HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET!
Reference:
Dr. Fisher's essay was written to acknowledge the 63rd anniversary of the American B-29 bomber named Enola Gay, which took off from Tinian Island in the Marianas to drop a single atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945.
More than 80,000 mainly civilians died in less than a minute, and led to 140,000 deaths in later years. In that instant, most of Hiroshima ceased to exist.
Two days after Hiroshima, on August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan (as agreed to at Yalta in February 1945 by president Franklin D. Roosevelt, prime minister Winston Churchill and commissar Joseph Stalin).
An atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 10, 1945, with 40,000 mainly civilian deaths, which eventually led to over 100,000 deaths.
On August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered.
Japan's formal unconditional surrender to the Allied Forces was presented in a document to General Douglas MacAruthur aboard the U. S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.
Humanity had acquired the power to destroy the world and mankind. Sixty-three years later the world trembles in the shadow of the atomic bomb's mushroom cloud.
WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
Apologies for the delayed response.
Minus hospital time in Pearl Harbor, my father spent the time from late 1942 to mid-1946 in the South Pacific, almost all of it on an escort carrier CVE-84, USS Shamrock Bay. He missed Midway, but caught most of the action thereafter. In July 1945, his carrier was part of a task force headed toward Tokyo Bay to join other American forces building there for the final assault on the Japanese home island. Although he’d survived a lot of stuff he shouldn't have, including the kamikazes at Leyte, he was 100% convinced that this was it. The reason being, the ordnance hold of their ship, and those of the others, was loaded with poison gas. One bomb or torpedo and they were all goners.
Based on what they'd seen on Iwo, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa, they were convinced that the Japanese would dig in even more fiercely on their home island. It would take forever to root them out of the mountains and caves of Japan. So, the primary battle plan was the widespread use of gas through aerial bombing. The ground invasion would then focus on ‘mopping up’ operations. Casualty projections were 500,000 – 750,000 Americans, 1.5M Japanese military, and over 4M Japanese civilians.
Roosevelt didn't believe in the bomb, and undertook the project only after considerable nagging by Einstein and others who knew the Germans were working on it. We built four bombs, and used one at Alamogordo, leaving three. The Japanese didn't know that. For all they knew, we were building them hand over fist. Shifting to Dresden, some believe that the firebombing was revenge. More likely, it was an attempt to break the will to fight. Our strategic bombing of military and industrial targets made war fighting difficult, but the fire bombing of Dresden brought despair to the German people, and coupled with their disaster on the Russian front, broke their will.
When Truman took over, he took a more pragmatic stance. He was willing to try the bombs, and if they didn't work, he could still follow the primary plan. They worked in that they convinced the Emperor that we could / would annihilate the Japanese race. He stepped in, ended the war, and was almost assassinated for his trouble.
In the end, about 175,000 people died. That's a lot of folks. However, if you had to make the decision, would it be more moral to incur the casualties of the primary plan rather than use a nuclear device? I’d have to recheck my data, but I believe more Japanese were actually killed in the incendiary attacks on Tokyo leading up to August 1945 than in the atomic bombs themselves. The bombs accomplished a second objective as well. They sent a message to the world that said, “We have it, we’ll use it. Don’t mess with us again.”
It’s easy for artists and poets to wring their hands, but as usual, it’s with less than total context. The Japanese bemoan the events and build memorials, but I see them building no memorials to Nanking.
Atomic weapons are horrible things, but it is their very horror that gave them value – they forced even politicians to constrain their military adventurism. They kept the cold war an economic contest. The good news is their time has passed. Both candidates for President have said they will downsize and DE-alert nuclear weapons, and frankly, the time has come. The Russians welcome that too, as they want to do the same. Nuclear weapons are expensive to maintain and dangerous to have around. The only limit to how fast we can downsize is how fast we can destroy the material in civilian reactors. (It’s not good to have plutonium around in any format.) We can however, DE-alert immediately. It only requires Presidential order.
Unfortunately, we cannot un-invent technology. Neither can we keep the technology to ourselves forever. We’re going to have to face nuclear terror, it is inevitable. However, the time of major powers hoarding thousands of weapons is gone. I see the world’s major powers downsizing to dozens of weapons, not thousands; just enough to be a deterrent. As I write this, USSTRATCOM is doing their homework to determine what to downsize and when to downsize it in anticipation of a new President. I know this because I am personally involved in these exercises. My career today focuses on modernizing the technologies to permit us to go to the minimum number necessary for deterrent. (Every target we can hit conventionally is one more nuke we don’t need.) Good riddance I say.
What of the future? It’s my observation that people who have something worthwhile to lose, don’t much like war. It’s my hope, my dream, that as economic modernization and uplifted lifestyle spreads around the globe, the people themselves will back away from war, leaving the politicians to waggle their tongues and weenies at each other. That’s what they’re best at anyway.
v/r
e
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
e
Thank you for a sage and thoughtful personal and professional response. Man has a future if there are more with a mindset such as yours. I am humbled to have my reflections of this tragedy placed in such meaningful perspective. We are on the same page. May temperance prevail.
Be always well,
Jim
WRITER WRITES AGAIN:
I know this has been beat to death, and I apologize for responding yesterday after you cried uncle; I was working through emails up from the bottom.
I’ve been thinking though, about the civilian target thing. It seems to me that reticence about hitting civilian targets is a product of modern media – bringing into people’s homes the true brutality of war on civilians. Civilians have always gotten the dirty end of war. I could think of no war in history where civilian targets were not attacked, and as you go farther back, the sacking of civilian targets for plunder actually becomes the objective. In modern times, I think attacking of civilian targets reflects a frustration that sticking to military targets is not bringing the conflict to the desired ends. Civilian targets are soft and indefensible.
When the cold war began, both the US and Soviets targeted each other’s cities. As American missiles grew more accurate, the warheads grew smaller, and the targets switched to 100% military. The Soviets today are 50 – 50, targeting both our weapons and our cities. Perhaps, the reticence of attacking civilian targets actually reflects progress in the maturity of our species? Wouldn’t that be Grande? As demonstrated by Gen Giap in Vietnam, all you have to do to win is break the opponent’s will to fight. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to annihilate him. Maybe we’re gradually evolving to where Sun Tzu was in 400 BC – to win without fighting is the highest glory.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Thursday, August 07, 2008
HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET! A Thoughtful and Emotional Response
HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET
A Thoughtful and Emotional Response
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 7, 2008
“Examine what is said, not him who speaks.”
Arabian Proverb
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
That is an evocative piece from beginning to end. Thank you for sharing it with us.
I have to tell you, my immediate reaction to any perceived criticism of the atom bombing of Japan in 1945 is quite visceral. My blood began to boil as I started reading your missive. There are some truths the defense of which I take as a defense of all I hold dear: the sanctity of our Constitution, the righteousness of the Union in the Civil War, the treason of the Confederacy, its leaders, and its entire population in the same, the need for Good nations to act swiftly and decisively to protect the weak from genocide, as in the Balkans in the 90's or Darfur today, and the bombing of Japan in 1945 among them. The fact that there are those among us who question my positions triggers the fight part of my fight-or-flight animal response in a way that rarely happens in other situations. After all, I am an adult, and in most other cases I can control my baser emotions, such as rage or jealousy.
I have taught English to hundreds of adult Japanese students, and the fact that they look upon themselves as innocent victims in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appalls me. To this day, the Japanese are not taught of the horrors of the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the Korean Comfort Women, or any of the many other atrocities perpetrated by their citizen-soldiers. Indeed, they are taught in school that the US was the aggressor in WWII because we cut them off from oil and rubber imports, and their nation would have crumbled had they not "defended" themselves. This travesty is akin to German Holocaust denial, but on an intentional cultural-wide scale.
