discovery mission to create an understanding of the world I have experienced that may prove helpful to others in the process of discovering and then creating theirs.
Simply put, I am an autodidact when it comes to philosophy. There is not a lot of room with chemistry, physics, mathematics, tons of labs, and languages, outside of a few required core courses, for much philosophy exposure in a scientific curriculum.
However, I did take electives in "understanding fiction" and "understanding poetry," along with a graduate seminar in "Shakespeare.” That is how I got exposure to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The University of Iowa is a haven for writers.
That said you are the writer and thinker you are, and I am the writer and thinker I am. Both are relevant to our times. You may be less conflicting than I am because I am clearly a Catholic thinker with a renegade spirit.
Catholicism believes in religious dogma (with the pope infallible as custodian of dogma), which must be mediated by the middleman that is the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Catholicism has thirteen layers of hierarchical authority, which, incidentally, as once did the secular complex organization until recently.
Protestantism believes religion should be directly between the individual and God with no middleman. Strangely, the "Protestant Work Ethic" has created all these layers of management not unlike the Roman Church with the concomitant pittfals.
This is the reason for my writing, WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990).
V KIERKEGAARD - A PARADOX IS A CONTRADICTION THAT APPEARS NOT TO BE CONTRADICTORY
If you examine my writing, I hold a critical eye up to the complex organization, which has created an army of middlemen between work and workers and has taken for itself most of the economic pie in non performance jobs.
Kierkegaard is right when he says there is "objective truth" and "subjective truth."
Objective Truth, according to him, is something that is true whether you know it or believe it, while Subjective Truth may be true for me but not for you. Krishnamurti said the same thing.
THE GROUP CREATES OBJECTIVE TRUTHS.
The Catholic Church, or the gang of clerics, is an objective truth factory. There we have all the dogmatic "Thou shalts." Opinions of the group, however, are usually wrong.
We managed our society with polls and look at the shape society is in. Polling is a major industry, which even became more major in this electronic age. We seldom read a book; go to a film, or restaurant, much less send our kids to a college that doesn’t have the seal of approval of the "Top Ten."
OBJECTIVE TRUTHS ARE WHAT WE OURSELVES THINK.
People of objective truth are suspicious of groupthink. They are mavericks. They base what they think and believe from sensory experience and what they read and observe that confirms such subjectivity.
When I was with Honeywell, "brainstorming" was big. This is groupthink taken to the absurd.
It is the reason why writers of provocative ideas become the focus rather than what they say.
The messenger is killed before the message is perceived.
The very legitimate filter of suspicion we all have and should use is directed at the credibility of the messenger rather than the credibility of the message.
The filter asks: what are his or her credentials, how does she or he fit in the scheme of things; what university did he or she attend; and what jobs has she or he held? The message is lost. The exploiters of this advantage are everywhere with uncanny success.
Only this past weekend I went to Sam's Club, Walmart, and Barnes & Noble, looking at the books on display at the three places as BB shopped.
Sam's Club had ten books and Walmart had five books prominently displayed --- all national best sellers. Barnes & Noble had all of these best sellers displayed in a tapestry of books in front as you come in the door.
I smiled to BB. "The self-fulfilling prophecy works here, too."
"What?"
"You can't help but be a best seller if the only books displayed prominently are best sellers."
"Oh."
"That's all, oh?"
She looks at her list. "You going to buy a book?"
I smiled again, thinking, BB you are so precious. You keep me tethered.
* * *
"If you show it, it will sell." This is "groupthink" worthy of readers. It is a catholic tradition spawned by the Catholic mystique. It is something the Roman Catholic Church slid into Western culture without anyone noticing.
VI TO HAVE A FRIEND YOU MUST BE A FRIEND TO YOURSELF
My Catholic education taught me discipline, completing my work, punctuality, to value reading (we had to make 18 book reports each year in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade), the power of myth and the intoxication of rites of passage and ritual.
Now, an old man, although I don't attend Mass, the Church knows it still owns me.
One of the objectives of my writing, and the reason I desire to be part of the think tank, is not to do wonderful humanitarian things for everybody, but to encourage people to think on their own.
People are perfectly capable of thinking given the inclination. But that means swaying them to think differently than their neighbors; to decide things for themselves; and then to have the integrity to stand up for what they believe despite the inevitable pressure to conform to groupthink.
Erich Fromm wrote a wonderful and perceptive book called "Escape From Freedom" (1941). We are, most of us, afraid to live an uncompromising life. It is a scary prospect. A think tank can nudge us in the right direction.
We are afraid not to belong, not to be accepted, not to be recognized, not to be noticed, when we don't belong to ourselves, don't accept ourselves as we are, don't take honest pleasure in our little victories, and fail to be self-aware, and therefore aware of others. Think of it. Each of these is a wall of our own cage. No wonder we have a sense of anxiety. No wonder we are afraid of freedom.
The Catholic Church builds on this angst. It is why I wrote THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).
There is only one posted review of THE TABOO on www.amazon.com, and that reader trashes the book.
She was looking for a book on how to be self-assertive. In other words, how to give as well as she got, not to have a meeting of the mind with herself.
True to objective truth, she attacked the author, not his message. She was in form and a predictable member of groupthink. Yet, I applaud her for going to the effort of expressing her anger so that everyone could see it. That was a step in the right direction. She may not have noticed but she was demonstrating the spirit of the book she trashed.
VII MAYBE I SHOULD BE A BUDDHIST
I will close this with: my first introduction to Jean Paul Sartre was reading his play, "No Exist," in the original French in college. I was never much of a French student, but he got my attention.
Wow! Did he ever! Sartre claimed we were condemned to freedom, and I think he has a point. But we don't want its responsibility, which I think is also true.
We conform to the comforts we derive from being subsumed under a structured culture because our culture is a refuge from freedom: in the home, community, at school, and in our work and play.
My focus in my books and articles has been on the professional worker. I attempt to rally him or her against this dread of authenticity in a world of inauthentic camp followers, cookie-cutter ciphers, true believers, bureaucrats, and automatons.
The score so far is "Them - 40,000 -- Fisher - 4 (but who’s counting?)." Maybe I should become a Buddhist.
Be always well, and keep thinking and believing and growing,
Jim
PS In 1440 Johannes Gutenberg, a gold smith and gem cutter, got the date of the fair wrong and found himself in the hapless position of all his wares to sell and no market. He needed to get the word out quickly, and perfected a movable type cast in metal that could be evenly spaced and set on a printing press. The rest is history. He revolutionized the world for the next nearly 600 years. What will the world be like 600 years from now with the Internet? LOOKING BACKWARD (1888) by Edward Bellamy, a medical doctor, envisioned a Utopian society in the year 2000, or 112 years after he published his book. Maybe in a few hundred more years, who knows?
_________________
Dr. Fisher books mentioned here are available on this website or from your Internet provider.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
FALLACY OF 101 ECONOMICS -- An Exchange
FOR MY READERS:
Don is a fellow Clintonian (Iowa) with whom I grew up. Like me, he first went into science and engineering as a career, than regrouped, and went into psychology with NASA, while remained in both careers in the private sector with high tech companies.
Dr. Don has created a network of more than 300 fellow Clintonians stretched across the globe to keep them in contact with each other and with the source of their good fortune, growing up in Clinton, Iowa, a crescent city on the nose of the Mississippi River as it rolls by Iowa.
A fellow Clintonian, reading something that I had published, offered a professor's take on how the tax system works. This is my reply from the perspective of being a thirty-nine year resident of the State of Florida.
MY COMMENTS ON "101 ECONOMICS"
Don,
This is clever. I enjoyed it. But it is still a chicken and an egg thing, don't you think?
The rich or the upper level economic class of American society illustrate the chicken, and the egg those in the lower number denominations.
We wouldn't have the upper without the lower, but we could have the lower without the upper in a different societal configuration as we see across the world. But this is the United States, and we are ethnocentric to the extreme. We would rather analyze our problems to death as some kind of a game rather than solve them. Solving them would mean making sacrifices, changing tax codes, and actually changing the nature of our priorities (i.e., our behavior), which we find impossible to consider much less do.
We want gain without pain. We do a good job of this by perpetuating the myths that the wealthy have programmed into us to believe as irrefutable: that without them we would not survive as a nation. They have killed our mom & pop grocery stores, our mom & pop ice cream parlors, our mom & pop farms, our mom & pop hardware stores, and on and on, while sending jobs that were the life blood of a community elsewhere, and that makes their myths irrefutable? I don't think so.
We have been sold a bill of goods that big is better and corpocracy is best, and we have fallen in line to support this myth and therefore giving it credence. One of the major reasons we fail on the international scene is that we promulgate this myth to a world that has a decidedly different orientation and perception of existence.
I
I happen to know people who pay $26,000 a year property tax; the guy next door pays $13,000, and they both have essentially the same valued house and property. The first one built from scratch, and the second kept a sliver of the foundation and a wall, and therefore, was classified as "upgrading his domicile."
Both of course are heavy hitters, but know all kinds of tax shelters that blow the professor's economic illustration out of the water. But that is another subject.
II
So, back to the chicken and egg thing. The chicken pays more in actual dollars as the illustration demonstrates but without the egg -- without those millions and millions who pay little taxes -- the country or county (in my case) sinks into the red.
We in Florida just had a vote for property tax relief. It passed. BB and I voted against it because we could see where it would have to cut police, education, and other city and county services.
In our area, alone, this will be by some $50 - 100 million. The shortfall, of course, that nobody wants to think about, will probably in the end cost more than the tax relief just passed. It is an economic oxymoron that politicians favor.
This will no doubt result in raising the sales tax which is already 7 percent in this county and 7.5 in the next. It will likely introduce a state income tax, which we have never had. It will no doubt bump up the sales tax a half point or more, while still failing to tax services, which is our main industry.
Currently, we don't pay sales tax for food, prescription drugs, health services and solar energy investments, or services. Because the property tax reduction passed, chances are we will see cracks in this tax barrier wall as well. But rest assured, politicians will attempt to hide this as much as possible in sleight of hand tricks.
III
For us old codgers, we can't imagine paying a sales tax for Internet purchases here in Florida, but that is coming, too. The Florida Tax Watch has said that property taxes could be reduced by $2 billion annually if Florida collected sales taxes owed on Internet purchases. Don't hold your breath on this.
IV
If I were to come from another planet, I would think economic madness was a precondition to human existence. We don't want to give up sin, so let's tax it!
Here in Florida, the government is looking to ways of expanding the lottery, increasing casino gambling, leasing now free bridges, raiding trust funds, imposing surcharges on strip club, and generally, finding new ways to have sin pay its way by encouraging sin to spread like a prairie fire.
For example, those little minds in Tallahassee that are running the state lottery have come up with a scheme where people who are willing to pay $2 or $3 for a lottery ticket instead of the current $1 can have the same chance at the lottery jackpot, but get this, win two or three times the published jackpot sum in the newspapers.
So, if the jackpot is $5 million, and they hold a $2 or $3 ticket, they can win either $10 million or $15 million. GREED IS GOOD and lottery officials believe people will rush to buy $2 -- $3 tickets. Sin, you are so predictable.
The Seminole Indians Revenge is like a book out of Revelations. These crafty warriors have convinced the Florida governor that the Seminole Nation has a scheme that can relieve Florida of much of its economic woes, and make the governor a hero, by establishing Las Vegas type gambling here in Florida. It is expected to add billions to state coffers.
Since the house is the only winner in the gambling scheme, little concern seems to register about the fall guys and gals in this enterprise.
If Florida makes billions, than the house will be making hundreds of billions, an industry that creates jobs from sin to promote sin and to ultimately establish Dante's Hell for losers.
That said the Florida governor, who is widely popular for reasons beyond my understanding, with a chameleon like instinct for survival, bypassed the state legislature and signed a contract with Andrew Jackson's former nemesis.
"He who waits finally wins," must be an Indian proverb.
The Spanish may have attempted to annihilate Florida Indians some 500 years ago with small pox infected blankets, but the Indian Nation today has discovered a less intrusive way of neutralizing its eternal nemesis with casino sin.
V
Back to reality, our property tax increased for BB and I by 110 percent last year. We represent 50 percent of the Florida households so assessed. Others were assessed 75%, 60%, and down in reverse order to the professor's equation.
Then we had this reality headline yesterday for Tampa: Generous City Benefits Continue Amid Cutbacks.
With the property tax referendum (i.e., Amendment 1) passing, the City of Tampa will have to cut $12 million in its budget. It paid Tampa City employees $16.5 million last year in compensation for unused sick leave and vacation and that is expected to be the same this year.
Earlier in the year, the Tampa mayor announced the elimination of several hundred jobs, and get this, NOT A SINGLE MANAGER IN THE BUNCH. All of the redundant employees were in low level city service sector jobs.
No one ever said politicians had to have backbones, did they?
Of course not! The public sector is no more courageous than the private sector where, as you know, I was right in the thick of it as a Human Resource Director in Planning & Development.
The cushy jobs are always protected in the public and private sector, but the jobs of the real workers doing real things in real time are always expandable. And why? Because real workers have given the cushy job brigade their power. It is another one of corpocracy's perpetuated myths: workers will not work without a supervisor.
In my experience, we could get rid of NINETY PERCENT OF THE DEPARTMENT HEADS and there wouldn't be a glitch in the activity.
On the other hand, eliminate workers who cut lawns, fill potholes, resurface streets, service fire hydrants, repair buildings, put out fires, recover stray animals, clean our reservoirs, protect our persons and property, then the cry of the city is, "Tampa, we have a problem!"
A professor -- and we've both been there -- lives and works and thinks in a surreal world of ideas and algorithms, while the real world works quite differently than a nice exercise in logic. I truly wish it worked in actuality the way the professor illustrates, but capitalism like other social economic systems is sick and showing signs of age and symptoms of senility.
