A RESPONSE TO “HARD LESSONS OF OD”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 29, 2008
A WRITER WRITES:
These are some good thoughts. But sometimes I wonder if contemplating a scene (he sends a photo of beautiful flowers) is more humanizing. I have a friend who did his best to humanize GM as an international rep for the UAW - and who retrained a lot of GM OD and other OD folks, but for naught.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
The photo is relaxing and understandable, as we prefer to take our attention away from rather than towards our problems. Nature may prove humanizing but OD is more pragmatic than using escape to make its point.
It has been my life’s work to draw attention to the ugly smell in the room caused by adults wetting the bed, not potty trained, or restrained in any way, while resorting to tantrums when their needs are not met. This has been a case of unintended consequences. It has evolved with steady consistency over the decades driving our American culture into placidity and inevitable decline. We have answers for all this most of which we blame on foreigners who will work for so little while staying in school so long to acquire skills we have no time or interest to pursue.
Darwin with a small "d" has shadowed us all my life.
You mention UAW and GM.
GM historically was a collection of tool & die guilds right out of the 19th century that formed into "General Motors." These tool & die makers set up their own machines, made arrangements to have them repaired, bought replacement parts, and, indeed, purchased their own supplies necessary to run the machines.
In short, these workers had control of what they did. When GM first commenced to coalesce into a "corporation," worker control was still a fact of operating life.
It was the 1930s, the time of the Great Depression, and such companies as GM were putting the screws to workers, even hiring gangs to put them into line. The so-called famous "Robber Barons" were not a very ethical group.
Enter the union movement in a big way. Unions never quite gained purchase in the 19th and early 20th century. We all know about the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) legendary Walter Ruether. His rise to power and prominence was after the cataclysm of WWI. What Ruether did, and what all the other labor unions did as well was:
(1) Construct the UAW business model after that of the emerging business model of GM;
(2) Use the strike to force GM to negotiate concessions; and
(3) Sue for wage and benefit concessions, as well as more improved working conditions and labor relation policies.
This all sounds well and good, so proper, but it is OD deficient because of one looming, implicit and irrevocable change. OD would have noted this, and made clear to UAW and GM management alike that it was throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The implicit concession was workers gave up control of work to management for wage and benefits. UAW would continue to do this throughout the 19540s into the twenty-first century without interruption or the slightest of departures from the draconian practice.
This is precisely what company management wanted.
The dance between GM and UAW was entertaining until 1968, when the game they were playing was taken away from them by Japan, South East Asia, and increasingly, by Europe.
Even so, GM and UAW didn’t tarry from their two-step wage-benefit routine, as if the world would eventually change to accommodate Detroit, there was no way Detroit was going to accommodate the world.
The wake-up call of Tom Brokaw in 1980, “Japan Can, Why Can’t We” on NBCTV only drove GM to cosmetic change engineered by human resources management. No power was gained by workers, but a new vocabulary introduced: such expressions as “participative management” and “empowerment” and “work centered management,” and so on. Words, only words! It was a con game and nothing happened in American until GM did something. Remember that arrogance?
Then someone in the leaderless leadership decided that the problem was GM and other companies weren’t generous enough. The thinking went something like this: give workers more money, more perks and they will show their gratitude by being more productive. WRONG!
It was with such thinking that the workplace has slipped from any notion of contribution to comfort and finally to a culture of complacency. I’ve written several books on this nosedive without so much as a modest blip on the American business conscience.
That said we see this descent (contribution-comfort-complacency) at all levels of work with one exception, which is mentioned in the piece you reference, and that is the electronics industry. Operationally, the high tech industry has retrogressed back to a guild-like determination, knowing full well that creativity is a function of a sense of individual initiative and control and is best generated in chaotic conditions where conflict is a norm, and confrontation is managed. No one is pyramid climbing or campaigning for the next job; everyone is trying to come up with the next electronic iteration of the industry. Brains are on fire!
Unfortunately, for workers in most other enterprises we killed the goose that laid the golden egg, and I've written (as have others) about this extensively.
We have never found our way back to enterprise and have come to accept (or is the word concede) that (as Time mentions in its July 7, 2008 issue, "service is our strength") we are no longer a maker of things. We have accepted that “have a happy day” is our mantra, always said with a smile because we are no longer in charge of anything leastwise ourselves.
I write in SIX SILENT KILLERS (CRC Press 1998):
"The dramatic change in work was primarily caused by leisure, not work. Before the twentieth century, there was little leisure for most Americans. Work and struggle were all the average family experienced. After WWII, when leisure became legitimate aspect of working life, the majority of workers didn't know how to handle it.
"This was dramatically illustrated by the late 1960s with the furlough program of Bethlehem Steel and Alcoa. A 13-week furlough program was inaugurated for veteran steel workers who already enjoyed practically every benefit and financial concession imaginable. These veteran steelworkers were given an additional 13 weeks of paid vacation every five years. The furlough was designed to administer manpower requirements more effectively, and to give workers the opportunity to pursue self-enhancement interests...Most furloughed workers got second jobs, and enjoyed the benefit of double incomes. When they returned to work, they complained they couldn't live on the status of a single income, and became petulant as children, many dogging it. The program completely backfired and demonstrated the true maturity of the workforce." (Six Silent Killers, pp. 89 - 90)
I wrote in another book (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend Delta Group 1996):
"To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons. The same holds true for ourselves."
We have created this monster, the American worker, flabby, self-pitying, looking for what he can get, not give, and permanently suspended in terminal adolescence with the mindset and maturity of a twelve-year-old dependent child.
It started in the 1930s, given a respite during WWII, and came to total true fruition by 1968. We have a spoiled brat constituency, and you need look no further than what the two presidential candidates are saying, “It is not any of our faults.” Both candidates want to get elected, and so we will be asked to sacrifice nothing, to change no behavior, but to look for government to suckle us at her breast and calm our anxiety. Whoever is elected, it seems certain that the maturity of our collective psyches will continue to blame the world for America’s decline.
OD could have had a role in this but hasn't and didn't because human resources management came into the void, a discipline that can never say "no" to management, a discipline that has a "pleaser" mentality, and a discipline that echoes the management mantra of treating people like things to be managed, not people to guide through the necessary pain and struggle and chaos that is the road to purposeful performance.
JRF
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is an industrial and organizational psychologist writing in the genre of organizational psychology, author of Confident Selling, Work Without Managers, The Worker, Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, Time Out for Sanity, Meet Your New Best Friend, Purposeful Selling, In the Shadow of the Courthouse and Confident Thinking and Confidence in Subtext. A Way of Thinking About Things, Who Put You in a Cage, and Another Kind of Cruelty are in Amazon’s KINDLE Library.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Saturday, June 28, 2008
HARD LESSONS OF ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT (OD) NEVER LEARNED!
HARD LESSONS OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (OD) NEVER LEARNED!
DANKA BUSINESS SYSTEMS – A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 28, 2008
“The Tampa Bay area lost another corporate headquarters when shareholders of St. Petersburg and London-based DANKA BUSINESS SYSTEMS voted Friday to approve $240 million sale of the office equipment and service company of KONICA MINOLTA BUSINESS SOLUTIONS USA of Ramsey, N.J. The proposed sale was announced in April. Danka, which got its start locally here in 1977, saw its financial fortunes begin to plummet after the $588 million acquisition of an EASTMAN KODAK copier division in 1996 and subsequent difficulties blending the corporate cultures and technological infrastructures.”
Business Section, The Tampa Tribune – June 28, 2008
* * * * * * * * * * *
It is interesting to note that in the same business section of the Tampa Tribune there is a tribute to Bill Gates and his gang of innovators who started Microsoft in 1978, creating several billionaires, among whom Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, and literally hundreds and hundreds of millionaires.
Bill Gates is stepping down from day-to-day operations to devote his full time to his philanthropic enterprises. Pictured in this issue is the rag tag group of long hairs and scrubby looks of nine men and two women, who made Microsoft one of the most imposing companies in the world thirty years later.
This unimpressive fledgling group of college dropouts and counterculture sympathizers, a group few took seriously, were actually a dedicated collection of hard working doers. They did so without thinking about culture or infrastructure or any popular theme of today that gets so much press. Their eyes were on a single ball, putting their software into every home in the world.
In the process, however, this eclectic group was developing a culture, creating an infrastructure, developing a value system, and evolving a work ethic that would manifest itself exponentially into one of the most successful enterprise systems ever known to man.
They didn’t worry about salary, perks, fringe benefits, selective parking, recognition for hours worked, or having corner offices signifying clout. They had neither time for award ceremonies, pep rallies or motivating meetings nor for complex policies and procedures, high talent demographics or performance appraisals. They had time only for focusing on meaningful results. They were eleven people with a singular attitude.
They came together when project points had to be checked. They did so spontaneously and expeditiously, and then moved on. No one had time to develop slogans about “team work” or the “power of teaming,” or “empowerment.” Slogans were for advertisers who designed products for people to want what they didn’t necessarily need. Not so with them. They were in to making people’s lives easier by finding easier ways in the conduct of life with software.
The bureaucracy that developed was lean and mean, direct and confrontational, and off the cuff but never off the project shelf. There were no expensive brochures to entice people to want their products; no enticing brochures to bring talent to their door. It was all word of mouth in those early days.
In a strange way, it harkened back to the pre-industrial days of the European guilds as enterprise was conducted in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Everyone in those days was a generalist and brought his or her talent to the needs of the project as it unfolded. It could be anything from household goods to farm equipment to luxury items.
DANKA’S DOWNFALL
As the newspaper item quotes, Danka is still sliding down the slope of entropy. It got too big too fast with too much that wasn’t Danka at all.
Eastman Kodak is not the only acquisition that Danka acquired in its attempt to be a main player in its industry, but it was the most damaging acquisition. Danka was a small company that acquired this copier division, a company stuck in a time warp with excessive perks, benefits, requirements, rituals, rites of passage, and hubris that looked back to an age long since passed.
Danka, like early Microsoft, was lean and mean and on target. The company assumed its collective enthusiasm and determination to be a major player would be contagious for any operation that joined its ranks. Danka had little patience with Kodak protocol, or its pomp and circumstance, and even less appetite for its demands.
Danka found the pay structure of salesmen, the benefit package, and other perks such as vacation and sick leave policies excessive to the extreme. Eastman Kodak people were now Danka people and they had better get used to the idea. WRONG!
It takes six weeks to create a habit and a lifetime to change that habit. Imagine sales people with Kodak, say for twenty years, being asked to bite the bullet now for scaled down perks and benefits in the future. Not likely. Imagine those same people thinking themselves superior because they come from an established hundred-year-old company to this fledgling upstart, and you have a sense of how things might rupture into dismay.
The Kodak people were suspended in permanent adolescence, taken care of by their caregivers, management, and as such were looking for what they could get, not give.
Granted, these workers were typical of workers in mega corporations across America, and the backbone of a society that ceased to exist by 1968, which marked the end of the American Century.
Such workers lived in the nostalgia of WWII when the world was desecrated and had no choice but to “buy American.” It took until 1968 for the rest of the world to catch up, and the young people of Microsoft and Danka were part of that new cadre of workers.
THE IMPORANCE OF OD AND HOW IT COULD HAVE MADE A DIFFERENCE
I am going to get personal now. I am an old codger no longer in the thick of things, but happen to be one of the pioneers of one of the most critical disciplines around today, a discipline that is rarely understood, and more rarely practiced, as it should be by professionals of the discipline.
OD is not personnel! OD is not human resources management! OD is the high priest of the new frontier of human endeavor!
I make no apologies for italics. If I could use an analogy, the OD professional is a combination police officer and priest. He is there to “serve and protect” the company from everyone, including its management; and there to see that the ethics of operations and the practices of employment are humanistic, sensible, fair, and consistent.
The purpose of an organization is what it does, and what it does should be mutually beneficial to workers, managers, and customers alike, and so in the best interests of the markets the company serves.
OD is diligence to see that management doesn’t exploit workers to its benefit, or for workers to exploit the company at its detriment. .
OD’s client is not management; nor is its client the workers. OD’s client is the company.
OD is the social, industrial and organizational psychologist of the company. It assesses the company’s social psychological health in the same manner the clinical psychologist assesses the psychological health of the individual.
OD is essentially an unobtrusive observer of behavior at all levels and in all circumstances.
OD’s many instruments to devise this perspective, aside from observation, include individual interviews, demographic surveys, personality surveys, assessment centers, value-clarification interventions, conflict management, and attitudinal surveys.
OD should also be party to corporate board meetings, executive meetings, and worker meetings. In a word, observing all parties as they relate to the purpose of the company being what it does, not what it says it does, or what it wishes that it could do, or what it hopes to do in the future, but what it is doing now!
OD is not the friend of management or of the worker. OD is not the friend of the company. OD is the conscience of all.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The moment that contingencies of an organization change; the moment that it feels it must take the short cut and acquire this or that operation to give it a fuller capability, IT CHANGES!
That is the same for Microsoft as it motors into the future, as it has been unhappily for Danka in the past.
When in transition and in the midst of transformation, an OD professional on board with clout is worth his or her price in diamonds several times over. Company management has yet to realize this because it thinks common sense is common, and OD is all about common sense, and it knows as much about it as anyone. Repeated company failures involved in mergers have failed to dent this perception.
That said the OD professional could help the company bridge the gap between yesterday, today, and tomorrow, wherever the company might be in that equation.
OD is the mathematical equivalent of E = MC2, only it deals in human combustibles. I say that because it takes the collective nascent energy of a company, and gives it a release pattern that soars instead of self-implodes as Danka has. Culture is the key to everything, and culture is OD's domain.
* * * * * * * * *
Dr. Fisher has written several books and hundreds of articles on this subject, most recently A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). See his website: www.fisherofideas.com for more information.
DANKA BUSINESS SYSTEMS – A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 28, 2008
“The Tampa Bay area lost another corporate headquarters when shareholders of St. Petersburg and London-based DANKA BUSINESS SYSTEMS voted Friday to approve $240 million sale of the office equipment and service company of KONICA MINOLTA BUSINESS SOLUTIONS USA of Ramsey, N.J. The proposed sale was announced in April. Danka, which got its start locally here in 1977, saw its financial fortunes begin to plummet after the $588 million acquisition of an EASTMAN KODAK copier division in 1996 and subsequent difficulties blending the corporate cultures and technological infrastructures.”
