PERIMETERS OF HATE IN THE QUADRENNIAL MADNESS OF PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 30, 2008
“We hate some persons because we do not know them; and we will not know them because we hate them.”
Caleb C. Colton (1780 – 1832), English clergyman
BEING IN BUT NOT OF POLITICS
In the presidential campaign of 1964, when incumbent President Lyndon Johnson ran against Senator Barry Goldwater, I was president of the Young Republicans of Marion County (Indianapolis, Indiana). I had previously been asked to run for the House of Representatives by a delegation of Republicans from my district, which had been recently gerrymandered to ensure a Republican Representative in Congress. I demurred. I was involved in politics but I was not of politics.
I had gotten involved in politics, as I was a friend of Mayor Settles of Lawrence, Indiana, a suburb of Indianapolis, where I lived. He appointed me Secretary to the Board of Zoning Appeals of Lawrence Township, which was in a rapid growth mode at the time. As leader of the Young Republicans, I was active in the Goldwater Presidential Campaign, organizing canvassing and a Young Republican rally in which the governor of the State of Indiana and senator Goldwater’s son took part.
You get a sense of the energy, excitement, and contention surrounding presidential politics within and without the “perimeters of hate.”
It is a surreal climate made more so when you find yourself sitting across the kitchen table in a lawyer friend’s home (Lloyd DeWester) with Governor Matthew Welsh and Lee Hamilton, a member of the House of Representative from Noblesville’s, going over campaign strategy.
Forty-two years later, Representative Hamilton, now a private citizen, along with James Baker, formerly of the George H. W. Bush administration, would head up the “Iraq Study Group Report” and present it to President George W. Bush in 2006.
Now, nearly a half-century later, you remember the intensity, irrationality, and the hysteria surrounding the campaign, and look back seasoned with life at the madness of it all.
QUADRENNIAL MADNESS TODAY
Hatred and vituperation if anything have increased exponentially over forty-four years (1964 – 2008).
Decency, proportion, humor, reason, and good will have gone up in flames fueled by slanderous rhetoric, negative ads, and improbable promises. I voted by mail as soon as it was possible, and given what is to follow, I feel obliged to tell you I voted for a Democrat, Senator Barak Obama. He doesn’t come unscathed in this missive nor does his opponent.
That said I never expected the day would come in my lifetime that I, a white middle class American, would have an opportunity to vote for a black man. But that is not why I voted for him. His intellect and sober bearing resonate with my spirit, as much as his rhetoric does not. I think of Adlai Stevenson, also of Illinois, twice nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate, but in the twentieth century where eloquence and elitism were held in contempt.
Senator Obama shares a common eloquence with Stevenson and another man from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. The challenges for the new president, should Obama be elected, are as huge as they were for Honest Abe. Like Lincoln, he is mainly untried but shares Lincoln’s smarts, turn of mind, and brooding power.
There are several dimensions to this quadrennial madness, which is bounded by what I call “the hate” of why, what, where, and how. Negative campaigning is abhorred by both candidates, who always promise to maintain a positive campaign, but ultimately resort to mud slinging because hate in politics sells, and nowhere better than on the Internet where legends can be created that don’t have a grain of truth to them.
“THE WHY” OF THE POLITICS OF HATE
The United States of America in the truest sense is neither a democracy nor a republic, but a fragile linchpin between the two attempting to be both.
Once a member of the House of Representatives is elected, there is more than an eighty percent chance that he or she will be reelected until he or she dies or becomes caught in some type of scandal.
Since Congressman are elected every two years, they spend most of their time campaigning for the next election, while spending from Tuesday to Thursday in Washington, D.C., if that much time with the balance in their home district or on some jaunt about the globe at the taxpayers expense.
Senators are elected for six-year terms, and also reelected more than sixty-five percent of the time. Senators Stevens of Alaska, recently found guilty of corruption, is running for reelection, while Senator Byrd of West Virginia, former member of the Ku Klux Klan, has grown old in the senate where he has been since 1958.
Longevity is much the same for federal and municipal court judges, while Supreme Court Justices are lifetime positions. The only level where longevity is not the norm is at the governor’s level. They can serve only two four-year terms, and often fall short of that.
Currently, the Congress of the United States enjoys popularity in the single digits with the electorate, which is even below President George W. Bush.
Presidential campaigns find the candidates going on the road and getting in the trenches where they romance the electorate, while the electorate plays its part in the charade by venting its frustrations. Large rallies like those that once graced the coliseum in Rome become common fare. Here the ghost of wrath is exorcized from the belly of the beast with campaign rhetoric and promises as the remedy.
It is a dreamlike experience and nothing short of a religious transformation as one candidate is meant to personify change and hope while the other more of the same and despair. One candidate is charismatic transporting the electorate to the promise land while the other candidate is seen to block the path to this utopia.
The charismatic candidate lifts the electorate out of its passivity, if only for a moment, while the other candidate is seen to offer no lifelines.
The candidates know there is powerful need to believe. So, they look for hooks like in a popular song to create slogans and catch phrases to ride the tide to victory.
Voters long for the assurance that the candidate can wave a magic wand and quell their fears. This means candidates play on voters’ self-ignorance. If voters don’t know themselves than they are vulnerable to the puppet master, to the magician that has the sleight-of-hand skills to manipulate the moment to his candidacy. This strategy of quadrennial madness is based on hate.
“THE WHAT” OF THE POLITICS OF HATE
The nightmare of fear is one its boundaries.
The brokers of fear play on voters’ sense of lack, that is, the belief that voters cannot extricate themselves out of their paradoxical dilemma without governmental help. Credit card debt is not their fault. It was necessary to maintain their standard of living, which they no longer could afford. Having obsolescent skills is not their fault. Employers expected them to get more appropriate technical skills on their own time and at their own expense. How could they do that and keep up with the Jones? Voters are reminded of what they lack every four years with presidential candidates promising to mitigate this lack once in office.
The brokers of fear play on voters’ sense of limitations, that is, the belief that they don’t have the brains or brass to embrace their challenges. They need asset relief because what they are and what they have is all they see themselves capable of doing. They are a painted bird, victims of a society that has marginalized them. They believe they need help, and it is music to their ears when the candidate informs them help is on the way. Overachievers are the enemy.
The brokers of fear play up the hindrances to voters’ well being. Political speak is of barriers to economic, social, political, ethnic, racial, religious, cultural, psychological and personal justice. These barriers are seen as unjustly keeping voters from being all that they could be. They need the candidate once elected to knock down these hindrances, as they cannot see doing it on their own.
The brokers of fear play on voters’ paranoia, that is, those invisible but silent invaders lurking in the shadows that voters see compromising or stealing their identity or security.
Presidential candidates use quadrennial madness with the precision of religious zealots postulating doomsday scenarios as if this is the end of days. Voters are reminded of the enemy without but never the enemy within, which is a greater threat to their security. It is easier to sell other directed hate than to turn the light on self-hatred.
In voters’ lack, they see a champion who will erase their nightmares. In their limitations, they see a leader who will remedy their anxieties of low self-worth. In being haunted by barriers, they see a social engineer who will lift these hindrances. In a climate of deception, they see a straight shooter who will ease their paranoia.
“THE WHERE” OF THE POLITICS OF HATE
The prize of the presidency may be an ambition that the candidate has harbored since a lad. Lincoln confessed as much to a friend saying, “I’ve always wanted to be president even as a small child.”
So, the heart of the candidate wants his moment with history. It probably never occurred to him that the obstacle to this ambition is where hate resides. In good times, hate transmogrifies easily into personal attacks that vary from the petty to the scandalous, but these are not good times. Troubles are poignant and disaster looms on the horizon. It is a time when quadrennial madness must vent its spleen. It is a time of war between MAIN STREET and WALL STREET, as if they had nothing in common.
Candidates make Wall Street the fall guy for the sins of Main Street. It is an easy target because the wealth creators and brokers of wealth live the life that books and films are made of, and so Wall Street is an easy to hate.
But it takes two to tango.
The subprime meltdown took buyers as well as sellers to the cleaners. They were co-conspirators who didn’t mind playing quick and dirty with real estate loans, loans both buyers and sellers knew were bogus contracts. But who’s to worry, house prices always go up, don’t they?
Hedge fund operators didn’t mind increasing the risk and complicating the process because it was only paper transactions. They took their cut and moved the derivatives on. Everyone was complicit in the affair. With every economic collapse, there must be a rogue and a victim. Main Street was the victim and the roguish greed of Wall Street was the scoundrel. No one mentions that greed works two ways. Main Street was living beyond its means.
This failure of Main Street to grow up and act adult and Wall Street to act responsibly has come to roost. Public trust has gone up in smoke. Panic has reduced the climate to bailouts, rescue and stimulus packages with money that does not exist. The Federal Reserve says, “No problem, we’ll print more.”
Hate always finds a culprit. What better one than deregulation and the failure of oversight? The fact is Wall Street has created such a web of financial wizardry with its instruments of intrigue that nobody, and that means nobody knows what will and won’t work because the problem is buried in the deception.