We are a dying society not because we don't protect the rich enough to keep them investing and growing our economy.
We are a dying society because nobody is in charge, and everything goes along on "101 logic" as if that will spell our problems.
No, we would rather argue how many angels are on the head of a pin than prick our pomposity and hubris, and get on with it.
Be always well,
Jim
-----------------
SUBJECT: ECONOMICS 101, OR HOW THE TAX SYSTEM WORKS
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten
comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it
would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every
day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement.
One day, the owner threw them a curve. 'Since you are all such good
customers, he said, 'I'm going to reduce
the cost of your daily beer by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the
first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. What
happens to the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide
the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?' They
realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that
from everybody's share,
then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to
drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to
reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to
work out the amounts each should pay..
And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four
continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men
began to compare their savings.
'I only got a dollar out of the $20,'declared the sixth man. He pointed
to the tenth man,' but he got $10!'
'Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man. 'I only saved a dollar,
too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!'
'That's true!!' shouted the seventh man. 'Why should he get $10 back
when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!'
'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison. 'We didn't get
anything at all. The system exploits the poor!'
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat
down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill,
they discovered something important.
They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our
tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most
benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and
they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking
overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, University of Georgia
For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
_______________
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., an organization/industrial psychologist, former chemist and field chemical engineer, has worked for Nalco Chemical Company, Honeywell, Inc., and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. He has worked across the United States, and in South America, Europe and South Africa, and has traveled extensively in the Middle East and North Africa. He is the author of nine books in the o/i genre with his most recent A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. He encourages exchanges such as this.
Don is a fellow Clintonian (Iowa) with whom I grew up. Like me, he first went into science and engineering as a career, than regrouped, and went into psychology with NASA, while remained in both careers in the private sector with high tech companies.
Dr. Don has created a network of more than 300 fellow Clintonians stretched across the globe to keep them in contact with each other and with the source of their good fortune, growing up in Clinton, Iowa, a crescent city on the nose of the Mississippi River as it rolls by Iowa.
A fellow Clintonian, reading something that I had published, offered a professor's take on how the tax system works. This is my reply from the perspective of being a thirty-nine year resident of the State of Florida.
MY COMMENTS ON "101 ECONOMICS"
Don,
This is clever. I enjoyed it. But it is still a chicken and an egg thing, don't you think?
The rich or the upper level economic class of American society illustrate the chicken, and the egg those in the lower number denominations.
We wouldn't have the upper without the lower, but we could have the lower without the upper in a different societal configuration as we see across the world. But this is the United States, and we are ethnocentric to the extreme. We would rather analyze our problems to death as some kind of a game rather than solve them. Solving them would mean making sacrifices, changing tax codes, and actually changing the nature of our priorities (i.e., our behavior), which we find impossible to consider much less do.
We want gain without pain. We do a good job of this by perpetuating the myths that the wealthy have programmed into us to believe as irrefutable: that without them we would not survive as a nation. They have killed our mom & pop grocery stores, our mom & pop ice cream parlors, our mom & pop farms, our mom & pop hardware stores, and on and on, while sending jobs that were the life blood of a community elsewhere, and that makes their myths irrefutable? I don't think so.
We have been sold a bill of goods that big is better and corpocracy is best, and we have fallen in line to support this myth and therefore giving it credence. One of the major reasons we fail on the international scene is that we promulgate this myth to a world that has a decidedly different orientation and perception of existence.
I
I happen to know people who pay $26,000 a year property tax; the guy next door pays $13,000, and they both have essentially the same valued house and property. The first one built from scratch, and the second kept a sliver of the foundation and a wall, and therefore, was classified as "upgrading his domicile."
Both of course are heavy hitters, but know all kinds of tax shelters that blow the professor's economic illustration out of the water. But that is another subject.
II
So, back to the chicken and egg thing. The chicken pays more in actual dollars as the illustration demonstrates but without the egg -- without those millions and millions who pay little taxes -- the country or county (in my case) sinks into the red.
We in Florida just had a vote for property tax relief. It passed. BB and I voted against it because we could see where it would have to cut police, education, and other city and county services.
In our area, alone, this will be by some $50 - 100 million. The shortfall, of course, that nobody wants to think about, will probably in the end cost more than the tax relief just passed. It is an economic oxymoron that politicians favor.
This will no doubt result in raising the sales tax which is already 7 percent in this county and 7.5 in the next. It will likely introduce a state income tax, which we have never had. It will no doubt bump up the sales tax a half point or more, while still failing to tax services, which is our main industry.
Currently, we don't pay sales tax for food, prescription drugs, health services and solar energy investments, or services. Because the property tax reduction passed, chances are we will see cracks in this tax barrier wall as well. But rest assured, politicians will attempt to hide this as much as possible in sleight of hand tricks.
III
For us old codgers, we can't imagine paying a sales tax for Internet purchases here in Florida, but that is coming, too. The Florida Tax Watch has said that property taxes could be reduced by $2 billion annually if Florida collected sales taxes owed on Internet purchases. Don't hold your breath on this.
IV
If I were to come from another planet, I would think economic madness was a precondition to human existence. We don't want to give up sin, so let's tax it!
Here in Florida, the government is looking to ways of expanding the lottery, increasing casino gambling, leasing now free bridges, raiding trust funds, imposing surcharges on strip club, and generally, finding new ways to have sin pay its way by encouraging sin to spread like a prairie fire.
For example, those little minds in Tallahassee that are running the state lottery have come up with a scheme where people who are willing to pay $2 or $3 for a lottery ticket instead of the current $1 can have the same chance at the lottery jackpot, but get this, win two or three times the published jackpot sum in the newspapers.
So, if the jackpot is $5 million, and they hold a $2 or $3 ticket, they can win either $10 million or $15 million. GREED IS GOOD and lottery officials believe people will rush to buy $2 -- $3 tickets. Sin, you are so predictable.
The Seminole Indians Revenge is like a book out of Revelations. These crafty warriors have convinced the Florida governor that the Seminole Nation has a scheme that can relieve Florida of much of its economic woes, and make the governor a hero, by establishing Las Vegas type gambling here in Florida. It is expected to add billions to state coffers.
Since the house is the only winner in the gambling scheme, little concern seems to register about the fall guys and gals in this enterprise.
If Florida makes billions, than the house will be making hundreds of billions, an industry that creates jobs from sin to promote sin and to ultimately establish Dante's Hell for losers.
That said the Florida governor, who is widely popular for reasons beyond my understanding, with a chameleon like instinct for survival, bypassed the state legislature and signed a contract with Andrew Jackson's former nemesis.
"He who waits finally wins," must be an Indian proverb.
The Spanish may have attempted to annihilate Florida Indians some 500 years ago with small pox infected blankets, but the Indian Nation today has discovered a less intrusive way of neutralizing its eternal nemesis with casino sin.
V
Back to reality, our property tax increased for BB and I by 110 percent last year. We represent 50 percent of the Florida households so assessed. Others were assessed 75%, 60%, and down in reverse order to the professor's equation.
Then we had this reality headline yesterday for Tampa: Generous City Benefits Continue Amid Cutbacks.
With the property tax referendum (i.e., Amendment 1) passing, the City of Tampa will have to cut $12 million in its budget. It paid Tampa City employees $16.5 million last year in compensation for unused sick leave and vacation and that is expected to be the same this year.
Earlier in the year, the Tampa mayor announced the elimination of several hundred jobs, and get this, NOT A SINGLE MANAGER IN THE BUNCH. All of the redundant employees were in low level city service sector jobs.
No one ever said politicians had to have backbones, did they?
Of course not! The public sector is no more courageous than the private sector where, as you know, I was right in the thick of it as a Human Resource Director in Planning & Development.
The cushy jobs are always protected in the public and private sector, but the jobs of the real workers doing real things in real time are always expandable. And why? Because real workers have given the cushy job brigade their power. It is another one of corpocracy's perpetuated myths: workers will not work without a supervisor.
In my experience, we could get rid of NINETY PERCENT OF THE DEPARTMENT HEADS and there wouldn't be a glitch in the activity.
On the other hand, eliminate workers who cut lawns, fill potholes, resurface streets, service fire hydrants, repair buildings, put out fires, recover stray animals, clean our reservoirs, protect our persons and property, then the cry of the city is, "Tampa, we have a problem!"
A professor -- and we've both been there -- lives and works and thinks in a surreal world of ideas and algorithms, while the real world works quite differently than a nice exercise in logic. I truly wish it worked in actuality the way the professor illustrates, but capitalism like other social economic systems is sick and showing signs of age and symptoms of senility.
We are a dying society not because we don't protect the rich enough to keep them investing and growing our economy.
We are a dying society because nobody is in charge, and everything goes along on "101 logic" as if that will spell our problems.
No, we would rather argue how many angels are on the head of a pin than prick our pomposity and hubris, and get on with it.
Be always well,
Jim
-----------------
SUBJECT: ECONOMICS 101, OR HOW THE TAX SYSTEM WORKS
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten
comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it
would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every
day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement.
One day, the owner threw them a curve. 'Since you are all such good
customers, he said, 'I'm going to reduce
the cost of your daily beer by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the
first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. What
happens to the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide
the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?' They
realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that
from everybody's share,
then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to
drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to
reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to
work out the amounts each should pay..
And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four
continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men
began to compare their savings.
'I only got a dollar out of the $20,'declared the sixth man. He pointed
to the tenth man,' but he got $10!'
'Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man. 'I only saved a dollar,
too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!'
'That's true!!' shouted the seventh man. 'Why should he get $10 back
when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!'
'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison. 'We didn't get
anything at all. The system exploits the poor!'
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat
down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill,
they discovered something important.
They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our
tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most
benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and
they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking
overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D. Professor of Economics, University of Georgia
For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
_______________
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., an organization/industrial psychologist, former chemist and field chemical engineer, has worked for Nalco Chemical Company, Honeywell, Inc., and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. He has worked across the United States, and in South America, Europe and South Africa, and has traveled extensively in the Middle East and North Africa. He is the author of nine books in the o/i genre with his most recent A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. He encourages exchanges such as this.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Reflections on This Little Essay: STUCK IN THE SIXTH GRADE
Reference: STUCK IN THE SIXTH GRADE
My dear readers!
Thank you for the many responses I've received from this missive. This little essay has generated more responses than any other I have ever posted on my email or website.
It makes me wonder why. Some have suggested STUCK has universal themes; many have suggested that it should have much wider circulation in such diverse publications as PARENT, READER'S DIGEST, HARPER'S, ATLANTIC MONTHLY to name a few.
Some have suggested that I concentrate on writing lessons for young people.
One simply said, "It is BEAUTIFUL” (the reader’s upper case).
As I've said many times, these things come to me as I walk. I don't attempt to formulate them; my mind does all the work. I simply transcribe them. That is why I describe myself as the PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER.
There can be a lot of reasons to explain the reaction to STUCK.
One might be nostalgia for the way it was and no longer is; another for frustration with the way it is; and more fundamentally, a third may be that people of all ages -- young as well as old -- sense that "what is," that thing we call "reality," is undergoing a possible Quantum leap.
Some paleontologists theorize the plight of all living things on earth take periodic evolutionary leaps, that evolutionary change is not a constant but an interrupted process.
Pitrim Sorokin suggests that such Quantum leaps are manifested every 600 years; that we are at the end of a 600-year-Sensate Cultural Day.
Sorokin's evidence is our modern and postmodern preoccupation with natural biological functions and ephemeral pleasure. He sees us moving into a 600-Ideational Day, where radically new ideas will be embraced. His books, written 70 years ago, read like Nostradamus.
Perhaps our institutions, which seem to be struggling on wobbly legs, are actually in a state of collapse bordering on disintegration, and out of this possible dust will rise a new Phoenix consistent with Sorokin’s prophecy. .
The best evidence is that society is out-of-joint with work, communications and play with the times. We cannot seem to escape our factory mentality or orientation.
WORK is something we do today most strenuously to accomplish too little, when work has moved swiftly from brawn to brains, and from physical effort to mental reflection, or to a new kind of stasis.
When WORK becomes a manufactured center of life than life has to be by design placed on the periphery.
You no longer work to live, but live to work, accumulating more and more of what you don't want or need but simply must have.
This is not your fault but the fault of your factory programming. Our consumer driven economy has resulted in the mummification of human motivation into walking boredom. “Driven” is the operative word as 70 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) depends on us spending until we are broke, or even beyond.
INFORMATION is seldom any longer self-generated but second-third-or-fourth hand through what is popularly known as media. Media are mainly through television and other fun electronics such as the Internet, and less so through printed sources.
People no longer read, digest, assimilate, and process information on-their-own. They rely on media to do it for them.
And what are media?
Media are the processed confections of our time; the "information bologna," or processed lunch meat like data, which is collected from "undisclosed sources," then generated, packaged, distributed, and sold as NEWS, mainly through television or the Internet.
Like lunchmeat, "information bologna" is far removed from the original sources with only vague indications of its original aspect. Not surprisingly, it is as indigestible as these processed meats at your local supermarket, which it resembles more than it would like.
PLAY makes media look like original products by comparison. PLAY has ceased to be spontaneous, or even active, but reactive as media have become, but even more so. The best evidence is professional sport, theatre, art, literature, and even the crafts.
At the end of the SENSATE DAY that Sorokin refers, we are almost, I say almost, a totally passive factory oriented society. Nearly everything is created for our passive consumption. Moreover, at a time when leisure is a distinct possibility, we work harder and harder with the accelerator to the floor burning up rubber and going nowhere.
Yes, I know I keep drumming away at this, and it is easy to so ho hum, but there is a crack in the factory.