Business Section, The Tampa Tribune – June 28, 2008
* * * * * * * * * * *
It is interesting to note that in the same business section of the Tampa Tribune there is a tribute to Bill Gates and his gang of innovators who started Microsoft in 1978, creating several billionaires, among whom Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, and literally hundreds and hundreds of millionaires.
Bill Gates is stepping down from day-to-day operations to devote his full time to his philanthropic enterprises. Pictured in this issue is the rag tag group of long hairs and scrubby looks of nine men and two women, who made Microsoft one of the most imposing companies in the world thirty years later.
This unimpressive fledgling group of college dropouts and counterculture sympathizers, a group few took seriously, were actually a dedicated collection of hard working doers. They did so without thinking about culture or infrastructure or any popular theme of today that gets so much press. Their eyes were on a single ball, putting their software into every home in the world.
In the process, however, this eclectic group was developing a culture, creating an infrastructure, developing a value system, and evolving a work ethic that would manifest itself exponentially into one of the most successful enterprise systems ever known to man.
They didn’t worry about salary, perks, fringe benefits, selective parking, recognition for hours worked, or having corner offices signifying clout. They had neither time for award ceremonies, pep rallies or motivating meetings nor for complex policies and procedures, high talent demographics or performance appraisals. They had time only for focusing on meaningful results. They were eleven people with a singular attitude.
They came together when project points had to be checked. They did so spontaneously and expeditiously, and then moved on. No one had time to develop slogans about “team work” or the “power of teaming,” or “empowerment.” Slogans were for advertisers who designed products for people to want what they didn’t necessarily need. Not so with them. They were in to making people’s lives easier by finding easier ways in the conduct of life with software.
The bureaucracy that developed was lean and mean, direct and confrontational, and off the cuff but never off the project shelf. There were no expensive brochures to entice people to want their products; no enticing brochures to bring talent to their door. It was all word of mouth in those early days.
In a strange way, it harkened back to the pre-industrial days of the European guilds as enterprise was conducted in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Everyone in those days was a generalist and brought his or her talent to the needs of the project as it unfolded. It could be anything from household goods to farm equipment to luxury items.
DANKA’S DOWNFALL
As the newspaper item quotes, Danka is still sliding down the slope of entropy. It got too big too fast with too much that wasn’t Danka at all.
Eastman Kodak is not the only acquisition that Danka acquired in its attempt to be a main player in its industry, but it was the most damaging acquisition. Danka was a small company that acquired this copier division, a company stuck in a time warp with excessive perks, benefits, requirements, rituals, rites of passage, and hubris that looked back to an age long since passed.
Danka, like early Microsoft, was lean and mean and on target. The company assumed its collective enthusiasm and determination to be a major player would be contagious for any operation that joined its ranks. Danka had little patience with Kodak protocol, or its pomp and circumstance, and even less appetite for its demands.
Danka found the pay structure of salesmen, the benefit package, and other perks such as vacation and sick leave policies excessive to the extreme. Eastman Kodak people were now Danka people and they had better get used to the idea. WRONG!
It takes six weeks to create a habit and a lifetime to change that habit. Imagine sales people with Kodak, say for twenty years, being asked to bite the bullet now for scaled down perks and benefits in the future. Not likely. Imagine those same people thinking themselves superior because they come from an established hundred-year-old company to this fledgling upstart, and you have a sense of how things might rupture into dismay.
The Kodak people were suspended in permanent adolescence, taken care of by their caregivers, management, and as such were looking for what they could get, not give.
Granted, these workers were typical of workers in mega corporations across America, and the backbone of a society that ceased to exist by 1968, which marked the end of the American Century.
Such workers lived in the nostalgia of WWII when the world was desecrated and had no choice but to “buy American.” It took until 1968 for the rest of the world to catch up, and the young people of Microsoft and Danka were part of that new cadre of workers.
THE IMPORANCE OF OD AND HOW IT COULD HAVE MADE A DIFFERENCE
I am going to get personal now. I am an old codger no longer in the thick of things, but happen to be one of the pioneers of one of the most critical disciplines around today, a discipline that is rarely understood, and more rarely practiced, as it should be by professionals of the discipline.
OD is not personnel! OD is not human resources management! OD is the high priest of the new frontier of human endeavor!
I make no apologies for italics. If I could use an analogy, the OD professional is a combination police officer and priest. He is there to “serve and protect” the company from everyone, including its management; and there to see that the ethics of operations and the practices of employment are humanistic, sensible, fair, and consistent.
The purpose of an organization is what it does, and what it does should be mutually beneficial to workers, managers, and customers alike, and so in the best interests of the markets the company serves.
OD is diligence to see that management doesn’t exploit workers to its benefit, or for workers to exploit the company at its detriment. .
OD’s client is not management; nor is its client the workers. OD’s client is the company.
OD is the social, industrial and organizational psychologist of the company. It assesses the company’s social psychological health in the same manner the clinical psychologist assesses the psychological health of the individual.
OD is essentially an unobtrusive observer of behavior at all levels and in all circumstances.
OD’s many instruments to devise this perspective, aside from observation, include individual interviews, demographic surveys, personality surveys, assessment centers, value-clarification interventions, conflict management, and attitudinal surveys.
OD should also be party to corporate board meetings, executive meetings, and worker meetings. In a word, observing all parties as they relate to the purpose of the company being what it does, not what it says it does, or what it wishes that it could do, or what it hopes to do in the future, but what it is doing now!
OD is not the friend of management or of the worker. OD is not the friend of the company. OD is the conscience of all.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The moment that contingencies of an organization change; the moment that it feels it must take the short cut and acquire this or that operation to give it a fuller capability, IT CHANGES!
That is the same for Microsoft as it motors into the future, as it has been unhappily for Danka in the past.
When in transition and in the midst of transformation, an OD professional on board with clout is worth his or her price in diamonds several times over. Company management has yet to realize this because it thinks common sense is common, and OD is all about common sense, and it knows as much about it as anyone. Repeated company failures involved in mergers have failed to dent this perception.
That said the OD professional could help the company bridge the gap between yesterday, today, and tomorrow, wherever the company might be in that equation.
OD is the mathematical equivalent of E = MC2, only it deals in human combustibles. I say that because it takes the collective nascent energy of a company, and gives it a release pattern that soars instead of self-implodes as Danka has. Culture is the key to everything, and culture is OD's domain.
* * * * * * * * *
Dr. Fisher has written several books and hundreds of articles on this subject, most recently A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). See his website: www.fisherofideas.com for more information.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
JERZY KOSINSKI & EUROPEAN GENERATION THAT SURVIVED WWII
JERZY KOSINSKI & EUROPEAN GENERATION THAT SURVIVED WWII
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 26, 2008
“No man can answer for his courage who has never been in danger.”
Francois Rochefoucauld (1620 – 1680), French moralist
* * * * * * *
Reference: This is a letter to a German executive colleague of mine with whom I served Honeywell Europe, Ltd. during the late 1980s. At the time, he was Director of Human Resources for Germany, and I was Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for Honeywell Europe’s Corporate Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. He went on to become Executive Vice President of Human Resources for Honeywell International, Inc.
* * * * * * *
Manfred,
I don't know if you ever read Jerzy Kosinski, who was a soaring star for his European novels of his youth during WWII ("The Painted Bird" and "Steps").
He claimed the material to be biographical, but many of his critics have felt otherwise. Be that as it may, the sense of the horrors of war and place ring true in these novels, and most devastatingly so.
I mention it because it was a terrible period for young people such as he, and, yes, young people such as yourself and Gerda.
I thought reading these books of Kosinski that your children should be especially proud of their parents. They cannot appreciate or have a true sense of what it was like for young people to endure and survive that terrible period of war.
It is quite remarkable, upon reflection, that you kept a hold of your sanity and sensibility, and managed because of that courage, to make significant contributions to society thereafter.
Kosinski came to the US talented but penniless in the late 1950s at the age of 24, constantly reinvented himself, wrote best selling books and an Academy Award screen play ("Being There"), won a series of other celebrity awards, became rich in his own right, while living a flamboyant lifestyle with the rich of famous. In the end, Kosinski's body broken by excess, his spirit essentially dead, he succumbed ultimately to self-imploded debauchery, taking his own life at age 57.
You managed to complete your education under the most difficult circumstances, acclimate yourself to a new society and world after years at war, work your way up the ladder, and culminate your executive career by becoming vice president of human resources for Honeywell International, Inc., a Fortune 100 company.
That is a remarkable achievement in and of itself, but beyond that, it represents the courage of a man who was a boy during the darkest days of the Second World War, and came out of it whole, married and reared a family of achievers, who continue to contribute to society in meaningful ways to this day.
I had the good fortune of meeting your daughter, Jessica, as a young lady, when she came to visit us in Brussels. I have followed her achievements including earning a Ph.D. in pharmacology, and now being a new mother.
I remember your one son being especially solicitous to my daughter, Jennifer, when there was a mix up when she came to Germany to visit Jessica, and was stranded at the air port. Your son calmed her down over the phone, gave her directions, and everything worked out well, and your son was only a boy himself.
I've not met him nor his brother, but know that they have both done well and continue to make significant contributions to society.
Your children are a powerful legacy of two people who were only children themselves during a time when Europe was ravaged with war and displacement with no one knowing for certain if they would survive.
I have reached a period in my life when I am well aware of how fragile and vulnerable we are as human beings.
I know how easily we can be moved to destroy as well as create, mount difficult tasks with great courage or look for ways to steal, cheat or kill others if it means an advantage to us.
I've known both kinds, and Kosinki's books reminded me of how lucky I have been to know you.
When I was in the US Navy on the USS Salem (CA-139), Flagship of the Sixth Fleet, operating in the Mediterranean at the end of the 1950s, my best friend was Wolfgang Erdmann. We were Hospital Corpsman on the ship.
We were part of the US Navy's experiment to hire college graduates as an option to the Selective Service Draft.
Wolfgang was drafted into the US Navy while not yet a US citizen when he escaped from East Germany and found his way to the States. He was an optometrist by education, but a white hat (enlisted man) in the navy as I was a chemist by education, and also a white hat.
Wolfgang was in the German Army on the Eastern Front at the end of WWII, and only eleven-years-old. He told me tales I thought were exaggerated at the time. The older German soldiers, he claimed, knowing the war was lost, protected him, and then designed a way for him to escape back into Germany.
Wolfgang was from East Berlin, and was educated behind the Berlin Wall. In 1955, a wild escape was mounted right out of a John LeCarre novel with him eventually acquiring a US Visa in London. It helped that an uncle in New Jersey owned an electronics factory, where he could be employed. The uncle, however, could not protect him from being drafted into the US Navy.
We would stand on the fantail of the Salem and talk of an evening as the sun went down over the horizon in the middle of the Mediterranean, and dream of our futures. I've lost track of Wolfgang but never my memory of him, or what he went through. I've always been going to write a book about that period, but what else is new?
Wolfgang got me to read Goethe, and I got him to read American authors. We were both big readers, and culture vultures, going on every tour we could muster. We also had a common interest in opera among other things. He also introduced me to German cuisine.
Kosinski's books remind me that I, like most Americans, who were protected from experiencing WWII directly, can hardly appreciate what a struggle it must have been for young people of our generation in Europe to grow up straight and tall and sane and sanguine when exposed to the cruelty of war first hand. It was something Kosinski failed to manage, but you did.
Be always well,
Jim
* * * * * * *
Dr. Fisher has written nine books in the genre of organizaional development (OD) and is now writing a novel of South Africa to be titled GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 26, 2008
“No man can answer for his courage who has never been in danger.”
Francois Rochefoucauld (1620 – 1680), French moralist
* * * * * * *
Reference: This is a letter to a German executive colleague of mine with whom I served Honeywell Europe, Ltd. during the late 1980s. At the time, he was Director of Human Resources for Germany, and I was Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for Honeywell Europe’s Corporate Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. He went on to become Executive Vice President of Human Resources for Honeywell International, Inc.
* * * * * * *
Manfred,
I don't know if you ever read Jerzy Kosinski, who was a soaring star for his European novels of his youth during WWII ("The Painted Bird" and "Steps").
He claimed the material to be biographical, but many of his critics have felt otherwise. Be that as it may, the sense of the horrors of war and place ring true in these novels, and most devastatingly so.
I mention it because it was a terrible period for young people such as he, and, yes, young people such as yourself and Gerda.
I thought reading these books of Kosinski that your children should be especially proud of their parents. They cannot appreciate or have a true sense of what it was like for young people to endure and survive that terrible period of war.
It is quite remarkable, upon reflection, that you kept a hold of your sanity and sensibility, and managed because of that courage, to make significant contributions to society thereafter.
Kosinski came to the US talented but penniless in the late 1950s at the age of 24, constantly reinvented himself, wrote best selling books and an Academy Award screen play ("Being There"), won a series of other celebrity awards, became rich in his own right, while living a flamboyant lifestyle with the rich of famous. In the end, Kosinski's body broken by excess, his spirit essentially dead, he succumbed ultimately to self-imploded debauchery, taking his own life at age 57.
You managed to complete your education under the most difficult circumstances, acclimate yourself to a new society and world after years at war, work your way up the ladder, and culminate your executive career by becoming vice president of human resources for Honeywell International, Inc., a Fortune 100 company.
That is a remarkable achievement in and of itself, but beyond that, it represents the courage of a man who was a boy during the darkest days of the Second World War, and came out of it whole, married and reared a family of achievers, who continue to contribute to society in meaningful ways to this day.
I had the good fortune of meeting your daughter, Jessica, as a young lady, when she came to visit us in Brussels. I have followed her achievements including earning a Ph.D. in pharmacology, and now being a new mother.
I remember your one son being especially solicitous to my daughter, Jennifer, when there was a mix up when she came to Germany to visit Jessica, and was stranded at the air port. Your son calmed her down over the phone, gave her directions, and everything worked out well, and your son was only a boy himself.
I've not met him nor his brother, but know that they have both done well and continue to make significant contributions to society.
Your children are a powerful legacy of two people who were only children themselves during a time when Europe was ravaged with war and displacement with no one knowing for certain if they would survive.
I have reached a period in my life when I am well aware of how fragile and vulnerable we are as human beings.
I know how easily we can be moved to destroy as well as create, mount difficult tasks with great courage or look for ways to steal, cheat or kill others if it means an advantage to us.
I've known both kinds, and Kosinki's books reminded me of how lucky I have been to know you.
When I was in the US Navy on the USS Salem (CA-139), Flagship of the Sixth Fleet, operating in the Mediterranean at the end of the 1950s, my best friend was Wolfgang Erdmann. We were Hospital Corpsman on the ship.