Before Americans were no longer buying American made automobiles, before air travel became as uncomfortable as covered wagons, before the steel mills were shutting down and Americans were importing steel, before American manufacturing became a hollow industry, before exports were only a fraction of imports, before quality education became measured by money not performance, before high school graduates couldn’t read and write, before college test scores in science and math were the lowest in the international community, before our roads, rails, bridges and rivers were wanting for attention, before our dependence on foreign oil was a punishing reality, the man on Main Street and Wall Street knew there was a problem, but chose rhetoric to resolve. Presidential candidates know this and use it to suit them.
“THE HOW” OF THE POLITICS OF HATE
Presidential candidates have a way of transcending reality creating a motion picture in our heads. They take us out of our angst and into our pleasure zones, bypassing the dark corners of our minds that terrify us. It is the same mechanism used in religion. Religion draws our attention away from “what is” to “what could be” without any need for proof or verification. Have you ever notice God is always telling preachers to do this or to do that, and no one accuses them of schizophrenia?
Well, presidential candidates do the same. They tell us they are going to cut taxes, boost incomes, create jobs, and give relief on school loans. They promise to find a way to offer universal health coverage and to see that everyone has access to a college education. They have a drop-dead date when we will no longer be dependence on foreign oil, and promise to reduce hydrocarbon emission by 80 percent by mid-century, of course, when they are no longer in office. They paint a picture of sparkling clear water, fresh air, green pastures, and money in our deep pockets. You don’t have to die to enjoy paradise for it is heave-on-earth.
The rhetoric is successful because we as voters want to believe. We want our ambivalence dashed to pieces. It is all about want and not about need.
What we need is a dwelling to live in but what we want is a fancy house we can’t afford. What we need is transportation to get to and from work but what we want is a huge gas-guzzler that puts us high above the traffic. What we need is a balance diet of meat, fruits and vegetables but what we want are empty calories in food and drink that makes us overweight but feel good. What we need is exercise to maintain mind and body health but what we want is a pill to bypass the need.
We voters know what we need but we don’t want presidential candidates to remind us of what we need.
We voters desire the good life, and look for presidential candidates to assure us that one; we deserve it, and two, that their candidacy has the formula to provide such satisfaction.
We don’t want to hear life is not fair, that some are more gifted than others. Neither do we want to hear about equal opportunity nor about the small business owner who works twelve or fourteen hours a day seven days a week to meet the bills with little profit, but about the employees who work for the owner who haven’t had a raise in five years.
“The how” of the politics of hate operates playing one group against another, dividing and conquering, while talking almost incessantly about building a community. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if MAIN STREET and WALL STREET were pulling in the same direction rather than pushing against each other?
That is not possible in “the how” of the politics of hate because there has to be a fall guy, the Bush Administration, some ethnic group, something that can build the consensus of hate at one pole against the opposite pole. If a sitting president’s popularity is low, as if president Bush’s, he is the punching bag of both presidential candidates. You would think the president is an authority on to himself.
Supposedly, the Executive Branch of the presidency is checked and balanced by the Legislative Branch or the US Congress, and they both are checked and balanced by the Judicial Branch or the US Supreme Court. Where were these other two branches in the affair? Do we have a putative dictatorship? I don’t think so.
Why do we have 435 Congressmen and women, 100 Senators, and nine Supreme Court Justices if the War in Iraq and Afghanistan, the collapse of the economy, the high energy prices at the fuel pump, rising unemployment, the pressing recession, and all the rest if they are the exclusive fault of the president?
THE MYTH OF QUADRENNIAL MADNESS
Every four-year voters look for a new president to rescue them from the reality of their ways. They love the utopian platforms of the two parties, which deceive them with hope. This approach is successful because there is something in them for everyone. The candidate’s words sooth us as they tell us we come first when we know better.
It is music to our ears when our favorite candidate tells us change is on the way but we don’t have to change, don’t have to tighten our seatbelts, don’t have to make sacrifices, don’t have to grin and bare it at all much less for a year or two, don’t need to do anything but go out and vote because “as soon as I am elected . . ..”
Presidential candidates talk about change, change in administration, change in policies, and change in parties. They talk about reform, reform from the way it is to the way it will be. But doesn’t change and reform require sacrifice? Don’t they involve failures and setbacks as the change models work out the flaws? Won’t things get worse before they get better? If so, why are we not hearing about this?
Voters understand there is no possibility of reform or change without pain and inconvenience except cosmetically. Change and reform take nine times more courage than hope. Courage involves action; hope waits for results.
There is little talk in a presidential campaign about austerity, about the possibility of losing our dominate status in the world community, about the language and technical skills required in a global economy, about the changing complexion of the new world order, about the US being a player but no longer the dominate player, about the danger of embracing the world as it was not as it is, about progress no longer being our most important product, as the planet is dying because of the insanity of progress.
With more than two billion souls on this planet making less in a year than the average American makes in a week, and with Americans consuming 25 percent of the world’s energy resources while being only 5 percent of the world’s population, there is a disparity of wealth and health that must be addressed, or the world may one day self-implode.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
THE WONDER OF WONDERS
THE WONDER OF WONDERS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 28, 2008
“I often think its comical how nature always does contrive, that every boy and every gal, that’s born into the world alive, is either a little liberal, or else a little conservative.”
Steven Pinker, THE BLANK SLATE: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), p.283.
Through the miracle of television, and by the accident of channel hopping, the other day I came across a lecture of Dr. Steven Pinker of Harvard, eminent cognitive psychologist, delightful writer with clear vision of the cognitive world, and now a presence. It was C-Span, and he was giving a lecture on “Denial of Human Nature.” The lecture actually took place in October 2002, when his book on the subject came out.
It is one thing to read the works of an author, and quite another to see and hear him addressing an audience of astute readers of his works. I say “astute” because the Q&A after his lecture confirmed this.
Pinker doesn’t believe we come into the world with a blank slate. Indeed, he believes and has science to prove it that our genes are already actively involved in apprehending the landscape, activating speaking mechanisms to generate language, and process and interpret social interchange.
Briefly, he acknowledged the work of etymologist E. O. Wilson and his sociobiology, which hypothesizes that there is genetic carryover from parent to sibling to give a child a running start. Almost in the same breath, he mentioned a hero of mine, Steven Jay Gould, the paleontologist who contests Wilson’s claim, Gould being a totally dedicated Darwinist.
It was nice to see, as one person in the audience pointed out, that the tug of war between the two scientists was as much for show as anything. I mention this because Wilson and Gould are not very different from us. What is more, they don’t claim to be. Their work involves asking tough questions that we take for granted or refuse to consider. They stick to issues often stumbling in the dark to find the light switch to Life’s mysteries.
One statement that Pinker made is so true, that is, it is wonderful to be alive, to be conscious and cognitive. We should not only make the most of every day, but of every moment.
If you ever pick up one of his books, you will see he is writing to us as well as his colleagues. The key to good writing is to be able to communicate to a diverse audience and at several levels. This is obvious in the three books of his I have read: “The Blank Slate” (2002), “How the Mind Works” (1997), and “Words and Rules” (1999). He uses popular culture including comic strip cartoons to illustrate his points. You don’t have to agree with all his premises but the reading will refresh you.
* * * * * * * * * * *
My BB is a subscriber to the “Smithsonian,” which I often don’t find time to skim much less peruse, but the November issue has a timely article on “Election Day 1860” from the book “Lincoln President-Elect” (2008) by Harold Holzer.
There are photographs of Lincoln and his home in Springfield, the state capitol, and his famous opponent Stephen Douglas, along with two other candidates John Breckinridge of the Northern Democrats and John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party.
BB and I once toured these grounds along with his former residences in Indiana and Kentucky. The Lincoln Library in Springfield is different than any other presidential library I have visited in that it has a carnival atmosphere.
Holzer captures Lincoln’s quiet strength, burning but carefully masked ambition, and the steel in his cutting humor. You also get a sense of Lincoln’s self-doubt, something that Barak Obama in candid aside admitted to a television interviewer. Holzer writes:
“Lincoln had confided to a caller that he would have preferred a full term in the Senate, ‘where there was more chance to make reputation and less danger of losing it – than four years in the presidency.’ It was a startling admission. But having lost two senatorial races over the past five years, most recently to Stephen A. Douglas – one of the two Democrats he now opposed in his run for the White House – Lincoln’s conflicted thoughts were understandable.”
Given how momentous the 1860 election was, it surprised me to learn that Lincoln’s handlers wanted him to do no campaigning. It was apparently in bad taste in 1860 to be out on the stump campaigning. Today, candidates spend nearly a half billion dollars attempting to win the presidency.
William Cullen Bryant of the New York Evening Post, bluntly reminded Lincoln that “the vast majority of your friends want you to make no speeches, write no letters as a candidate, enter into no pledges, make no promises, nor even give any of those kind words which men are apt to interpret into promises.” Lincoln obliged.