You see it in self-published books that are rivaling the established industry, which, incidentally, is dying.
If anyone reading this has read Kathy Flippo or Dixie Land, out of our own frozen tundra, you know how healthy this industry is.
Kathy and Dixie would not consider assuming the mantle of brave souls, but they are. They are both authentic voices of the future and there are hundreds of thousands just like them rises out of the swamps and mountains, and valleys, and wilderness, and plains of our vast land. They are part of the IDEATIONAL CULTURE looming on the horizon. And they are evidence that the Phoenix is rising.
I have suggested elsewhere, however, that we continue to operate in a climate of the pathology of normalcy, when what appears normal is pathological. It is the central theme of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), in which I use the 1970s to compare to today and see the same things happening only with different names of people, places and things.
For the past 100 years we have been developing a working society with passionate determination that would have citizens schooled in the "3-R's" and programmed in punctuality, obedience, politeness, discipline and passivity. We still need the “3-R’s,” but these programmed attributes are counterproductive to a society that needs creative not critical thinking to survive.
We have become a factory society at home, at school, in the workplace, how we generate and distribute our communication, and even in our play.
Everything is organized to the nth degree, and continues to be stubbornly so, even when it no longer works or is relevant.
We who are Americans see ourselves as a superpower when we have 50 million people who cannot read this little missive, and who live at or below the poverty level. As bad as this is, tens of thousands attempt to cross our borders every year because where they are is even more depressing and less sustaining.
Do you think they like coming here to America? They consider it necessary.
We attempt to solve these problems with a factory mentality in an age that no longer operates like a factory, but more like the gravitational tides, and so the constant disappointments and failure to even touch much less deal with reality. People sense this.
We want everyone to be college graduates when we don't have enough carpenters, plumbers, electricians, farmers, gardeners, builders, bricklayers, and other technicians to keep the fabric of society intact. Our infrastructure is decaying for this deficiency.
A factory mentality is a reactive mentality. That is how we have been programmed. It is how we solve our problems at home, in school, at the office and workplace, and in government.
We react to the problems rather than anticipate them. This has created a solution driven industry. The factory mentality is well in evidence with the Dr. Phils and Oprahs who have created an entertainment media to feign to solve problems of the nuclear family, social relationships, and the workplace, while generating a plethora of books to replicate the factory in design and function and purpose.
The fact that it is not working fails to get attention because it is so deeply engrained in our nature. But many people sense that something is awry.
Even now, in this election year, in which well-meaning politicians act as if they are still in the sixth grade while spending millions of dollars, we humor them because we look for them to solve our problems, which they cannot solve, because we remain passive.
We have never grown up to understand leadership, and so look for it as if the Holy Grail.
Our preoccupation with leaders and leadership is symptomatic of society out-of-joint.
A friend copied me on a piece that is flying across the Internet regarding a new book by Lee Iaccoca. I don’t know whether what is quoted is what Iaccoca said or not, but I have read his biography and an unauthorized biography of him, and he is a cigar-smoking, tough-guy talking man’s man, who likes to play the heavy as if he is some kind of a maestro, and we should therefore listen. If any of what was contained in this review of his new book is true, it feeds on what I have said here. We are good at complaining but not resolving, good at generating solutions looking for problems, but have little appetite or inclination to doing the heavy lifting of the problem defining. For example, no one wants to define the problem of immigration because than our slothfulness, rapaciousness and xenophobia may be exposed.
No one has written more perceptively and more profoundly about the problematic nature of the problem solving than William L. Livingston in his books titled “The New Plague” (1985), “Have Fun At Work” (1988), and “Friends in High Places” (1990). You probably never heard of these books, never saw them in bookstores, or saw glowing reviews about them in the national media because they were self-published, and sadly, no longer in circulation. But Livingston planted the seed in my mind and others, and it will continue to bear fruit, as the new day you sense is upon us.
Be always well,
Jim
See www.fisherofideas.com for more information about books mentioned here.
My dear readers!
Thank you for the many responses I've received from this missive. This little essay has generated more responses than any other I have ever posted on my email or website.
It makes me wonder why. Some have suggested STUCK has universal themes; many have suggested that it should have much wider circulation in such diverse publications as PARENT, READER'S DIGEST, HARPER'S, ATLANTIC MONTHLY to name a few.
Some have suggested that I concentrate on writing lessons for young people.
One simply said, "It is BEAUTIFUL” (the reader’s upper case).
As I've said many times, these things come to me as I walk. I don't attempt to formulate them; my mind does all the work. I simply transcribe them. That is why I describe myself as the PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER.
There can be a lot of reasons to explain the reaction to STUCK.
One might be nostalgia for the way it was and no longer is; another for frustration with the way it is; and more fundamentally, a third may be that people of all ages -- young as well as old -- sense that "what is," that thing we call "reality," is undergoing a possible Quantum leap.
Some paleontologists theorize the plight of all living things on earth take periodic evolutionary leaps, that evolutionary change is not a constant but an interrupted process.
Pitrim Sorokin suggests that such Quantum leaps are manifested every 600 years; that we are at the end of a 600-year-Sensate Cultural Day.
Sorokin's evidence is our modern and postmodern preoccupation with natural biological functions and ephemeral pleasure. He sees us moving into a 600-Ideational Day, where radically new ideas will be embraced. His books, written 70 years ago, read like Nostradamus.
Perhaps our institutions, which seem to be struggling on wobbly legs, are actually in a state of collapse bordering on disintegration, and out of this possible dust will rise a new Phoenix consistent with Sorokin’s prophecy. .
The best evidence is that society is out-of-joint with work, communications and play with the times. We cannot seem to escape our factory mentality or orientation.
WORK is something we do today most strenuously to accomplish too little, when work has moved swiftly from brawn to brains, and from physical effort to mental reflection, or to a new kind of stasis.
When WORK becomes a manufactured center of life than life has to be by design placed on the periphery.
You no longer work to live, but live to work, accumulating more and more of what you don't want or need but simply must have.
This is not your fault but the fault of your factory programming. Our consumer driven economy has resulted in the mummification of human motivation into walking boredom. “Driven” is the operative word as 70 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) depends on us spending until we are broke, or even beyond.
INFORMATION is seldom any longer self-generated but second-third-or-fourth hand through what is popularly known as media. Media are mainly through television and other fun electronics such as the Internet, and less so through printed sources.
People no longer read, digest, assimilate, and process information on-their-own. They rely on media to do it for them.
And what are media?
Media are the processed confections of our time; the "information bologna," or processed lunch meat like data, which is collected from "undisclosed sources," then generated, packaged, distributed, and sold as NEWS, mainly through television or the Internet.
Like lunchmeat, "information bologna" is far removed from the original sources with only vague indications of its original aspect. Not surprisingly, it is as indigestible as these processed meats at your local supermarket, which it resembles more than it would like.
PLAY makes media look like original products by comparison. PLAY has ceased to be spontaneous, or even active, but reactive as media have become, but even more so. The best evidence is professional sport, theatre, art, literature, and even the crafts.
At the end of the SENSATE DAY that Sorokin refers, we are almost, I say almost, a totally passive factory oriented society. Nearly everything is created for our passive consumption. Moreover, at a time when leisure is a distinct possibility, we work harder and harder with the accelerator to the floor burning up rubber and going nowhere.
Yes, I know I keep drumming away at this, and it is easy to so ho hum, but there is a crack in the factory.
You see it in self-published books that are rivaling the established industry, which, incidentally, is dying.
If anyone reading this has read Kathy Flippo or Dixie Land, out of our own frozen tundra, you know how healthy this industry is.
Kathy and Dixie would not consider assuming the mantle of brave souls, but they are. They are both authentic voices of the future and there are hundreds of thousands just like them rises out of the swamps and mountains, and valleys, and wilderness, and plains of our vast land. They are part of the IDEATIONAL CULTURE looming on the horizon. And they are evidence that the Phoenix is rising.
I have suggested elsewhere, however, that we continue to operate in a climate of the pathology of normalcy, when what appears normal is pathological. It is the central theme of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), in which I use the 1970s to compare to today and see the same things happening only with different names of people, places and things.
For the past 100 years we have been developing a working society with passionate determination that would have citizens schooled in the "3-R's" and programmed in punctuality, obedience, politeness, discipline and passivity. We still need the “3-R’s,” but these programmed attributes are counterproductive to a society that needs creative not critical thinking to survive.
We have become a factory society at home, at school, in the workplace, how we generate and distribute our communication, and even in our play.
Everything is organized to the nth degree, and continues to be stubbornly so, even when it no longer works or is relevant.
We who are Americans see ourselves as a superpower when we have 50 million people who cannot read this little missive, and who live at or below the poverty level. As bad as this is, tens of thousands attempt to cross our borders every year because where they are is even more depressing and less sustaining.
Do you think they like coming here to America? They consider it necessary.
We attempt to solve these problems with a factory mentality in an age that no longer operates like a factory, but more like the gravitational tides, and so the constant disappointments and failure to even touch much less deal with reality. People sense this.
We want everyone to be college graduates when we don't have enough carpenters, plumbers, electricians, farmers, gardeners, builders, bricklayers, and other technicians to keep the fabric of society intact. Our infrastructure is decaying for this deficiency.
A factory mentality is a reactive mentality. That is how we have been programmed. It is how we solve our problems at home, in school, at the office and workplace, and in government.
We react to the problems rather than anticipate them. This has created a solution driven industry. The factory mentality is well in evidence with the Dr. Phils and Oprahs who have created an entertainment media to feign to solve problems of the nuclear family, social relationships, and the workplace, while generating a plethora of books to replicate the factory in design and function and purpose.
The fact that it is not working fails to get attention because it is so deeply engrained in our nature. But many people sense that something is awry.
Even now, in this election year, in which well-meaning politicians act as if they are still in the sixth grade while spending millions of dollars, we humor them because we look for them to solve our problems, which they cannot solve, because we remain passive.
We have never grown up to understand leadership, and so look for it as if the Holy Grail.
Our preoccupation with leaders and leadership is symptomatic of society out-of-joint.
A friend copied me on a piece that is flying across the Internet regarding a new book by Lee Iaccoca. I don’t know whether what is quoted is what Iaccoca said or not, but I have read his biography and an unauthorized biography of him, and he is a cigar-smoking, tough-guy talking man’s man, who likes to play the heavy as if he is some kind of a maestro, and we should therefore listen. If any of what was contained in this review of his new book is true, it feeds on what I have said here. We are good at complaining but not resolving, good at generating solutions looking for problems, but have little appetite or inclination to doing the heavy lifting of the problem defining. For example, no one wants to define the problem of immigration because than our slothfulness, rapaciousness and xenophobia may be exposed.
No one has written more perceptively and more profoundly about the problematic nature of the problem solving than William L. Livingston in his books titled “The New Plague” (1985), “Have Fun At Work” (1988), and “Friends in High Places” (1990). You probably never heard of these books, never saw them in bookstores, or saw glowing reviews about them in the national media because they were self-published, and sadly, no longer in circulation. But Livingston planted the seed in my mind and others, and it will continue to bear fruit, as the new day you sense is upon us.
Be always well,
Jim
See www.fisherofideas.com for more information about books mentioned here.
Friday, February 08, 2008
STUCK IN THE SIXTH GRADE
STUCK IN THE SIXTH GRADE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 7, 2008
“Tell me what are the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of young men, and I will tell you what is to be the character of the next generation.”
Edmund Burke, English Statesman (1729 – 1797)
THE PROGRAMMATIC PROCESS
When we were sixth graders and twelve-years-old, we had already been programmed to be polite, obedient, to speak when spoken to, to mind our manners, to respect our elders, to do our chores, complete our homework, to stay out of trouble, and be little embarrassment to our family. We were directed not to lie, cheat, steal, or covet the possessions of others; and to respect their privacy. We were also trained to look up to authority figures, trust their commands as they had our best interests at heart, and to believe a man’s word was his bond.
We were also expected to honor and be faithful to the culture of our parents principally reflected in our religion: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, some other religious persuasion, or no religion at all. Whatever were the views of our caretakers and caregivers became indisputably our views, which were to be echoed in our speech and conduct with a consistency to give proof of our virtue.
Consequently, our learning of geography, history, English, arithmetic, social studies, and science paled in comparison with the importance of being polite, obedient, punctual, disciplined, well groomed, humble and submissive. We learned at an early age to fit in rather than be disruptive, to follow instructions rather than to vary creatively, to behave rather than to challenge. To earn high marks in school and enjoy the approval of our elders, we conscientiously gave answers to our examinations consistent with our lesson plans convinced they contained unassailable truths.
Yet, despite this programming, inconsistencies were noted. We were told to pay them little mind. They were exceptions to the rule. What we thought we saw was not what we actually observed, but a figment of our immature imagination. We didn’t see people lying, cheating, stealing, talking ill of their neighbors, or doing something contradictory to what we were told to believe of our elders. We simply lacked an appreciation of the complexities of what was happening.
We were, as sixth graders and twelve-year-olds, an amorphous mass of protoplasm that could be molded and shaped, pushed and shoved, badgered and beaten, pinched and tweaked, criticized and consoled, flattered and cajoled, nurtured and neglected into what we were told we were with little input from ourselves. .
By the end of the sixth grade, we had learned what we should do, should be and should become all of which were still beyond the light of our comprehension. We had been leavened into pleasers of others with little attention directed to pleasing ourselves. But something was happening. The inconsistencies were mounting. We couldn’t conceive of rebelling against it, whatever “it” was, but were increasingly forced to be other directed while being told to be self-directed and self-controlled. In this confusion, we worked hard to be what we were expected to be with little sense of success.
We came to realize our parents lived through our exploits. They found it socially acceptable to brag about us to give themselves a backhanded compliment. Whatever our distinction: beauty, brains, talent, athleticism, gregariousness, or popularity was all about us while not being about us at all.