We were part of the US Navy's experiment to hire college graduates as an option to the Selective Service Draft.
Wolfgang was drafted into the US Navy while not yet a US citizen when he escaped from East Germany and found his way to the States. He was an optometrist by education, but a white hat (enlisted man) in the navy as I was a chemist by education, and also a white hat.
Wolfgang was in the German Army on the Eastern Front at the end of WWII, and only eleven-years-old. He told me tales I thought were exaggerated at the time. The older German soldiers, he claimed, knowing the war was lost, protected him, and then designed a way for him to escape back into Germany.
Wolfgang was from East Berlin, and was educated behind the Berlin Wall. In 1955, a wild escape was mounted right out of a John LeCarre novel with him eventually acquiring a US Visa in London. It helped that an uncle in New Jersey owned an electronics factory, where he could be employed. The uncle, however, could not protect him from being drafted into the US Navy.
We would stand on the fantail of the Salem and talk of an evening as the sun went down over the horizon in the middle of the Mediterranean, and dream of our futures. I've lost track of Wolfgang but never my memory of him, or what he went through. I've always been going to write a book about that period, but what else is new?
Wolfgang got me to read Goethe, and I got him to read American authors. We were both big readers, and culture vultures, going on every tour we could muster. We also had a common interest in opera among other things. He also introduced me to German cuisine.
Kosinski's books remind me that I, like most Americans, who were protected from experiencing WWII directly, can hardly appreciate what a struggle it must have been for young people of our generation in Europe to grow up straight and tall and sane and sanguine when exposed to the cruelty of war first hand. It was something Kosinski failed to manage, but you did.
Be always well,
Jim
* * * * * * *
Dr. Fisher has written nine books in the genre of organizaional development (OD) and is now writing a novel of South Africa to be titled GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA.
Friday, June 13, 2008
"1968"
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 13, 2008
“In 1968, the world stood on its metaphorical head and wondered why it couldn’t get anywhere.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Author’s Forward, Green Island In A Black Sea – novel-in-progress
* * * * * *
Lance Morrow of “Time” magazine (January 11, 1988) wrote, “1968 is like a knife blade that severed the past from the future.”
1968 was the year young people broke with the past. Called freaks, members of the counterculture, flower children or hippies, they were transforming the West, as it was known. They introduced spiritual freedom disassociated from the Church, hope disassociated from the straight world, and happiness without familial or sexual constraints. Hippies were bent on social justice and Cultural Revolution for no other reason than because they could.
1968 was twenty years after the establishment of the United Nations, and the State of Israel. It was also twenty years after the Afrikaner Government came to power in South Africa.
GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA is a story told through the experience of Seamus “Dirk” Devlin, 30, on the fringe of this generation, but who couldn’t be more conventional, uptight or more a prisoner of the past. As he assumes his new assignment in South Africa in 1968, he encounters its policy of apartheid, a country without television, indeed, a country without the deviations of a counterculture at all, but a country author Allen Drury describes as a very strange society for its parallax view of the world.
1968 marked the departure of young people from the stultifying boredom of a consumer society, a society that lived in identical suburbs, slept in twin beds, drove identical cars, watched mind-numbing sitcoms on television, and went to church satisfied that they were the moral guardians of the world.
1968 was the year young people looked around and saw old people, who had not left the celebratory spirit of 1945 and World War Two, controlled everything. They created separation with rock ‘n’ roll music, drugs, free love, dress and appearance, while displaying a distaste for war, violence and rules. When the FBI and CIA, and other agencies tried to discredit them, they launched a counterculture with a vengeance. This included the idea of destroying the college to get an education. They were defined by virtually everything that conventional society was not, and the more they were taken as an oddity the more their presence was felt by that society.
These seemingly unrelated fragments find the world today, more than forty years later, turned upside down, and inside out, running on empty, still wishing 1945 could somehow return.
1968 was the year Devlin walked out of this upside down world into the right side up world of the Afrikaner Government, which had no intentions of changing. He would soon discover whether it was a nightmare or a dream.
END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY
1968 was the year the “American Century” ended, thirty-two years early.
1968 was the year America’s self-confidence ran amuck. Nothing and no one was in control. Corporate America was 20 or 30 divisions in search of a corporation. Japan, Inc. was eating America’s lunch. Quietly, Japan was taking away the U.S. competitive advantage. Left behind were hollow U.S. factories in the automotive, appliance, lighting, and finance industries. Japan bombed Hawaii in 1941; in 1968 it was buying Hawaii with real estate purchases.
1968 was the year leaders became caricatures of themselves. Education became a factory with no room for thinking.
1968 was the year the Church became lost in cultural relativism no longer certain the meaning of truth.
END OF CONTROL FROM THE TOP
1968 was the year politicians ignored the seismic cultural shift and became irrelevant. They were still lock stepping to the cadence of 1945, while ignoring the counterculture paradigm shift.
1968 was the year young people let their presence be known. There were revolts and rebellions of university students from Prague to Peru.
1968 was the year the Czech Communist leader Alexander Dubcek attempted to give socialism a human face in the “Spring of Freedom.” He failed as the movement died as 650,000 Warsaw Pact troops and tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union crushed the rebellion but lost the hearts and minds of the people.
1968 was the year of the riots in the streets of Paris with 30,000 university students battling 50,000 policemen. These students brought President Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic to its knees. Many observers thought it marked the end of civilization.
1968 was the year the police slaughtered peaceful marchers in Mexico City with estimates of student murders by police from 30 to as high as 300.
1968 was the year rioting turned British and West German universities into student occupying communes. Student riots also caused the premiers of Italy and Belgium to be toppled.
1968 was the year students of Columbia University shut down the campus and occupied the university’s administrative buildings.
1968 was the year 10,000 students descended on the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago led by the “Youth International Party” (Yippies) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). These students disrupted proceedings decrying the Vietnam War, racism, and the hypocritical political process, pointing out that 60 percent of the Viet Nam deaths were Negroes when only 12 percent of the population. Frightened voters, reacting to melee aired on nightly television news for days, narrowly elected Richard M. Nixon as president in November over Hubert Humphrey.
1968 was the year of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War. Viet Cong lost the battle but gained a psychological victory. The surprise attack brought about a drastic reversal in the U.S. policy in Viet Nam. Of the 206,000 additional troops requested by General Westmoreland, President Johnson authorized only 13,500; relieved the general of his command; and then announced he would not run for reelection.
END OF DUE PROCESS
1968 was the year Viet Nam, a war never declared, spun out of control. Congress was duped into approving the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” (August 7, 1964).
Two American destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf, which marked the boundary of North Viet Nam, were allegedly attacked without provocation by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The “Pentagon Papers” proved otherwise.
Daniel Ellsbergs, consultant to the State Department, made the papers public in June of 1971. Excerpts were published in The New York Times and The Washington Post. These documents revealed a legacy of blunders and deceit from presidents Eisenhower, through Kennedy to Johnson’s secret war plan.
President Johnson planned to goad the Communists into aggravating hostilities, thereby giving him an excuse to massively retaliate. The war, the Pentagon Papers revealed, was being fought 70 percent “to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat,” the first in American history, and only 10 percent for the sake of the Vietnamese.
1968 was the year of the fiasco of the U.S Pueblo. The Pueblo was an American spy ship in international waters that was boarded and impounded by the North Koreans. Some 83 sailors languished in North Korean prisons for nearly a year, frequently beaten, exacting many confessions of their crimes before television cameras, including the ship’s captain, Commander Lloyd M. Bucher.
YOUNG PEOPLE LOOKING FOR A WAY OUT TO FIND A WAY IN
1968 was the year of New Age spiritualism led by Carlos Castaneda and his “The Teachings of Don Juan.”
1968 was the year of LSD, and the psychedelic acid trips of Harvard professor Timothy Leary.
1968 was the year of novelist Ken Kesey and his “Merry Pranksters.” These hippies zigzagged across the country in a converted school bus painted in psychedelic colors, stayed high, sold drugs, and organized parties of surrealistic joy.
1968 was the year of the “acid rock” music of the Grateful Dead. Amplifiers and microphones were hooked through many speakers to produce a sound like a chemical refinery. Steppenwolf, Country Joe and the Fish, the Jefferson Airplane, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and many others joined the entourage of the Grateful Dead.
1968 was the year young people accepted rock ‘n’ roll music as the new form of communication for their generation. As the sound grew louder, the dancing more frantic, the lights blinking more hypnotically, they fused into a tidal wave of collective hysteria.
These impassioned revelers wake up now, forty years later, to find they have changed history by dropping out to find a way in.
END OF HEROES
1968 was the year that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated (April 4) and Robert F. Kennedy (June 5).
1968 was the year the Summer Olympics in Mexico City became political. Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the “Black Power” salute with their fists raised defiantly in the air from the medals platform after winning the Gold and Bronze medal as the United States National Anthem played.
1968 was the year of the Black Panther Party with the cry, “Black is beautiful and we want power to determine the destiny of our black community.”
1968 was the year professor Timothy Leary of Harvard advocated the “Politics of Ecstasy,” stating, “If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, you must turn on, turn in, and drop out.” As the pope of dope, he led the sexual revolution in psychedelic erotic exhilaration.
END OF THE RATIONAL
1968 was the year that the absurd became legitimate. The mocking writings of Beckett, Sartre and Camus, Nietzsche and Heidegger found a home in a place called “Haight-Asbury,” outside San Francisco.
1968 was the year novelist Ken Kesey insisted people needed to be outlaws for the pleasure of it. They wallowed in hedonistic glee outside the rational ordering society of laws and policemen. Free food was distributed boosted from Safeway trucks. They sashayed about in clothes lifted from assignment shops; walked naked as jay birds through a sea of revelers at open air concerts without raising an eyebrow; bedded down in abandoned buildings paying no rent; made love whenever the mood hit them unconcerned about privacy. These outlaws had no rules, responsibilities or regrets, only the ecstasy of having fun in the moment.
1968 was the year that tens of thousands escaped to Canada to avoid the Selective Service Draft. Those that didn’t declared November 14 “National Turn in Your Draft Card Day.” Still others burned their draft cards in public bonfires in defiance of the law.
1968 was the year Yippy founders, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, announced, “Never trust anyone over thirty.”
1968 was the year longhaired bearded youth looked down at their job holding parents who measured worth by job competence while they measured it in terms of personal truth. .
END OF PARENTING
1968 was the year the nuclear family died. Parents gave up the frustrating attempt to control their children and abdicated the responsibility.
1968 was the year that the fallacy was proven that happiness was a matter of economic security. Parents justified being full-time jobholders by providing what they had not enjoyed as children. These good intentions backfired.
1968 was the year the idea of being teenagers was fully realized along with the discovery that parental guilt could be exploited. Teenagers did as they pleased, stayed out all hours, skipped school when the mood hit them, drank hard liquor, smoked cigarettes, experimented with drugs, and had sexual trysts. They lied, cheated and stole with impunity, but maintained the concession of being available to sit down dinners on holidays.
1968 was the year teachers lost control of the classroom. School became a combat zone. Teachers felt successful if they survived the day without bodily harm. Not only did learning suffer, but competent people avoided the profession.
1968 was the year adults retrogressed into adolescence. The “over thirty” crowd joined the hippie lifestyle. Recreational drugs became fashionable at adult gatherings as society lost its mind as well as its way.
1968 was the year that the counterculture established trends in dress, lifestyle, coiffure, language, diet, music, art, theatre, film, politics, sport, media, entertainment, architecture, literature, journalism, values, interests, and beliefs. It even elevated primitive body painting to an accepted art form.
THE END OF HISTORY
1968 was the year the home was abandoned as refuge from the world at large. The home no longer represented the crucible of leadership, the citadel of learning, the place of stability. Home became synthetic, arbitrary, a second hand experience. The loss of this sanctuary was not simply a dumbing down of society; it was the “end of history.”
1968 was the year science and the struggle for individual recognition now filled this new vacuum. Science opened the door to economic possibility, while the drive for recognition was its motor. Life was all about getting ahead. Greed was good. Everything was measured in terms of economics. Tradition was not only gone, but forgotten. Historical landmarks were razed to make parking, construct fast-food restaurants, or cut a new highway through a community armed with Eminent Domain.
1968 was the year tyranny lost its edge, tyranny of government, employment, institutions or, vested interests? In the absence of tyrannies, everyone was now in charge, which meant no one was. This was the new reality.
1968 was the year man was at the door of the future. Francis Fukuyama has since personified this as the “last man” in history. Soaring man no longer had time to look back to the chaos of history. In any case, facts were seen as fiction, truth was considered relative, and the drive toward capitalistic liberal democracies was deemed the end state of the historical process.
1968 was the year the nonfiction novel of Norman Mailer recorded the people’s march (The Armies of the Night) on Washington, DC.
1968 was the year that Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson created the “New Journalism,” using fictional techniques to dramatize their nonfiction writing. The blur between reality and fantasy spawned by the hippies, given credence by counterculture philosophers, was gaining purchase in popular culture.
1968 was the year of cultural studies as universities abandoned objective truth for relativism. The inherited wisdom of the past was now passé.
1968 was the year symbolic systems emphasized the construction of identities, social institutions, and social relations, and gave birth to feminist studies, African American studies, and other cultural pursuits.
1968 was the year of anti-humanism in the wake of the student radical movement. The movers and shakers were the old New Left crowd of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Lacan. These philosophers were the Continental gurus who took the hippies seriously and shared their contempt for the past.
1968 was the year of “poststructuralism” and “deconstructionists.” The thought police have made a clear break with the past throwing conventional thinking on its head. Anti-humanistic philosophy, as it was called, claimed human reason was impotent and insufficient to make universal moral judgments.
It was the end of history. The past should be interpreted in terms of its own values because knowledge was not certain, but relative; truth was not discernible except contextually, and then totally subject to interpretation; and science was not value-free but quite subject dependent.
1968 was the year science lost its certainty, and in losing it, found its freedom. Nothing was sacred anymore. The charge was that science invented scientific theories rather at the expense of scientific discoveries.
The relevance of several academic disciplines were challenged, especially those in the humanities and social sciences. Major universities no longer taught Shakespeare. Others asked: what did Freud and Jung prove, other than that they were megalomaniacs? Forty years later the controversy remains unresolved.
1968 was the year historical research and the distinction between history and fiction was undermined. Everything was questioned now; nothing was sacred.