The bombing of Japan is all the more important to me because of my own father's experience. He turned 18 in November 1944, and signed up for service that same day. He went through basic training to head off to Europe, but had an operation that kept him stateside. His buddies sent him letters from the front. When he had finally recovered, he was redirected to prepare for the invasion of Japan instead. He knew very well that he likely would have been among those estimated hundreds of thousands or one million American servicemen expected to die in the case of an invasion of the Japanese home islands. In all probability, I write this email only because Truman ordered bombs dropped on Japan.
...But it has always bothered me that we chose cities rather than military targets. I haven't got an answer for why that was okay. And so, as I read your piece, I ordered myself to simmer down and let your words sink in. They didn't change my mind about how we ended the war, but they did reinforce my belief that we erred morally in choosing civilian targets.
I look forward to reading your novel. I'll buy it soon. Your talent as a novelist seems even better than your impressive talent as a business writer.
Regards,
T.C.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for a thoughtful and candid reply to this evocative essay. Its intention was the same as Norman Cousins book, MODERN MAN IS OBSOLETE (Viking 1945). The thinking of the 1940s and 1950s, with which we have been locked stepping is irrelevant, and even disastrous.
On this small planet, where water, not oil, will be the call to arms, community, not conflict is the planet’s only salvation. Manuscripts of mine that have addressed this issue have never found a publisher. We can live without oil. We cannot live without water.
The atrocities of the Empire of Japan in China (Rape of Nanking), in the Philippines (Bataan Death March) and Korea, which you list, all happened as well as the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands on December 7, 1941.
What your Japanese students told you, however, was true. Japan was in a state of panic, a burgeoning population with no natural resources, being cut off from these resources by the United States and others, provided theater for the radical war mongering voices.
Japanese historians today admit it was a war Japan could not win, but felt it had to launch. As one put it, “We have awakened the tiger.”
Killing for whatever reason is not natural to man. It is why men at war suffer mightily adjusting to peace. Yet, in war, man is not only given permission to kill, but wins accolades for the killing.
You wonder why a nonmilitary target was chosen for the atomic bomb. It was meant to send a message, and did.
Hate and ignorance are the supple soil for fanaticism.
For this to work, the target must be dehumanized and demonized. I remember a slogan on the side of bread trucks during WWII, “The only good Jap is a dead Jap.” Sixty-three years later, Japan is an ally and an important trading partner. Go figure.
You are a passionate and compassionate man, and do a lot of good. I know this to be a fact. People of passion have strong opinions. The important thing about one’s opinions is to understand their nature, and whether they serve one or not. My service to you is that I have reintroduced you to yours.
Be always well,
Jim
PS Iris Chang, then 29, won the National Book Award for nonfiction with “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II” (Basic Books 1997). I saw her on the "PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer" being interviewed after she had won that prestigious award.
I was devastated learning later that this quiet bright modest young lady with so much talent committed suicide. If you haven’t read her book, I recommend you do so, a book which must have been very painful to research and write.
Another book, a novel by Gerald Seymour titled “The Walking Dead” (Overbrook Press 2007) deals with suicide bombers from the perspective of the whole insanity from recruitment to incineration.
We live in a time of madness with a 1940s mindset. Meanwhile, we distract ourselves with electronic toys.
A Thoughtful and Emotional Response
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 7, 2008
“Examine what is said, not him who speaks.”
Arabian Proverb
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
That is an evocative piece from beginning to end. Thank you for sharing it with us.
I have to tell you, my immediate reaction to any perceived criticism of the atom bombing of Japan in 1945 is quite visceral. My blood began to boil as I started reading your missive. There are some truths the defense of which I take as a defense of all I hold dear: the sanctity of our Constitution, the righteousness of the Union in the Civil War, the treason of the Confederacy, its leaders, and its entire population in the same, the need for Good nations to act swiftly and decisively to protect the weak from genocide, as in the Balkans in the 90's or Darfur today, and the bombing of Japan in 1945 among them. The fact that there are those among us who question my positions triggers the fight part of my fight-or-flight animal response in a way that rarely happens in other situations. After all, I am an adult, and in most other cases I can control my baser emotions, such as rage or jealousy.
I have taught English to hundreds of adult Japanese students, and the fact that they look upon themselves as innocent victims in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appalls me. To this day, the Japanese are not taught of the horrors of the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the Korean Comfort Women, or any of the many other atrocities perpetrated by their citizen-soldiers. Indeed, they are taught in school that the US was the aggressor in WWII because we cut them off from oil and rubber imports, and their nation would have crumbled had they not "defended" themselves. This travesty is akin to German Holocaust denial, but on an intentional cultural-wide scale.
The bombing of Japan is all the more important to me because of my own father's experience. He turned 18 in November 1944, and signed up for service that same day. He went through basic training to head off to Europe, but had an operation that kept him stateside. His buddies sent him letters from the front. When he had finally recovered, he was redirected to prepare for the invasion of Japan instead. He knew very well that he likely would have been among those estimated hundreds of thousands or one million American servicemen expected to die in the case of an invasion of the Japanese home islands. In all probability, I write this email only because Truman ordered bombs dropped on Japan.
...But it has always bothered me that we chose cities rather than military targets. I haven't got an answer for why that was okay. And so, as I read your piece, I ordered myself to simmer down and let your words sink in. They didn't change my mind about how we ended the war, but they did reinforce my belief that we erred morally in choosing civilian targets.
I look forward to reading your novel. I'll buy it soon. Your talent as a novelist seems even better than your impressive talent as a business writer.
Regards,
T.C.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for a thoughtful and candid reply to this evocative essay. Its intention was the same as Norman Cousins book, MODERN MAN IS OBSOLETE (Viking 1945). The thinking of the 1940s and 1950s, with which we have been locked stepping is irrelevant, and even disastrous.
On this small planet, where water, not oil, will be the call to arms, community, not conflict is the planet’s only salvation. Manuscripts of mine that have addressed this issue have never found a publisher. We can live without oil. We cannot live without water.
The atrocities of the Empire of Japan in China (Rape of Nanking), in the Philippines (Bataan Death March) and Korea, which you list, all happened as well as the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands on December 7, 1941.
What your Japanese students told you, however, was true. Japan was in a state of panic, a burgeoning population with no natural resources, being cut off from these resources by the United States and others, provided theater for the radical war mongering voices.
Japanese historians today admit it was a war Japan could not win, but felt it had to launch. As one put it, “We have awakened the tiger.”
Killing for whatever reason is not natural to man. It is why men at war suffer mightily adjusting to peace. Yet, in war, man is not only given permission to kill, but wins accolades for the killing.
You wonder why a nonmilitary target was chosen for the atomic bomb. It was meant to send a message, and did.
Hate and ignorance are the supple soil for fanaticism.
For this to work, the target must be dehumanized and demonized. I remember a slogan on the side of bread trucks during WWII, “The only good Jap is a dead Jap.” Sixty-three years later, Japan is an ally and an important trading partner. Go figure.
You are a passionate and compassionate man, and do a lot of good. I know this to be a fact. People of passion have strong opinions. The important thing about one’s opinions is to understand their nature, and whether they serve one or not. My service to you is that I have reintroduced you to yours.
Be always well,
Jim
PS Iris Chang, then 29, won the National Book Award for nonfiction with “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II” (Basic Books 1997). I saw her on the "PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer" being interviewed after she had won that prestigious award.
I was devastated learning later that this quiet bright modest young lady with so much talent committed suicide. If you haven’t read her book, I recommend you do so, a book which must have been very painful to research and write.
Another book, a novel by Gerald Seymour titled “The Walking Dead” (Overbrook Press 2007) deals with suicide bombers from the perspective of the whole insanity from recruitment to incineration.
We live in a time of madness with a 1940s mindset. Meanwhile, we distract ourselves with electronic toys.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET!
HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 6, 2008
“On Monday, August 7, 1945, I read in The Clinton Herald that yesterday “President Truman reveals a U.S. Army Air Force bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.”
“I never heard of such a bomb or such a place. On Thursday, I read that the day before, Wednesday, August 9, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Each bomb, according to The Herald, was a single missile 2,000 times the blasting power of the largest bomb used previously in the war. I try to fathom this destructive power and the reason for it.
“I listen to my da’s railroad buddies celebrating these bombings with a kind of excitement I hadn’t heard before. ‘Understand it leveled Hiroshima to the ground, and all their papier-mâché huts with it,’ says one. ‘Not a Jap standing,’ says another. ‘Did even a better job at Nagasaki,’ says a third. ‘Heard on the radio tens of thousands killed and tens of thousands more critically wounded in both attacks,’ says a fourth, ‘and we didn’t lose a flier.’ Finally, my da concludes, ‘Won’t be long now.’
‘Thank God for that!’ they echo as one.
“’Does Japan have that huge an army in those two cities,’ I ask innocently, seeing that as the only justification for such an attack. All eyes turn to me in stunned silence. Usually, they don’t even notice me. Then they break out into uproarious laughter. Their eyes go watery. Fists to the eyes stay their tears; legs kick the floor until the house shakes, and some even hold their stomachs in raucous hilarity. I didn’t mean it to be funny. What’s so funny about tens of thousands of people dying? Does war make people like that? I ask my mother who is in the kitchen reading. She says, ‘you wouldn’t understand.’ I ask my da after his railroad buddies leave. He says simply, ‘It saved thousands of American lives.’ Both answers are inadequate.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003 AuthorHouse), pp. 301-302.
* * * * * *
Today, August 6, 2008, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) featured the BBC (Great Britain) and the DW-TV (Germany) News as it does every day, Monday thru Friday, which I watch religiously.
Were it not for this coverage, I might have forgotten how moved and confused I was in 1945 when Hiroshima was bombed. That day and that scene, I thought, had made an indelible mark on my soul, yet were it not for these two foreign news sources, it would have passed from my attention completely.
The BBC showed some 45,000 mourners in Hiroshima today at the shrine of those who lost their life that August morning so long ago. The BBC reporter said, “Some 140,000 lost their lives in little over a minute, tens of thousands subsequently died from radiation, while many sicknesses to this day can be traced to radioactive contamination.” The reporter said nothing about psychological or emotional damage.
I hope other American news sources to which I am not privy covered this 63rd anniversary because it is that important, that significant in the annals of man.
Lest we forget, this conflagration was the greatest single destruction of human life in a single event in recorded history. Writer Norman Cousins felt such profound guilt over the bomb’s use on human beings that he immediately wrote a slender volume, MODERN MAN IS OBSOLETE (Viking Press 1945), which became a national bestseller.
Cousins opens with these lines:
“The beginning of the Atomic Age has brought less hope than fear. It is a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend. This fear is not new; in its classical form it is the fear of irrational death. But overnight it has become intensified, magnified. It has burst out of the subconscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehension.”
Science, he goes on to say, has eclipsed man. Man can see that piety is obsolete, faith is obsolete, mysticism is obsolete, prophetic vision is obsolete, and any modern man can see he is obsolete. Cousins sees a terrible revenge for making men obsolete, for making their inventions more relevant and powerful and more controlling than they are.
He ends the 49-page book with an absurd course to the future, and he says in all seriousness since man is obsolete:
“Let him dissociate himself, carefully and completely, from civilization and all its works. Let him systematically abolish science and the tools of science. Let him destroy all the machines and the knowledge which can build or operate those machines. Let him raze his cities, smash his laboratories, dismantle his factories, tear down his universities and schools, burn his libraries, rip apart his art. Let him murder his scientists, his lawmakers, his statesmen, his doctors, his teachers, his mechanics, his merchants, and anyone who has anything to do with the machinery of knowledge or progress. Let him punish literacy by death. Let him eradicate nations and set up the tribe as sovereign. Let him, in short, revert to his condition in society in 10,000 B.C. Thus emancipated from science, from progress, from government, from knowledge, from thought, he can be reasonably certain of prolonging his existence on this planet.
“This is a way out if ‘modern’ man is looking for a way out from the modern world.”
I read that little book at my uncle Leonard’s in Detroit the summer of 1946. He was head of the department of finance & commerce at the University of Detroit. He asked me what I thought, and I told him, not understanding sarcasm or absurdity, that I thought the author was quite mad.
“No, Jimmy,” my uncle said, “he’s quite sane. It is madness that he fears and madness that he desires to prevent.”
Sixty years later, we have the genocide of Pol Pot of Cambodia who killed millions of scholars and professional people to drive that society back into the Stone Age.
There are the lawless tribes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey who resemble today what he warned about then when lawlessness prevails.
We have had ethnic cleansing in Serbia and Bosnia, and in many other places in Africa.
There is even fear that terrorist possess nuclear suitcase bombs, bombs more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, that could kill millions in a single blast if detonated in a major city of the world.
Sense and sensibility were expressed in the appendix to this little book with excerpts from THE FEDERALIST on The Making of the Constitution of the United States of America (1788). Cousins’ ultimate declaration for modern man to survive is to make war obsolete.
Incidentally, it was many years later that I learned the answer to my question to my da’s railroad buddies: was there a significant military presence in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped?
There was not. In fact, more than 95 percent of the casualties were civilians, people like you and me, people who get caught up in the hysteria of the times and forget that we are all human beings and members of the same human race.
I was but a boy when that conflagration happened, a curious boy, and one that followed the war almost in an obsessive-compulsive manner in The Clinton Herald. So much so, as I point out in my memoir-as-a-novel, Sister Mary Helen allowed me to update the class daily on events when I was in the fourth grade.
By another curious accident, I was at the University of Iowa when author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a visiting scholar, and I heard him talk about his novel, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. I was chemistry major but loved literature, and was always taking electives outside my discipline.
Vonnegut was at Dresden, Germany as a prisoner of war during the fire bombing of that city in February 1945. Dresden was not a strategic military target, but an ancient and historic city. Why, then, did British bombers attempt to bomb the city into antiquity?
Vonnegut suggested the revenge bombing was for the German V-2 rocket attacks that destroyed much of London in 1943 – 1944. He captured the Dresden insanity with the novelist’s eye and quoted statistics of the tens of thousands of bombs dropped compared to the single one dropped at Hiroshima.
He wondered why the crew of the Enola Gray, or the Allied observers who went into Hiroshima afterwards had failed to write novels of the earth shaking event. I wonder to this day if any of them ever did. Biographies have been written, true, but mind wrenching novels? I don't think so.
We can talk of the shame of the Nazis and the Holocaust, the shame of Russian Siberia in the handling of dissidents, and the shame of the Japanese Bataan Death March in the Philippines in 1942, but why no expression of remorse for Hiroshima?
I didn’t understand as a boy, and I don’t understand now as an old man. It could happen here lest we forget.
* * * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 6, 2008
“On Monday, August 7, 1945, I read in The Clinton Herald that yesterday “President Truman reveals a U.S. Army Air Force bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.”
“I never heard of such a bomb or such a place. On Thursday, I read that the day before, Wednesday, August 9, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Each bomb, according to The Herald, was a single missile 2,000 times the blasting power of the largest bomb used previously in the war. I try to fathom this destructive power and the reason for it.
“I listen to my da’s railroad buddies celebrating these bombings with a kind of excitement I hadn’t heard before. ‘Understand it leveled Hiroshima to the ground, and all their papier-mâché huts with it,’ says one. ‘Not a Jap standing,’ says another. ‘Did even a better job at Nagasaki,’ says a third. ‘Heard on the radio tens of thousands killed and tens of thousands more critically wounded in both attacks,’ says a fourth, ‘and we didn’t lose a flier.’ Finally, my da concludes, ‘Won’t be long now.’
