A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, A JOURNAL FOR THE FUTURE?

A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, A JOURNAL FOR THE FUTURE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 24, 2008

“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (1922 – 2008), A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY (2004), his last book

Those of you who have read “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD” (2007) know that I have great affection for another Midwesterner and fellow outsider, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He died last year. True to his form, he combined savvy advice, cutting humor and an appreciation for the absurd. These are all evident in this last collection of wondrous memories, his family legacy, and his poignant, obstinate, unfashionable humanism.

On cigarette smoking, he writes:

“I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown & Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am now eighty-two”

And they haven’t killed me yet. He was eighty-five when he died.

When I was a student at the University of Iowa, and Vonnegut was a writer-in-residence there, I heard him speak. When I was a field manager with Nalco Chemical Company in Indianapolis, and he came to visit his family, I saw him on television. It was not until I read “A Man Without A Country” (2004) that I learned that he was a chemistry major and took a master’s in anthropology that I felt another professional connection, not to mention that he, too, is a junior, and comfortable being eternally an outsider.

Vonnegut is of German stock whereas I am of Irish stock, two tribes that have always had great affection for each other. He used humor, often gallows humor to cut through the pervading malarkey of his times, which overlap mine.

While eminently successful, he remains a controversial writer. Once he asked a friend, whom he considered wise, “Saul, I am a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling we are in two very different businesses. What makes me feel that way?”

His friend answered, “There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.”

Vonnegut and I have that in common, too, we respond to life and write out of our own perceptions, perspectives and experiences.

For the past quarter century or so, I’ve been responding to my experiences and perceptions derived from my early youth as a child (“In the Shadow of the Courthouse," 2003) to my initial encounter of work outside the protection of the chemistry laboratory (“Confident Selling,” 1970) to my growing cynicism of the complex organization despite my meteoric career (“Work Without Managers,” 1990) to a rallying cry for professionals to get off their asses and take charge (“The Worker, Alone!” 1995).

I then took a slightly different tact to address the individual who was looking for answers in all the wrong places (“The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend,”1996), followed by registering my total disgust with toxic leaderless leadership at the level of senior management (“Corporate Sin,” 2000) to the self-indulgent passive behavior of workers which was its consequences (“Six Silent Killers,” 1998) to putting the whole period of my career in absurd and cutting perspective (“A Look Back To See Ahead,” 2007).

We keep going down the same road, as Vonnegut pointed out, falling into the same ditches apparently learning nothing for the trouble.

We can write about “Watergate” but it didn’t stop us from having many subsequent “gates.” We can write about the “savings and loan” scandal, but it didn’t stop the run-on-trust that rocks the financial world from Wall Street to Hong Kong. We can have the egregious fiascos of Enron and WorldCom where executives become a law until themselves, but it hasn’t stopped a rash of similar excesses.

We have a toxic society, as Vonnegut pointed out, with people in charge without conscience. They are filled with no doubt because they don’t care what happens to people on Main Street.

The “mask of sanity” is the one worn by these poisoned personalities who still claim their innocence and feel as pure as the driven snow no matter what anybody thinks. It is not enough to be a millionaire, these poisoned personalities have to be billionaires, and then trillionaires, and the government is organized to protect them.

Society wears the “masks of sanity” while it finds the same people with these poisoness attributes rising to the top, which suggest the Orwellian like adage, “insanity is sanity.”

A man like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. passes without much notice, an aggravation but an entertaining one; an interloper who didn’t belong, a man who thought humanism meant being a free thinker and not a true believer, and a person that thought kindness the greatest of all virtues.

Although I have a similar chemistry and psychology foundation to his, I lack his skill and good humor. I’m in your face, and not just in the face of the high rollers but the heavy lifters as well.

The subtitle to “Corporate Sin” was “Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers.” I claim we have a generation of spoiled brats suspended in terminal adolescence afraid of failure so they have no real success, afraid of pain so they experience no real pleasure, afraid of risk so they have no real development, afraid of life so they exist but never find time to live. They take comfort in their latest technological contraption and text message everyone they can think of while no one is more lonely or lost then they are.

We have created a society of high-minded expectations and low-minded interests. The subprime real estate debacle took self-indulgent buyers as well as greedy sellers. The quest for a college education took entrepreneur educators and consumer driven students, who wanted a degree but not necessarily the experience of learning.

Consequently, grades have been escalated to the stratosphere but we still produce students that can’t think, or think only in terms of money, power, authority, and luxury.

“A Look Back To See Ahead” documented this, not for this generation, or the next, who will continue to create and fall into the same sinkholes, but for many generations in the future when someone will be asked one day, “How the hell could they have created such a mess for us?”