1968 was the year a new generation of young people in their flared trousers, hippy beads and tie-dye clothes provided significant energy to stopping the Viet Nam War. They were a recognizable disrupted force to the once-independent institutions of civil society, including education, the Church, the media, the corporation, and trade unions. In doing so, they proved they could no longer be conveniently subsumed as a homogeneous and largely mindless mass beneath this edifice.
ENTER SEAMUS “DIRK” DEVLIN
1968 was the year that he came to South Africa to form a new chemical company for his employer, Polychem International, Inc. A devout man, who didn’t smoke, drink, or swear, he believed in the Holy Roman Catholic Church, the Infallibility of the Pope, the Mystical Body of Christ, the sanctity of marriage, importance of duty. He was on the brink of entering Conrad’s “heart of darkness.”
END OF LIVING WELL LIVING CHEAPLY
1968 was the year in which the average cost of a new house was $14,975; average income was $7,844; a new automobile cost $2,822; average rent was $130; tuition at Harvard University was $2,000; movie ticket was $1.50; gasoline was 34 cents a gallon; a U.S. Postage Stamp was 6 cents; granulated sugar was 60 cents for 5 pounds; ground coffee was 93 cents a pound; Vitamin D Milk was $1,21; bacon was 75 cents per pound; eggs were 38 cents a dozen; fresh ground beef was 50 cents a pound; and a fresh loaf of baked bread was 22 cents.
Devlin at 30 with an education at a land grant institution was making $57,500 including perks and bonuses, and paying no taxes as he was living and working abroad.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Tampa, Florida
June 2008
______________________
This is the author’s Forward to a novel-in-progress, “Green Island in a Black Sea."
© June 13, 2008
“In 1968, the world stood on its metaphorical head and wondered why it couldn’t get anywhere.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Author’s Forward, Green Island In A Black Sea – novel-in-progress
* * * * * *
Lance Morrow of “Time” magazine (January 11, 1988) wrote, “1968 is like a knife blade that severed the past from the future.”
1968 was the year young people broke with the past. Called freaks, members of the counterculture, flower children or hippies, they were transforming the West, as it was known. They introduced spiritual freedom disassociated from the Church, hope disassociated from the straight world, and happiness without familial or sexual constraints. Hippies were bent on social justice and Cultural Revolution for no other reason than because they could.
1968 was twenty years after the establishment of the United Nations, and the State of Israel. It was also twenty years after the Afrikaner Government came to power in South Africa.
GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA is a story told through the experience of Seamus “Dirk” Devlin, 30, on the fringe of this generation, but who couldn’t be more conventional, uptight or more a prisoner of the past. As he assumes his new assignment in South Africa in 1968, he encounters its policy of apartheid, a country without television, indeed, a country without the deviations of a counterculture at all, but a country author Allen Drury describes as a very strange society for its parallax view of the world.
1968 marked the departure of young people from the stultifying boredom of a consumer society, a society that lived in identical suburbs, slept in twin beds, drove identical cars, watched mind-numbing sitcoms on television, and went to church satisfied that they were the moral guardians of the world.
1968 was the year young people looked around and saw old people, who had not left the celebratory spirit of 1945 and World War Two, controlled everything. They created separation with rock ‘n’ roll music, drugs, free love, dress and appearance, while displaying a distaste for war, violence and rules. When the FBI and CIA, and other agencies tried to discredit them, they launched a counterculture with a vengeance. This included the idea of destroying the college to get an education. They were defined by virtually everything that conventional society was not, and the more they were taken as an oddity the more their presence was felt by that society.
These seemingly unrelated fragments find the world today, more than forty years later, turned upside down, and inside out, running on empty, still wishing 1945 could somehow return.
1968 was the year Devlin walked out of this upside down world into the right side up world of the Afrikaner Government, which had no intentions of changing. He would soon discover whether it was a nightmare or a dream.
END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY
1968 was the year the “American Century” ended, thirty-two years early.
1968 was the year America’s self-confidence ran amuck. Nothing and no one was in control. Corporate America was 20 or 30 divisions in search of a corporation. Japan, Inc. was eating America’s lunch. Quietly, Japan was taking away the U.S. competitive advantage. Left behind were hollow U.S. factories in the automotive, appliance, lighting, and finance industries. Japan bombed Hawaii in 1941; in 1968 it was buying Hawaii with real estate purchases.
1968 was the year leaders became caricatures of themselves. Education became a factory with no room for thinking.
1968 was the year the Church became lost in cultural relativism no longer certain the meaning of truth.
END OF CONTROL FROM THE TOP
1968 was the year politicians ignored the seismic cultural shift and became irrelevant. They were still lock stepping to the cadence of 1945, while ignoring the counterculture paradigm shift.
1968 was the year young people let their presence be known. There were revolts and rebellions of university students from Prague to Peru.
1968 was the year the Czech Communist leader Alexander Dubcek attempted to give socialism a human face in the “Spring of Freedom.” He failed as the movement died as 650,000 Warsaw Pact troops and tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union crushed the rebellion but lost the hearts and minds of the people.
1968 was the year of the riots in the streets of Paris with 30,000 university students battling 50,000 policemen. These students brought President Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic to its knees. Many observers thought it marked the end of civilization.
1968 was the year the police slaughtered peaceful marchers in Mexico City with estimates of student murders by police from 30 to as high as 300.
1968 was the year rioting turned British and West German universities into student occupying communes. Student riots also caused the premiers of Italy and Belgium to be toppled.
1968 was the year students of Columbia University shut down the campus and occupied the university’s administrative buildings.
1968 was the year 10,000 students descended on the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago led by the “Youth International Party” (Yippies) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). These students disrupted proceedings decrying the Vietnam War, racism, and the hypocritical political process, pointing out that 60 percent of the Viet Nam deaths were Negroes when only 12 percent of the population. Frightened voters, reacting to melee aired on nightly television news for days, narrowly elected Richard M. Nixon as president in November over Hubert Humphrey.
1968 was the year of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War. Viet Cong lost the battle but gained a psychological victory. The surprise attack brought about a drastic reversal in the U.S. policy in Viet Nam. Of the 206,000 additional troops requested by General Westmoreland, President Johnson authorized only 13,500; relieved the general of his command; and then announced he would not run for reelection.
END OF DUE PROCESS
1968 was the year Viet Nam, a war never declared, spun out of control. Congress was duped into approving the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” (August 7, 1964).
Two American destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf, which marked the boundary of North Viet Nam, were allegedly attacked without provocation by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The “Pentagon Papers” proved otherwise.
Daniel Ellsbergs, consultant to the State Department, made the papers public in June of 1971. Excerpts were published in The New York Times and The Washington Post. These documents revealed a legacy of blunders and deceit from presidents Eisenhower, through Kennedy to Johnson’s secret war plan.
President Johnson planned to goad the Communists into aggravating hostilities, thereby giving him an excuse to massively retaliate. The war, the Pentagon Papers revealed, was being fought 70 percent “to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat,” the first in American history, and only 10 percent for the sake of the Vietnamese.
1968 was the year of the fiasco of the U.S Pueblo. The Pueblo was an American spy ship in international waters that was boarded and impounded by the North Koreans. Some 83 sailors languished in North Korean prisons for nearly a year, frequently beaten, exacting many confessions of their crimes before television cameras, including the ship’s captain, Commander Lloyd M. Bucher.
YOUNG PEOPLE LOOKING FOR A WAY OUT TO FIND A WAY IN
1968 was the year of New Age spiritualism led by Carlos Castaneda and his “The Teachings of Don Juan.”
1968 was the year of LSD, and the psychedelic acid trips of Harvard professor Timothy Leary.
1968 was the year of novelist Ken Kesey and his “Merry Pranksters.” These hippies zigzagged across the country in a converted school bus painted in psychedelic colors, stayed high, sold drugs, and organized parties of surrealistic joy.
1968 was the year of the “acid rock” music of the Grateful Dead. Amplifiers and microphones were hooked through many speakers to produce a sound like a chemical refinery. Steppenwolf, Country Joe and the Fish, the Jefferson Airplane, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and many others joined the entourage of the Grateful Dead.
1968 was the year young people accepted rock ‘n’ roll music as the new form of communication for their generation. As the sound grew louder, the dancing more frantic, the lights blinking more hypnotically, they fused into a tidal wave of collective hysteria.
These impassioned revelers wake up now, forty years later, to find they have changed history by dropping out to find a way in.
END OF HEROES
1968 was the year that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated (April 4) and Robert F. Kennedy (June 5).
1968 was the year the Summer Olympics in Mexico City became political. Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the “Black Power” salute with their fists raised defiantly in the air from the medals platform after winning the Gold and Bronze medal as the United States National Anthem played.
1968 was the year of the Black Panther Party with the cry, “Black is beautiful and we want power to determine the destiny of our black community.”
1968 was the year professor Timothy Leary of Harvard advocated the “Politics of Ecstasy,” stating, “If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, you must turn on, turn in, and drop out.” As the pope of dope, he led the sexual revolution in psychedelic erotic exhilaration.
END OF THE RATIONAL
1968 was the year that the absurd became legitimate. The mocking writings of Beckett, Sartre and Camus, Nietzsche and Heidegger found a home in a place called “Haight-Asbury,” outside San Francisco.
1968 was the year novelist Ken Kesey insisted people needed to be outlaws for the pleasure of it. They wallowed in hedonistic glee outside the rational ordering society of laws and policemen. Free food was distributed boosted from Safeway trucks. They sashayed about in clothes lifted from assignment shops; walked naked as jay birds through a sea of revelers at open air concerts without raising an eyebrow; bedded down in abandoned buildings paying no rent; made love whenever the mood hit them unconcerned about privacy. These outlaws had no rules, responsibilities or regrets, only the ecstasy of having fun in the moment.
1968 was the year that tens of thousands escaped to Canada to avoid the Selective Service Draft. Those that didn’t declared November 14 “National Turn in Your Draft Card Day.” Still others burned their draft cards in public bonfires in defiance of the law.
1968 was the year Yippy founders, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, announced, “Never trust anyone over thirty.”
1968 was the year longhaired bearded youth looked down at their job holding parents who measured worth by job competence while they measured it in terms of personal truth. .
END OF PARENTING
1968 was the year the nuclear family died. Parents gave up the frustrating attempt to control their children and abdicated the responsibility.
1968 was the year that the fallacy was proven that happiness was a matter of economic security. Parents justified being full-time jobholders by providing what they had not enjoyed as children. These good intentions backfired.
1968 was the year the idea of being teenagers was fully realized along with the discovery that parental guilt could be exploited. Teenagers did as they pleased, stayed out all hours, skipped school when the mood hit them, drank hard liquor, smoked cigarettes, experimented with drugs, and had sexual trysts. They lied, cheated and stole with impunity, but maintained the concession of being available to sit down dinners on holidays.
1968 was the year teachers lost control of the classroom. School became a combat zone. Teachers felt successful if they survived the day without bodily harm. Not only did learning suffer, but competent people avoided the profession.
1968 was the year adults retrogressed into adolescence. The “over thirty” crowd joined the hippie lifestyle. Recreational drugs became fashionable at adult gatherings as society lost its mind as well as its way.
1968 was the year that the counterculture established trends in dress, lifestyle, coiffure, language, diet, music, art, theatre, film, politics, sport, media, entertainment, architecture, literature, journalism, values, interests, and beliefs. It even elevated primitive body painting to an accepted art form.
THE END OF HISTORY
1968 was the year the home was abandoned as refuge from the world at large. The home no longer represented the crucible of leadership, the citadel of learning, the place of stability. Home became synthetic, arbitrary, a second hand experience. The loss of this sanctuary was not simply a dumbing down of society; it was the “end of history.”
1968 was the year science and the struggle for individual recognition now filled this new vacuum. Science opened the door to economic possibility, while the drive for recognition was its motor. Life was all about getting ahead. Greed was good. Everything was measured in terms of economics. Tradition was not only gone, but forgotten. Historical landmarks were razed to make parking, construct fast-food restaurants, or cut a new highway through a community armed with Eminent Domain.
1968 was the year tyranny lost its edge, tyranny of government, employment, institutions or, vested interests? In the absence of tyrannies, everyone was now in charge, which meant no one was. This was the new reality.
1968 was the year man was at the door of the future. Francis Fukuyama has since personified this as the “last man” in history. Soaring man no longer had time to look back to the chaos of history. In any case, facts were seen as fiction, truth was considered relative, and the drive toward capitalistic liberal democracies was deemed the end state of the historical process.
1968 was the year the nonfiction novel of Norman Mailer recorded the people’s march (The Armies of the Night) on Washington, DC.
1968 was the year that Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson created the “New Journalism,” using fictional techniques to dramatize their nonfiction writing. The blur between reality and fantasy spawned by the hippies, given credence by counterculture philosophers, was gaining purchase in popular culture.
1968 was the year of cultural studies as universities abandoned objective truth for relativism. The inherited wisdom of the past was now passé.
1968 was the year symbolic systems emphasized the construction of identities, social institutions, and social relations, and gave birth to feminist studies, African American studies, and other cultural pursuits.
1968 was the year of anti-humanism in the wake of the student radical movement. The movers and shakers were the old New Left crowd of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Lacan. These philosophers were the Continental gurus who took the hippies seriously and shared their contempt for the past.
1968 was the year of “poststructuralism” and “deconstructionists.” The thought police have made a clear break with the past throwing conventional thinking on its head. Anti-humanistic philosophy, as it was called, claimed human reason was impotent and insufficient to make universal moral judgments.
It was the end of history. The past should be interpreted in terms of its own values because knowledge was not certain, but relative; truth was not discernible except contextually, and then totally subject to interpretation; and science was not value-free but quite subject dependent.
1968 was the year science lost its certainty, and in losing it, found its freedom. Nothing was sacred anymore. The charge was that science invented scientific theories rather at the expense of scientific discoveries.
The relevance of several academic disciplines were challenged, especially those in the humanities and social sciences. Major universities no longer taught Shakespeare. Others asked: what did Freud and Jung prove, other than that they were megalomaniacs? Forty years later the controversy remains unresolved.
1968 was the year historical research and the distinction between history and fiction was undermined. Everything was questioned now; nothing was sacred.
1968 was the year a new generation of young people in their flared trousers, hippy beads and tie-dye clothes provided significant energy to stopping the Viet Nam War. They were a recognizable disrupted force to the once-independent institutions of civil society, including education, the Church, the media, the corporation, and trade unions. In doing so, they proved they could no longer be conveniently subsumed as a homogeneous and largely mindless mass beneath this edifice.