‘Thank God for that!’ they echo as one.
“’Does Japan have that huge an army in those two cities,’ I ask innocently, seeing that as the only justification for such an attack. All eyes turn to me in stunned silence. Usually, they don’t even notice me. Then they break out into uproarious laughter. Their eyes go watery. Fists to the eyes stay their tears; legs kick the floor until the house shakes, and some even hold their stomachs in raucous hilarity. I didn’t mean it to be funny. What’s so funny about tens of thousands of people dying? Does war make people like that? I ask my mother who is in the kitchen reading. She says, ‘you wouldn’t understand.’ I ask my da after his railroad buddies leave. He says simply, ‘It saved thousands of American lives.’ Both answers are inadequate.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003 AuthorHouse), pp. 301-302.
* * * * * *
Today, August 6, 2008, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) featured the BBC (Great Britain) and the DW-TV (Germany) News as it does every day, Monday thru Friday, which I watch religiously.
Were it not for this coverage, I might have forgotten how moved and confused I was in 1945 when Hiroshima was bombed. That day and that scene, I thought, had made an indelible mark on my soul, yet were it not for these two foreign news sources, it would have passed from my attention completely.
The BBC showed some 45,000 mourners in Hiroshima today at the shrine of those who lost their life that August morning so long ago. The BBC reporter said, “Some 140,000 lost their lives in little over a minute, tens of thousands subsequently died from radiation, while many sicknesses to this day can be traced to radioactive contamination.” The reporter said nothing about psychological or emotional damage.
I hope other American news sources to which I am not privy covered this 63rd anniversary because it is that important, that significant in the annals of man.
Lest we forget, this conflagration was the greatest single destruction of human life in a single event in recorded history. Writer Norman Cousins felt such profound guilt over the bomb’s use on human beings that he immediately wrote a slender volume, MODERN MAN IS OBSOLETE (Viking Press 1945), which became a national bestseller.
Cousins opens with these lines:
“The beginning of the Atomic Age has brought less hope than fear. It is a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend. This fear is not new; in its classical form it is the fear of irrational death. But overnight it has become intensified, magnified. It has burst out of the subconscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehension.”
Science, he goes on to say, has eclipsed man. Man can see that piety is obsolete, faith is obsolete, mysticism is obsolete, prophetic vision is obsolete, and any modern man can see he is obsolete. Cousins sees a terrible revenge for making men obsolete, for making their inventions more relevant and powerful and more controlling than they are.
He ends the 49-page book with an absurd course to the future, and he says in all seriousness since man is obsolete:
“Let him dissociate himself, carefully and completely, from civilization and all its works. Let him systematically abolish science and the tools of science. Let him destroy all the machines and the knowledge which can build or operate those machines. Let him raze his cities, smash his laboratories, dismantle his factories, tear down his universities and schools, burn his libraries, rip apart his art. Let him murder his scientists, his lawmakers, his statesmen, his doctors, his teachers, his mechanics, his merchants, and anyone who has anything to do with the machinery of knowledge or progress. Let him punish literacy by death. Let him eradicate nations and set up the tribe as sovereign. Let him, in short, revert to his condition in society in 10,000 B.C. Thus emancipated from science, from progress, from government, from knowledge, from thought, he can be reasonably certain of prolonging his existence on this planet.
“This is a way out if ‘modern’ man is looking for a way out from the modern world.”
I read that little book at my uncle Leonard’s in Detroit the summer of 1946. He was head of the department of finance & commerce at the University of Detroit. He asked me what I thought, and I told him, not understanding sarcasm or absurdity, that I thought the author was quite mad.
“No, Jimmy,” my uncle said, “he’s quite sane. It is madness that he fears and madness that he desires to prevent.”
Sixty years later, we have the genocide of Pol Pot of Cambodia who killed millions of scholars and professional people to drive that society back into the Stone Age.
There are the lawless tribes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey who resemble today what he warned about then when lawlessness prevails.
We have had ethnic cleansing in Serbia and Bosnia, and in many other places in Africa.
There is even fear that terrorist possess nuclear suitcase bombs, bombs more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, that could kill millions in a single blast if detonated in a major city of the world.
Sense and sensibility were expressed in the appendix to this little book with excerpts from THE FEDERALIST on The Making of the Constitution of the United States of America (1788). Cousins’ ultimate declaration for modern man to survive is to make war obsolete.
Incidentally, it was many years later that I learned the answer to my question to my da’s railroad buddies: was there a significant military presence in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped?
There was not. In fact, more than 95 percent of the casualties were civilians, people like you and me, people who get caught up in the hysteria of the times and forget that we are all human beings and members of the same human race.
I was but a boy when that conflagration happened, a curious boy, and one that followed the war almost in an obsessive-compulsive manner in The Clinton Herald. So much so, as I point out in my memoir-as-a-novel, Sister Mary Helen allowed me to update the class daily on events when I was in the fourth grade.
By another curious accident, I was at the University of Iowa when author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a visiting scholar, and I heard him talk about his novel, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. I was chemistry major but loved literature, and was always taking electives outside my discipline.
Vonnegut was at Dresden, Germany as a prisoner of war during the fire bombing of that city in February 1945. Dresden was not a strategic military target, but an ancient and historic city. Why, then, did British bombers attempt to bomb the city into antiquity?
Vonnegut suggested the revenge bombing was for the German V-2 rocket attacks that destroyed much of London in 1943 – 1944. He captured the Dresden insanity with the novelist’s eye and quoted statistics of the tens of thousands of bombs dropped compared to the single one dropped at Hiroshima.
He wondered why the crew of the Enola Gray, or the Allied observers who went into Hiroshima afterwards had failed to write novels of the earth shaking event. I wonder to this day if any of them ever did. Biographies have been written, true, but mind wrenching novels? I don't think so.
We can talk of the shame of the Nazis and the Holocaust, the shame of Russian Siberia in the handling of dissidents, and the shame of the Japanese Bataan Death March in the Philippines in 1942, but why no expression of remorse for Hiroshima?
I didn’t understand as a boy, and I don’t understand now as an old man. It could happen here lest we forget.
* * * * * *
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
WHAT WE REALLY KNOW, WE DON'T!
WHAT WE REALLY KNOW, WE DON’T!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 5, 2008
“Knowledge is but folly unless it is guided by grace.”
George Herbert (1593 – 1633), English poet
When I read carefully skewed quotations from an author’s body of work, I think of the more than a million words I've published in my adult life over the past forty years, not including all the words I have posted on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com).
How easy it would be to craft a case to use my words against my best intentions. It is the danger of being a writer and having your thoughts recorded for posterity, thoughts that are changing, maturing, and being redefined as you move into differing moments of your experience. This occurred to me as I read the political traffic concerning the approaching presidential election.
The paradox of politics is that it has a momentum of its own but nonetheless subject to being personalized. We as a people choose individuals or have them chosen for us to lead. It is true in all aspects of our lives. Politics is not confined to government. Politics pervades every aspect of our existence.
Politicians differ little from ourselves, only they have taken a stride of separation away from us to be celebrated or castigated as the case may be. In the end, we get the leadership we deserve.
Leadership is a reflection of how we think, feel, and behave and embodies our fears, biases, dreams, fantasies, as well as our secret hates and loves. There is a national psyche as well as a personal psyche and no one exploits this better than politicians. We are not simply blue or red states but clusters of attitudes and values.
The irony is that the persons who receive credit or blame or are made scapegoats are only part of the momentum and mainly fortuitous benefactors or victims of this force.