By the sixth grade nothing was for the fun of it anymore. Life and learning, play and sport were now serious business. We must be the best at what we did and what we were before we knew the difference. We had already been regimented into organized sports and supervised activities by our parents long before the sixth grade playing football, basketball, soccer, and hockey. Now we were expected to excel. The same was true for ballet, ice-skating, social clubs, and extracurricular activities. Our time was organized, no longer free. Our lives depended upon being involved in something constructive every waking moment. We were to be all we could be before we had had a chance to catch our second breath.
Kudos came our way if we stood out in sports or schoolwork or school activities. We were conditioned to accept these accolades with modesty with only our parents and relatives having the luxury of bragging rights.
We didn’t get it by the sixth grade, but it was seeping into our souls that life was not all about us but all about them; not all about living in the world but in conquering the world, as our parents hadn’t. We were brought up to make restitution for their mislaid plans and misspent dreams, for their failures and slights, their fears and doubts, their demons and devils, none of which were ours, but they had become ours by proxy. There was little room to find our way because the place in which we found ourselves had no room for us. It was fully occupied by them. It was theirs not ours. And since we were living their lives as if our own, attempting to find what they had lost and not what we could discover, we were lost almost from the get go.
We were told to be competitive, to stand up for our rights, while being conditioned to be submissive and obedient to the demands of others. What made this conflicting was seeing our parents acting assertive over the powerless and subservient to the powerful. We were instructed to learn the hard lessons of life when we often witnessed our parents being crippled by them. Parents complicated this further attempting to be our best friend rather than our parents. Little learning took place when they excused our foul ups and relieved us of the consequences of our actions. Exaggerating our strengths and understating our weaknesses was forgivable because it was out of unconditioned love.
Parents and elders expected us to behave differently than we saw them behaving. We saw them drinking and smoking, swearing and lying, cheating and stealing, and delighting in the misfortunes of others as coffee table talk. It was natural for us to sample their liquor, sneak a smoke, practice swearing and lying, making fun of those less fortunate, and even shoplift for trinkets in dime stores. When caught and reprimanded, we wondered why it was all right for them and not for us to do. We displayed our angst by punishing others with our schoolbook knowledge or athletic prowess to make them feel small and us big. We justified our petty deceptions as we saw our parents trying to get us into movies and ballgames as our being “under twelve,” when we were already going on thirteen.
Our parents told us to clean our room, and when we didn’t, they cleaned it for us. They told us to do our chores, and when we didn’t, they did them for us. They told us to do our homework, and when we didn’t, they did it for us. They told us to be home on time, but never asked us where we had been or with whom. They grounded us for misbehaving but forgot about it by the next day. Then they wondered why we were always waiting for them to do for us what we could best do for ourselves. We had never been given our own moral compass and therefore had trouble finding our way.
THE IMPORTANCE OF REBELLION: A PERSONAL ODYSSEY
Something is happening in our chemistry as we move through the sixth grade, something that we are discouraged from allowing to happen because it carries the pejorative, “rebellion.” Rebellion is as necessary to finding out who and what we are as the importance of learning the three “R’s.
We know the story of the prodigal son who rebels and leaves home only to return to find out how wise his father has become. There is truth in this, but remember the prodigal son did rebel, did experience the world as it is, and we are programmed to skip that step, and move from adolescence to adulthood without the maturing process.
As a consequence, there is a good chance we are protected from knowing ourselves and therefore experiencing life directly. We are as a society suspended in terminal adolescence with the emotional maturity of an obedient and submissive twelve-year-old. This is evident in our arrested development and counterdependence on society and the workplace as surrogate parent, caretaker and caregiver for our total well being.
Society is not comfortable with an adult perspective or the mindset and behavior of adults. Adults have their own minds, are confrontational, do not accept things simply on the authority of others, or at face value. They are discriminating, self-directed and self-motivated, and do not need the approval of others to approve of themselves. They don’t need managers to tell them they are doing a good job. They know in their bones the quality of their work. They are professionals.
We leave the leadership of our lives up to others who are as lost and confused as we are, and then wonder why we have our foot to the peddle burning up rubber and going nowhere.
I
My personal odyssey has been to go against the grain to create another possibility, which has not been smooth or trouble free or especially exemplifying. It has been a struggle, but it has been my struggle, which has given me the courage to write these words.
If you were like me, reared in Irish Roman Catholicism, where your religion was your lone security, you would grasp it as if an anchor in a raging storm. My first five years of life were traumatic and lonely as I was without my mother and father. I was instead shuttled, along with my little sister, from relative to relative and foster parent to foster parent. My da was attempting to discover his adult legs as a parent, while my mother’s emotional and physical health were constantly in jeopardy as she was confined to care giving birth to three children in four years.
By the sixth grade, you realize there is a difference between you and other children even in a Catholic parochial school. You now have your mother and father, your little sister and little brother, and baby sister all in your own home. It is years since those difficult early days, but you witness daily your parents struggle to make ends meet. You see how the lack of education cripples your da in his job and sense of self-worth. You cower from his temper flare-ups, and retreat into yourself. Some of your classmates are well off and have bright new clothes with all the valued accessories, which are not available to you. This causes a peculiar reaction. You don’t envy them for their good fortune, but look at them more critically and see they are not any brighter, more athletic, or better looking than you are. You discover arrogance in yourself that is not always becoming to your pastor or the good Sisters of St. Francis, who teach you at St. Patrick’s School.
II
At home, I find myself living in a climate of psychological abuse as my da has a violent temper constantly painting the air blue with his shouting, swearing, and woe is me self-pity. This is compounded when his Irish railroad buddies come to drink coffee, eat fudge cake and smoke cigarettes, which is every week. They don’t notice me as I have become indistinguishable from the furniture as I listen to why they have failed to make satisfactory progress in life.
The men are in the living room and their wives in the kitchen, all smoking, laughing, and decrying their sad status. It is hard for me to breathe in this little house and I invariably get a migraine headache. All these men claim to be Irish Catholic to the core, but not one of them attends Sunday Mass, only their wives.
My mother is a devout Catholic, and I find myself nearly as devout as she, thus maintaining my anchor. That means I believe unconditionally everything I have learned about my faith in the Baltimore Catechism. I learned later that my faith had been sanitized to a consistency that left little room for doubt or skepticism, and therefore even less room for truth.
One day I wander into the public library when I am in the sixth grade, and happen on a book on the “Inquisition,” something that I had never heard of before. The pictures and accounts in the book are terrifying. It shows people being tortured on the rack and burned at the stake for being heretics. I tell myself, it can’t be true.
When I ask Sister at school, she tells me it doesn’t concern me. When I ask Father, he says, “What gives you the idea there was an Inquisition?” When I ask my mother, she says, “That was a dark period in our church history.”
Here I am sixty years later reminiscing about that period. I thank my mother for her candor. No one else conceded it was true, that the church is, indeed, a human institution with buried skeletons, as do we all.
Later, I ask my da, and he confesses he has no idea what I’m talking about. My great aunt Annie laughs and slaps her leg when I tell her. I lived with her and my uncle Mart when I was four.
“Your father is not well acquainted with his catechism,” she says with a knowing twinkle in her eyes. “One day when your father was only seven, he rushed home from St. Patrick’s shouting with joy to his grandmother, ‘Granny, granny, I learned a new prayer today.’”
“What prayer was that, Raymond?”
“Across the Street.”
It was “The Apostles Creed.” His religious insight was pretty close to “across the street,” that is, until the final innings of his life when he was dying of bone cancer. Then he received the Last Sacraments of the Church, and Holy Communion nearly every day.
III
In the sixth grade, all of these moments coalesce into one nature. Yet it is natural for the human spirit to attempt to stretch beyond these parochial confines. What helps to get me out of my introspective nature and unto the playground of life is not actually a playground at all, but an expanse of lawn between the Clinton County Jail and the Clinton County Courthouse. Four streets border this rectangular block. I live only three doors down and across the street from this set of buildings.
Here we play baseball from sunrise to sunset on a diamond laid out by the deputy sheriffs with a wire mesh screen backstop provided by the county sheriff. Our team is known as the “Courthouse Tigers,” named by a deputy for his favorite team, the Detroit Tigers.
In the fall, we play tackle football on this lawn but without shoulder pads and helmets, or goal posts. A regulation basketball court is also laid out at one end with two basketball hoops on an earthen court. In the winter, the lawn is turned into a bowl and filled with water, which quickly freezes into ice, and becomes our ice skating rink. Music is piped out of the sheriff’s garage that is situated next to and north of the jail.
That place and space is my haven and heaven, and a defining feature of my youth through the sixth grade. There I meet a boy, who lives across the street from the county jail. The first sentence of my novel (In the Shadow of the Courthouse 2003) attests to his influence: “The first day of my life was when I was eight-years-old and met Bobby Witt.”
As sixth graders, we are both starters on St. Patrick’s eighth grade basketball team. It is during World War Two. Bobby is a boy that inspires other boys, lifts them up to be better than they are, not by word but deed. He is fun and funny, a good student, and a better friend, but most of all, a devout Roman Catholic, who cherishes his faith with no need for proselytizing zeal.
Things that disturb me do not bother him. I fail to understand why. I confess my concerns as we walk to school, which is only two blocks away, or downtown to a movie, which is less than a mile, or to an Industrial League baseball game in Riverview Stadium, which is only four blocks away and close to the Mississippi River, or to the municipal swimming pool, which is parallel to the river and only a couple blocks south and east of the stadium.
This is our world, all in the shadow of the four-sided courthouse clock that chimes every half hour. We are in our cocoon, a safety net that, unbeknown to us, will protect us all our lives for having experienced it. Bobby listens to me on these walks, and says, “Why do you bother your mind about these things? You don’t know what you’re talking about anyway.”
It is true. I don’t but that doesn’t seem to help. I wonder why all the Negroes live in a one-block area of Maple Street; why I never see them at the municipal swimming pool, or rarely at baseball games; why they don’t come over to the courthouse when they live only three blocks away; or why I never see them at the movies. No Negroes work in the factories or the department stores downtown. I wonder where they work. None of them go to school at St. Patrick’s. Aren’t any of them Catholics? I go on and on beating my concern to death, until Bobby becomes totally bored and puts his hands over his ears.
IV
It slowly registers that there are good people who are content with what is, but for some reason, I’m not. Through the sixth grade, for instance, I play on a basketball team at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and Bobby never plays there. He doesn’t even come down to the Y. That puzzles me.
“You know what Father says. It’s not a good place for Catholics to be.”
“But it’s just basketball, Bobby.”
“Father says it can corrupt our minds; that’s good enough for me.”
Why isn’t it good enough for me? I can’t explain it, nor can I tell Bobby I attended a YMCA Conference. It must be a mortal sin. Several ministers talk about athletics and moral commitment. I don’t understand it all, but they are so eloquent. They don’t mumble their words, or have a lot of “ah” pauses. Their voices are music to my ears. They talk in complete sentences, and when they pause, it is like they are allowing time for the thought to sink in. They don’t talk in the monotone way Father does when he reads the epistle and gospel in Sunday’s Mass.
His sermons after the gospel seem to cause him pain, but not as much as they give. I wonder why ministers speak so well and priest so poorly, that is, parish priests. Oblate Fathers who travel across the country giving Novenas speak like ministers.
I conclude that priests are not taught how to give sermons, but left to wing it, while ministers are well schooled in the theatrics of delivery, and that is the reason for the difference.
Father seems so bored when he reads the gospel and only passionate when he is asking for money. His money sermons, though, always make me squirm because my mother puts twenty-five cents in the envelope every Sunday, and then Father reads at the end of the year how much the 200 families in the parish have given.
He starts with the highest contributors and ends with the lowest, reading every single family name in the parish. The lawyers and doctors and businessmen are always at the top with $300 - $400, while my family is at or near the bottom with $10 - $12, sometimes even less. It never seems to total the $13 it should, and I know my mother never misses a Sunday Offertory.
Thirteen dollars isn’t much in 2008 but it is a good deal more when you multiply it by a factor of ten, which would make it $130 in 2008 dollars. Nonetheless, I have never outgrown the humiliation of having my family’s poor financial status broadcast to the world. Bobby’s family never gives anymore, but he could care less. It isn’t his problem. It is still my problem more than sixty years later.
The upside of this is we don’t have to pay tuition to attend this private Catholic school. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Davenport wants to be sure we are fully indoctrinated in the faith. With this mainly subliminal programming, we automatically regurgitate the correct responses to matters of faith and morals:
Question: What is the true Church?
Answer: The only true Church is the Holy Roman Catholic Church established by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and no other church shall stand before it.
That Q&A gets me thinking. I share this with Bobby. We’re a minority religion in this country, I tell him. It is even worse in Clinton where probably only one in ten is Roman Catholic. “So?” he says. “What of it?”
“What is going to happen to all of them, Bobby, where are they all going to go when they die? Surely not hell, especially if they’ve been good.”
“Ask Father,” he laughs knowing my touchy relationship with our pastor. That shuts me up.
V
At twelve, I am already five-nine, and tower over Father. It is my job to ask him for the key to the school gym on Saturdays and Sundays during the winter, and always when Father is having his breakfast after saying his second Mass of the morning.
His housekeeper comes to the door, and says Father is eating breakfast. I always say the same thing, “Ma’am, it’s cold out here,” stamping my feet for emphasis, and then smiling. “All we want is the key to the gym to play basketball.”
She closes the door without a word. A period of five or more minutes passes, then Father comes finally to the door with a white napkin hanging from his Roman collar, contempt in his eyes, reminding me I am interrupting his breakfast, which is getting cold. I want to say, ‘Father, why not let your housekeeper give us the key?’ But I don’t; I just think it. Perhaps he can read my mind.