Unalterably opposed to slavery, his handlers urged him the day before the election to assure voters he wouldn’t act rashly on the issue. Holzer writes:
“Lincoln branded such men as ‘liars and knaves,’ explaining hotly, ‘this is the same old trick by which the South breaks down every Northern victory. Even if I were personally willing to barter away the moral principle involved in this contest for the commercial gain of a new submission to the South, I would go to Washington without countenance of the men who supported me and were my friends before the election. I would be as powerless as a block of buckeye wood.’”
Consequently, Lincoln’s campaign for president ended as it began in adamant silence.
I smiled when I read how Lincoln described presidential campaigns. I’ve called them quadrennial madness. His metaphor is more apt:
“Elections in this country were like ‘big boils’ – they caused a great deal of pain before they came to a head, but after the trouble was over the body was in better health than before.”
The 1860 presidency was contentious with some predicting unhappily that “the obscure and coarse Lincoln” would be “elected by the sectional Abolition Party of the North.”
Close to my hometown of Clinton, Iowa is Galena, Illinois, the hometown of Ulysses S. Grant who “was by no means a Lincoln man,” but was a loyal Republican. He was retired from the military trying to make a living in the leather goods business in Galena, not realizing that destiny would, indeed, make him Lincoln’s man. .
Lincoln, as many of you know, rose from a humble background but was a prominent, you could even say rich lawyer in Springfield, Illinois. He had argued cases at the Supreme Court, and had an outstanding jurisprudent record. Yet, in terms of national politics, he had served but a single term in the US Congress from 1847 – 1849. So, there was little evidence at the outset that he would be a good much less great president.
If you have read the poet Carl Sandburg’s four volumes on Lincoln, you know that he makes quite a case of Lincoln’s toughness. Prior to the election, Lincoln received many cables and telegrams, many unsettling. One was from Ozias Hatch, a former Congressman, was especially so. After reading it, Lincoln turned to one of his people, and said, “This man would bear watching.” It was the first indication that he was confident he would be the next president.
As the tallies rolled in, Lincoln saw he had won Chicago by 2,500 votes, and Cook County by 4,000. In nine Southern states he wasn’t even on the ballot. At midnight, still not knowing the outcome, he went for ice cream at William W. Watson & Son’s across from Capitol Square.
When a telegram came from Philadelphia, all eyes were fixed upon the tall form of Lincoln and his slightly trembling lips, as he read in a clear and distinct voice, “The city and state for Lincoln by a decisive majority,” and immediately added in slow, emphatic terms, and with a significant gesture of the forefinger, “I think that settles it.”
Lincoln was elected as the sixteenth president of the United States by carrying every Northern state save New Jersey with 180 electoral votes while needing only 152. He received 1, 866,452 but only 40 percent of the total east, second only to John Quincy Adams as the smallest share ever collected by a victor. In the entire South, he collected only 26,000 votes, most of them in Missouri and the city of St. Louis, where there was a large German-born Republican constituency.
Once he had won, he felt “oppressed with the overwhelming responsibility upon him.” Barak Obama has said something to that effect recently.
I will end this little piece with an observation. If you wonder why some people attain what is construed as greatness and others celebrity, and still others fame, fortune or significant achievement in science, art, engineering, or literature, take heart in this:
“From boyhood up, Lincoln had confided to his old friend Ward Hill Lamon that ‘my ambition was to be President.’”
It is no accident. We achieve what we can see ourselves achieving. It takes ambition fueled by vision for a career to climb above the lowest rungs of Life’s Ladder.
Someone asked me recently what it takes to be a writer. I paused and said, “Writers are not made. Writers are born.” I believe that to be true. Yes, some people scribble this or that and get it published because they are a celebrity or distinguished in some other endeavor, but writers, real writers are born. They have no choice but to write. It is in their blood, their bones, and their genes.
Lincoln’s ambition was to be president. He lived the idea several lives before it reached fruition stumbling and bumbling along the way, but never losing sight of the target.
I’m writing a novel of South Africa. It goes slow. But if God gives me the energy and the mind to finish it, I will. That is my ambition, to tell a story that only I can tell because only I have lived it. Will it be a great novel?
I smile when people ask me that question. First, I don’t measure quality in terms of chronological but psychological time. Ambition has no chronology. Lincoln’s ambition was to be president, not necessarily a great president but to fulfill that ambition. Its horizon never left his sight.
Greatness had nothing to do with it. So, the question whether my novel will even get published is academic. The process of writing it is an end in itself. That is the secret of ambition that so many miss.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 28, 2008
“I often think its comical how nature always does contrive, that every boy and every gal, that’s born into the world alive, is either a little liberal, or else a little conservative.”
Steven Pinker, THE BLANK SLATE: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), p.283.
Through the miracle of television, and by the accident of channel hopping, the other day I came across a lecture of Dr. Steven Pinker of Harvard, eminent cognitive psychologist, delightful writer with clear vision of the cognitive world, and now a presence. It was C-Span, and he was giving a lecture on “Denial of Human Nature.” The lecture actually took place in October 2002, when his book on the subject came out.
It is one thing to read the works of an author, and quite another to see and hear him addressing an audience of astute readers of his works. I say “astute” because the Q&A after his lecture confirmed this.
Pinker doesn’t believe we come into the world with a blank slate. Indeed, he believes and has science to prove it that our genes are already actively involved in apprehending the landscape, activating speaking mechanisms to generate language, and process and interpret social interchange.
Briefly, he acknowledged the work of etymologist E. O. Wilson and his sociobiology, which hypothesizes that there is genetic carryover from parent to sibling to give a child a running start. Almost in the same breath, he mentioned a hero of mine, Steven Jay Gould, the paleontologist who contests Wilson’s claim, Gould being a totally dedicated Darwinist.
It was nice to see, as one person in the audience pointed out, that the tug of war between the two scientists was as much for show as anything. I mention this because Wilson and Gould are not very different from us. What is more, they don’t claim to be. Their work involves asking tough questions that we take for granted or refuse to consider. They stick to issues often stumbling in the dark to find the light switch to Life’s mysteries.
One statement that Pinker made is so true, that is, it is wonderful to be alive, to be conscious and cognitive. We should not only make the most of every day, but of every moment.
If you ever pick up one of his books, you will see he is writing to us as well as his colleagues. The key to good writing is to be able to communicate to a diverse audience and at several levels. This is obvious in the three books of his I have read: “The Blank Slate” (2002), “How the Mind Works” (1997), and “Words and Rules” (1999). He uses popular culture including comic strip cartoons to illustrate his points. You don’t have to agree with all his premises but the reading will refresh you.
* * * * * * * * * * *
My BB is a subscriber to the “Smithsonian,” which I often don’t find time to skim much less peruse, but the November issue has a timely article on “Election Day 1860” from the book “Lincoln President-Elect” (2008) by Harold Holzer.
There are photographs of Lincoln and his home in Springfield, the state capitol, and his famous opponent Stephen Douglas, along with two other candidates John Breckinridge of the Northern Democrats and John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party.
BB and I once toured these grounds along with his former residences in Indiana and Kentucky. The Lincoln Library in Springfield is different than any other presidential library I have visited in that it has a carnival atmosphere.
Holzer captures Lincoln’s quiet strength, burning but carefully masked ambition, and the steel in his cutting humor. You also get a sense of Lincoln’s self-doubt, something that Barak Obama in candid aside admitted to a television interviewer. Holzer writes:
“Lincoln had confided to a caller that he would have preferred a full term in the Senate, ‘where there was more chance to make reputation and less danger of losing it – than four years in the presidency.’ It was a startling admission. But having lost two senatorial races over the past five years, most recently to Stephen A. Douglas – one of the two Democrats he now opposed in his run for the White House – Lincoln’s conflicted thoughts were understandable.”
Given how momentous the 1860 election was, it surprised me to learn that Lincoln’s handlers wanted him to do no campaigning. It was apparently in bad taste in 1860 to be out on the stump campaigning. Today, candidates spend nearly a half billion dollars attempting to win the presidency.
William Cullen Bryant of the New York Evening Post, bluntly reminded Lincoln that “the vast majority of your friends want you to make no speeches, write no letters as a candidate, enter into no pledges, make no promises, nor even give any of those kind words which men are apt to interpret into promises.” Lincoln obliged.
Unalterably opposed to slavery, his handlers urged him the day before the election to assure voters he wouldn’t act rashly on the issue. Holzer writes:
“Lincoln branded such men as ‘liars and knaves,’ explaining hotly, ‘this is the same old trick by which the South breaks down every Northern victory. Even if I were personally willing to barter away the moral principle involved in this contest for the commercial gain of a new submission to the South, I would go to Washington without countenance of the men who supported me and were my friends before the election. I would be as powerless as a block of buckeye wood.’”
Consequently, Lincoln’s campaign for president ended as it began in adamant silence.
I smiled when I read how Lincoln described presidential campaigns. I’ve called them quadrennial madness. His metaphor is more apt:
“Elections in this country were like ‘big boils’ – they caused a great deal of pain before they came to a head, but after the trouble was over the body was in better health than before.”
The 1860 presidency was contentious with some predicting unhappily that “the obscure and coarse Lincoln” would be “elected by the sectional Abolition Party of the North.”