The problem with facts and statistics is that they are subject to misinterpretation or selective interpretation. When people are reduced to numbers, or identified in select categories, the human goes out of being.
This is not new but a product of communication from the time man first invented language. There are predators and prey in all of the animal kingdom, and with man the predator and prey are often opposite sides of man's conscience. Politicians jump on this predilection to ride its momentum, which has a mind of its own.
For example, when I was a boy, I was told Iowa’s only president, Herbert Hoover, caused the Great Depression. Time has proven he was a scapegoat. The actual cause was the "anything goes" insouciance of the Jazz Age and the "Roaring Twenties," which included wild speculation on Wall Street after WWI.
Proof that we never learn is the new century's brand of insouciance. Were it not for some safeguards, God only knows where we would be. Blame it on oil or the sub prime fiasco, but who caused this? People did. We did. Everybody did. People we put in leadership positions didn't have the bottle to say, "Hell, no, we can't do that." They went along because their thinking machine was stuck on "more."
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was given credit for pulling us out of the Great Depression when it was World War II. We were still in the depression in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, which changed the momentum.
More recently, president Bill Clinton was given credit for the economic rebound in the 1990s, which was actually fueled by the late economic policy changes of George H. W. Bush, another case of momentum.
The beautiful thing about our system is that the transition from one administration to another, although heatedly contested during the primary campaign and presidential election, once a winner is declared, the American people usually rally around the elected president.
I say "usually" because that was not the case with Abraham Lincoln. He had to be secretly escorted to Washington, D.C. for fear of being assassinated. I was reminded of this in a book I picked up recently, "Lincoln: His Words and His World."
Imagine the "Great Emancipator" was considered a lightweight, unqualified for the presidency with his single term in the House of Representatives, a "country bumpkin" from Illinois, poorly educated, although a successful lawyer.
Cartoons of hate couldn't have been more vicious in their attacks on him. Known for his silver tongue, cutting humor, and storytelling, even these were lampooned. His mind was crafted in language like a fine carpenter but this, too, was used against him. Fortunately, the momentum of the times was ready for him. Were the waffler general George McClellan to have been elected president, we might have been two nations today.
When I was a lad in high school, I read two books that have stayed with me all my life. Sinclair Lewis called his book, “It Can’t Happen Here”; the other was, "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle) by Adolf Hitler.
The Lewis book was about fascism finding its way into American society, in other words, that it could happen here!
Hitler, the little corporal from Austria was jailed in 1923 after his failed "Putsch" rebellion. This gave him the opportunity to write his book. He had had a history of failure from his earliest days. He blamed the Versailles Treaty in Paris after WWI, which was not as draconian as alleged, for Germany's economic woes. He then played on German pride with ideas spelled out in "Mein Kampf."
It was all there, the idea of a "master race" lifted from Nietzsche, and disposing of the "Jewish Question" with a rationale that Jews were an impediment to Germany's triumph.
For his failure as an artist, he blamed Jewish authorities in Austria and not on his lack of talent. Thus, a personal angst became successfully translated first into national identity, Nazism, and then national shame, the Holocaust.
We have two decent men running for president, but they both ride the momentum of two costly wars that rose out of the terrorist attack of 9/11. George W. Bush, whom I think a decent man, was caught up in the moment and we know the rest.
What do we really know? If the truth were told, we don't know anything. Our minds are locked into selective memory, selective data, and selective justification. I have a son who is so cynical that he refuses to register to vote. Sinclair Lewis was speaking to him in "It Can't Happen Here."
People on Dr. Don Farr's Network are not like my son. I expect that 100 percent of them will vote. I applaud them for this. I would hope, however, that some of them suspend certainty and explore the momentum to which I speak.
The next president is not going to change the momentum. The momentum has too much of a will of its own, and it is not limited to the United States. The next president has to find a way to deal with this momentum outside traditional channels as friends and enemies in the international community suggest war as an option might best to be left behind.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 5, 2008
“Knowledge is but folly unless it is guided by grace.”
George Herbert (1593 – 1633), English poet
When I read carefully skewed quotations from an author’s body of work, I think of the more than a million words I've published in my adult life over the past forty years, not including all the words I have posted on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com).
How easy it would be to craft a case to use my words against my best intentions. It is the danger of being a writer and having your thoughts recorded for posterity, thoughts that are changing, maturing, and being redefined as you move into differing moments of your experience. This occurred to me as I read the political traffic concerning the approaching presidential election.
The paradox of politics is that it has a momentum of its own but nonetheless subject to being personalized. We as a people choose individuals or have them chosen for us to lead. It is true in all aspects of our lives. Politics is not confined to government. Politics pervades every aspect of our existence.
Politicians differ little from ourselves, only they have taken a stride of separation away from us to be celebrated or castigated as the case may be. In the end, we get the leadership we deserve.
Leadership is a reflection of how we think, feel, and behave and embodies our fears, biases, dreams, fantasies, as well as our secret hates and loves. There is a national psyche as well as a personal psyche and no one exploits this better than politicians. We are not simply blue or red states but clusters of attitudes and values.
The irony is that the persons who receive credit or blame or are made scapegoats are only part of the momentum and mainly fortuitous benefactors or victims of this force.
The problem with facts and statistics is that they are subject to misinterpretation or selective interpretation. When people are reduced to numbers, or identified in select categories, the human goes out of being.
This is not new but a product of communication from the time man first invented language. There are predators and prey in all of the animal kingdom, and with man the predator and prey are often opposite sides of man's conscience. Politicians jump on this predilection to ride its momentum, which has a mind of its own.
For example, when I was a boy, I was told Iowa’s only president, Herbert Hoover, caused the Great Depression. Time has proven he was a scapegoat. The actual cause was the "anything goes" insouciance of the Jazz Age and the "Roaring Twenties," which included wild speculation on Wall Street after WWI.
Proof that we never learn is the new century's brand of insouciance. Were it not for some safeguards, God only knows where we would be. Blame it on oil or the sub prime fiasco, but who caused this? People did. We did. Everybody did. People we put in leadership positions didn't have the bottle to say, "Hell, no, we can't do that." They went along because their thinking machine was stuck on "more."
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was given credit for pulling us out of the Great Depression when it was World War II. We were still in the depression in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, which changed the momentum.
More recently, president Bill Clinton was given credit for the economic rebound in the 1990s, which was actually fueled by the late economic policy changes of George H. W. Bush, another case of momentum.
The beautiful thing about our system is that the transition from one administration to another, although heatedly contested during the primary campaign and presidential election, once a winner is declared, the American people usually rally around the elected president.
I say "usually" because that was not the case with Abraham Lincoln. He had to be secretly escorted to Washington, D.C. for fear of being assassinated. I was reminded of this in a book I picked up recently, "Lincoln: His Words and His World."
Imagine the "Great Emancipator" was considered a lightweight, unqualified for the presidency with his single term in the House of Representatives, a "country bumpkin" from Illinois, poorly educated, although a successful lawyer.
Cartoons of hate couldn't have been more vicious in their attacks on him. Known for his silver tongue, cutting humor, and storytelling, even these were lampooned. His mind was crafted in language like a fine carpenter but this, too, was used against him. Fortunately, the momentum of the times was ready for him. Were the waffler general George McClellan to have been elected president, we might have been two nations today.
When I was a lad in high school, I read two books that have stayed with me all my life. Sinclair Lewis called his book, “It Can’t Happen Here”; the other was, "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle) by Adolf Hitler.
The Lewis book was about fascism finding its way into American society, in other words, that it could happen here!
Hitler, the little corporal from Austria was jailed in 1923 after his failed "Putsch" rebellion. This gave him the opportunity to write his book. He had had a history of failure from his earliest days. He blamed the Versailles Treaty in Paris after WWI, which was not as draconian as alleged, for Germany's economic woes. He then played on German pride with ideas spelled out in "Mein Kampf."