ENTER SEAMUS “DIRK” DEVLIN
1968 was the year that he came to South Africa to form a new chemical company for his employer, Polychem International, Inc. A devout man, who didn’t smoke, drink, or swear, he believed in the Holy Roman Catholic Church, the Infallibility of the Pope, the Mystical Body of Christ, the sanctity of marriage, importance of duty. He was on the brink of entering Conrad’s “heart of darkness.”
END OF LIVING WELL LIVING CHEAPLY
1968 was the year in which the average cost of a new house was $14,975; average income was $7,844; a new automobile cost $2,822; average rent was $130; tuition at Harvard University was $2,000; movie ticket was $1.50; gasoline was 34 cents a gallon; a U.S. Postage Stamp was 6 cents; granulated sugar was 60 cents for 5 pounds; ground coffee was 93 cents a pound; Vitamin D Milk was $1,21; bacon was 75 cents per pound; eggs were 38 cents a dozen; fresh ground beef was 50 cents a pound; and a fresh loaf of baked bread was 22 cents.
Devlin at 30 with an education at a land grant institution was making $57,500 including perks and bonuses, and paying no taxes as he was living and working abroad.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Tampa, Florida
June 2008
______________________
This is the author’s Forward to a novel-in-progress, “Green Island in a Black Sea."
Thursday, June 12, 2008
WHAT IS SOCIAL JUSTICE? AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS
WHAT IS SOCIAL JUSTICE? AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 12, 2008
GERMAN FRIEND WRITES:
Being a lawyer by education, I must admit the big problem of social justice is the perception of the people involved depending on their geographical position, social status, cultural background etc.
What seems right for some may seem wrong for others. The issue will be that parts of this world with enormously growing populations generally are poor compared to the industrial countries. If we cannot balance this disparity, we will have to face aggressiveness and violence - even if we regard it as injustice!
Manfred Fiedler
Meisenweg 9 Germany
MY RESPONSE
Manfred,
What you say is true.
My thrust is that the mechanism to change the tide from exploitation and subjugation to social justice and freedom must be in place. It takes time and will from outside and inside the process.
For example, I see a combination of terminal (money, materials, food, medicine, etc.) interventions, which represent a COMMITMENT to deal in a most limited way with the problem, and instrumental (taking action in terms of education, infrastructure building, etc.) interventions, which represent an INVOLVEMENT in the process.
The combination of terminal/instrumental intervention is meant to establish the CLIMATE for social justice. It is not the engine of social change. The people must provide that. Do gooding has its limitations.
As you point out, this becomes complicated when the people are not ready for social change.
Then, I say, the terminal/instrumental intervention must be protracted to accommodate the lack of maturity of the people to assume ownership of the social change process. This, too, has a limited window of opportunity.
In the end, the intended benefactors to social change must want (seek it) and then seize (display the courage, sacrifice and will) the opportunity for social justice to take hold.
Ultimately, self-interest (internally & externally) must be subdued and subsumed to a higher cause. That is my take on the problem.
How is Germany dealing with social justice challenge of rising oil prices? We see truckers across Europe are not too happy.
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 12, 2008
GERMAN FRIEND WRITES:
Being a lawyer by education, I must admit the big problem of social justice is the perception of the people involved depending on their geographical position, social status, cultural background etc.
What seems right for some may seem wrong for others. The issue will be that parts of this world with enormously growing populations generally are poor compared to the industrial countries. If we cannot balance this disparity, we will have to face aggressiveness and violence - even if we regard it as injustice!
Manfred Fiedler
Meisenweg 9 Germany
MY RESPONSE
Manfred,
What you say is true.
My thrust is that the mechanism to change the tide from exploitation and subjugation to social justice and freedom must be in place. It takes time and will from outside and inside the process.
For example, I see a combination of terminal (money, materials, food, medicine, etc.) interventions, which represent a COMMITMENT to deal in a most limited way with the problem, and instrumental (taking action in terms of education, infrastructure building, etc.) interventions, which represent an INVOLVEMENT in the process.
The combination of terminal/instrumental intervention is meant to establish the CLIMATE for social justice. It is not the engine of social change. The people must provide that. Do gooding has its limitations.
As you point out, this becomes complicated when the people are not ready for social change.
Then, I say, the terminal/instrumental intervention must be protracted to accommodate the lack of maturity of the people to assume ownership of the social change process. This, too, has a limited window of opportunity.
In the end, the intended benefactors to social change must want (seek it) and then seize (display the courage, sacrifice and will) the opportunity for social justice to take hold.
Ultimately, self-interest (internally & externally) must be subdued and subsumed to a higher cause. That is my take on the problem.
How is Germany dealing with social justice challenge of rising oil prices? We see truckers across Europe are not too happy.
Jim
WHAT IS SOCIAL JUSTICE?
WHAT IS SOCIAL JUSTICE?
HOW DO INSTRUMENTAL AND TERMINAL INTERVENTIONS FIT IN THE SCHEME OF “SOCIAL JUSTICE”?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 11, 2008
“There is a conceptual advantage to defining all terminal values as referring only to end-states of existence and to defining all instrumental values as referring only to idealized modes of behavior.”
Milton Rokeach, “The Nature of Human Values” (The Free Press 1973)
* * * * * *
WHAT IS SOCIAL JUSTICE?
There are two fundamental values of civil society. One is instrumental; the other is terminal. Neither can lead to social justice, alone, but both are necessary for it to be realized.
Social justice is to give every man what is rightly his own, and what is rightly his own is earned, not given as if a gift, because in the earning and possessing is the strength of the man, and by extension, society. The problem as you can envision is that terminal interventions are looking for a specific outcome, while instrumental interventions are directed at behavioral change.
Terminal interventions are expedient, crisis driven, of limited and measured success, provisional commitment and little direct or sustained involvement.
Instrumental interventions are directed at apparent needs that require total commitment and complete involvement to realize even the remotest possibility of the behavioral change desired.
OUR COMFORT LEVEL WITH STOPGAP TERMINAL INTERVENTIONS
In 1968, it was the famine in the new Republic of Biafra that dramatized the nature of the world’s ambivalent approach to social justice.
Once Biafra succeeded from Nigeria, that country blockaded Biafra reducing the new nation to essentially ruin. Soon images of starving children flooded the Western media. Relief agencies attempted valiantly to airlift supplies to the besieged state with only limited success.
The world’s consuming fear was that Biafra’s succession would spur successions all over Africa. Great Britain, Egypt, and the Soviet Union armed Nigeria with weapons and supplies in its blockade of Biafra. They did this with the tacit approval of the United States. Portugal, South Africa, and France backed Biafra, but feebly. Two years later, Nigeria had quelled the rebellion and had reduced the country to a desert. More than one million Biafrans had died, mostly children, and mostly from starvation.
The relief agencies were committed to a terminal intervention. The Nigerian politicians were involved in an instrumental intervention. Terminal and instrumental interventions do not always have the same outcome in mind.
Zoom ahead forty years and little has changed. Today it is Darfur where the Sudanese Janjuweed has displaced nearly 3 million people in a conflict between Sudan and Darfur. The Janjuweed marauders have raped, murdered and pillaged Sudan’s own civilian population, being either sponsored by the government as hired thugs, or having some quid pro quo connection to the government.
The homeless million live in this wasteland in plastic sheeting, blankets, mosquito nets with their only utensils cooking pots and water containers, or they escape into Chad. The chaos and deprivation experienced make the feudal system of the middle ages appear like paradise in comparison.
A Donor Conference held in July 2007 found many members of the United Nation pledging support, but failing to deliver. Even commitment to a terminal intervention can often be reduced to approach avoidance passive behavior, that is, to promise grandly but without any intention of delivering.
What is unfortunate the truth be told is that affluent nations of the world are not interested in being committed much less involved in situations that may prove difficult if not embarrassing. That is the current situation with the people of Burma, ravaged by natural disasters. So it has been all of my lifetime.
It is easier to pledge money or supplies than challenge human right practices. When such aid is refused, it is easier to turn tail and go home than deal with the government’s paranoia. I see no change from this in the immediate or distant future.
THE NATURE AND POSSIBILITIES OF INSTRUMENTAL INTERVENTIONS
Doctors Without Borders
Instrumental interventions are more subtle, more difficult, more longitudinal, less ideological, less ethnocentric, less grand, and much more effective and consequential. Doctors Without Borders come to mind.
The practice of instrumental interventions cannot be done simply with a checkbook, cannot be limited to flowery rhetoric, nor can it be reduced to a slogan or a catchy policy. It demands action.
Doctors Without Borders not only do such medical stuff as deliver babies, plaster cast broken arms, distribute antibiotics to the sick, distribute condoms, or treat AIDS patients. They also train people to be nurses, therapists, caretakers, caregivers, and educators in medical prevention practices. They aim to reduce the mortality rate by initiating prenatal care, and tending to mothers with difficult pregnancies.
Many patients go on to become doctors or other medical professionals, returning to their villages to serve their people.
Doctors Without Borders gravitate to crisis situations, but often stay once the crisis has subsided. Being non-political, they are often tolerated by the most draconian governments. As a result, they create a climate of social justice by their mere presence.
Reports indicate they have even ventured beyond medicine to assist people in home management, farming, marketing and distributing their products. They have also engineered the drilling of water wells, creating sanitation systems, and acquiring mosquito nets to improve the climate of health.
The Great Depression and President Hoover’s Administration
The Great Depression not only meant the collapse of Wall Street, but it found people of Oklahoma and Arkansas in a veritable dust bowl because of the great drought that hit these states. Tens of thousands of people fled to the West looking for jobs and a new start.
Present Herbert Hoover, a trained engineer, saw no reason to launch either an instrumental or terminal intervention to allay the national distress.
Hoover believed the economy would correct itself. It didn’t. In 1933, he was voted out of office with Franklin Delano Roosevelt elected.
President Roosevelt’s Well Meant Instrumental Intervention
Roosevelt, his biographers tell us, had no plan. He simply knew that he had to do something. His first 100 days in office was a mix bag of instrumental and terminal interventions with the emphasis on the former. He launched what he called the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which authorized the president to regulate banks, and stimulate the U.S. economy to recover from the Great Depression. Much of it was later found unconstitutional.
With the Emergency Work Progress Bill, President Roosevelt created 5,000 camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Progress Administration (WPA), which damned rivers, built bridges, roads, and cut through mountains for railroads, created city parks and built baseball stadiums. All 48 states of the United States participated. Workers were paid $1 a day ($25 in 2008 dollars) of which $25 ($625 in 2008 dollars) per month was sent directly to their families. The CCC was made up of approximately 3.5 million men, 225,000 WWI veterans, and the balance young American boys, unmarried, between the ages of 17 and 28 years. The CCC existed until 1942; the WPA was closed down in 1943. The WPA benefits going to African Americans exceeded their proportion of the general population. Altogether in 1935, about 40 percent of the nations African American adults were working on WPA projects or on relief, being unskilled and otherwise unemployable. My da was on the WPA.
Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s efforts failed to allay the forces of the depression. It took the country’s total mobilization of WWII to put the steam back into the American economy. FDR successfully seeded it by giving back the American worker his pride and dignity, and for it was elected to four terms as president.
The Instrumental Value of World War II’s G.I. Bill
Following WWII, Congress approved the G.I. Bill of Rights, which provided veterans of that war the financial assistance to pursue a trade, go to college, finance a home, or start a business. This was a terminal intervention with an instrumental intervention outcome, showing that the two interventions can often work in sync. Many young men and women became the first members of their families to acquire a college degree; many became doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, and educators. The G.I. Bill solidified the American middle class and promoted by so doing, social justice.
Social justice isn’t an algorithm of a certain socioeconomic status but the climate of a civil society to grow in bread and breadth to create a climate and culture of support and encouragement. We are still reaping the benefits of this far-reaching program. I am a former recipient of such benefits.
The Legacy of President Bush
The Bill & Cathy Gates Foundation is committed to social justice instrumentally (through training & development) and terminally (through financial support & facility building). Yet, as asset heavy as is this foundation, it cannot exercise the scope or impact of a dedicated country to social justice such as the United States. It can show the way but not save the day.
Perhaps the most important legacy of the troubled George W. Bush presidency will be his African Policy.
The U.S. is on track to increase its already generous assistance to Africa to $8.7 billion by 2010, double the level of assistance in 2004.
President Bush’s Malaria Initiative, alone, has already reached 25 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief since 2003 has supported the anti-retroviral treatment of 1.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Unfortunately, because of a global gag rule, this policy bars organizations that receive U.S. international family planning funds from having anything to do with abortion. This has resulted in the continuing spread of HIV because of a permissive shortage of free prophylactics or condoms.
Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 30-million of the world’s 40-million HIV/AIDS sufferers. It has a shortage of condoms and AIDS treatment in Family Planning Clinics from Ethiopia to Swaziland because of the president’s antiabortion religious right policies.
That said President Bush has however secured international agreement on the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative, which provides 100 percent debt relief from the major international Financial Institutions to the world’s poorest nations. This amounts to some $42 billion in debt to date, $34 billion of which was for 19 African countries. Over time, a total of 33 African countries could receive full debt relief because of this initiative.
In 2006, the United States provided $195 million in the first of a five-year plan to support the African Union’s Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program. This instrumental initiative is meant to eliminate hunger, reduce poverty and food insecurity, increase trade, and promote wealth in Africa.
President Bush has also proposed that a portion of the U.S. Food Aid Funding Program purchase crops directly from farmers in Africa instead of shipping in food assistance from the developed world. This initiative is designed to assist in building up local agriculture markets in an attempt to break the cycle of famine.
Since 2005, the United States has trained over 39,000 African peacekeepers, which represents over 80 percent of the African Union Force. The United States has supported democratically elections in Liberia, Mauritania, and Burundi. It has also assisted civil society organizations across Africa in combating gender-based violence, trafficking of persons, and other human rights violations. It has also contributed more than 40 percent of the budget to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The United States has been less effective in quelling the genocide in Darfur, the violence in Eastern Congo and Kenya, or the staggering inflation and starvation in Zimbabwe.
As you can see, there are instrumental and terminal components to this Africa Policy and social justice lies somewhere in the stream. Were other wealthy nations of the world to match the US effort, which to date they haven’t, even considering the president’s cultural bias, the continent of Africa could become a major social, economic and political force.