Close to my hometown of Clinton, Iowa is Galena, Illinois, the hometown of Ulysses S. Grant who “was by no means a Lincoln man,” but was a loyal Republican. He was retired from the military trying to make a living in the leather goods business in Galena, not realizing that destiny would, indeed, make him Lincoln’s man. .
Lincoln, as many of you know, rose from a humble background but was a prominent, you could even say rich lawyer in Springfield, Illinois. He had argued cases at the Supreme Court, and had an outstanding jurisprudent record. Yet, in terms of national politics, he had served but a single term in the US Congress from 1847 – 1849. So, there was little evidence at the outset that he would be a good much less great president.
If you have read the poet Carl Sandburg’s four volumes on Lincoln, you know that he makes quite a case of Lincoln’s toughness. Prior to the election, Lincoln received many cables and telegrams, many unsettling. One was from Ozias Hatch, a former Congressman, was especially so. After reading it, Lincoln turned to one of his people, and said, “This man would bear watching.” It was the first indication that he was confident he would be the next president.
As the tallies rolled in, Lincoln saw he had won Chicago by 2,500 votes, and Cook County by 4,000. In nine Southern states he wasn’t even on the ballot. At midnight, still not knowing the outcome, he went for ice cream at William W. Watson & Son’s across from Capitol Square.
When a telegram came from Philadelphia, all eyes were fixed upon the tall form of Lincoln and his slightly trembling lips, as he read in a clear and distinct voice, “The city and state for Lincoln by a decisive majority,” and immediately added in slow, emphatic terms, and with a significant gesture of the forefinger, “I think that settles it.”
Lincoln was elected as the sixteenth president of the United States by carrying every Northern state save New Jersey with 180 electoral votes while needing only 152. He received 1, 866,452 but only 40 percent of the total east, second only to John Quincy Adams as the smallest share ever collected by a victor. In the entire South, he collected only 26,000 votes, most of them in Missouri and the city of St. Louis, where there was a large German-born Republican constituency.
Once he had won, he felt “oppressed with the overwhelming responsibility upon him.” Barak Obama has said something to that effect recently.
I will end this little piece with an observation. If you wonder why some people attain what is construed as greatness and others celebrity, and still others fame, fortune or significant achievement in science, art, engineering, or literature, take heart in this:
“From boyhood up, Lincoln had confided to his old friend Ward Hill Lamon that ‘my ambition was to be President.’”
It is no accident. We achieve what we can see ourselves achieving. It takes ambition fueled by vision for a career to climb above the lowest rungs of Life’s Ladder.
Someone asked me recently what it takes to be a writer. I paused and said, “Writers are not made. Writers are born.” I believe that to be true. Yes, some people scribble this or that and get it published because they are a celebrity or distinguished in some other endeavor, but writers, real writers are born. They have no choice but to write. It is in their blood, their bones, and their genes.
Lincoln’s ambition was to be president. He lived the idea several lives before it reached fruition stumbling and bumbling along the way, but never losing sight of the target.
I’m writing a novel of South Africa. It goes slow. But if God gives me the energy and the mind to finish it, I will. That is my ambition, to tell a story that only I can tell because only I have lived it. Will it be a great novel?
I smile when people ask me that question. First, I don’t measure quality in terms of chronological but psychological time. Ambition has no chronology. Lincoln’s ambition was to be president, not necessarily a great president but to fulfill that ambition. Its horizon never left his sight.
Greatness had nothing to do with it. So, the question whether my novel will even get published is academic. The process of writing it is an end in itself. That is the secret of ambition that so many miss.
Monday, October 27, 2008
FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY -- TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE
FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY – TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 27, 2008
“Young people are the antithesis of extremism while being portrayed as being just that by the media. They see through the hypocrisy of a society that is living out George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ conducting a war that makes no sense to them, a cause for which they are expected to join and possibly die with patriotic zeal without moralistic persuasion.”
“A Look Back to See Ahead” with reference to the Vietnam War, page 48
There are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t. I’m definitely of the former persuasion.
Long before I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I was a corporate executive and adjunct professor, working about the world and then teaching graduate students at several local universities.
I found two different kinds of co-workers as well as students. My co-workers were so immersed in what they were doing to have little inclination to think beyond the task at hand.
Some of my students looked at a range of current social problems and thought everything looked pretty much the same as they had always looked with a few blips in the road, but otherwise no big deal. They took comfort in the adage: the more things change the more they remain the same.
For them, current crises whatever they were mashed together into a mega-mash so at the end of the day they felt little inclination to look at things differently. If they were optimists, they colored the conditions to fit an optimistic slant. If they were pessimists, assorted calamities were ticked off to validate their pessimism.
Then there were those who looked more deeply into conditions to discover patterns that revealed something different. What had been was not what was happening now. They abandoned conventional wisdom and sought new approaches to gain insight into the problems at hand.
I must admit they were rare, perhaps one out of every one hundred with whom I worked or taught. My co-workers were interested mainly in how much money they made, while my students were most interested in the grade they would earn.
For my deep thinkers, however, every situation was unique with its own set of challenging variables, its own systemic dimensions, generating its own pristine assumptions, in a word, justifying a fresh approach deserving fresh eyes to define the problem freshly.
Unfortunately, as rare as I found this fresh approach at work or in the classroom, I found it even rarer in leadership.
That said I must confess that when I was in college, and a bit later, when I was first in the working world, I belonged to the first set of people. Everything looked pretty much alike. Europeans were like Americans, as were Canadians, as were Mexicans and South Americans. But that would change. I started to grow up when I was point man in crisis after crisis in South Africa in 1968. Now, in my thirties, I no longer enjoyed the luxury of seeing everything the same as I was bombarded with too many differences.
I came face to face with the Afrikaner government’s apartheid policy of separate development of the races. The white government of less than one-quarter of the population controlled the Bantu majority of three-quarters of the population who had no vote, few rights, and were totally subjugated “for their own good.” And I was an operative in that anachronistic colonial environment.
Even so, it didn’t register until my Bantu gardener was murdered on my estate and the crime was treated as if a dog had been killed. This moving experience converted me from thinking everything was basically the same to seeing everything was richly different.
People who think there are two kinds of people in the world don’t necessarily see themselves as being one kind of person today and another kind of person tomorrow.
They don’t expect to change because they see no need to change. They buy into the satisfying propaganda that keeps them content as they are while embellishing differences. This finds them buying into such myths as the rich are different than the poor, the “best and the brightest” are different than the “less gifted and dullards," whites are different than blacks, and so on. If you think these differences are apparent, then you're confirming the problem and bias I'm attempting to illustrate.
Some people look at a range of things and think everything looks the same. What is happening today for them is like things were in the past. All events over time are mashed together to suggest what has happened in the past.
I was trained to be obedient, to be polite and submissive to authority, to treat the dogma and dictates of my Irish Catholic faith without challenge, to be a good student, then loyal employee, following the rules, and submitting to the demands of my superiors. Being first trained as a chemist, I accepted the laws of my discipline without question.
Subsequently, I was trained to be a leader of men. I would discharge my paternalistic authority consistent with that training with little or no deviation from the norm. The more successful I became the more I developed a refined sense of just how different workers were from me their leader, that is, until South Africa.
South Africa was such a jolt to my life perspective that I returned to the United States, and retired. It was 1969. I wrote an essay to myself, put it away and didn’t look at it again until 2006. It would become A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
You see in rereading this essay in the new century I realized we were still prisoners of the last century despite the media glitz to the contrary.
Over a lapse of forty years, little had changed by 2007. Young people were now engaged in another unpopular war, political upheaval was still in the air, corrupt politicians who had lied and cheated the electorate were once again on trial, drugs were still ruining lives, morality remained on holiday, and new forms of bigotry and hatred were hatching.
The automotive industry was once again in sharp decline, while OPEC was manipulating crude oil production. Lame duck president Bush was hunkered down and a law unto himself, while Congress continued to vacillate staying the same, missing the changes, failing to face them leaving the future up for grabs.
The subprime real estate crisis was festering but no one could see it coming because everyone was stuck in the bubble of euphoric bliss. It is amazing how reticent the best minds are in society until there is no recourse but to act, and always too late to avoid the tsunami of consequences of their inaction.
Now, we are about to elect a new president. From the campaign trail, would you say these candidates see two kinds of people in the American electorate or not?
Consider this. Presidential candidates US Senator Barak Obama and US Senator John McCain, as well as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernacke, and Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulsen talk about the current economic crisis as if it is 1929 again.
As a consequence, at least as they communicate to the public, they soft-pedal the unique factors given birth to it. It is not enough to promote the mantra of how complex finance is. After all, it is arithmetic, not quantum mechanics or astrophysics. The devious math has been used to hide profits and hoodwink the public. The "invisible hand" of self-interests has proven a flawed concept for the times, and further evidence that the past is not the present.
The bailouts and rescue packages are reminiscent of similar strategies during the Great Depression. Nobel Laureate Paul Kruger of Princeton claims we need the equivalent of FDR’s (president Franklin Delano Roosevelt) “New Deal.” He fails to note FDR’s National Recovery Act (NRC) of 1933 was later ruled unconstitutional.