It was all there, the idea of a "master race" lifted from Nietzsche, and disposing of the "Jewish Question" with a rationale that Jews were an impediment to Germany's triumph.
For his failure as an artist, he blamed Jewish authorities in Austria and not on his lack of talent. Thus, a personal angst became successfully translated first into national identity, Nazism, and then national shame, the Holocaust.
We have two decent men running for president, but they both ride the momentum of two costly wars that rose out of the terrorist attack of 9/11. George W. Bush, whom I think a decent man, was caught up in the moment and we know the rest.
What do we really know? If the truth were told, we don't know anything. Our minds are locked into selective memory, selective data, and selective justification. I have a son who is so cynical that he refuses to register to vote. Sinclair Lewis was speaking to him in "It Can't Happen Here."
People on Dr. Don Farr's Network are not like my son. I expect that 100 percent of them will vote. I applaud them for this. I would hope, however, that some of them suspend certainty and explore the momentum to which I speak.
The next president is not going to change the momentum. The momentum has too much of a will of its own, and it is not limited to the United States. The next president has to find a way to deal with this momentum outside traditional channels as friends and enemies in the international community suggest war as an option might best to be left behind.
Be always well,
Jim
Sunday, August 03, 2008
AMERICA'S BLUES as reported by THE ECONOMIST
AMERICA’S BLUES – As reported by The Economist
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 3, 2008
“Melancholy is a kind of demon that haunts our island, and often conveys herself to us in an easterly wind.”
Joseph Addison (1672 – 1719), English essayist.
Seldom have I read such a concise piece as this article that appeared in the Tampa Tribune, Sunday, August 3, 2008 in the "Commentary Section." It is titled "Red, White and Blues: America's Funk." You can find it on the newspaper's website (www.TBO.com) should you be so inclined.
You have heard me rant about its main points. The rant has become reality. That is what happens when the bottom falls out.
Some main points of the article:
(1) The American swagger is gone as 8 out of 10 Americans are in a depressing funk.
This change is blamed on the hapless administration of president Bush, but that is to be expected. We like to raise our leaders above us to treat them more than human only to tear them down as less than human when our appetites and indulgences drive everything south. We never blame ourselves.
(2) It is American capitalism, stupid!
The August 11, 2008 issue of Time magazine is dedicated to "The Economy." Pundits and Bill Gates tell us how to make capitalism work, and for an old codger such as myself, it sounds strangely like the same palaver I heard in the 1950s when Sputnik reduced education to a whirling nightmare; the 1970s when OPEC's oil embargo, the Iran Hostage Crisis, Watergate and Vietnam warranted the title in my book WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) of "Incipient Catastrophe."
Why catastrophe? I found the circumstances reminiscent of the "fall of Rome." The 1980s confirmed this with Japan eating our lunch, and buying the store.
"WWMs" was written nearly two decades ago when it was clear Detroit was living in a dream world with the die cast. Like a house of falling playing cards, we were all falling prostrate to its momentum.
(3) Consumer confidence an oxymoron?
The Economist list of contributors to the angst adds up to a big headache with an aspirin cure. My wonder is if this article will have any impact.
Last year when I was in Europe, the Euro was worth about $1.20; today it is about $1.59. Gasoline had not yet spiked; so more and more SUVs and trucks glutted the highways and byways.
The Economist points out that "America's beer," Budweiser, is now owned by little Belgium. This gets some people’s attention.
Less attention is given our spiraling debt of $ trillions and $ trillions owned primarily by foreign note holders. Consumer confidence is indeed an oxymoron as we are all mainly renters not owners (although we think we own what we own) and walk the economic tightrope without ever looking up, down or around.
(4) Forever looking for a sure thing. The Economist reports "many Americans feel as if they missed the boom."
Does that explain the rash of casinos across the land? Imagine a growth industry that produces nothing but false hope?
Hope is a passive word; courage is an active word. We have been reduced from doers to hopers.
The Economist reports that "between 2002 and 2006" the incomes of 99 percent rose by an average of 1 percent a year in real terms." How many saved a dime?
It reports further that as impressive as this rise, the top 1 percent saw its wealth rise 11 percent per year "between 2002 and 2006." Then the article hits us where it hurts: "three quarters of the economic gains during the Bush's presidency went to that top 1 percent."
There is deception here. It implies that this is a unique trend indigenous to this sitting president, alone, when it has been a consistent pattern.
In the 1970s, I was teaching a graduate seminar at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida for students of Golden Gate University of San Francisco, California. I presented a set of statistics very similar to those the present article for the United States since WWII.
Several students stayed after class, stunned and incredulous. I gave them references to check out my assertions. They did not want to believe the system was weighed against them. They wanted to believe capitalism’s invisible hand was for all as Adam Smith had promised.
Yet, since the beginning of capitalism, 80 to 90 percent of the wealth has been controlled by 10 to 20 percent of the people. Accessibility to wealth was then and remains now mainly a myth. Time's August issue will not change that.
It is why my books and articles have been provocative. They represent an attempt to engage the ordinary person to do the things that give him or her a chance at some independence and security.
It takes the realization that credit card companies, banks, and commercial enterprises with their tantalizing discounts are not in business for this purpose, but to rest personal independence and security from one to add to their own coffers.
Their economic strategy is for you to want to own a house that looks like those of the rich, a house you can't afford but will give you a sense of connection to the wealthy.
They want you to buy a boat that you can't afford, or some other luxury item that will make you feel as if you are affluent.
They want you to buy clothes you don't need, an automobile you can't afford when the one you are driving is working fine, but isn't the latest model.
See the trend?
It is the cloying need to make an impression convinced that it is your patriotic duty to work and spend paycheck-to-paycheck so the top 1 percent can maintain that ever-increasing edge.
No one can understand how an oil company can have $15 billion in quarterly profits when most people can't afford the gas to drive their car.
Few can understand why medical prescriptions cost so much when pharmaceutical companies have $ billion in quarterly profits. Drug companies insist "it takes years to develop a new drug," but they don't mention the government funded subsidized research. Notice the medical and pharmaceutical professions are less in the business of prevention than in ameliorative treatment.
We are not happy campers; we have lost our self-restraint and are paying dearly for it.
(5) Globalization is under fire.
We loved reading Tom Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” with his glorification of "this electronic age," that is, until free trade and immigration policy became scapegoats to our economic crises.
Politicians always have scapegoats in their pockets to get our dander up, and of course we believe them because they're in the know.
The Economist could not have said it with more bitter irony: panic is on display "when a nation built on immigrants is building a fence to keep them out."
Politicians on both sides of the aisle are endorsing some form of this asinine immigration policy instead of going back to the genesis of the problem, which is the double standard of work and respect. This, too, will blow up in our face.
We cannot have it both ways: cheap labor and cheat policies. People will put their lives at risk as long as survival is at stake.
We never seem to learn from history. As for globalization, we treat it as if it were a new thing. Globalization has existed since the days of the Romans.
We are a consumer driven economy and have never thought about the price of its intemperance.
(6) What about nation-building at home?
The paradox about nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq is that we have failed schools, failing children, and a falling apart infrastructure at home. The Romans allowed this to happen at home as well. It wasn’t terrorists that crippled Rome, but its own excesses. This left it vulnerable for the Visigoths and Germanic tribes of the north to plunder the city and collapse an empire.
(7) Resilience, how real?
The Economist points out that the United States is good at fixing itself, good at rebounding from its excesses and false steps. It claims the US has this capacity because it isn't stodgy and taciturn like Europe.
The Economist suggests self-correction will deal with the collapse and rubble of our misbegotten ways. New life, new innovations, new bursts of inspiration will absolve America of all its sins. Why not? It has always been so before, right?