This is not social justice with an upper case “S” and “J” but social justice between instrumental and terminal interventions with a lower case of these two letters.
Social Justice and Self-Interests
Upper case Social Justice will always have to flow against the current of self-interests. We have seen the Robert Mugabe government of Zimbabwe collapse from a rich agricultural exporting country to one of massive unemployment (80 percent), mass inflation (100,000 percent) and pervasive poverty in the quarter century of his rule. This has stemmed from his hatred of the former white Rhodesian colonial government. His instrumental interventions have been ruinous because he destroyed the white infrastructure of farmers and businessmen before a black competent majority could be successfully developed. It has been a policy repeated by dictators across the globe assumed leadership positions once their hated colonial masters were disposed.
Should pharmaceutical companies make accessible drugs that would stem the tide of AIDS, distribute condoms and other prophylactics, and educate on the use of these products; should agricultural manufacturers and engineers make accessible equipment and training for irrigation, crop rotation, and planting; should an army of educators build schools and create appropriate curriculums; should planners, architects, bankers, lawyers, executives and businessmen make available their expertise; and should public health professionals work to create sanitation and water reclamation systems, the benefits would be that of instrumental interventions, but that would not be social justice.
Social Justice is not something you can legislate from the outside. Those who seek it must seize it, as all the successful instrumental and terminal interventions are for naught if they don’t.
It is probably the most optimistic possibility, if we are to create a world in which Social Justice is demonstrated, that we recognize the obvious limitations of what we can do to that end.
George W. Bush may leave office with the lowest popularity rating of a president back to the time of Abraham Lincoln, but he can look with pride at the legacy of his Africa Policy. He hasn’t attained social justice, but he has implemented terminal and instrumental interventions, which could move the African continent in that direction.
Social Justice Closer To Home
We have pockets of poverty in the United States. We have 40 million Americans without health insurance. We have 60 million Americans that cannot read or comprehend these words. Only about 75 percent of whites, 60 percent of blacks and 58percent of Hispanics graduate from American high schools. Consequently, we have huge pockets of young adults without any job skills. We therefore have huge pockets of whites, blacks and Hispanics in our jails and prisons.
Forty years ago when I was working and living in South Africa, there was violence in American classrooms, violence on university campuses, and violence in America's city streets. Often during the Civil Rights Movement, police were instigators of the violence. This carnage was captured on television showing the nation it wasn't what it thought it was.
Today, the violence has become murderous as many young people have guns, and are apt to you them at the slightest provocation. The nightly television news in Tampa is daily predicated with such senseless and regretable deaths.
What would constitute social justice at home?
The sanctity of the family would help; staying in school would build confidence; showing chidren the instrumental and terminal value to education could prove a winner; subsuming self-interests to community involvement; encouraging businesses to employ young people in summer jobs; expanding summer recreational programs; fighting corruption in government which often spawns elicit activities; combating drug trafficking by reducing adult addiction to recreational drugs; doing more things as a family; going to church; with parents creating sensible borders in which children can breathe and enjoy the rites of passage.
Those that seek social justice must seize it, but impressionistic youth need guidance the same as the people about the world do who are not quite ready on their own.
These are my thoughts as I walk through my neighborhood today.
HOW DO INSTRUMENTAL AND TERMINAL INTERVENTIONS FIT IN THE SCHEME OF “SOCIAL JUSTICE”?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 11, 2008
“There is a conceptual advantage to defining all terminal values as referring only to end-states of existence and to defining all instrumental values as referring only to idealized modes of behavior.”
Milton Rokeach, “The Nature of Human Values” (The Free Press 1973)
* * * * * *
WHAT IS SOCIAL JUSTICE?
There are two fundamental values of civil society. One is instrumental; the other is terminal. Neither can lead to social justice, alone, but both are necessary for it to be realized.
Social justice is to give every man what is rightly his own, and what is rightly his own is earned, not given as if a gift, because in the earning and possessing is the strength of the man, and by extension, society. The problem as you can envision is that terminal interventions are looking for a specific outcome, while instrumental interventions are directed at behavioral change.
Terminal interventions are expedient, crisis driven, of limited and measured success, provisional commitment and little direct or sustained involvement.
Instrumental interventions are directed at apparent needs that require total commitment and complete involvement to realize even the remotest possibility of the behavioral change desired.
OUR COMFORT LEVEL WITH STOPGAP TERMINAL INTERVENTIONS
In 1968, it was the famine in the new Republic of Biafra that dramatized the nature of the world’s ambivalent approach to social justice.
Once Biafra succeeded from Nigeria, that country blockaded Biafra reducing the new nation to essentially ruin. Soon images of starving children flooded the Western media. Relief agencies attempted valiantly to airlift supplies to the besieged state with only limited success.
The world’s consuming fear was that Biafra’s succession would spur successions all over Africa. Great Britain, Egypt, and the Soviet Union armed Nigeria with weapons and supplies in its blockade of Biafra. They did this with the tacit approval of the United States. Portugal, South Africa, and France backed Biafra, but feebly. Two years later, Nigeria had quelled the rebellion and had reduced the country to a desert. More than one million Biafrans had died, mostly children, and mostly from starvation.
The relief agencies were committed to a terminal intervention. The Nigerian politicians were involved in an instrumental intervention. Terminal and instrumental interventions do not always have the same outcome in mind.
Zoom ahead forty years and little has changed. Today it is Darfur where the Sudanese Janjuweed has displaced nearly 3 million people in a conflict between Sudan and Darfur. The Janjuweed marauders have raped, murdered and pillaged Sudan’s own civilian population, being either sponsored by the government as hired thugs, or having some quid pro quo connection to the government.
The homeless million live in this wasteland in plastic sheeting, blankets, mosquito nets with their only utensils cooking pots and water containers, or they escape into Chad. The chaos and deprivation experienced make the feudal system of the middle ages appear like paradise in comparison.
A Donor Conference held in July 2007 found many members of the United Nation pledging support, but failing to deliver. Even commitment to a terminal intervention can often be reduced to approach avoidance passive behavior, that is, to promise grandly but without any intention of delivering.
What is unfortunate the truth be told is that affluent nations of the world are not interested in being committed much less involved in situations that may prove difficult if not embarrassing. That is the current situation with the people of Burma, ravaged by natural disasters. So it has been all of my lifetime.
It is easier to pledge money or supplies than challenge human right practices. When such aid is refused, it is easier to turn tail and go home than deal with the government’s paranoia. I see no change from this in the immediate or distant future.
THE NATURE AND POSSIBILITIES OF INSTRUMENTAL INTERVENTIONS
Doctors Without Borders
Instrumental interventions are more subtle, more difficult, more longitudinal, less ideological, less ethnocentric, less grand, and much more effective and consequential. Doctors Without Borders come to mind.
The practice of instrumental interventions cannot be done simply with a checkbook, cannot be limited to flowery rhetoric, nor can it be reduced to a slogan or a catchy policy. It demands action.
Doctors Without Borders not only do such medical stuff as deliver babies, plaster cast broken arms, distribute antibiotics to the sick, distribute condoms, or treat AIDS patients. They also train people to be nurses, therapists, caretakers, caregivers, and educators in medical prevention practices. They aim to reduce the mortality rate by initiating prenatal care, and tending to mothers with difficult pregnancies.
Many patients go on to become doctors or other medical professionals, returning to their villages to serve their people.
Doctors Without Borders gravitate to crisis situations, but often stay once the crisis has subsided. Being non-political, they are often tolerated by the most draconian governments. As a result, they create a climate of social justice by their mere presence.
Reports indicate they have even ventured beyond medicine to assist people in home management, farming, marketing and distributing their products. They have also engineered the drilling of water wells, creating sanitation systems, and acquiring mosquito nets to improve the climate of health.
The Great Depression and President Hoover’s Administration
The Great Depression not only meant the collapse of Wall Street, but it found people of Oklahoma and Arkansas in a veritable dust bowl because of the great drought that hit these states. Tens of thousands of people fled to the West looking for jobs and a new start.
Present Herbert Hoover, a trained engineer, saw no reason to launch either an instrumental or terminal intervention to allay the national distress.
Hoover believed the economy would correct itself. It didn’t. In 1933, he was voted out of office with Franklin Delano Roosevelt elected.
President Roosevelt’s Well Meant Instrumental Intervention
Roosevelt, his biographers tell us, had no plan. He simply knew that he had to do something. His first 100 days in office was a mix bag of instrumental and terminal interventions with the emphasis on the former. He launched what he called the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which authorized the president to regulate banks, and stimulate the U.S. economy to recover from the Great Depression. Much of it was later found unconstitutional.
With the Emergency Work Progress Bill, President Roosevelt created 5,000 camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Progress Administration (WPA), which damned rivers, built bridges, roads, and cut through mountains for railroads, created city parks and built baseball stadiums. All 48 states of the United States participated. Workers were paid $1 a day ($25 in 2008 dollars) of which $25 ($625 in 2008 dollars) per month was sent directly to their families. The CCC was made up of approximately 3.5 million men, 225,000 WWI veterans, and the balance young American boys, unmarried, between the ages of 17 and 28 years. The CCC existed until 1942; the WPA was closed down in 1943. The WPA benefits going to African Americans exceeded their proportion of the general population. Altogether in 1935, about 40 percent of the nations African American adults were working on WPA projects or on relief, being unskilled and otherwise unemployable. My da was on the WPA.
Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s efforts failed to allay the forces of the depression. It took the country’s total mobilization of WWII to put the steam back into the American economy. FDR successfully seeded it by giving back the American worker his pride and dignity, and for it was elected to four terms as president.
The Instrumental Value of World War II’s G.I. Bill
Following WWII, Congress approved the G.I. Bill of Rights, which provided veterans of that war the financial assistance to pursue a trade, go to college, finance a home, or start a business. This was a terminal intervention with an instrumental intervention outcome, showing that the two interventions can often work in sync. Many young men and women became the first members of their families to acquire a college degree; many became doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, and educators. The G.I. Bill solidified the American middle class and promoted by so doing, social justice.
Social justice isn’t an algorithm of a certain socioeconomic status but the climate of a civil society to grow in bread and breadth to create a climate and culture of support and encouragement. We are still reaping the benefits of this far-reaching program. I am a former recipient of such benefits.
The Legacy of President Bush
The Bill & Cathy Gates Foundation is committed to social justice instrumentally (through training & development) and terminally (through financial support & facility building). Yet, as asset heavy as is this foundation, it cannot exercise the scope or impact of a dedicated country to social justice such as the United States. It can show the way but not save the day.
Perhaps the most important legacy of the troubled George W. Bush presidency will be his African Policy.
The U.S. is on track to increase its already generous assistance to Africa to $8.7 billion by 2010, double the level of assistance in 2004.
President Bush’s Malaria Initiative, alone, has already reached 25 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief since 2003 has supported the anti-retroviral treatment of 1.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Unfortunately, because of a global gag rule, this policy bars organizations that receive U.S. international family planning funds from having anything to do with abortion. This has resulted in the continuing spread of HIV because of a permissive shortage of free prophylactics or condoms.
Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 30-million of the world’s 40-million HIV/AIDS sufferers. It has a shortage of condoms and AIDS treatment in Family Planning Clinics from Ethiopia to Swaziland because of the president’s antiabortion religious right policies.
That said President Bush has however secured international agreement on the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative, which provides 100 percent debt relief from the major international Financial Institutions to the world’s poorest nations. This amounts to some $42 billion in debt to date, $34 billion of which was for 19 African countries. Over time, a total of 33 African countries could receive full debt relief because of this initiative.
In 2006, the United States provided $195 million in the first of a five-year plan to support the African Union’s Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program. This instrumental initiative is meant to eliminate hunger, reduce poverty and food insecurity, increase trade, and promote wealth in Africa.
President Bush has also proposed that a portion of the U.S. Food Aid Funding Program purchase crops directly from farmers in Africa instead of shipping in food assistance from the developed world. This initiative is designed to assist in building up local agriculture markets in an attempt to break the cycle of famine.
Since 2005, the United States has trained over 39,000 African peacekeepers, which represents over 80 percent of the African Union Force. The United States has supported democratically elections in Liberia, Mauritania, and Burundi. It has also assisted civil society organizations across Africa in combating gender-based violence, trafficking of persons, and other human rights violations. It has also contributed more than 40 percent of the budget to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The United States has been less effective in quelling the genocide in Darfur, the violence in Eastern Congo and Kenya, or the staggering inflation and starvation in Zimbabwe.
As you can see, there are instrumental and terminal components to this Africa Policy and social justice lies somewhere in the stream. Were other wealthy nations of the world to match the US effort, which to date they haven’t, even considering the president’s cultural bias, the continent of Africa could become a major social, economic and political force.
This is not social justice with an upper case “S” and “J” but social justice between instrumental and terminal interventions with a lower case of these two letters.
Social Justice and Self-Interests
Upper case Social Justice will always have to flow against the current of self-interests. We have seen the Robert Mugabe government of Zimbabwe collapse from a rich agricultural exporting country to one of massive unemployment (80 percent), mass inflation (100,000 percent) and pervasive poverty in the quarter century of his rule. This has stemmed from his hatred of the former white Rhodesian colonial government. His instrumental interventions have been ruinous because he destroyed the white infrastructure of farmers and businessmen before a black competent majority could be successfully developed. It has been a policy repeated by dictators across the globe assumed leadership positions once their hated colonial masters were disposed.
Should pharmaceutical companies make accessible drugs that would stem the tide of AIDS, distribute condoms and other prophylactics, and educate on the use of these products; should agricultural manufacturers and engineers make accessible equipment and training for irrigation, crop rotation, and planting; should an army of educators build schools and create appropriate curriculums; should planners, architects, bankers, lawyers, executives and businessmen make available their expertise; and should public health professionals work to create sanitation and water reclamation systems, the benefits would be that of instrumental interventions, but that would not be social justice.
Social Justice is not something you can legislate from the outside. Those who seek it must seize it, as all the successful instrumental and terminal interventions are for naught if they don’t.
It is probably the most optimistic possibility, if we are to create a world in which Social Justice is demonstrated, that we recognize the obvious limitations of what we can do to that end.
George W. Bush may leave office with the lowest popularity rating of a president back to the time of Abraham Lincoln, but he can look with pride at the legacy of his Africa Policy. He hasn’t attained social justice, but he has implemented terminal and instrumental interventions, which could move the African continent in that direction.