Nor is it mentioned that the United States was still mired in the Great Depression when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, resulting in World War Two.
The United States would not enter the war until after December 7, 1941 when the air and sea forces of the Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands and knocked out the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet.
It was World War Two that pulled the American economy out of the Great Depression and not the “New Deal.”
The past is the past and the present is the present and as much as they might seem the same they are not. The thinking of the past is never right for the thinking of the present. The present is never the past but uniquely different. It requires richly different thinking and action. It also requires each of us to know what persuasion we are when it comes to the two kinds of people in the world considered here.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 27, 2008
“Young people are the antithesis of extremism while being portrayed as being just that by the media. They see through the hypocrisy of a society that is living out George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ conducting a war that makes no sense to them, a cause for which they are expected to join and possibly die with patriotic zeal without moralistic persuasion.”
“A Look Back to See Ahead” with reference to the Vietnam War, page 48
There are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t. I’m definitely of the former persuasion.
Long before I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I was a corporate executive and adjunct professor, working about the world and then teaching graduate students at several local universities.
I found two different kinds of co-workers as well as students. My co-workers were so immersed in what they were doing to have little inclination to think beyond the task at hand.
Some of my students looked at a range of current social problems and thought everything looked pretty much the same as they had always looked with a few blips in the road, but otherwise no big deal. They took comfort in the adage: the more things change the more they remain the same.
For them, current crises whatever they were mashed together into a mega-mash so at the end of the day they felt little inclination to look at things differently. If they were optimists, they colored the conditions to fit an optimistic slant. If they were pessimists, assorted calamities were ticked off to validate their pessimism.
Then there were those who looked more deeply into conditions to discover patterns that revealed something different. What had been was not what was happening now. They abandoned conventional wisdom and sought new approaches to gain insight into the problems at hand.
I must admit they were rare, perhaps one out of every one hundred with whom I worked or taught. My co-workers were interested mainly in how much money they made, while my students were most interested in the grade they would earn.
For my deep thinkers, however, every situation was unique with its own set of challenging variables, its own systemic dimensions, generating its own pristine assumptions, in a word, justifying a fresh approach deserving fresh eyes to define the problem freshly.
Unfortunately, as rare as I found this fresh approach at work or in the classroom, I found it even rarer in leadership.
That said I must confess that when I was in college, and a bit later, when I was first in the working world, I belonged to the first set of people. Everything looked pretty much alike. Europeans were like Americans, as were Canadians, as were Mexicans and South Americans. But that would change. I started to grow up when I was point man in crisis after crisis in South Africa in 1968. Now, in my thirties, I no longer enjoyed the luxury of seeing everything the same as I was bombarded with too many differences.
I came face to face with the Afrikaner government’s apartheid policy of separate development of the races. The white government of less than one-quarter of the population controlled the Bantu majority of three-quarters of the population who had no vote, few rights, and were totally subjugated “for their own good.” And I was an operative in that anachronistic colonial environment.
Even so, it didn’t register until my Bantu gardener was murdered on my estate and the crime was treated as if a dog had been killed. This moving experience converted me from thinking everything was basically the same to seeing everything was richly different.
People who think there are two kinds of people in the world don’t necessarily see themselves as being one kind of person today and another kind of person tomorrow.
They don’t expect to change because they see no need to change. They buy into the satisfying propaganda that keeps them content as they are while embellishing differences. This finds them buying into such myths as the rich are different than the poor, the “best and the brightest” are different than the “less gifted and dullards," whites are different than blacks, and so on. If you think these differences are apparent, then you're confirming the problem and bias I'm attempting to illustrate.
Some people look at a range of things and think everything looks the same. What is happening today for them is like things were in the past. All events over time are mashed together to suggest what has happened in the past.
I was trained to be obedient, to be polite and submissive to authority, to treat the dogma and dictates of my Irish Catholic faith without challenge, to be a good student, then loyal employee, following the rules, and submitting to the demands of my superiors. Being first trained as a chemist, I accepted the laws of my discipline without question.
Subsequently, I was trained to be a leader of men. I would discharge my paternalistic authority consistent with that training with little or no deviation from the norm. The more successful I became the more I developed a refined sense of just how different workers were from me their leader, that is, until South Africa.
South Africa was such a jolt to my life perspective that I returned to the United States, and retired. It was 1969. I wrote an essay to myself, put it away and didn’t look at it again until 2006. It would become A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
You see in rereading this essay in the new century I realized we were still prisoners of the last century despite the media glitz to the contrary.
Over a lapse of forty years, little had changed by 2007. Young people were now engaged in another unpopular war, political upheaval was still in the air, corrupt politicians who had lied and cheated the electorate were once again on trial, drugs were still ruining lives, morality remained on holiday, and new forms of bigotry and hatred were hatching.
The automotive industry was once again in sharp decline, while OPEC was manipulating crude oil production. Lame duck president Bush was hunkered down and a law unto himself, while Congress continued to vacillate staying the same, missing the changes, failing to face them leaving the future up for grabs.
The subprime real estate crisis was festering but no one could see it coming because everyone was stuck in the bubble of euphoric bliss. It is amazing how reticent the best minds are in society until there is no recourse but to act, and always too late to avoid the tsunami of consequences of their inaction.
Now, we are about to elect a new president. From the campaign trail, would you say these candidates see two kinds of people in the American electorate or not?
Consider this. Presidential candidates US Senator Barak Obama and US Senator John McCain, as well as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernacke, and Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulsen talk about the current economic crisis as if it is 1929 again.
As a consequence, at least as they communicate to the public, they soft-pedal the unique factors given birth to it. It is not enough to promote the mantra of how complex finance is. After all, it is arithmetic, not quantum mechanics or astrophysics. The devious math has been used to hide profits and hoodwink the public. The "invisible hand" of self-interests has proven a flawed concept for the times, and further evidence that the past is not the present.
The bailouts and rescue packages are reminiscent of similar strategies during the Great Depression. Nobel Laureate Paul Kruger of Princeton claims we need the equivalent of FDR’s (president Franklin Delano Roosevelt) “New Deal.” He fails to note FDR’s National Recovery Act (NRC) of 1933 was later ruled unconstitutional.
Nor is it mentioned that the United States was still mired in the Great Depression when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, resulting in World War Two.
The United States would not enter the war until after December 7, 1941 when the air and sea forces of the Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands and knocked out the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet.
It was World War Two that pulled the American economy out of the Great Depression and not the “New Deal.”
The past is the past and the present is the present and as much as they might seem the same they are not. The thinking of the past is never right for the thinking of the present. The present is never the past but uniquely different. It requires richly different thinking and action. It also requires each of us to know what persuasion we are when it comes to the two kinds of people in the world considered here.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
THE PERIPATETIC READER
THE PERIPATETIC READER
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 22, 2008
“The greatest part of mankind labor under one delirium or another; and Don Quixote differed from the rest, not in madness but in the species of it. The covetous, the prodigal, the superstitious, the libertine, and the coffee-house politician, are all Quixotes in their several ways.”
Henry Fielding (1707 –1754), English Novelist, author of “Tom Jones” and “Joseph Andrews”
One wonders at my age how many more periods of quadrennial insanity of presidential campaigns he will endure before he returns to his maker.
Were I to make a scholarly study of the many I have experienced in my lifetime, I believe I could put transparencies one on top of the other of the promises made never kept once elected, the candidates so similar and devoid of contrast as to be mirror images of each other, not to mention the insufferable passion and blind guile of those for and against these candidates in the run up to the election as to miss the entertaining folly, and not to put too small a turn on it, but also the incredible waste of energy, capital, intellect, spirit and truth in the process, all in the name of democracy that is hardly democratic when a half billion dollars is used creating the subliminal cacaphony of blitzing television ads.
Hitting the low ball into the dirt is par for the course, but this is not new. It has been going on long before a place called the United States of America existed, indeed, before the Western Hemisphere was discovered. I suppose you could go back to the time man first walked upright.
I’m a self- confessed peripatetic reader. Although no scholar, as a respite from my writing, I may on occasion wander into a subject, and find myself reading on it in no certain sequence and find myself amazed, surprised, disappointed, confused, but generally entertained for the attention.
When author Garry Wills was here in town, for example, and gave a brief talk on his then new book, WHAT PAUL MEANT, meaning St. Paul of course, I attended at The Tampa Tribune's auditorium.
I had called ahead and asked if I could bring my books by the author to be autographed. The person setting up the author's appearance, co-owner of the Inkwood Bookstore, said, “Yes, by all means.” I brought a whole bag of books, twelve in all, which of course held up the signing line a bit.
No surprise, as he signed the books, he looked to see if I had read them. I’ve done the same. We did get into a little conversation as he was signing “Explaining America: The Federalist” (1981), “Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence” (1978), “A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government” (1999), “Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders” (1994), “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America” (1992 – winner of Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction), “Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home” (1987), “Confessions of a Conservative” (1979), “John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity” (1997), “Under God: Religion and American Politics” (1990), “Papal Sin: Structure of Deceit” (2000), “Saint Augustine’s Memory” (2002), “Saint Augustine” (1999), “Why I Am A Catholic” (2002).