The routine never varies. I stand there, looking down at the top of his thinning silver hair, say nothing, return his stare, and wait. His nostrils flare, he mumbles something under his breath, and abruptly shuts the door. It is as if he thinks that is enough rejection to move me off his porch, but I don’t budge. I wait until hell freezes over, and think it will. But always, he returns with the key, gives me another practiced glare before handing it to me, moans a complaint I don’t understand, but later wish I did.
Once I have the key, I am off jumping from the back porch, landing on the sidewalk, and racing across the backyard before he can change his mind. With the basketball in my hands, I promptly forget about the whole ordeal, until the next week, when the same histrionic ritual is repeated, that is, until my mother goes to confession after one Friday Novena.
She is always the last in the confessional as she is very hard of hearing, and nearly yells out her sins, as Father shouts his penance and instructions in return. If your penance is five Hail Marys and five Our Fathers, your sins are clearly venial sins. But if Father gives you the rosary to say, well, then you are in mortal sin territory, and heading straight for hell. Father routinely gives me the rosary to say, but never my mother.
It is Father’s thoughtful idea to have my mother be the last confessor. They always chat with each other after confession for a few moments as Father locks the church doors. But this night is different. Father claims he is at his wits end.
“You’ve got a problem child, Dorothy, a real problem child in Jimmy. God only knows how he’s going to end up. I’ve thought many times of expelling him.”
My only run in with him is the gym key thing. He reads all our report cards to each class every six weeks, and always praises my academic performance in front of my classmates, while taking the opportunity to say I need work on my conduct. That is it.
But this is different. Now my mother is hearing her golden boy is irrevocably bad and on the brink of being expelled.
My mother comes home from church crying, barely able to talk. “Jimmy, how could you do this to me?” Her face is a blanket of pain, which only confuses me. I feel strangely calm because it has to be a misunderstanding. My life is great.
Not my da. He leaps out of his chair in combat mode with his bulging arms ready to land on my person. I back away. “Jimmy, what did you do now?”
“Nothing. Who says I did anything?”
Wrong question. “Father says you’re imperious, disrespectful and spiteful of his authority.”
Imperious? I have no idea what that means. I expect it is close to spiteful. Much as I don’t want to admit it, I can see where Father may have a case. Maybe you don’t have to say it, just think it; maybe priests can reads minds. If they can, I’m in real trouble.
Through tearful sobs she explains her conference with Father after confession. My da is inches from my face. “Get out of my sight, Jimmy, or I swear I’ll hit you so hard you won’t stop at the first wall.”
Stupid me, I stand my ground, and try to explain that Father is a jerk, and that he is the problem, not me. Wrong strategy.
“There, there, you see, Ray, see why Father resents Jimmy? That’s the kind of son you’ve raised, a hot head just like you!” Now I am “his son,” not hers, which is new. I have no ally. Now, I am afraid.
“My son, huh? I’m a hot head, am I? That’s rich. Now this is all about me, is it?” I think he is going to swallow his cigarette. “You call him ‘my son’? You’ve made him special. Not me! You treat him like he’s goddamn perfect. He’s not our only kid you know. Goddammit, Dorothy, we’ve got four kids, not one!”
Thus the battle lines are drawn, and I am safely out of it, so I go quietly upstairs to my room, knowing that I am the topic but no longer the problem. His voice rages on for an hour at decibel levels that make the glassware quiver, but then the house is quiet again.
In the morning, my mother says. You could have nipped the problem in the bud if you had apologized to Father. Why didn’t you, Jimmy?”
The reason is so stupid I can’t tell her. It never occurs to me. My mind can only think about the words Father used to describe me. I need to get to a dictionary to see if I agree. When I look up the words, I feel somewhat vindicated. I can use the same words to describe him. He must see in me what I see in him. Maybe that’s why he hates me. Do I hate him? No. But it is true I don’t like him very much. I wonder how much damage he does to other kids that he doesn’t like. I wonder how much I do.
Father doesn’t damage me because I can see maybe he is right. I am arrogant, but not malicious. I never knowingly want to hurt anyone, but I do think I am sufficient on to myself. I just do. Then again, maybe people I respect, like my mother, can hurt me. Yes, she can hurt me. I hurt her by how I treat Father. I never thought of it that way. Life is so complicated I don’t understand any of it. Maybe Father is on to something; maybe I should pay attention.
VI
It is strange to live in an insular Irish community of like-minded individuals and then to step outside that community, and realize you are a minority. I sense this when called a “Mick” because I am Irish, a “cod cruncher” because I am Catholic and eat only fish on Friday, and a “catlicker” as a bastardizing of Catholic. I am taller than other boys my age so people call me “beanpole,” or “whitey” because of my blond hair. Bobby calls me “duffus” because I am always asking questions that have no answers.
My mother puts this in perspective. “People are threatened by difference. Don’t bring attention to yourself by flaunting your difference. Use your ease at doing things, take pride in it, but don’t punish people with it.”
I didn’t know it at the time but do now, that she was defining my life as an outsider where I would have to find a home. Her counsel has given me enormous freedom and the luxury of a confident point of view.
She did something else. She defined my essence, telling me how bright and beautiful I was, how capable, what a presence I had, a commanding voice, and that I was going to go somewhere.
This assessment upset my da, as he sees the world destroying me as he has allowed it to destroy him. My mother explains to him that I have a coldness that he lacks, and cannot understand, and that I have moral fiber equal to but differing with his physical courage. “You see them running over Jimmy like they have run over you, Ray, but Jimmy will never give them his power, never. Power is a two-edge sword, true. It can cut Jimmy down as much as it can cut him loose. I have full confidence he will use it well.”
The metaphor of physical courage he can understand because although of small stature and slight build he fears no man physically, but every man in authority.
“Jimmy will never bow down to anyone, Ray. Do you hear me? Anyone! It is not in his character. It is why he has a problem with Father. Priests expect adulation. Jimmy has no such inclination. He will be hated and loved in life, and neither one will change his path.”
He shakes his head, “Dorothy, you’ve fed Jimmy’s head so full of bullshit that his feet have never touched the ground. They’ll beat the shit out of him, Dorothy, as he chases windmills, mark my words.”
She chuckles. “That’s the whole idea.”
From the perspective of sixty years, I find they both were right. She was speaking with the mind of ambition and love; he with the mind of defeat and fear. The best job that he ever had was on the extra board of the Chicago & North Western Railroad where he would work passenger or baggage the 202 miles from Clinton to Boone, or deadhead one way and work the other. Before that, he worked as a laborer at the Clinton Corn Starch Company; before that on the WPA during the Great Depression; and before that as a bellhop in Chicago as a young man.
He was always pushing the Sisyphus rock up the hill, and having it come crushing down on him again and again, and then dying three days after his fiftieth birthday with bone cancer. Little wonder he feared for his smart aleck son who acted as if he was God’s gift to the world.
VII
We have a chicken coop in the backyard, which came with the house. We don’t raise chickens and so I use it as my den. I have removed the nesting shelves and fashioned a desk and use a crate as a chair. I have cleaned the windows, walls and floor of feathers and droppings, and stake it out as my place. I read there, write my little poems, and musings.
During the month of May, I fashion an altar to the Blessed Virgin Mary with a candle I don’t light, and a small statue and picture of the Madonna. I also have a picture of Pope Pius XII pinned to the wall. I fill a little vase with cherry blossoms, borrow a white napkin from the dining room hutch, and fashion an altar. I say long prayers to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, prayers that I’ve since forgotten. I say these prayers every day during my Lady’s month. I also talk to Her about my life, and the problems in it, and always feel better for the attention.
Twelve years later, when I am in the US Navy, I visit her shrine at Fatima in Portugal, and meet Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen there, a Catholic scholar whom I greatly admire, and later have a military audience with Pope Pius XII with some five hundred other US sailors in his private chapel, only a month before he dies.
We have a garage beside the chicken coop, but no automobile. We take the bus or walk to wherever we have to go. Our little backyard is a veritable orchard. We have delicious, green, and crab apple trees, a plum tree, grape vines lining both sides of the walk from the house to the garage, an asparagus patch, current berry bushes, and a cherry tree. I throw apples at the apple trees, and two or three fresh apples fall down, grab a couple of bunches of white and purple grapes, pluck a plum off its tree, and retreat to my chicken coop sanctuary to spend a delightful hour.
I love comic books, especially the rare ones that are called “classic comics,” and dream of the Count of Monte Christi, the swashbuckler who always saves the day, or Tom Sawyer, who always gets other people to do his work.
My mother reads books borrowed from the library, books I am not allowed to read because I always get jam and peanut butter on them. Small wonder that my home today has thousands of books, which may not be soiled by food, but are richly marked with highlighters, turned pages, or scratchy notes.
VIII
One of the crushing realities of the sixth grade is being the last boy in my class chosen to be an altar boy. I know the Latin Mass as well as any classmate, and love the ritual of celebrant and server even more than Bobby, who prefers to attend rather than serve Mass.
My mother wants me to be a Jesuit priest and my da a New York City policeman, both seem remote when I can’t even become an altar boy. Then again, we live more than a thousand miles from metropolitan New York. The barrier, of course, is Father and me. I am working on it. I can now say I love his guttural laugh, but have to add it never reaches his eyes.
Sometimes reality has a strange way of proving parents to be prophets. Admirers label me as a moral philosopher, which is something of a blend of priest and cop. It is also the product of being an interdisciplinary doer. Although first trained in science as a chemist and chemical engineer, later in sales where I encountered the raw attitudes of people, moving on to executive status in the problem solving, then being retrained in the social and behavioral sciences, becoming a consultant and adjunct professor, then returning to the corporation world and working about the globe, I now find myself writing books and essays, such as this.
IX
This natural progression in work has meant traveling across the United States, Europe, Africa and South America. It is in such travels I have witnessed people living daily on less than what American teenagers spend on soft drinks during their school lunch breaks. I also see how American companies exploit the natives in such places as Jamaica, Suriname, Venezuela, and South Africa. Companies and governments act in collusion in extracting the rich oil reserves, or bauxite ore out of the soil, while paying indigenous labor little. It makes an impression.
It is 1968 and I am in South Africa, where my programmed idealism clashes with draconian reality. My mind is trained for the job, but not my heart. I am a young executive sent to facilitate the formation of a new chemical company to virtually eliminate competition in the specialty chemical industry.
The strategy is to consolidate into a new entity an American subsidiary, a British affiliate, and the specialty chemical division of the largest chemical company in all of Africa in the oppressive climate of South Africa apartheid.
Living in a midwestern community of few Negroes, but having friends of that race at university, apartheid shocks my senses. The policy of the Afrikaans South African government in this period is the separate development of the Bantu or blacks into homelands, where little commercial, industrial, or agricultural development exists. African men are forced leave their homelands to seek gainful employment in the white metropolitan areas.
If you can imagine, 2.5 million white Afrikaners and 1.4 million whites of British descent live a privileged existence over 12 million Bantu and 2 million Colored with absolute authority. Africans carry identity cards and can be incarcerated if in metropolitan areas after curfew. They can be imprisoned up to 120 days without being formally charged.
This experience changes this Iowa boy forever. It reconstitutes his life into a not always quiet outrage. He isn’t prepared for corporate exploitation or governmental malfeasance, in South Africa or anywhere else. His work takes him to countries rich in natural resources but poor in the distribution of wealth, which is apparently all right with American corporations and former European colonizers.
X
My mindset and sense of fair play is established by the sixth grade thanks to a retinue of volunteer teachers not much older than I am.
There is a star high school athlete, an alumnus of St. Patrick’s, who comes back to coach us. He singles me out because I am tall, and with the patience of Job, develops me into a basketball player. I win three major letters in high school basketball and am on the varsity for four years.
There are two other high school students who have grown up in the shadow of the courthouse, who teach us how to play baseball on the courthouse diamond. They both become professional baseball players. Were it not for WWII, and military service, they would have been major league players.
One is a joy to be around, athletically superb, but as much fun as if he were no older than we are. The other one is more mature, and seems to have a special understanding of us boys as we struggle to find our way through adolescence.
He is a lovely man, the ideal type of the caring person. How much less a man I would be today had I not experienced his guidance. He accepted my high-strung nature, my idealism, and showed me how to use rather than be abused by it.
Although a boy himself, he seems to understand what I don’t, and to move me from being my own worst enemy to my own best friend. He never compliments me, but corrects my play in such a way that it always feels like a compliment.
These young volunteer coaches not only help us as athletes, but as persons as well.
Two of them are gone, but they are all in my heart and will be there until I join them.
XI
Then there is a young Sister of St. Francis. She is my sixth grade teacher. Only 20, and not much older than her students, this is Sister’s first teaching assignment. An initial challenge is finding a way to deal with my high-strung nature. We are today the best of friends, but this was a traumatic period for us both. I was trying to get a grip on my passions, and she was trying to gain control of her class.
One day, she tells us that no one shall speak until she acknowledges his or her raised hand, a clear attempt to gain control of the chaos. Three times I recite the answer when someone else has a hand up. After the third disruption, she has me come to the front of the room.
Calmly, she tells me my behavior is unacceptable. I am ready to apologize, which has worked before, feeling it will close the matter, when she puts her small hand to her lips, then holds her hand up, palm out, and her innocent gaze silences me.
“For this disrespect to me and your classmates, James, you will stay after school and write on the blackboard 300 times, ‘I will not talk in class until I am called upon by Sister to speak’.”
“When, Sister?”
“After school.”
“Tonight?” She nods. “But I have basketball practice!”
“You’ll have to miss it.”