This resilience sounds very much like "adolescent rebound" where the child has never had to experience the pain and struggle to grow up, or like America's nearly quarter millennium history.
Psychological characteristics may help to describe this collective phenomenon. To wit, personality is the "acquired self." Personality is what is not one's own. It is the "invented self."
Essence is our inheritance. It is what we are born with. Essence cannot be lost, cannot be changed or injured as easily as personality. It is our "real self."
Personality can be changed almost completely with the change of circumstances. Personality can be lost and injured.
Essence is the basis of one physical and mental makeup. It involves natural propensities, talents, our native intelligence, and innate capacities.
Personality is learned behavior consciously or unconsciously.
By unconsciously, I mean the inclination to imitate or attempt to be like someone else even if not compatible with one's own essence. Personality can be reduced to acquired tastes with all sort of artificial likes and dislikes subliminally bombarding the psyche.
When personality is developed at the expense of essence, we become pleasers, true believers, people who need to belong so they go along, people who are captives to self-designed cages.
When personality begins to dominate essence, we become less healthy as we are attracted to what is bad for us and to dislike what is good for us.
Normally, when essence dominates personality, personality can become quite useful. But if personality dominates essence, this can produce wrong results of many kinds.
Personality is not bad. We must have personality to live a social life. Personality and essence should grow parallel to each other with one not outgrowing the other.
Cases of essence outgrowing personality occur among uneducated people. These people may be very good, and even clever, but they are incapable of development in the same way as people with more developed personalities.
Such people often find comfort in using derogatory words to describe minorities or people not as naturally gifted as they are. They are also quick to reduce others to simple stereotypes. Media, advertisers, and politicians study and exploit these propensities with great proficiency.
Cases of personality outgrowing essence are often to be found among the rich and famous, the cultured and privileged, the movers and shakers. They fawn and spawn each other as the celebrity culture.
They often rise to head corporations, educational institutions, charitable foundations, religious institutions, the entertainment industry, media, and government because they embody what current society promotes. Rhetoric trumps reality in the new world order.
Essence in such cases remains in a half-grown, half-developed, half-realized state. Expediency and serendipity prevail at the expense of patience and plodding more essential to release significant essence.
What does this mean, and why do I mention it here?
We have rather implicit but rigid norms for personality and essence.
Quick and early growth of personality and essence to such norms can stop growth and development at a very early age. As our self-indulgent society might suggest, it has.
We are taught to be polite, obedient, submissive, passive, punctual, engaging and conforming, good natured, happy and obliging from preschool on, while we are expected to be modest about displaying our talent or specialness for fear of appearing elitist.
The result is that many grow up physically mature but emotionally immature acquiring high academic, business, professional or political status without growing up, acting in essence as if age of ten or twelve suspended in terminal adolescence. It is why leaders today often appear as if they have never left the sixth grade.
Consequently, while submerged in the wonder of electronics and the sophistication of a postmodern society, there seems a preference for underdeveloped essence when it comes to maturity.
Why else would there be such infatuation with gratuitous violence in entertainment, electronic games, spectator sports, or gamesmanship in business and politics? A competitive society is driven by imitation, replication, and duplication while trumpeting bogus creativity. China and India have fallen prey to this code.
If you want to look at the problems of society, look to the repressed development of essence in our young people. Jean Paul Sartre has said modern society lacks authenticity. He was referring to the artificiality of personality and the warped development of essence. Boredom, he claimed, is indicative of a society intimidated by adulthood.
(8) The Economist “slam-dunk” world of rhetoric.
“Countries like people behave dangerously when their mood turns dark.”
“America is not just hurting allies and trading partners but itself.”
“Credit crunch is in part the consequence of a flawed regulatory system.”
“Lax monetary policy allowed Americans to build up debts and fueled a housing bubble that had to eventually burst.”
“Lessons need to be learned.”
“Over-unionized and unaccountable American school system needs the same competition as its universities which are the envy of the world.”
Then on to health care, the rise of China, and then ending with, “Everybody goes through bad times.”
This rhetorical litany of disaster ends with this softball: “America has had the wisdom to take the first course (i.e., learn from its mistakes) before. Let’s hope it does so again.”
I must confess I thank God for the American blues, for the high cost of gasoline, for the credit card crunch, for the falling prices of homes, for the drop out sufferers, and why?
Because the abstract anodynes of enlightenment fail to move us off the dime, circumstances do. We have needed something to break through our sleepwalking.
Lord Byron’s knew something of our dilemma:
“Melancholy is a fearful gift; what is it but the telescope of truth, which brings life near in utter darkness, making the cold reality too real?”
I take no comfort in hope. I look for the courage to wake up America!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 3, 2008
“Melancholy is a kind of demon that haunts our island, and often conveys herself to us in an easterly wind.”
Joseph Addison (1672 – 1719), English essayist.
Seldom have I read such a concise piece as this article that appeared in the Tampa Tribune, Sunday, August 3, 2008 in the "Commentary Section." It is titled "Red, White and Blues: America's Funk." You can find it on the newspaper's website (www.TBO.com) should you be so inclined.
You have heard me rant about its main points. The rant has become reality. That is what happens when the bottom falls out.
Some main points of the article:
(1) The American swagger is gone as 8 out of 10 Americans are in a depressing funk.
This change is blamed on the hapless administration of president Bush, but that is to be expected. We like to raise our leaders above us to treat them more than human only to tear them down as less than human when our appetites and indulgences drive everything south. We never blame ourselves.
(2) It is American capitalism, stupid!
The August 11, 2008 issue of Time magazine is dedicated to "The Economy." Pundits and Bill Gates tell us how to make capitalism work, and for an old codger such as myself, it sounds strangely like the same palaver I heard in the 1950s when Sputnik reduced education to a whirling nightmare; the 1970s when OPEC's oil embargo, the Iran Hostage Crisis, Watergate and Vietnam warranted the title in my book WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) of "Incipient Catastrophe."
Why catastrophe? I found the circumstances reminiscent of the "fall of Rome." The 1980s confirmed this with Japan eating our lunch, and buying the store.
"WWMs" was written nearly two decades ago when it was clear Detroit was living in a dream world with the die cast. Like a house of falling playing cards, we were all falling prostrate to its momentum.
(3) Consumer confidence an oxymoron?
The Economist list of contributors to the angst adds up to a big headache with an aspirin cure. My wonder is if this article will have any impact.
Last year when I was in Europe, the Euro was worth about $1.20; today it is about $1.59. Gasoline had not yet spiked; so more and more SUVs and trucks glutted the highways and byways.
The Economist points out that "America's beer," Budweiser, is now owned by little Belgium. This gets some people’s attention.
Less attention is given our spiraling debt of $ trillions and $ trillions owned primarily by foreign note holders. Consumer confidence is indeed an oxymoron as we are all mainly renters not owners (although we think we own what we own) and walk the economic tightrope without ever looking up, down or around.
(4) Forever looking for a sure thing. The Economist reports "many Americans feel as if they missed the boom."
Does that explain the rash of casinos across the land? Imagine a growth industry that produces nothing but false hope?
Hope is a passive word; courage is an active word. We have been reduced from doers to hopers.
The Economist reports that "between 2002 and 2006" the incomes of 99 percent rose by an average of 1 percent a year in real terms." How many saved a dime?
It reports further that as impressive as this rise, the top 1 percent saw its wealth rise 11 percent per year "between 2002 and 2006." Then the article hits us where it hurts: "three quarters of the economic gains during the Bush's presidency went to that top 1 percent."
There is deception here. It implies that this is a unique trend indigenous to this sitting president, alone, when it has been a consistent pattern.
In the 1970s, I was teaching a graduate seminar at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida for students of Golden Gate University of San Francisco, California. I presented a set of statistics very similar to those the present article for the United States since WWII.