Since then, I've read the author's “Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power” (2003), “What Jesus Meant” (2006) and “What Paul Meant” (2007).
I found author Wills shy and introspective as I expected he might be. How else could he be so productive?
Wills was discovered in the pages of “The New York Review,” where he is a constant contributor with impressively researched articles.
As he signed and I talked, I mentioned in passing that I met Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen at the Shrine of Fatima in Portugal, and had had a brief conversation with him.
It was 1957, and I was a white hat sailor in the Sixth Fleet operating in the Mediterranean. I mentioned to Wills that I told the bishop I had read several of his books.
Bishop Sheen looked at me suspiciously. I felt as if I was being profiled as an enlisted man or a cut below a reader much less one that read challenging books in theology and philosophy. When he asked me what I had read, I ticked off half a dozen titles while doing a slow burn.
“It is amazing,” I said to Wills, “how ordinary extraordinary people can be.”
Wills didn’t disappoint. This prize winning author, a cerebral man, Northwestern University professor, and ex-priest-to-be fed me a non sequitur: “Wasn’t it amazing how short he (Bishop Sheen) was?” I wanted to say, I thought he was a giant, having been one of my heroes but I said nothing. Wills was obviously obsessed with height, physical height, when he was a giant in his own right as well.
Of late, people see me at McDonald’s reading these books on Jesus and Paul, Peter, Paul and Mary, and most recently, Barbara Thiering’s controversial bestseller of “Jesus The Man,” and they look at me as if I’m some kind of religious nut when I’m not religious at all. I’m an idea guy, and what better place for ideas than this.
Thiering attempts to debunk almost everything sacred to a Christian, especially a Roman Catholic: the Virgin birth; the Immaculate Conception, the miracles, Jesus dying on the Cross, the Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, not to mention Peter and Timothy. She also attacks the Ascension of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven and the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus.
She has Jesus dying at age 70 somewhere in France leaving his progeny. It is a captivating story with the book now transformed into a television drama in Australia. She claims her research covers twenty years of digging into the history of Jesus. Even so, most of it remains highly speculative because that is the nature of the story. Faith not fact drives its efficacy and survival.
What surprised me is that I could read her book and not take offense because the historic Jesus is magnificently attractive and compelling. A half century ago, I was not so accommodating. My acculuration as an Irish Roman Catholic was too much of a barrier to cross.
Yet, reading occasionally allowed some light to penetrate my darkness. For example, when I was a young man and read Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamasov,” I came to encounter his "Grand Inquisitor." I wasn’t prepared for that either, but now I am writing a novel that has a touch of that confluence.
If you have read this book, you know that after fifteen hundred years, Christ returns to earth in Seville, where the Spanish Inquisition reigns supreme. Jesus has a conversation with the Grand Inquisitor, who accuses Jesus of getting it all wrong. This compelling scene has lived on in the annals of literature since first published in 1880.
Suffice it to say the conversation between Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor revolves around freedom and evil with the Grand Inquisitor stating human beings would prefer death to freedom because they cannot handle free will, and fall through the cracks running from responsibility while remaining slaves to authority. Sound familiar?
This is more evidence that the more we change the less we change and the more we remain the same.
Dostoyevsky is a compelling author, I think, more so than Tolstoy, but that is my bias. Tolstoy, like Dostoyevsky, wrote about himself, but Tolstoy wanted to be loved, while Dostoyevsky was comfortable showing all sides of his contemptible personality. There is a message for the serious writer here.
My first introduction to Dostoyevsky was when “Notes From The Underground” became required reading in a core course in college. The author got into my blood. His passion was palpable. Over the years reading him, several biographies on him, as well as several of his books, I realized how this man, so full of man’s weaknesses demonstrated man’s greatest strengths, and then had the talent to crystalize that essence.
Dostoyevsky had a passion for Christianity of the Russian Orthodox variety, and knew scripture well. I’ve been reading scholars of late, principally Bart D. Ehrman, and I find much of what we take to be real about the New Testament, for example, is a kind of catch can of authors, including the four Gospel writers, who may or may not have written what is considered true and holy for several reasons.
First, because virtually no original manuscripts of any works have survived, secondly the versions that are extant were copied and recopied, ad infinitum, largely by illiterate copiers, and finally, the bias of the times was preserved by changing the content and context if ever so slightly to protect or to present more favorably this or that person, or situation, including Jesus.
“Legends,” which we now know from the Internet, ideas and claims that are essentially if not totally bogus, were with us some 2,000 or 3,000 years ago if not longer.
Ehrman’s “Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why” (2005) and “Peter, Paul & Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend” (2006) are spirited journeys into the nebulous world of the past by the chair of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina.
You get a sense in reading these books of how human and real the principals are, and how little has changed in the human drama and its folly and vicissitudes over the centuries. It gives you a new perspective on how intimate the human family, how grand and self-punishing it has always been, and how little it has changed through the centuries.
It is easy to forget that most of the stories we remember from the New Testament were lived as if the last days, which had a bearing on what was written and the impact expected.
Scientists tell us the sun will eventually lose its candlepower, move towards the earth, dry up all the water, merge with the earth, and become a baren planet without life as several others in our solar system, but that is a few billion years off.
Those that read me know I take some pride in being an outsider, a marginal person, a person who embraces the freedom the Grand Inquisitor says we fear.
It may seem strange at first light that outsiders would pass the candle from one generation to the other, and not insiders, but it has always been so. Outsiders are not caught up in the here and now, or in its possessions or notice but embrace horizons not yet seen.
Jesus was a rebel, an outsider, and was accused of being a low life for preferring people said to be the dregs of society rather than breaking bread with the privileged few. Paul was an outsider in the same sense.
It is interesting that Paul, the architect of Christianity, and not Jesus, has been excoriated by the best among us for ages.
Thomas Jefferson said Judas gave Jesus’ body over to death and Paul buried his spirit. Jefferson claimed Paul substituted his half-baked high-flown dark theology for the simple words of Jesus. William Short, a friend of Jefferson’s, saw Paul the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.
George Bernard Shaw saw Paul as a monstrous imposition upon the soul of Jesus, while Nietzsche called Paul “the anti-Christ.” Yet, Paul was the best writer, most eloquent of the many followers of the Man from Nazareth.
When you are not a scholar but a peripatetic reader, like I am, in search of common ideas that hold us as one, you are given a sense of connection with your culture, its verities and dissemblers, and realize if the expurgated version of the Bible created by Jefferson were our true heritage it would be an amazingly dull world from which we all have sprung.
Take the whole hierarchical structure of society, first enjoined by the Roman Church. This is an invention of neither Jesus nor Paul, but those that followed. There were no priests or bishops, in fact, no church at all, as Jesus and Paul were both laymen. There were gatherings of people held together by a common spirit. That all changed as the Catholic papal hierarchy was created with the nonsense claim of infallibility of popes in manners of faith and morals, which in turn would lead to a similar sin with the “Divine Right of Kings.”
Those who would lead have always found a way to use human weakness to assume rights, power, control and importance. They insist that people have a preference for evil to freedom, reasoning that they have to have leaders assume leadership with an elaborate infrastructure to corral them into obedience and sensibility.
What at first blush may seem incredulous in this modern age of thinking man is not. No matter how many alphabet letters (BA, BS, MBA, Ph.D., et al.) after one’s name chances are one falls in line quiescently to some authority and its demands.
You will find that stimulated brains don't necessarily put a fire in the belly or steel in the spine.
Alas, it gives perspective when you read the sins of the great, who play celebrated roles and wear grand robes of pomp and circumstance to accord their station and dignity. Most people are surprised when those of such elevated status commit the most egregious sins. Dante had fun with this in his “Inferno,” and so it has been, and yet we have somehow survived as the human race.
A respite from soul searching came the other day when I was reading about CERN, which is the European Organization for Nuclear Research and the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.
CERN is located in a suburb of Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border and has been since 1954. It is more than 100 meters underground and covers several square miles, a veritable city with gigantic particle accelerators being manned by nearly 3,000 workers and 8,000 scientists and engineers from some 500 universities and 80 nationalities.
Here scientists have confirmed the “Big Bang,” which is evidence that the universe had a beginning and is constantly expanding.
Complemented by astronomers who have given CERN data indicating that our solar system is at least 13.5 billion years old, these scientists pursue the source of energy of that beginning using quantum mechanics of colliding atoms. In the process, they have encountered extra dimensions beyond our comprehension, and even the speed of light exceeding Einstein’s constant.
When you consider the fact that these people have been working quietly for more than half a century relatively unnoticed, making significant scientific discoveries, it gives you pause. Not everything is for show. CERN has also its company of Nobel Laureates.
Of perhaps special interest is the World Wide Web (www.com), or the Internet, which began as a CERN project called ENQUIRE, initiated by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in 1989.