“But I can’t miss it. I can’t.” I can see by her quiet resolve that something is different; that she means business. My mind races. I am not to play basketball today! Basketball is my life! A rage wells up in me that is so powerful and so overwhelming that I pick up the object nearest me, a folding chair, and raise it high above my head. I seem a foot taller than Sister.
There is fright in her eyes as if I am about to send the chair crashing down on her head. But even in my towering rage, I have no intentions of hitting anyone, much less Sister. I want to demolish something, throw the chair through the window. I don’t want to hurt anyone. Like the calm in the center of a storm, I am out of control but not totally so.
There I stand frozen with the chair over my head, and I look at Sister, and she looks as frightened as a doe in the headlights of an on rushing car. Then she does something that I shall remember until my dying day. She touches her lips with her index finger, and then makes the Sign of the Cross.
That nonverbal action pricks my spell as if she had lanced a boil, and I collapse into the chair folding myself into it like a fetus. The room is bathed in an anxious silence. Now composed, Sister dismisses the class for the day, asks me to stay.
She sits there behind her desk for several minutes and says nothing. I still am in the folding chair my head bowed in fatigue and shame unable to look at her. I want to apologize but can’t. Right then and there I know I am my da’s son. I have been critical of his spontaneous rages, his impulsive explosions over nothing: phone calls from bill collectors, my mother smoking too much, the house being in a mess, my walking with my hands in my pockets down Chicago’s loop district. I was twelve and he expects me to treat life like a combat zone.
My terrible temper has never gotten out of control outside play, but now I see it for what it is, a curse. I am already big and strong, and could hurt someone. I pray that never happens. I am mumbling prayers in Latin, sitting on that folding chair, prayers in that dead language that distances me from myself: “Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatae Mariae semper Virgini, beato Michaeli Archangelo, beato Ioanni Baptistae, sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo…” These is a response of the altar boy at Mass, I have finally become.
My mind slowly becomes conscious of my fix. Will I be expelled? Will I no longer be able to play basketball? I am full of “me, me, me,” while Sister sits quietly behind her desk, looking at me pensively.
Then the school bell rings ending classes for the day.
“I’m going to leave you now, James,” she says, “to complete your punishment and I’m not coming back to check your work. I don’t expect you to leave until it is completed. Is that clear?” I nod. “Then we should both forget it ever happened.”
What beautiful psychology. Here I am writing about it sixty years later.
She knew then that it was an important moment in both our lives and that it would never be forgotten. There was no lecture; no psychological melodrama; no analysis of what a terrible temper I had, and how it would be my albatross in the future; none of that. Perhaps that is why it cauterized my soul with the imprint of its terrible truth. It was a transformational moment.
Sister knew, as hot headed as I was, as angry as I was that she had reached me. She knew also that I was task oriented, and would dutifully complete my punishment. I printed those 300 lines, doing 50 at a time, then erasing the blackboard, and doing 50 more. School let out at 3:20 p.m., and I was still printing my sentences at 5:00 p.m. It was already dark outside.
The janitor sees the light on in the sixth grade room, and is waiting to clean it. He finally comes in and asks me how much longer I’ll be. “I’m doing an assignment,” I say.
With tongue in cheek, he says, “I can see that. I’ve come by here several times and you keep writing the same sentence over and over again. Up to 275 now, huh? How many more left?”
“25. I have to do a total of 300.” My head hurts sharing this with this stranger, but he doesn’t make a joke of my predicament.
Instead he asks, “Can I clean the board when you’re done?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you have to save your work?”
“No.”
“How are you going to prove you stayed and did it?”
“Sister will know because I’ll tell her I did it.”
For some reason with those words of trust I lose it in front of this stranger. Something rises from deep inside me, something that comes roaring out without warning. I start to bawl, deep, deep sobs in front of the janitor, crying so hard and so loud that it might have been embarrassing if I were the least bit connected.
I feel so sorry for how terrible I have been to Sister; how king and trusting she has been of me. I am very disappointed with myself. I don’t like me very much. I am mourning that fact. I cannot help myself.
“Are you all right, son?” he asks, clearly mystified by my breakdown.
“No,” I sob. “I’m not all right.”
“Can I do anything? Get you a glass of water?”
“No.”
“Well, I’ll leave you then, come back later.” His kindness makes me sob even more.
Several minutes later, I go into the cloakroom, put my jacket on, and walk to my block by the courthouse. I walk around the courthouse block at least a half dozen times. It has started to snow; large soft snowflakes touch my tearing face and melt with them. When I finally walk from the corner of the jail to the three houses west to my home, my mother is waiting in the doorway with a cigarette dangling from her lips and a coffee cup in her hand. “Where have you been, Jimmy?”
I hate her smoking, hate her talking with a cigarette in her mouth, but somehow none of that is important. Dripping with snow, she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I start to laugh, and swallow her in a bear hug, all 95 pounds and five feet one inch of her, and say, “I love you, mommy. God, how I love you.”
She takes her cigarette out of her mouth, and holds it away from her body, and says, “Well, I’m not used to that.” That finds me hugging her even harder. “Careful now. I’m not a sack of flour.” Then she chuckles with that glint in her eye, “You going to tell me what brought this on?”
“Maybe someday.”
“Okay,” she says as if to herself, I can live with that. I suspect she thinks it relates to basketball practice lasting longer than usual. Whatever, she doesn’t press me and I love her all the more for it.
I never did tell her, although I write about the incident in my memoir as a novel, “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” (2003). She dies ten years before it is published on D-Day, June 6, 1993 at the age of 79. I found myself crying when I wrote about that day in the novel, and now I find myself crying as even an older man writing this essay in 2008, still stuck in the sixth grade.
________________
Dr. Fisher’s books are listed and available on his website: www.fisherofideas.com. His most recent book is “A Look Back to See Ahead” (Authorhouse 2007).
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 7, 2008
“Tell me what are the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of young men, and I will tell you what is to be the character of the next generation.”
Edmund Burke, English Statesman (1729 – 1797)
THE PROGRAMMATIC PROCESS
When we were sixth graders and twelve-years-old, we had already been programmed to be polite, obedient, to speak when spoken to, to mind our manners, to respect our elders, to do our chores, complete our homework, to stay out of trouble, and be little embarrassment to our family. We were directed not to lie, cheat, steal, or covet the possessions of others; and to respect their privacy. We were also trained to look up to authority figures, trust their commands as they had our best interests at heart, and to believe a man’s word was his bond.
We were also expected to honor and be faithful to the culture of our parents principally reflected in our religion: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, some other religious persuasion, or no religion at all. Whatever were the views of our caretakers and caregivers became indisputably our views, which were to be echoed in our speech and conduct with a consistency to give proof of our virtue.
Consequently, our learning of geography, history, English, arithmetic, social studies, and science paled in comparison with the importance of being polite, obedient, punctual, disciplined, well groomed, humble and submissive. We learned at an early age to fit in rather than be disruptive, to follow instructions rather than to vary creatively, to behave rather than to challenge. To earn high marks in school and enjoy the approval of our elders, we conscientiously gave answers to our examinations consistent with our lesson plans convinced they contained unassailable truths.
Yet, despite this programming, inconsistencies were noted. We were told to pay them little mind. They were exceptions to the rule. What we thought we saw was not what we actually observed, but a figment of our immature imagination. We didn’t see people lying, cheating, stealing, talking ill of their neighbors, or doing something contradictory to what we were told to believe of our elders. We simply lacked an appreciation of the complexities of what was happening.
We were, as sixth graders and twelve-year-olds, an amorphous mass of protoplasm that could be molded and shaped, pushed and shoved, badgered and beaten, pinched and tweaked, criticized and consoled, flattered and cajoled, nurtured and neglected into what we were told we were with little input from ourselves. .
By the end of the sixth grade, we had learned what we should do, should be and should become all of which were still beyond the light of our comprehension. We had been leavened into pleasers of others with little attention directed to pleasing ourselves. But something was happening. The inconsistencies were mounting. We couldn’t conceive of rebelling against it, whatever “it” was, but were increasingly forced to be other directed while being told to be self-directed and self-controlled. In this confusion, we worked hard to be what we were expected to be with little sense of success.
We came to realize our parents lived through our exploits. They found it socially acceptable to brag about us to give themselves a backhanded compliment. Whatever our distinction: beauty, brains, talent, athleticism, gregariousness, or popularity was all about us while not being about us at all.
By the sixth grade nothing was for the fun of it anymore. Life and learning, play and sport were now serious business. We must be the best at what we did and what we were before we knew the difference. We had already been regimented into organized sports and supervised activities by our parents long before the sixth grade playing football, basketball, soccer, and hockey. Now we were expected to excel. The same was true for ballet, ice-skating, social clubs, and extracurricular activities. Our time was organized, no longer free. Our lives depended upon being involved in something constructive every waking moment. We were to be all we could be before we had had a chance to catch our second breath.
Kudos came our way if we stood out in sports or schoolwork or school activities. We were conditioned to accept these accolades with modesty with only our parents and relatives having the luxury of bragging rights.
We didn’t get it by the sixth grade, but it was seeping into our souls that life was not all about us but all about them; not all about living in the world but in conquering the world, as our parents hadn’t. We were brought up to make restitution for their mislaid plans and misspent dreams, for their failures and slights, their fears and doubts, their demons and devils, none of which were ours, but they had become ours by proxy. There was little room to find our way because the place in which we found ourselves had no room for us. It was fully occupied by them. It was theirs not ours. And since we were living their lives as if our own, attempting to find what they had lost and not what we could discover, we were lost almost from the get go.
We were told to be competitive, to stand up for our rights, while being conditioned to be submissive and obedient to the demands of others. What made this conflicting was seeing our parents acting assertive over the powerless and subservient to the powerful. We were instructed to learn the hard lessons of life when we often witnessed our parents being crippled by them. Parents complicated this further attempting to be our best friend rather than our parents. Little learning took place when they excused our foul ups and relieved us of the consequences of our actions. Exaggerating our strengths and understating our weaknesses was forgivable because it was out of unconditioned love.
Parents and elders expected us to behave differently than we saw them behaving. We saw them drinking and smoking, swearing and lying, cheating and stealing, and delighting in the misfortunes of others as coffee table talk. It was natural for us to sample their liquor, sneak a smoke, practice swearing and lying, making fun of those less fortunate, and even shoplift for trinkets in dime stores. When caught and reprimanded, we wondered why it was all right for them and not for us to do. We displayed our angst by punishing others with our schoolbook knowledge or athletic prowess to make them feel small and us big. We justified our petty deceptions as we saw our parents trying to get us into movies and ballgames as our being “under twelve,” when we were already going on thirteen.
Our parents told us to clean our room, and when we didn’t, they cleaned it for us. They told us to do our chores, and when we didn’t, they did them for us. They told us to do our homework, and when we didn’t, they did it for us. They told us to be home on time, but never asked us where we had been or with whom. They grounded us for misbehaving but forgot about it by the next day. Then they wondered why we were always waiting for them to do for us what we could best do for ourselves. We had never been given our own moral compass and therefore had trouble finding our way.
THE IMPORTANCE OF REBELLION: A PERSONAL ODYSSEY
Something is happening in our chemistry as we move through the sixth grade, something that we are discouraged from allowing to happen because it carries the pejorative, “rebellion.” Rebellion is as necessary to finding out who and what we are as the importance of learning the three “R’s.
We know the story of the prodigal son who rebels and leaves home only to return to find out how wise his father has become. There is truth in this, but remember the prodigal son did rebel, did experience the world as it is, and we are programmed to skip that step, and move from adolescence to adulthood without the maturing process.
As a consequence, there is a good chance we are protected from knowing ourselves and therefore experiencing life directly. We are as a society suspended in terminal adolescence with the emotional maturity of an obedient and submissive twelve-year-old. This is evident in our arrested development and counterdependence on society and the workplace as surrogate parent, caretaker and caregiver for our total well being.
Society is not comfortable with an adult perspective or the mindset and behavior of adults. Adults have their own minds, are confrontational, do not accept things simply on the authority of others, or at face value. They are discriminating, self-directed and self-motivated, and do not need the approval of others to approve of themselves. They don’t need managers to tell them they are doing a good job. They know in their bones the quality of their work. They are professionals.
We leave the leadership of our lives up to others who are as lost and confused as we are, and then wonder why we have our foot to the peddle burning up rubber and going nowhere.
I
My personal odyssey has been to go against the grain to create another possibility, which has not been smooth or trouble free or especially exemplifying. It has been a struggle, but it has been my struggle, which has given me the courage to write these words.
If you were like me, reared in Irish Roman Catholicism, where your religion was your lone security, you would grasp it as if an anchor in a raging storm. My first five years of life were traumatic and lonely as I was without my mother and father. I was instead shuttled, along with my little sister, from relative to relative and foster parent to foster parent. My da was attempting to discover his adult legs as a parent, while my mother’s emotional and physical health were constantly in jeopardy as she was confined to care giving birth to three children in four years.
By the sixth grade, you realize there is a difference between you and other children even in a Catholic parochial school. You now have your mother and father, your little sister and little brother, and baby sister all in your own home. It is years since those difficult early days, but you witness daily your parents struggle to make ends meet. You see how the lack of education cripples your da in his job and sense of self-worth. You cower from his temper flare-ups, and retreat into yourself. Some of your classmates are well off and have bright new clothes with all the valued accessories, which are not available to you. This causes a peculiar reaction. You don’t envy them for their good fortune, but look at them more critically and see they are not any brighter, more athletic, or better looking than you are. You discover arrogance in yourself that is not always becoming to your pastor or the good Sisters of St. Francis, who teach you at St. Patrick’s School.
II
At home, I find myself living in a climate of psychological abuse as my da has a violent temper constantly painting the air blue with his shouting, swearing, and woe is me self-pity. This is compounded when his Irish railroad buddies come to drink coffee, eat fudge cake and smoke cigarettes, which is every week. They don’t notice me as I have become indistinguishable from the furniture as I listen to why they have failed to make satisfactory progress in life.