Several students stayed after class, stunned and incredulous. I gave them references to check out my assertions. They did not want to believe the system was weighed against them. They wanted to believe capitalism’s invisible hand was for all as Adam Smith had promised.
Yet, since the beginning of capitalism, 80 to 90 percent of the wealth has been controlled by 10 to 20 percent of the people. Accessibility to wealth was then and remains now mainly a myth. Time's August issue will not change that.
It is why my books and articles have been provocative. They represent an attempt to engage the ordinary person to do the things that give him or her a chance at some independence and security.
It takes the realization that credit card companies, banks, and commercial enterprises with their tantalizing discounts are not in business for this purpose, but to rest personal independence and security from one to add to their own coffers.
Their economic strategy is for you to want to own a house that looks like those of the rich, a house you can't afford but will give you a sense of connection to the wealthy.
They want you to buy a boat that you can't afford, or some other luxury item that will make you feel as if you are affluent.
They want you to buy clothes you don't need, an automobile you can't afford when the one you are driving is working fine, but isn't the latest model.
See the trend?
It is the cloying need to make an impression convinced that it is your patriotic duty to work and spend paycheck-to-paycheck so the top 1 percent can maintain that ever-increasing edge.
No one can understand how an oil company can have $15 billion in quarterly profits when most people can't afford the gas to drive their car.
Few can understand why medical prescriptions cost so much when pharmaceutical companies have $ billion in quarterly profits. Drug companies insist "it takes years to develop a new drug," but they don't mention the government funded subsidized research. Notice the medical and pharmaceutical professions are less in the business of prevention than in ameliorative treatment.
We are not happy campers; we have lost our self-restraint and are paying dearly for it.
(5) Globalization is under fire.
We loved reading Tom Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” with his glorification of "this electronic age," that is, until free trade and immigration policy became scapegoats to our economic crises.
Politicians always have scapegoats in their pockets to get our dander up, and of course we believe them because they're in the know.
The Economist could not have said it with more bitter irony: panic is on display "when a nation built on immigrants is building a fence to keep them out."
Politicians on both sides of the aisle are endorsing some form of this asinine immigration policy instead of going back to the genesis of the problem, which is the double standard of work and respect. This, too, will blow up in our face.
We cannot have it both ways: cheap labor and cheat policies. People will put their lives at risk as long as survival is at stake.
We never seem to learn from history. As for globalization, we treat it as if it were a new thing. Globalization has existed since the days of the Romans.
We are a consumer driven economy and have never thought about the price of its intemperance.
(6) What about nation-building at home?
The paradox about nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq is that we have failed schools, failing children, and a falling apart infrastructure at home. The Romans allowed this to happen at home as well. It wasn’t terrorists that crippled Rome, but its own excesses. This left it vulnerable for the Visigoths and Germanic tribes of the north to plunder the city and collapse an empire.
(7) Resilience, how real?
The Economist points out that the United States is good at fixing itself, good at rebounding from its excesses and false steps. It claims the US has this capacity because it isn't stodgy and taciturn like Europe.
The Economist suggests self-correction will deal with the collapse and rubble of our misbegotten ways. New life, new innovations, new bursts of inspiration will absolve America of all its sins. Why not? It has always been so before, right?
This resilience sounds very much like "adolescent rebound" where the child has never had to experience the pain and struggle to grow up, or like America's nearly quarter millennium history.
Psychological characteristics may help to describe this collective phenomenon. To wit, personality is the "acquired self." Personality is what is not one's own. It is the "invented self."
Essence is our inheritance. It is what we are born with. Essence cannot be lost, cannot be changed or injured as easily as personality. It is our "real self."
Personality can be changed almost completely with the change of circumstances. Personality can be lost and injured.
Essence is the basis of one physical and mental makeup. It involves natural propensities, talents, our native intelligence, and innate capacities.
Personality is learned behavior consciously or unconsciously.
By unconsciously, I mean the inclination to imitate or attempt to be like someone else even if not compatible with one's own essence. Personality can be reduced to acquired tastes with all sort of artificial likes and dislikes subliminally bombarding the psyche.
When personality is developed at the expense of essence, we become pleasers, true believers, people who need to belong so they go along, people who are captives to self-designed cages.
When personality begins to dominate essence, we become less healthy as we are attracted to what is bad for us and to dislike what is good for us.
Normally, when essence dominates personality, personality can become quite useful. But if personality dominates essence, this can produce wrong results of many kinds.
Personality is not bad. We must have personality to live a social life. Personality and essence should grow parallel to each other with one not outgrowing the other.
Cases of essence outgrowing personality occur among uneducated people. These people may be very good, and even clever, but they are incapable of development in the same way as people with more developed personalities.
Such people often find comfort in using derogatory words to describe minorities or people not as naturally gifted as they are. They are also quick to reduce others to simple stereotypes. Media, advertisers, and politicians study and exploit these propensities with great proficiency.
Cases of personality outgrowing essence are often to be found among the rich and famous, the cultured and privileged, the movers and shakers. They fawn and spawn each other as the celebrity culture.
They often rise to head corporations, educational institutions, charitable foundations, religious institutions, the entertainment industry, media, and government because they embody what current society promotes. Rhetoric trumps reality in the new world order.
Essence in such cases remains in a half-grown, half-developed, half-realized state. Expediency and serendipity prevail at the expense of patience and plodding more essential to release significant essence.
What does this mean, and why do I mention it here?
We have rather implicit but rigid norms for personality and essence.
Quick and early growth of personality and essence to such norms can stop growth and development at a very early age. As our self-indulgent society might suggest, it has.
We are taught to be polite, obedient, submissive, passive, punctual, engaging and conforming, good natured, happy and obliging from preschool on, while we are expected to be modest about displaying our talent or specialness for fear of appearing elitist.
The result is that many grow up physically mature but emotionally immature acquiring high academic, business, professional or political status without growing up, acting in essence as if age of ten or twelve suspended in terminal adolescence. It is why leaders today often appear as if they have never left the sixth grade.
Consequently, while submerged in the wonder of electronics and the sophistication of a postmodern society, there seems a preference for underdeveloped essence when it comes to maturity.
Why else would there be such infatuation with gratuitous violence in entertainment, electronic games, spectator sports, or gamesmanship in business and politics? A competitive society is driven by imitation, replication, and duplication while trumpeting bogus creativity. China and India have fallen prey to this code.
If you want to look at the problems of society, look to the repressed development of essence in our young people. Jean Paul Sartre has said modern society lacks authenticity. He was referring to the artificiality of personality and the warped development of essence. Boredom, he claimed, is indicative of a society intimidated by adulthood.
(8) The Economist “slam-dunk” world of rhetoric.
“Countries like people behave dangerously when their mood turns dark.”
“America is not just hurting allies and trading partners but itself.”
“Credit crunch is in part the consequence of a flawed regulatory system.”
“Lax monetary policy allowed Americans to build up debts and fueled a housing bubble that had to eventually burst.”
“Lessons need to be learned.”
“Over-unionized and unaccountable American school system needs the same competition as its universities which are the envy of the world.”
Then on to health care, the rise of China, and then ending with, “Everybody goes through bad times.”
This rhetorical litany of disaster ends with this softball: “America has had the wisdom to take the first course (i.e., learn from its mistakes) before. Let’s hope it does so again.”
I must confess I thank God for the American blues, for the high cost of gasoline, for the credit card crunch, for the falling prices of homes, for the drop out sufferers, and why?
Because the abstract anodynes of enlightenment fail to move us off the dime, circumstances do. We have needed something to break through our sleepwalking.
Lord Byron’s knew something of our dilemma:
“Melancholy is a fearful gift; what is it but the telescope of truth, which brings life near in utter darkness, making the cold reality too real?”
I take no comfort in hope. I look for the courage to wake up America!
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