My first introduction to this world was through college physics of a much more primitive nature a half century ago. This has been updated in an informal way through the reading of such books as those of James Gleick: “Chaos: Making a New Science” (1987), “Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything” (1999) and “Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman” (1992).
Science and scientists when they don’t gloat, don’t become celebrity personalities, when they stick to the mission are more than engaging, they are almost surreal, and not because they are less human, but because they are more so.
CERN is chasing the origin of the “Big Bang” and possible “dark matter” associated with it, on a course, strange as it may seem, which ties in with all this religion that sometimes seems nebulous if not nefarious, and that is the “God thing.”
It was, after all, Georges Lemaitre, an astrophysicist, civil engineer, army officer, and Belgium priest who first proposed the “Big Bang” theory in 1927. In doing so, he claimed the universe was expanding. Countless scientists since have confirmed his hypothesis.
On the other hand, Sir Frederick Hoyle, an astronomer, mathematician, astrophysicist, and English science fiction writer, claimed that the universe had no beginning and no end, and was governed by infinity. He was the leading proponent of steady-state cosmology, and died still resisting all the evidence to the contrary.
We should not be surprised. Einstein was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, which is the foundation of exploration in science today, yet he rejected it in his later years. Scientists like all of us are vulnerable to missteps and miscalculations as well as vanity.
Speaking of vanity, you that read me know that vanity and I are on good speaking terms.
Most recently, I got a taste of my own medicine when I was watching a performance of Michael Moore on C-Span as he spoke at the University of Michigan.
Moore is a curmudgeon who looks like an overweight Leprechaun as he attacks our Sacred Cows. He was putting me to sleep until he mentioned someone that I have discussed in one of my recent missives, Edward Bellamy, author of “Looking Backward” (1888).
He mentioned this utopian novel in similar context to mine, that is, that the social structure worked a lot better when we didn’t have all these “leaders” muddying up the pot. Moore was referring to the financial crisis, among other things, driven by sins of omission and commission by people who make a lot of money but are plague with bad decisions, which gets in the way of workers that do from doing their jobs.
It reminded me of the Catholic Church and its College of Cardinals. I smiled and said to Beautiful Betty, “Well, there is some hope for Moore, bleeding heart liberal that he is; he can read.” She rolled her eyes, and went back to making dinner.
Incidentally, Edward Bellamy’s brother, Francis, gave us “The Pledge of Allegiance.” Moore pointed out that his pledge was much simpler, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the Republic for which it stands,” with no mention of “under God,” or any of the other stuff.
Moore suggested that it should be, “I pledge allegiance to the people of the Republic and to all the people of the World.” Like writer of scripture, writers in other endeavors over time keep changing the message and not necessarily improving it.
Then I read in the Sunday Parade magazine (October 19, 2008) that historian Jon Meacham has an article on “5 Ideas for our Next President.”
The article resonated with me as I’ve written rather extensively about President Andrew Jackson’s leadership, and so it was nice to see it emphasized in this entertaining Sunday supplement. Mecham’s five points follow with my elaboration:
(1) Find people who tell it like it is.
Jackson never looked for such people. He was such people;
(2) Turn weaknesses into strengths.
Jackson literally had no formal education, had been a soldier since the Revolutionary War, and nearly died in it as a boy of fourteen, showing singular bravery, and an instinct for survival.
He distrusted people with education, anyone from the East, or anyone who put on airs. He took pride in never having read a book, and told anyone who would listen he had no time for couth.
Thomas Jefferson considered him a buffoon, but the man created an “Age of Jackson,” and gave birth to the imperial presidency;
(3) Speak to the electorate.
How he did that, indeed! He ignored Congress and his Cabinet, and spoke to and courted the electorate, so much so that he was accused of creating the “spoils system.”
The White House was open to the people, who after a weekend, often left the place with stained carpets, cigarette burns in the furniture and discarded food. It was the source of his power so that he could take on the Eastern Establishment, mainly the banks, which he dissolved, and created a Federal System that he could control to their mortification;
(4) Keep church and state separate.
He did this with a vengeance. He didn’t trust the clergy, didn’t take to sanctimonious types, liked his liquor and pipe, as did his pipe smoking wife. She died before he was inaugurated;
(5) Always have a backup plan (or two).
Jackson was of Protestant Scotch Irish stock and believed in asking forgiveness rather than permission.
He made his reputation by the “Battle of New Orleans” and built on it by invading Florida without permission and sacking both the British and Spanish.
He was called “Old Hickory” because he was as hard as hickory, and called the bluff of Southern States when they threatened succession from the Union.
He was a generation before Lincoln but would have been an amazing general for him had their two careers coincided.
Jackson had a nimble mind and could read his enemies like a book, and counted on them not to be able to read him. He was a schemer more than a planner, and had several backup schemes when one would fail.
He was never derailed by failure but learned from it, and used it to seed his next move. It was why he constantly confounded and finessed his enemies. He needed enemies to orchestrate his combative spirit, and if he didn’t have them, he would have had to create them to function.
It is a strange feeling being a writer such as I am with only an audience of one, but working themes common to so many others. There is a message somewhere in there, but like the source of “dark matter,” I swear I don’t know what it is.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 22, 2008
“The greatest part of mankind labor under one delirium or another; and Don Quixote differed from the rest, not in madness but in the species of it. The covetous, the prodigal, the superstitious, the libertine, and the coffee-house politician, are all Quixotes in their several ways.”
Henry Fielding (1707 –1754), English Novelist, author of “Tom Jones” and “Joseph Andrews”
One wonders at my age how many more periods of quadrennial insanity of presidential campaigns he will endure before he returns to his maker.
Were I to make a scholarly study of the many I have experienced in my lifetime, I believe I could put transparencies one on top of the other of the promises made never kept once elected, the candidates so similar and devoid of contrast as to be mirror images of each other, not to mention the insufferable passion and blind guile of those for and against these candidates in the run up to the election as to miss the entertaining folly, and not to put too small a turn on it, but also the incredible waste of energy, capital, intellect, spirit and truth in the process, all in the name of democracy that is hardly democratic when a half billion dollars is used creating the subliminal cacaphony of blitzing television ads.
Hitting the low ball into the dirt is par for the course, but this is not new. It has been going on long before a place called the United States of America existed, indeed, before the Western Hemisphere was discovered. I suppose you could go back to the time man first walked upright.
I’m a self- confessed peripatetic reader. Although no scholar, as a respite from my writing, I may on occasion wander into a subject, and find myself reading on it in no certain sequence and find myself amazed, surprised, disappointed, confused, but generally entertained for the attention.
When author Garry Wills was here in town, for example, and gave a brief talk on his then new book, WHAT PAUL MEANT, meaning St. Paul of course, I attended at The Tampa Tribune's auditorium.
I had called ahead and asked if I could bring my books by the author to be autographed. The person setting up the author's appearance, co-owner of the Inkwood Bookstore, said, “Yes, by all means.” I brought a whole bag of books, twelve in all, which of course held up the signing line a bit.
No surprise, as he signed the books, he looked to see if I had read them. I’ve done the same. We did get into a little conversation as he was signing “Explaining America: The Federalist” (1981), “Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence” (1978), “A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government” (1999), “Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders” (1994), “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America” (1992 – winner of Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction), “Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home” (1987), “Confessions of a Conservative” (1979), “John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity” (1997), “Under God: Religion and American Politics” (1990), “Papal Sin: Structure of Deceit” (2000), “Saint Augustine’s Memory” (2002), “Saint Augustine” (1999), “Why I Am A Catholic” (2002).
Since then, I've read the author's “Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power” (2003), “What Jesus Meant” (2006) and “What Paul Meant” (2007).
I found author Wills shy and introspective as I expected he might be. How else could he be so productive?
Wills was discovered in the pages of “The New York Review,” where he is a constant contributor with impressively researched articles.
As he signed and I talked, I mentioned in passing that I met Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen at the Shrine of Fatima in Portugal, and had had a brief conversation with him.
It was 1957, and I was a white hat sailor in the Sixth Fleet operating in the Mediterranean. I mentioned to Wills that I told the bishop I had read several of his books.
Bishop Sheen looked at me suspiciously. I felt as if I was being profiled as an enlisted man or a cut below a reader much less one that read challenging books in theology and philosophy. When he asked me what I had read, I ticked off half a dozen titles while doing a slow burn.
“It is amazing,” I said to Wills, “how ordinary extraordinary people can be.”
Wills didn’t disappoint. This prize winning author, a cerebral man, Northwestern University professor, and ex-priest-to-be fed me a non sequitur: “Wasn’t it amazing how short he (Bishop Sheen) was?” I wanted to say, I thought he was a giant, having been one of my heroes but I said nothing. Wills was obviously obsessed with height, physical height, when he was a giant in his own right as well.
Of late, people see me at McDonald’s reading these books on Jesus and Paul, Peter, Paul and Mary, and most recently, Barbara Thiering’s controversial bestseller of “Jesus The Man,” and they look at me as if I’m some kind of religious nut when I’m not religious at all. I’m an idea guy, and what better place for ideas than this.