Social Justice Closer To Home
We have pockets of poverty in the United States. We have 40 million Americans without health insurance. We have 60 million Americans that cannot read or comprehend these words. Only about 75 percent of whites, 60 percent of blacks and 58percent of Hispanics graduate from American high schools. Consequently, we have huge pockets of young adults without any job skills. We therefore have huge pockets of whites, blacks and Hispanics in our jails and prisons.
Forty years ago when I was working and living in South Africa, there was violence in American classrooms, violence on university campuses, and violence in America's city streets. Often during the Civil Rights Movement, police were instigators of the violence. This carnage was captured on television showing the nation it wasn't what it thought it was.
Today, the violence has become murderous as many young people have guns, and are apt to you them at the slightest provocation. The nightly television news in Tampa is daily predicated with such senseless and regretable deaths.
What would constitute social justice at home?
The sanctity of the family would help; staying in school would build confidence; showing chidren the instrumental and terminal value to education could prove a winner; subsuming self-interests to community involvement; encouraging businesses to employ young people in summer jobs; expanding summer recreational programs; fighting corruption in government which often spawns elicit activities; combating drug trafficking by reducing adult addiction to recreational drugs; doing more things as a family; going to church; with parents creating sensible borders in which children can breathe and enjoy the rites of passage.
Those that seek social justice must seize it, but impressionistic youth need guidance the same as the people about the world do who are not quite ready on their own.
These are my thoughts as I walk through my neighborhood today.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
DR. FISHER'S RESPONSE TO A FORMER GOVERNOR'S MESSAGE OF FEAR
DR. FISHER'S RESPONSE TO A FORMER GOVERNOR'S MESSAGE OF FEAR
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 8, 2008
"The end of the American Century was 1968, 32 years early."
JRF, Green Island in a Black Sea (novel-in-progress)
Reading the governor's remarks, which follow mine, I wonder how anyone could rise to the level of governor of a state of the United States with such myopic and incendiary views of such a sensitive issue. Fear is our enemy and not our friend, and the good governor should know that speaking in hyperbole does not engage reason, but disengages it.
If the good governor were a student of history, he would know the United States stole the state of California from the Mexicans, and that like many other pieces of what is now called the United States of America, it once belonged to indigenous people before Europeans invaded the continent.
America is the land of the free and home of the brave for mainly interlopers these many centuries later, my people among them.
Now, American Indians are confined to reservations or casinos, and I've seen enough of reservations (SOWETO in Johannesburg) from my time in South Africa to know the nature of exploitation of indigenous people.
I write in the forward of my new novel-in-progress, "1968 ended the American Century, 32 years early." The evidence is overwhelming. We have been standing on our metaphorical head ever since, and the good governor gives palpable evidence of that fact.
Will we ever learn how self-indulgence and immaturity have been our bane, how they have suspended us in permanent adolescence, and blunted our perception and perspective of the world in which we live?
While we bask in self-righteous arrogance secure in our hedonistic lifestyle the world festers around us. It never occurs to us why the hegemony of corporate America is suddenly falling apart. The good governor spoke from its citadel with the right words, the right assurances, and the right enemies.
Corporate America, despite this platform, is falling apart because its sense of omniscience and invulnerability, no matter its rhetorical stupidity, has been exposed finally for the fraud that it is, lost in its own surreal world.
If you want to throw arrows, throw them at who employs you or your children or grandchildren. They are the culprits, not Hispanic immigrants. Corporate America has not paid attention, and now we all must suffer for its greed.
Imagine if you will, why twelve million immigrants are to be made responsible for the excesses of 300 million. How is it we should take pride in being the least multiple language literate people in the entire developed world? That takes ethnocentrism to an entire new level.
If I was a Mexican, I would do exactly what these Mexicans are doing in order to survive, which is anything, risks and humiliations be damned!
How easy it is to make people who are exploited in jobs we will not do ourselves for wages we would not accept to become the object of our wrath.
How easy it is to look for the source of our problems outside ourselves than inside ourselves.
Politicians, and all of them now running for office are included, never ask us to behave differently, to sacrifice for the common good, or to do anything that might cause us a little discomfort. Hope is passive. Courage is active. Has anyone asked you to be courageous?
We squander our lives away smoking and drinking and partying and violating every standard that might represent discipline, and then in our old age get religion and moral values that were tabled when the blood was hot and our money was burning a hole in our pockets.
We failed to save because we wanted to keep up with the Jones, and who egged us on to do that -- Corporate America! Who is still egging on us? The same.
We never learn because we are always looking for answers outside ourselves provided by people who are as confused or more so than we are.
Who are these people?
They are celebrities who become environmentalists, political pundits, and wise men and women who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by appealing to our baser instincts, people who have popular television gigs solving lifetime problems of people they have just met on camera, and, of course, there are always those best selling books on self-improvement that promise how we can be healthy, wealthy and wise for $29.95.
People have sent me emails for years to celebrate leaders who have not led, but are full of themselves, have ask me to support national inanities that make no sense to me, or even have ask that I decry people who are not patriotic or religious enough, when the patriotism and religious beliefs espoused were xenophobic and selective.
Going along to get along has become a patriotic if not a religious oath, giving comfort to those that man the Military Industrial Complex or the elected offices of our society. This combined effort has driven us into the mess we are now in.
Leaders, and I use that word advisedly, in the government and Military Industrial Complex have successfully deflected our angst on this or that minority group, the people least able to defend themselves, and whose relevance to our major societal problems is peripheral at best. Well, I've had enough.
So, your SUV takes $90 to fill the tank, so you get 20 mpg or less, so Detroit is groveling like a whimpering kid, so the air lines are collapsing, the country is heading to God knows what or where, and the Mexican immigrants are the reason?
Why do we have cars and trucks as big as tanks? Why do we gas guzzle a third of the refined gasoline in the world when we are less than one-twentieth of the world's population? Because of minorities?
I've worked all over the world and have seen people who didn't make a $1 a day, who lived in circumstances that make these homeless camps in our metro cities look like, well, real homes, and they endure.
Two-thirds of the world's population has no power, no voice, and little energy to complain. They spend every waking hour attempting to survive until the next day, and often they fail in that attempt. What is worse, their own people exploit them, murder, and rape them, and turn their countries into veritable wastelands.
Worry about the Mexicans today, and tomorrow will make today seem like a dream.
JRF
-----------------
AN EMAILER WRITES
We know Dick Lamm as the former Governor of Colorado. In that context his thoughts are particularly poignant. Last week there was an immigration overpopulation conference in Washington , DC , filled to capacity by many of America 's finest minds and leaders. A brilliant college professor by the name of Victor Hansen Davis talked about his latest book, 'Mexifornia,' explaining how immigration - both legal and illegal was destroying the entire state of California. He said it would march across the country until it destroyed all vestiges of The American Dream.
Moments later, former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm stood up and gave a stunning speech on how to destroy America.
* * * * * *
FORMER GOVERNOR DICK LAMM OF COLORADO SPEAKS OF "AMERICA'S SUICIDE"!
The audience sat spellbound as he described eight methods for the destruction of the United States . He said,
'If you believe that America is too smug, too self-satisfied, too rich, then let's destroy America It is not that hard to do. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall and that 'An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.''
'Here is how they do it,' Lamm said:
'First, to destroy America , turn America into a bilingual or multi-lingual and bicultural country.
'History shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict, and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. The historical scholar, Seymour Lipset, put it this way: 'The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and tragedy.' Canada , Belgium , Malaysia , and Lebanon all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence . Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons, Corsicans and Muslims.'
'Second, to destroy America , invent 'multiculturalism' and encourage immigrants to maintain their culture.
'Make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal; that there are no cultural differences. Make it an article of faith that the Black and Hispanic dropout rates are due solely to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out of bounds.'
'Third, we could make the United States an 'Hispanic Quebec' without much effort.
'The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As Benjamin Schwarz said in the Atlantic Monthly recently: 'The apparent success of our own multi-ethnic and multicultural experiment might have been achieved not by tolerance but by hegemony. Without the dominance that once dictated ethnocentriy and what it meant to be an American, we are left with only tolerance and pluralism to hold us together.' Lamm said, 'I would encourage all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the melting pot metaphor with the salad bowl metaphor. It is important to en sure that we have various cultural subgroups living in America enforcing their differences rather than as Americans, emphasizing their similarities.'
'Fourth, I would make our fastest growing demographic group the least educated.
'I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated, and antagonistic to our population. I would have this second underclass have a 50% dropout rate from high school.'
'My fifth point for destroying America would be to get big foundations and business to give these efforts lots of money.
'I would invest in ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of 'Victimology.' I would get all minorities to think that their lack of success was the fault of the majority. I would start a grievance industry blaming all minority failure on the majority plation.'
'My sixth plan for America's downfall would include dual citizenship, and promote divided loyalties. I would celebrate diversity over unity. I would stress differences rather than similarities. Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other - that is, when they are not killing each other. A diverse, peaceful, or stable society is against most historical precet. People undervalue the unity it takes to keep a nation together. Look at the ancient Greeks. The Greeks believed that they belonged to the same race; they possessed a common language and literature; and they worshipped the same gods. All Greece took part in the Olympic games. A common enemy, Persia , threatened their liberty. Yet all these bonds were not strong enough to overcome two factors: local patriotism and geographical conditions that nurtured political divisions. Greece fell. 'E. Pluribus Unum' -- From many, one. In that historical reality, if we put the emphasis on the 'pluribus' instead of the 'Unum,' we will 'Balkanize' America as surely as Kosovo.'
'Next to last, I would place all subjects off limits.
'Make it taboo to talk about anything against the cult of 'diversity.' I would find a word similar to 'heretic' in the 16th century - that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking Words like 'racist' or 'xenophobe' halt discussion and debate. Having made America a bilingual/bicultural country, having established multi-cultum, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of 'Victimology,' I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws I would develop a mantra: That because immigration has been good for America , it must always be good. I would make every individual immigrant symmetric and ignore the cumulative impact of millions of them.'
* * * * * *
In the last minute of his speech, Governor Lamm wiped his brow. Profound silence followed. Finally he said, 'Lastly, I would censor Victor Hanson Davis's book 'Mexifornia.' His book is dangerous. It exposes the plan to destroy America . If you feel America deserves to be destroyed, don't read that book.'
There was no applause. A chilling fear quietly rose like an ominous cloud above every attendee at the conference. Every American in that room knew that everything Lamm enumerated was proceeding methodically, quietly, darkly, yet pervasively across the United States today. Discussion is being suppressed. Over 100 languages are ripping the foundation of our educational system and national cohesiveness. Even barbaric cultures that practice female genital mutilation are growing as we celebrate 'diversity.'
American jobs are vanishing into the Third World as corporations create a Third World in America Take note of California and other states. To date, ten million illegal aliens and growing fast. It is reminiscent of George Orwell's book '1984.' In that story, three slogans are engraved in the Ministry of Truth building: 'War is peace,' 'Freedom is slavery, ' and 'Ignorance is strength.'
Governor Lamm walked back to his seat. It dawned on everyone at the conference that our nation and the future of this great democracy is deeply in trouble and worsening fast. If we don't get this immigration monster stopped within three years, it will rage like a California wildfire and destroy everything in its path, especially The American Dream.
* * * * *
THE FINAL COMMENT OF DR. FISHER
As president Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, he had a simple message, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
The governor's speech here is predicated on the reader's capacity for fear and loathing of the world that is emerging as certain as these words I am now typing.
Just as Galleo proved the earth is not the center of the universe but simply a planet that rotates around its sun, the United States is simply one constituency in a global universe of nation states, and not the center of them all. The suicide, if suicide is to be our destiny, is the failure to recognize and deal with this reality.
[FREE Animations for your email - By IncrediMail! Click Here!]
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 8, 2008
"The end of the American Century was 1968, 32 years early."
JRF, Green Island in a Black Sea (novel-in-progress)
Reading the governor's remarks, which follow mine, I wonder how anyone could rise to the level of governor of a state of the United States with such myopic and incendiary views of such a sensitive issue. Fear is our enemy and not our friend, and the good governor should know that speaking in hyperbole does not engage reason, but disengages it.
If the good governor were a student of history, he would know the United States stole the state of California from the Mexicans, and that like many other pieces of what is now called the United States of America, it once belonged to indigenous people before Europeans invaded the continent.
America is the land of the free and home of the brave for mainly interlopers these many centuries later, my people among them.
Now, American Indians are confined to reservations or casinos, and I've seen enough of reservations (SOWETO in Johannesburg) from my time in South Africa to know the nature of exploitation of indigenous people.
I write in the forward of my new novel-in-progress, "1968 ended the American Century, 32 years early." The evidence is overwhelming. We have been standing on our metaphorical head ever since, and the good governor gives palpable evidence of that fact.
Will we ever learn how self-indulgence and immaturity have been our bane, how they have suspended us in permanent adolescence, and blunted our perception and perspective of the world in which we live?
While we bask in self-righteous arrogance secure in our hedonistic lifestyle the world festers around us. It never occurs to us why the hegemony of corporate America is suddenly falling apart. The good governor spoke from its citadel with the right words, the right assurances, and the right enemies.
Corporate America, despite this platform, is falling apart because its sense of omniscience and invulnerability, no matter its rhetorical stupidity, has been exposed finally for the fraud that it is, lost in its own surreal world.
If you want to throw arrows, throw them at who employs you or your children or grandchildren. They are the culprits, not Hispanic immigrants. Corporate America has not paid attention, and now we all must suffer for its greed.
Imagine if you will, why twelve million immigrants are to be made responsible for the excesses of 300 million. How is it we should take pride in being the least multiple language literate people in the entire developed world? That takes ethnocentrism to an entire new level.
If I was a Mexican, I would do exactly what these Mexicans are doing in order to survive, which is anything, risks and humiliations be damned!
How easy it is to make people who are exploited in jobs we will not do ourselves for wages we would not accept to become the object of our wrath.
How easy it is to look for the source of our problems outside ourselves than inside ourselves.
Politicians, and all of them now running for office are included, never ask us to behave differently, to sacrifice for the common good, or to do anything that might cause us a little discomfort. Hope is passive. Courage is active. Has anyone asked you to be courageous?
We squander our lives away smoking and drinking and partying and violating every standard that might represent discipline, and then in our old age get religion and moral values that were tabled when the blood was hot and our money was burning a hole in our pockets.
We failed to save because we wanted to keep up with the Jones, and who egged us on to do that -- Corporate America! Who is still egging on us? The same.
We never learn because we are always looking for answers outside ourselves provided by people who are as confused or more so than we are.