The men are in the living room and their wives in the kitchen, all smoking, laughing, and decrying their sad status. It is hard for me to breathe in this little house and I invariably get a migraine headache. All these men claim to be Irish Catholic to the core, but not one of them attends Sunday Mass, only their wives.
My mother is a devout Catholic, and I find myself nearly as devout as she, thus maintaining my anchor. That means I believe unconditionally everything I have learned about my faith in the Baltimore Catechism. I learned later that my faith had been sanitized to a consistency that left little room for doubt or skepticism, and therefore even less room for truth.
One day I wander into the public library when I am in the sixth grade, and happen on a book on the “Inquisition,” something that I had never heard of before. The pictures and accounts in the book are terrifying. It shows people being tortured on the rack and burned at the stake for being heretics. I tell myself, it can’t be true.
When I ask Sister at school, she tells me it doesn’t concern me. When I ask Father, he says, “What gives you the idea there was an Inquisition?” When I ask my mother, she says, “That was a dark period in our church history.”
Here I am sixty years later reminiscing about that period. I thank my mother for her candor. No one else conceded it was true, that the church is, indeed, a human institution with buried skeletons, as do we all.
Later, I ask my da, and he confesses he has no idea what I’m talking about. My great aunt Annie laughs and slaps her leg when I tell her. I lived with her and my uncle Mart when I was four.
“Your father is not well acquainted with his catechism,” she says with a knowing twinkle in her eyes. “One day when your father was only seven, he rushed home from St. Patrick’s shouting with joy to his grandmother, ‘Granny, granny, I learned a new prayer today.’”
“What prayer was that, Raymond?”
“Across the Street.”
It was “The Apostles Creed.” His religious insight was pretty close to “across the street,” that is, until the final innings of his life when he was dying of bone cancer. Then he received the Last Sacraments of the Church, and Holy Communion nearly every day.
III
In the sixth grade, all of these moments coalesce into one nature. Yet it is natural for the human spirit to attempt to stretch beyond these parochial confines. What helps to get me out of my introspective nature and unto the playground of life is not actually a playground at all, but an expanse of lawn between the Clinton County Jail and the Clinton County Courthouse. Four streets border this rectangular block. I live only three doors down and across the street from this set of buildings.
Here we play baseball from sunrise to sunset on a diamond laid out by the deputy sheriffs with a wire mesh screen backstop provided by the county sheriff. Our team is known as the “Courthouse Tigers,” named by a deputy for his favorite team, the Detroit Tigers.
In the fall, we play tackle football on this lawn but without shoulder pads and helmets, or goal posts. A regulation basketball court is also laid out at one end with two basketball hoops on an earthen court. In the winter, the lawn is turned into a bowl and filled with water, which quickly freezes into ice, and becomes our ice skating rink. Music is piped out of the sheriff’s garage that is situated next to and north of the jail.
That place and space is my haven and heaven, and a defining feature of my youth through the sixth grade. There I meet a boy, who lives across the street from the county jail. The first sentence of my novel (In the Shadow of the Courthouse 2003) attests to his influence: “The first day of my life was when I was eight-years-old and met Bobby Witt.”
As sixth graders, we are both starters on St. Patrick’s eighth grade basketball team. It is during World War Two. Bobby is a boy that inspires other boys, lifts them up to be better than they are, not by word but deed. He is fun and funny, a good student, and a better friend, but most of all, a devout Roman Catholic, who cherishes his faith with no need for proselytizing zeal.
Things that disturb me do not bother him. I fail to understand why. I confess my concerns as we walk to school, which is only two blocks away, or downtown to a movie, which is less than a mile, or to an Industrial League baseball game in Riverview Stadium, which is only four blocks away and close to the Mississippi River, or to the municipal swimming pool, which is parallel to the river and only a couple blocks south and east of the stadium.
This is our world, all in the shadow of the four-sided courthouse clock that chimes every half hour. We are in our cocoon, a safety net that, unbeknown to us, will protect us all our lives for having experienced it. Bobby listens to me on these walks, and says, “Why do you bother your mind about these things? You don’t know what you’re talking about anyway.”
It is true. I don’t but that doesn’t seem to help. I wonder why all the Negroes live in a one-block area of Maple Street; why I never see them at the municipal swimming pool, or rarely at baseball games; why they don’t come over to the courthouse when they live only three blocks away; or why I never see them at the movies. No Negroes work in the factories or the department stores downtown. I wonder where they work. None of them go to school at St. Patrick’s. Aren’t any of them Catholics? I go on and on beating my concern to death, until Bobby becomes totally bored and puts his hands over his ears.
IV
It slowly registers that there are good people who are content with what is, but for some reason, I’m not. Through the sixth grade, for instance, I play on a basketball team at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and Bobby never plays there. He doesn’t even come down to the Y. That puzzles me.
“You know what Father says. It’s not a good place for Catholics to be.”
“But it’s just basketball, Bobby.”
“Father says it can corrupt our minds; that’s good enough for me.”
Why isn’t it good enough for me? I can’t explain it, nor can I tell Bobby I attended a YMCA Conference. It must be a mortal sin. Several ministers talk about athletics and moral commitment. I don’t understand it all, but they are so eloquent. They don’t mumble their words, or have a lot of “ah” pauses. Their voices are music to my ears. They talk in complete sentences, and when they pause, it is like they are allowing time for the thought to sink in. They don’t talk in the monotone way Father does when he reads the epistle and gospel in Sunday’s Mass.
His sermons after the gospel seem to cause him pain, but not as much as they give. I wonder why ministers speak so well and priest so poorly, that is, parish priests. Oblate Fathers who travel across the country giving Novenas speak like ministers.
I conclude that priests are not taught how to give sermons, but left to wing it, while ministers are well schooled in the theatrics of delivery, and that is the reason for the difference.
Father seems so bored when he reads the gospel and only passionate when he is asking for money. His money sermons, though, always make me squirm because my mother puts twenty-five cents in the envelope every Sunday, and then Father reads at the end of the year how much the 200 families in the parish have given.
He starts with the highest contributors and ends with the lowest, reading every single family name in the parish. The lawyers and doctors and businessmen are always at the top with $300 - $400, while my family is at or near the bottom with $10 - $12, sometimes even less. It never seems to total the $13 it should, and I know my mother never misses a Sunday Offertory.
Thirteen dollars isn’t much in 2008 but it is a good deal more when you multiply it by a factor of ten, which would make it $130 in 2008 dollars. Nonetheless, I have never outgrown the humiliation of having my family’s poor financial status broadcast to the world. Bobby’s family never gives anymore, but he could care less. It isn’t his problem. It is still my problem more than sixty years later.
The upside of this is we don’t have to pay tuition to attend this private Catholic school. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Davenport wants to be sure we are fully indoctrinated in the faith. With this mainly subliminal programming, we automatically regurgitate the correct responses to matters of faith and morals:
Question: What is the true Church?
Answer: The only true Church is the Holy Roman Catholic Church established by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and no other church shall stand before it.
That Q&A gets me thinking. I share this with Bobby. We’re a minority religion in this country, I tell him. It is even worse in Clinton where probably only one in ten is Roman Catholic. “So?” he says. “What of it?”
“What is going to happen to all of them, Bobby, where are they all going to go when they die? Surely not hell, especially if they’ve been good.”
“Ask Father,” he laughs knowing my touchy relationship with our pastor. That shuts me up.
V
At twelve, I am already five-nine, and tower over Father. It is my job to ask him for the key to the school gym on Saturdays and Sundays during the winter, and always when Father is having his breakfast after saying his second Mass of the morning.
His housekeeper comes to the door, and says Father is eating breakfast. I always say the same thing, “Ma’am, it’s cold out here,” stamping my feet for emphasis, and then smiling. “All we want is the key to the gym to play basketball.”
She closes the door without a word. A period of five or more minutes passes, then Father comes finally to the door with a white napkin hanging from his Roman collar, contempt in his eyes, reminding me I am interrupting his breakfast, which is getting cold. I want to say, ‘Father, why not let your housekeeper give us the key?’ But I don’t; I just think it. Perhaps he can read my mind.
The routine never varies. I stand there, looking down at the top of his thinning silver hair, say nothing, return his stare, and wait. His nostrils flare, he mumbles something under his breath, and abruptly shuts the door. It is as if he thinks that is enough rejection to move me off his porch, but I don’t budge. I wait until hell freezes over, and think it will. But always, he returns with the key, gives me another practiced glare before handing it to me, moans a complaint I don’t understand, but later wish I did.
Once I have the key, I am off jumping from the back porch, landing on the sidewalk, and racing across the backyard before he can change his mind. With the basketball in my hands, I promptly forget about the whole ordeal, until the next week, when the same histrionic ritual is repeated, that is, until my mother goes to confession after one Friday Novena.
She is always the last in the confessional as she is very hard of hearing, and nearly yells out her sins, as Father shouts his penance and instructions in return. If your penance is five Hail Marys and five Our Fathers, your sins are clearly venial sins. But if Father gives you the rosary to say, well, then you are in mortal sin territory, and heading straight for hell. Father routinely gives me the rosary to say, but never my mother.
It is Father’s thoughtful idea to have my mother be the last confessor. They always chat with each other after confession for a few moments as Father locks the church doors. But this night is different. Father claims he is at his wits end.
“You’ve got a problem child, Dorothy, a real problem child in Jimmy. God only knows how he’s going to end up. I’ve thought many times of expelling him.”
My only run in with him is the gym key thing. He reads all our report cards to each class every six weeks, and always praises my academic performance in front of my classmates, while taking the opportunity to say I need work on my conduct. That is it.
But this is different. Now my mother is hearing her golden boy is irrevocably bad and on the brink of being expelled.
My mother comes home from church crying, barely able to talk. “Jimmy, how could you do this to me?” Her face is a blanket of pain, which only confuses me. I feel strangely calm because it has to be a misunderstanding. My life is great.
Not my da. He leaps out of his chair in combat mode with his bulging arms ready to land on my person. I back away. “Jimmy, what did you do now?”
“Nothing. Who says I did anything?”
Wrong question. “Father says you’re imperious, disrespectful and spiteful of his authority.”
Imperious? I have no idea what that means. I expect it is close to spiteful. Much as I don’t want to admit it, I can see where Father may have a case. Maybe you don’t have to say it, just think it; maybe priests can reads minds. If they can, I’m in real trouble.
Through tearful sobs she explains her conference with Father after confession. My da is inches from my face. “Get out of my sight, Jimmy, or I swear I’ll hit you so hard you won’t stop at the first wall.”
Stupid me, I stand my ground, and try to explain that Father is a jerk, and that he is the problem, not me. Wrong strategy.
“There, there, you see, Ray, see why Father resents Jimmy? That’s the kind of son you’ve raised, a hot head just like you!” Now I am “his son,” not hers, which is new. I have no ally. Now, I am afraid.
“My son, huh? I’m a hot head, am I? That’s rich. Now this is all about me, is it?” I think he is going to swallow his cigarette. “You call him ‘my son’? You’ve made him special. Not me! You treat him like he’s goddamn perfect. He’s not our only kid you know. Goddammit, Dorothy, we’ve got four kids, not one!”
Thus the battle lines are drawn, and I am safely out of it, so I go quietly upstairs to my room, knowing that I am the topic but no longer the problem. His voice rages on for an hour at decibel levels that make the glassware quiver, but then the house is quiet again.
In the morning, my mother says. You could have nipped the problem in the bud if you had apologized to Father. Why didn’t you, Jimmy?”
The reason is so stupid I can’t tell her. It never occurs to me. My mind can only think about the words Father used to describe me. I need to get to a dictionary to see if I agree. When I look up the words, I feel somewhat vindicated. I can use the same words to describe him. He must see in me what I see in him. Maybe that’s why he hates me. Do I hate him? No. But it is true I don’t like him very much. I wonder how much damage he does to other kids that he doesn’t like. I wonder how much I do.
Father doesn’t damage me because I can see maybe he is right. I am arrogant, but not malicious. I never knowingly want to hurt anyone, but I do think I am sufficient on to myself. I just do. Then again, maybe people I respect, like my mother, can hurt me. Yes, she can hurt me. I hurt her by how I treat Father. I never thought of it that way. Life is so complicated I don’t understand any of it. Maybe Father is on to something; maybe I should pay attention.
VI
It is strange to live in an insular Irish community of like-minded individuals and then to step outside that community, and realize you are a minority. I sense this when called a “Mick” because I am Irish, a “cod cruncher” because I am Catholic and eat only fish on Friday, and a “catlicker” as a bastardizing of Catholic. I am taller than other boys my age so people call me “beanpole,” or “whitey” because of my blond hair. Bobby calls me “duffus” because I am always asking questions that have no answers.
My mother puts this in perspective. “People are threatened by difference. Don’t bring attention to yourself by flaunting your difference. Use your ease at doing things, take pride in it, but don’t punish people with it.”
I didn’t know it at the time but do now, that she was defining my life as an outsider where I would have to find a home. Her counsel has given me enormous freedom and the luxury of a confident point of view.
She did something else. She defined my essence, telling me how bright and beautiful I was, how capable, what a presence I had, a commanding voice, and that I was going to go somewhere.
This assessment upset my da, as he sees the world destroying me as he has allowed it to destroy him. My mother explains to him that I have a coldness that he lacks, and cannot understand, and that I have moral fiber equal to but differing with his physical courage. “You see them running over Jimmy like they have run over you, Ray, but Jimmy will never give them his power, never. Power is a two-edge sword, true. It can cut Jimmy down as much as it can cut him loose. I have full confidence he will use it well.”