Who are these people?
They are celebrities who become environmentalists, political pundits, and wise men and women who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by appealing to our baser instincts, people who have popular television gigs solving lifetime problems of people they have just met on camera, and, of course, there are always those best selling books on self-improvement that promise how we can be healthy, wealthy and wise for $29.95.
People have sent me emails for years to celebrate leaders who have not led, but are full of themselves, have ask me to support national inanities that make no sense to me, or even have ask that I decry people who are not patriotic or religious enough, when the patriotism and religious beliefs espoused were xenophobic and selective.
Going along to get along has become a patriotic if not a religious oath, giving comfort to those that man the Military Industrial Complex or the elected offices of our society. This combined effort has driven us into the mess we are now in.
Leaders, and I use that word advisedly, in the government and Military Industrial Complex have successfully deflected our angst on this or that minority group, the people least able to defend themselves, and whose relevance to our major societal problems is peripheral at best. Well, I've had enough.
So, your SUV takes $90 to fill the tank, so you get 20 mpg or less, so Detroit is groveling like a whimpering kid, so the air lines are collapsing, the country is heading to God knows what or where, and the Mexican immigrants are the reason?
Why do we have cars and trucks as big as tanks? Why do we gas guzzle a third of the refined gasoline in the world when we are less than one-twentieth of the world's population? Because of minorities?
I've worked all over the world and have seen people who didn't make a $1 a day, who lived in circumstances that make these homeless camps in our metro cities look like, well, real homes, and they endure.
Two-thirds of the world's population has no power, no voice, and little energy to complain. They spend every waking hour attempting to survive until the next day, and often they fail in that attempt. What is worse, their own people exploit them, murder, and rape them, and turn their countries into veritable wastelands.
Worry about the Mexicans today, and tomorrow will make today seem like a dream.
JRF
-----------------
AN EMAILER WRITES
We know Dick Lamm as the former Governor of Colorado. In that context his thoughts are particularly poignant. Last week there was an immigration overpopulation conference in Washington , DC , filled to capacity by many of America 's finest minds and leaders. A brilliant college professor by the name of Victor Hansen Davis talked about his latest book, 'Mexifornia,' explaining how immigration - both legal and illegal was destroying the entire state of California. He said it would march across the country until it destroyed all vestiges of The American Dream.
Moments later, former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm stood up and gave a stunning speech on how to destroy America.
* * * * * *
FORMER GOVERNOR DICK LAMM OF COLORADO SPEAKS OF "AMERICA'S SUICIDE"!
The audience sat spellbound as he described eight methods for the destruction of the United States . He said,
'If you believe that America is too smug, too self-satisfied, too rich, then let's destroy America It is not that hard to do. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall and that 'An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.''
'Here is how they do it,' Lamm said:
'First, to destroy America , turn America into a bilingual or multi-lingual and bicultural country.
'History shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict, and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. The historical scholar, Seymour Lipset, put it this way: 'The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and tragedy.' Canada , Belgium , Malaysia , and Lebanon all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence . Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons, Corsicans and Muslims.'
'Second, to destroy America , invent 'multiculturalism' and encourage immigrants to maintain their culture.
'Make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal; that there are no cultural differences. Make it an article of faith that the Black and Hispanic dropout rates are due solely to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out of bounds.'
'Third, we could make the United States an 'Hispanic Quebec' without much effort.
'The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As Benjamin Schwarz said in the Atlantic Monthly recently: 'The apparent success of our own multi-ethnic and multicultural experiment might have been achieved not by tolerance but by hegemony. Without the dominance that once dictated ethnocentriy and what it meant to be an American, we are left with only tolerance and pluralism to hold us together.' Lamm said, 'I would encourage all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the melting pot metaphor with the salad bowl metaphor. It is important to en sure that we have various cultural subgroups living in America enforcing their differences rather than as Americans, emphasizing their similarities.'
'Fourth, I would make our fastest growing demographic group the least educated.
'I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated, and antagonistic to our population. I would have this second underclass have a 50% dropout rate from high school.'
'My fifth point for destroying America would be to get big foundations and business to give these efforts lots of money.
'I would invest in ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of 'Victimology.' I would get all minorities to think that their lack of success was the fault of the majority. I would start a grievance industry blaming all minority failure on the majority plation.'
'My sixth plan for America's downfall would include dual citizenship, and promote divided loyalties. I would celebrate diversity over unity. I would stress differences rather than similarities. Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other - that is, when they are not killing each other. A diverse, peaceful, or stable society is against most historical precet. People undervalue the unity it takes to keep a nation together. Look at the ancient Greeks. The Greeks believed that they belonged to the same race; they possessed a common language and literature; and they worshipped the same gods. All Greece took part in the Olympic games. A common enemy, Persia , threatened their liberty. Yet all these bonds were not strong enough to overcome two factors: local patriotism and geographical conditions that nurtured political divisions. Greece fell. 'E. Pluribus Unum' -- From many, one. In that historical reality, if we put the emphasis on the 'pluribus' instead of the 'Unum,' we will 'Balkanize' America as surely as Kosovo.'
'Next to last, I would place all subjects off limits.
'Make it taboo to talk about anything against the cult of 'diversity.' I would find a word similar to 'heretic' in the 16th century - that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking Words like 'racist' or 'xenophobe' halt discussion and debate. Having made America a bilingual/bicultural country, having established multi-cultum, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of 'Victimology,' I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws I would develop a mantra: That because immigration has been good for America , it must always be good. I would make every individual immigrant symmetric and ignore the cumulative impact of millions of them.'
* * * * * *
In the last minute of his speech, Governor Lamm wiped his brow. Profound silence followed. Finally he said, 'Lastly, I would censor Victor Hanson Davis's book 'Mexifornia.' His book is dangerous. It exposes the plan to destroy America . If you feel America deserves to be destroyed, don't read that book.'
There was no applause. A chilling fear quietly rose like an ominous cloud above every attendee at the conference. Every American in that room knew that everything Lamm enumerated was proceeding methodically, quietly, darkly, yet pervasively across the United States today. Discussion is being suppressed. Over 100 languages are ripping the foundation of our educational system and national cohesiveness. Even barbaric cultures that practice female genital mutilation are growing as we celebrate 'diversity.'
American jobs are vanishing into the Third World as corporations create a Third World in America Take note of California and other states. To date, ten million illegal aliens and growing fast. It is reminiscent of George Orwell's book '1984.' In that story, three slogans are engraved in the Ministry of Truth building: 'War is peace,' 'Freedom is slavery, ' and 'Ignorance is strength.'
Governor Lamm walked back to his seat. It dawned on everyone at the conference that our nation and the future of this great democracy is deeply in trouble and worsening fast. If we don't get this immigration monster stopped within three years, it will rage like a California wildfire and destroy everything in its path, especially The American Dream.
* * * * *
THE FINAL COMMENT OF DR. FISHER
As president Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, he had a simple message, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
The governor's speech here is predicated on the reader's capacity for fear and loathing of the world that is emerging as certain as these words I am now typing.
Just as Galleo proved the earth is not the center of the universe but simply a planet that rotates around its sun, the United States is simply one constituency in a global universe of nation states, and not the center of them all. The suicide, if suicide is to be our destiny, is the failure to recognize and deal with this reality.
[FREE Animations for your email - By IncrediMail! Click Here!]
Thursday, June 05, 2008
GERMAN FRIEND PUZZLES OVER AMERICAN PRIMARIES
A GERMAN FRIEND PUZZLES OVER BARAK OBAMA,
PRESUMPTIVE NOMINEE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
AN EXCHANGE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 5, 2008
GERMAN FRIEND WRITES:
Hello Jim,
What do you think about the victory of Obama, and his chances against McCain?
Manfred
MY RESPONSE
As to your question, I have this to say, the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic Party played by the rules in the primaries, and out finessed Hilary Clinton.
That is why he won the nomination. If he does the same during the next five months, and runs a campaign like the general whom he has proven to be, he will win.
A POINT TO NOTE
Hilary had a $100 million war chest before Super Tuesday, and spent most of it, thinking it would be all over by then. It wasn't and she had apparently no back up strategy.
CONSIDER THIS
Early on, Obama had no name recognition, little funds, and had to resort to the Internet, and college educated voters. That is what we hear over and over again. I
What we don’t hear is that when he won the caucus in Iowa, defeating Hilary Clinton, among others, Iowa put him on the map.
Iowans (I'm one of them) like straight talk and intelligent argument. Obama gave them that. Iowans are smart and they can see through pretense and posturing.
Thanks to Iowa, Obama came out of Super Tuesday alive if not yet viable. His appeal to the Internet kept him in the race. So, now, while Clinton is in debt, some think to the tune of $50 million or more, he has well over a $100 million and growing to take on McCain.
That said Obama, unfortunately, took only seven of the last seventeen primary states, and Clinton took all of the industrial states of blue-collar workers including Indiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, California and Texas, as well as Michigan and Florida, which did not count for violating primary rules of the Democratic Party. Now delegates of these misbehaving states are going to be seated at the Democratic Convention in Denver with half votes.
Blue-collar workers with no college, and women over fifty liked Hilary Clinton in the primaries, while college students and college trained professionals liked Obama.
To be noted, traditionally, blue-collar workers and women over fifty come out to vote in presidential elections.
This is not true of young people. We shall see if they break tradition and come out to vote in the fall as they have in the primaries, which is a big "if."
Finally, there are a lot of registered independents (BB is so registered) and Republicans (I am so registered) who are disenchanted with the Bush Administration, and don't want "four more years of Bush" in John McCain.
McCain almost beat Bush in the primaries in 2000. Too bad because I think he would have made a better president. But he is now 72 to Obama's 46, a generation gap, and I think the next four years are going to be a strenuous test for the new president.
Whatever happens, this is a great historic moment. Time will tell if Barak Obama is looked upon as "the Democratic presidential nominee who happens to be black," or the Black Democratic presidential nominee. I would hope that race has nothing to do with the outcome, but I'm an idealist.
ITEM
Here not far from my home on Interstate 75, a giant (50 feet by 30 feet) Confederate flag has been mounted on private property, supposedly in honor of Confederate President Jefferson Davis's birthday. We shall see if it holds any significance.
Even if Barak Obama is not elected president, he remains a powerful model for people of color. I can imagine how I would feel if I were black. I would be euphoric, thinking anything is possible in this country. Imagine what that could do for young blacks who are ambivalent about their future. Powerful stuff!
BB and I plan to vote for Barak Obama. We feel in this long primary campaign we have gotten to know him. His greatest challenge during the next five months is to act presidential, to act as if he is already president.
Everyone is talking about an Obama-Clinton "dream team" ticket. I cannot think of a more disastrous development for Obama.
I hope his advisers steer him away from that. I am a Republican conservative who has a preference for liberal Obama, only because we need to get out of the rut. I do not want a weak liberal as president, but a tough liberal who is not afraid to take on the Democratic Party bosses.
Just some thoughts for what they are worth.
Be always well,
Jim
PRESUMPTIVE NOMINEE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
AN EXCHANGE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 5, 2008
GERMAN FRIEND WRITES:
Hello Jim,
What do you think about the victory of Obama, and his chances against McCain?
Manfred
MY RESPONSE
As to your question, I have this to say, the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic Party played by the rules in the primaries, and out finessed Hilary Clinton.
That is why he won the nomination. If he does the same during the next five months, and runs a campaign like the general whom he has proven to be, he will win.
A POINT TO NOTE
Hilary had a $100 million war chest before Super Tuesday, and spent most of it, thinking it would be all over by then. It wasn't and she had apparently no back up strategy.
CONSIDER THIS
Early on, Obama had no name recognition, little funds, and had to resort to the Internet, and college educated voters. That is what we hear over and over again. I
What we don’t hear is that when he won the caucus in Iowa, defeating Hilary Clinton, among others, Iowa put him on the map.
Iowans (I'm one of them) like straight talk and intelligent argument. Obama gave them that. Iowans are smart and they can see through pretense and posturing.
Thanks to Iowa, Obama came out of Super Tuesday alive if not yet viable. His appeal to the Internet kept him in the race. So, now, while Clinton is in debt, some think to the tune of $50 million or more, he has well over a $100 million and growing to take on McCain.
That said Obama, unfortunately, took only seven of the last seventeen primary states, and Clinton took all of the industrial states of blue-collar workers including Indiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, California and Texas, as well as Michigan and Florida, which did not count for violating primary rules of the Democratic Party. Now delegates of these misbehaving states are going to be seated at the Democratic Convention in Denver with half votes.
Blue-collar workers with no college, and women over fifty liked Hilary Clinton in the primaries, while college students and college trained professionals liked Obama.
To be noted, traditionally, blue-collar workers and women over fifty come out to vote in presidential elections.
This is not true of young people. We shall see if they break tradition and come out to vote in the fall as they have in the primaries, which is a big "if."
Finally, there are a lot of registered independents (BB is so registered) and Republicans (I am so registered) who are disenchanted with the Bush Administration, and don't want "four more years of Bush" in John McCain.
McCain almost beat Bush in the primaries in 2000. Too bad because I think he would have made a better president. But he is now 72 to Obama's 46, a generation gap, and I think the next four years are going to be a strenuous test for the new president.
Whatever happens, this is a great historic moment. Time will tell if Barak Obama is looked upon as "the Democratic presidential nominee who happens to be black," or the Black Democratic presidential nominee. I would hope that race has nothing to do with the outcome, but I'm an idealist.
ITEM
Here not far from my home on Interstate 75, a giant (50 feet by 30 feet) Confederate flag has been mounted on private property, supposedly in honor of Confederate President Jefferson Davis's birthday. We shall see if it holds any significance.
Even if Barak Obama is not elected president, he remains a powerful model for people of color. I can imagine how I would feel if I were black. I would be euphoric, thinking anything is possible in this country. Imagine what that could do for young blacks who are ambivalent about their future. Powerful stuff!
BB and I plan to vote for Barak Obama. We feel in this long primary campaign we have gotten to know him. His greatest challenge during the next five months is to act presidential, to act as if he is already president.
Everyone is talking about an Obama-Clinton "dream team" ticket. I cannot think of a more disastrous development for Obama.
I hope his advisers steer him away from that. I am a Republican conservative who has a preference for liberal Obama, only because we need to get out of the rut. I do not want a weak liberal as president, but a tough liberal who is not afraid to take on the Democratic Party bosses.
Just some thoughts for what they are worth.
Be always well,
Jim