The metaphor of physical courage he can understand because although of small stature and slight build he fears no man physically, but every man in authority.
“Jimmy will never bow down to anyone, Ray. Do you hear me? Anyone! It is not in his character. It is why he has a problem with Father. Priests expect adulation. Jimmy has no such inclination. He will be hated and loved in life, and neither one will change his path.”
He shakes his head, “Dorothy, you’ve fed Jimmy’s head so full of bullshit that his feet have never touched the ground. They’ll beat the shit out of him, Dorothy, as he chases windmills, mark my words.”
She chuckles. “That’s the whole idea.”
From the perspective of sixty years, I find they both were right. She was speaking with the mind of ambition and love; he with the mind of defeat and fear. The best job that he ever had was on the extra board of the Chicago & North Western Railroad where he would work passenger or baggage the 202 miles from Clinton to Boone, or deadhead one way and work the other. Before that, he worked as a laborer at the Clinton Corn Starch Company; before that on the WPA during the Great Depression; and before that as a bellhop in Chicago as a young man.
He was always pushing the Sisyphus rock up the hill, and having it come crushing down on him again and again, and then dying three days after his fiftieth birthday with bone cancer. Little wonder he feared for his smart aleck son who acted as if he was God’s gift to the world.
VII
We have a chicken coop in the backyard, which came with the house. We don’t raise chickens and so I use it as my den. I have removed the nesting shelves and fashioned a desk and use a crate as a chair. I have cleaned the windows, walls and floor of feathers and droppings, and stake it out as my place. I read there, write my little poems, and musings.
During the month of May, I fashion an altar to the Blessed Virgin Mary with a candle I don’t light, and a small statue and picture of the Madonna. I also have a picture of Pope Pius XII pinned to the wall. I fill a little vase with cherry blossoms, borrow a white napkin from the dining room hutch, and fashion an altar. I say long prayers to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, prayers that I’ve since forgotten. I say these prayers every day during my Lady’s month. I also talk to Her about my life, and the problems in it, and always feel better for the attention.
Twelve years later, when I am in the US Navy, I visit her shrine at Fatima in Portugal, and meet Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen there, a Catholic scholar whom I greatly admire, and later have a military audience with Pope Pius XII with some five hundred other US sailors in his private chapel, only a month before he dies.
We have a garage beside the chicken coop, but no automobile. We take the bus or walk to wherever we have to go. Our little backyard is a veritable orchard. We have delicious, green, and crab apple trees, a plum tree, grape vines lining both sides of the walk from the house to the garage, an asparagus patch, current berry bushes, and a cherry tree. I throw apples at the apple trees, and two or three fresh apples fall down, grab a couple of bunches of white and purple grapes, pluck a plum off its tree, and retreat to my chicken coop sanctuary to spend a delightful hour.
I love comic books, especially the rare ones that are called “classic comics,” and dream of the Count of Monte Christi, the swashbuckler who always saves the day, or Tom Sawyer, who always gets other people to do his work.
My mother reads books borrowed from the library, books I am not allowed to read because I always get jam and peanut butter on them. Small wonder that my home today has thousands of books, which may not be soiled by food, but are richly marked with highlighters, turned pages, or scratchy notes.
VIII
One of the crushing realities of the sixth grade is being the last boy in my class chosen to be an altar boy. I know the Latin Mass as well as any classmate, and love the ritual of celebrant and server even more than Bobby, who prefers to attend rather than serve Mass.
My mother wants me to be a Jesuit priest and my da a New York City policeman, both seem remote when I can’t even become an altar boy. Then again, we live more than a thousand miles from metropolitan New York. The barrier, of course, is Father and me. I am working on it. I can now say I love his guttural laugh, but have to add it never reaches his eyes.
Sometimes reality has a strange way of proving parents to be prophets. Admirers label me as a moral philosopher, which is something of a blend of priest and cop. It is also the product of being an interdisciplinary doer. Although first trained in science as a chemist and chemical engineer, later in sales where I encountered the raw attitudes of people, moving on to executive status in the problem solving, then being retrained in the social and behavioral sciences, becoming a consultant and adjunct professor, then returning to the corporation world and working about the globe, I now find myself writing books and essays, such as this.
IX
This natural progression in work has meant traveling across the United States, Europe, Africa and South America. It is in such travels I have witnessed people living daily on less than what American teenagers spend on soft drinks during their school lunch breaks. I also see how American companies exploit the natives in such places as Jamaica, Suriname, Venezuela, and South Africa. Companies and governments act in collusion in extracting the rich oil reserves, or bauxite ore out of the soil, while paying indigenous labor little. It makes an impression.
It is 1968 and I am in South Africa, where my programmed idealism clashes with draconian reality. My mind is trained for the job, but not my heart. I am a young executive sent to facilitate the formation of a new chemical company to virtually eliminate competition in the specialty chemical industry.
The strategy is to consolidate into a new entity an American subsidiary, a British affiliate, and the specialty chemical division of the largest chemical company in all of Africa in the oppressive climate of South Africa apartheid.
Living in a midwestern community of few Negroes, but having friends of that race at university, apartheid shocks my senses. The policy of the Afrikaans South African government in this period is the separate development of the Bantu or blacks into homelands, where little commercial, industrial, or agricultural development exists. African men are forced leave their homelands to seek gainful employment in the white metropolitan areas.
If you can imagine, 2.5 million white Afrikaners and 1.4 million whites of British descent live a privileged existence over 12 million Bantu and 2 million Colored with absolute authority. Africans carry identity cards and can be incarcerated if in metropolitan areas after curfew. They can be imprisoned up to 120 days without being formally charged.
This experience changes this Iowa boy forever. It reconstitutes his life into a not always quiet outrage. He isn’t prepared for corporate exploitation or governmental malfeasance, in South Africa or anywhere else. His work takes him to countries rich in natural resources but poor in the distribution of wealth, which is apparently all right with American corporations and former European colonizers.
X
My mindset and sense of fair play is established by the sixth grade thanks to a retinue of volunteer teachers not much older than I am.
There is a star high school athlete, an alumnus of St. Patrick’s, who comes back to coach us. He singles me out because I am tall, and with the patience of Job, develops me into a basketball player. I win three major letters in high school basketball and am on the varsity for four years.
There are two other high school students who have grown up in the shadow of the courthouse, who teach us how to play baseball on the courthouse diamond. They both become professional baseball players. Were it not for WWII, and military service, they would have been major league players.
One is a joy to be around, athletically superb, but as much fun as if he were no older than we are. The other one is more mature, and seems to have a special understanding of us boys as we struggle to find our way through adolescence.
He is a lovely man, the ideal type of the caring person. How much less a man I would be today had I not experienced his guidance. He accepted my high-strung nature, my idealism, and showed me how to use rather than be abused by it.
Although a boy himself, he seems to understand what I don’t, and to move me from being my own worst enemy to my own best friend. He never compliments me, but corrects my play in such a way that it always feels like a compliment.
These young volunteer coaches not only help us as athletes, but as persons as well.
Two of them are gone, but they are all in my heart and will be there until I join them.
XI
Then there is a young Sister of St. Francis. She is my sixth grade teacher. Only 20, and not much older than her students, this is Sister’s first teaching assignment. An initial challenge is finding a way to deal with my high-strung nature. We are today the best of friends, but this was a traumatic period for us both. I was trying to get a grip on my passions, and she was trying to gain control of her class.
One day, she tells us that no one shall speak until she acknowledges his or her raised hand, a clear attempt to gain control of the chaos. Three times I recite the answer when someone else has a hand up. After the third disruption, she has me come to the front of the room.
Calmly, she tells me my behavior is unacceptable. I am ready to apologize, which has worked before, feeling it will close the matter, when she puts her small hand to her lips, then holds her hand up, palm out, and her innocent gaze silences me.
“For this disrespect to me and your classmates, James, you will stay after school and write on the blackboard 300 times, ‘I will not talk in class until I am called upon by Sister to speak’.”
“When, Sister?”
“After school.”
“Tonight?” She nods. “But I have basketball practice!”
“You’ll have to miss it.”
“But I can’t miss it. I can’t.” I can see by her quiet resolve that something is different; that she means business. My mind races. I am not to play basketball today! Basketball is my life! A rage wells up in me that is so powerful and so overwhelming that I pick up the object nearest me, a folding chair, and raise it high above my head. I seem a foot taller than Sister.
There is fright in her eyes as if I am about to send the chair crashing down on her head. But even in my towering rage, I have no intentions of hitting anyone, much less Sister. I want to demolish something, throw the chair through the window. I don’t want to hurt anyone. Like the calm in the center of a storm, I am out of control but not totally so.
There I stand frozen with the chair over my head, and I look at Sister, and she looks as frightened as a doe in the headlights of an on rushing car. Then she does something that I shall remember until my dying day. She touches her lips with her index finger, and then makes the Sign of the Cross.
That nonverbal action pricks my spell as if she had lanced a boil, and I collapse into the chair folding myself into it like a fetus. The room is bathed in an anxious silence. Now composed, Sister dismisses the class for the day, asks me to stay.
She sits there behind her desk for several minutes and says nothing. I still am in the folding chair my head bowed in fatigue and shame unable to look at her. I want to apologize but can’t. Right then and there I know I am my da’s son. I have been critical of his spontaneous rages, his impulsive explosions over nothing: phone calls from bill collectors, my mother smoking too much, the house being in a mess, my walking with my hands in my pockets down Chicago’s loop district. I was twelve and he expects me to treat life like a combat zone.
My terrible temper has never gotten out of control outside play, but now I see it for what it is, a curse. I am already big and strong, and could hurt someone. I pray that never happens. I am mumbling prayers in Latin, sitting on that folding chair, prayers in that dead language that distances me from myself: “Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatae Mariae semper Virgini, beato Michaeli Archangelo, beato Ioanni Baptistae, sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo…” These is a response of the altar boy at Mass, I have finally become.
My mind slowly becomes conscious of my fix. Will I be expelled? Will I no longer be able to play basketball? I am full of “me, me, me,” while Sister sits quietly behind her desk, looking at me pensively.
Then the school bell rings ending classes for the day.
“I’m going to leave you now, James,” she says, “to complete your punishment and I’m not coming back to check your work. I don’t expect you to leave until it is completed. Is that clear?” I nod. “Then we should both forget it ever happened.”
What beautiful psychology. Here I am writing about it sixty years later.
She knew then that it was an important moment in both our lives and that it would never be forgotten. There was no lecture; no psychological melodrama; no analysis of what a terrible temper I had, and how it would be my albatross in the future; none of that. Perhaps that is why it cauterized my soul with the imprint of its terrible truth. It was a transformational moment.
Sister knew, as hot headed as I was, as angry as I was that she had reached me. She knew also that I was task oriented, and would dutifully complete my punishment. I printed those 300 lines, doing 50 at a time, then erasing the blackboard, and doing 50 more. School let out at 3:20 p.m., and I was still printing my sentences at 5:00 p.m. It was already dark outside.
The janitor sees the light on in the sixth grade room, and is waiting to clean it. He finally comes in and asks me how much longer I’ll be. “I’m doing an assignment,” I say.
With tongue in cheek, he says, “I can see that. I’ve come by here several times and you keep writing the same sentence over and over again. Up to 275 now, huh? How many more left?”
“25. I have to do a total of 300.” My head hurts sharing this with this stranger, but he doesn’t make a joke of my predicament.
Instead he asks, “Can I clean the board when you’re done?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you have to save your work?”
“No.”
“How are you going to prove you stayed and did it?”
“Sister will know because I’ll tell her I did it.”
For some reason with those words of trust I lose it in front of this stranger. Something rises from deep inside me, something that comes roaring out without warning. I start to bawl, deep, deep sobs in front of the janitor, crying so hard and so loud that it might have been embarrassing if I were the least bit connected.
I feel so sorry for how terrible I have been to Sister; how king and trusting she has been of me. I am very disappointed with myself. I don’t like me very much. I am mourning that fact. I cannot help myself.
“Are you all right, son?” he asks, clearly mystified by my breakdown.
“No,” I sob. “I’m not all right.”
“Can I do anything? Get you a glass of water?”
“No.”
“Well, I’ll leave you then, come back later.” His kindness makes me sob even more.
Several minutes later, I go into the cloakroom, put my jacket on, and walk to my block by the courthouse. I walk around the courthouse block at least a half dozen times. It has started to snow; large soft snowflakes touch my tearing face and melt with them. When I finally walk from the corner of the jail to the three houses west to my home, my mother is waiting in the doorway with a cigarette dangling from her lips and a coffee cup in her hand. “Where have you been, Jimmy?”
I hate her smoking, hate her talking with a cigarette in her mouth, but somehow none of that is important. Dripping with snow, she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I start to laugh, and swallow her in a bear hug, all 95 pounds and five feet one inch of her, and say, “I love you, mommy. God, how I love you.”
She takes her cigarette out of her mouth, and holds it away from her body, and says, “Well, I’m not used to that.” That finds me hugging her even harder. “Careful now. I’m not a sack of flour.” Then she chuckles with that glint in her eye, “You going to tell me what brought this on?”
“Maybe someday.”
“Okay,” she says as if to herself, I can live with that. I suspect she thinks it relates to basketball practice lasting longer than usual. Whatever, she doesn’t press me and I love her all the more for it.
I never did tell her, although I write about the incident in my memoir as a novel, “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” (2003). She dies ten years before it is published on D-Day, June 6, 1993 at the age of 79. I found myself crying when I wrote about that day in the novel, and now I find myself crying as even an older man writing this essay in 2008, still stuck in the sixth grade.
________________
Dr. Fisher’s books are listed and available on his website: www.fisherofideas.com. His most recent book is “A Look Back to See Ahead” (Authorhouse 2007).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)