Thiering attempts to debunk almost everything sacred to a Christian, especially a Roman Catholic: the Virgin birth; the Immaculate Conception, the miracles, Jesus dying on the Cross, the Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, not to mention Peter and Timothy. She also attacks the Ascension of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven and the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus.
She has Jesus dying at age 70 somewhere in France leaving his progeny. It is a captivating story with the book now transformed into a television drama in Australia. She claims her research covers twenty years of digging into the history of Jesus. Even so, most of it remains highly speculative because that is the nature of the story. Faith not fact drives its efficacy and survival.
What surprised me is that I could read her book and not take offense because the historic Jesus is magnificently attractive and compelling. A half century ago, I was not so accommodating. My acculuration as an Irish Roman Catholic was too much of a barrier to cross.
Yet, reading occasionally allowed some light to penetrate my darkness. For example, when I was a young man and read Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamasov,” I came to encounter his "Grand Inquisitor." I wasn’t prepared for that either, but now I am writing a novel that has a touch of that confluence.
If you have read this book, you know that after fifteen hundred years, Christ returns to earth in Seville, where the Spanish Inquisition reigns supreme. Jesus has a conversation with the Grand Inquisitor, who accuses Jesus of getting it all wrong. This compelling scene has lived on in the annals of literature since first published in 1880.
Suffice it to say the conversation between Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor revolves around freedom and evil with the Grand Inquisitor stating human beings would prefer death to freedom because they cannot handle free will, and fall through the cracks running from responsibility while remaining slaves to authority. Sound familiar?
This is more evidence that the more we change the less we change and the more we remain the same.
Dostoyevsky is a compelling author, I think, more so than Tolstoy, but that is my bias. Tolstoy, like Dostoyevsky, wrote about himself, but Tolstoy wanted to be loved, while Dostoyevsky was comfortable showing all sides of his contemptible personality. There is a message for the serious writer here.
My first introduction to Dostoyevsky was when “Notes From The Underground” became required reading in a core course in college. The author got into my blood. His passion was palpable. Over the years reading him, several biographies on him, as well as several of his books, I realized how this man, so full of man’s weaknesses demonstrated man’s greatest strengths, and then had the talent to crystalize that essence.
Dostoyevsky had a passion for Christianity of the Russian Orthodox variety, and knew scripture well. I’ve been reading scholars of late, principally Bart D. Ehrman, and I find much of what we take to be real about the New Testament, for example, is a kind of catch can of authors, including the four Gospel writers, who may or may not have written what is considered true and holy for several reasons.
First, because virtually no original manuscripts of any works have survived, secondly the versions that are extant were copied and recopied, ad infinitum, largely by illiterate copiers, and finally, the bias of the times was preserved by changing the content and context if ever so slightly to protect or to present more favorably this or that person, or situation, including Jesus.
“Legends,” which we now know from the Internet, ideas and claims that are essentially if not totally bogus, were with us some 2,000 or 3,000 years ago if not longer.
Ehrman’s “Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why” (2005) and “Peter, Paul & Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend” (2006) are spirited journeys into the nebulous world of the past by the chair of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina.
You get a sense in reading these books of how human and real the principals are, and how little has changed in the human drama and its folly and vicissitudes over the centuries. It gives you a new perspective on how intimate the human family, how grand and self-punishing it has always been, and how little it has changed through the centuries.
It is easy to forget that most of the stories we remember from the New Testament were lived as if the last days, which had a bearing on what was written and the impact expected.
Scientists tell us the sun will eventually lose its candlepower, move towards the earth, dry up all the water, merge with the earth, and become a baren planet without life as several others in our solar system, but that is a few billion years off.
Those that read me know I take some pride in being an outsider, a marginal person, a person who embraces the freedom the Grand Inquisitor says we fear.
It may seem strange at first light that outsiders would pass the candle from one generation to the other, and not insiders, but it has always been so. Outsiders are not caught up in the here and now, or in its possessions or notice but embrace horizons not yet seen.
Jesus was a rebel, an outsider, and was accused of being a low life for preferring people said to be the dregs of society rather than breaking bread with the privileged few. Paul was an outsider in the same sense.
It is interesting that Paul, the architect of Christianity, and not Jesus, has been excoriated by the best among us for ages.
Thomas Jefferson said Judas gave Jesus’ body over to death and Paul buried his spirit. Jefferson claimed Paul substituted his half-baked high-flown dark theology for the simple words of Jesus. William Short, a friend of Jefferson’s, saw Paul the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.
George Bernard Shaw saw Paul as a monstrous imposition upon the soul of Jesus, while Nietzsche called Paul “the anti-Christ.” Yet, Paul was the best writer, most eloquent of the many followers of the Man from Nazareth.
When you are not a scholar but a peripatetic reader, like I am, in search of common ideas that hold us as one, you are given a sense of connection with your culture, its verities and dissemblers, and realize if the expurgated version of the Bible created by Jefferson were our true heritage it would be an amazingly dull world from which we all have sprung.
Take the whole hierarchical structure of society, first enjoined by the Roman Church. This is an invention of neither Jesus nor Paul, but those that followed. There were no priests or bishops, in fact, no church at all, as Jesus and Paul were both laymen. There were gatherings of people held together by a common spirit. That all changed as the Catholic papal hierarchy was created with the nonsense claim of infallibility of popes in manners of faith and morals, which in turn would lead to a similar sin with the “Divine Right of Kings.”
Those who would lead have always found a way to use human weakness to assume rights, power, control and importance. They insist that people have a preference for evil to freedom, reasoning that they have to have leaders assume leadership with an elaborate infrastructure to corral them into obedience and sensibility.
What at first blush may seem incredulous in this modern age of thinking man is not. No matter how many alphabet letters (BA, BS, MBA, Ph.D., et al.) after one’s name chances are one falls in line quiescently to some authority and its demands.
You will find that stimulated brains don't necessarily put a fire in the belly or steel in the spine.
Alas, it gives perspective when you read the sins of the great, who play celebrated roles and wear grand robes of pomp and circumstance to accord their station and dignity. Most people are surprised when those of such elevated status commit the most egregious sins. Dante had fun with this in his “Inferno,” and so it has been, and yet we have somehow survived as the human race.
A respite from soul searching came the other day when I was reading about CERN, which is the European Organization for Nuclear Research and the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.
CERN is located in a suburb of Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border and has been since 1954. It is more than 100 meters underground and covers several square miles, a veritable city with gigantic particle accelerators being manned by nearly 3,000 workers and 8,000 scientists and engineers from some 500 universities and 80 nationalities.
Here scientists have confirmed the “Big Bang,” which is evidence that the universe had a beginning and is constantly expanding.
Complemented by astronomers who have given CERN data indicating that our solar system is at least 13.5 billion years old, these scientists pursue the source of energy of that beginning using quantum mechanics of colliding atoms. In the process, they have encountered extra dimensions beyond our comprehension, and even the speed of light exceeding Einstein’s constant.
When you consider the fact that these people have been working quietly for more than half a century relatively unnoticed, making significant scientific discoveries, it gives you pause. Not everything is for show. CERN has also its company of Nobel Laureates.
Of perhaps special interest is the World Wide Web (www.com), or the Internet, which began as a CERN project called ENQUIRE, initiated by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in 1989.
My first introduction to this world was through college physics of a much more primitive nature a half century ago. This has been updated in an informal way through the reading of such books as those of James Gleick: “Chaos: Making a New Science” (1987), “Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything” (1999) and “Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman” (1992).
Science and scientists when they don’t gloat, don’t become celebrity personalities, when they stick to the mission are more than engaging, they are almost surreal, and not because they are less human, but because they are more so.
CERN is chasing the origin of the “Big Bang” and possible “dark matter” associated with it, on a course, strange as it may seem, which ties in with all this religion that sometimes seems nebulous if not nefarious, and that is the “God thing.”
It was, after all, Georges Lemaitre, an astrophysicist, civil engineer, army officer, and Belgium priest who first proposed the “Big Bang” theory in 1927. In doing so, he claimed the universe was expanding. Countless scientists since have confirmed his hypothesis.
On the other hand, Sir Frederick Hoyle, an astronomer, mathematician, astrophysicist, and English science fiction writer, claimed that the universe had no beginning and no end, and was governed by infinity. He was the leading proponent of steady-state cosmology, and died still resisting all the evidence to the contrary.
We should not be surprised. Einstein was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, which is the foundation of exploration in science today, yet he rejected it in his later years. Scientists like all of us are vulnerable to missteps and miscalculations as well as vanity.
Speaking of vanity, you that read me know that vanity and I are on good speaking terms.
Most recently, I got a taste of my own medicine when I was watching a performance of Michael Moore on C-Span as he spoke at the University of Michigan.
Moore is a curmudgeon who looks like an overweight Leprechaun as he attacks our Sacred Cows. He was putting me to sleep until he mentioned someone that I have discussed in one of my recent missives, Edward Bellamy, author of “Looking Backward” (1888).
He mentioned this utopian novel in similar context to mine, that is, that the social structure worked a lot better when we didn’t have all these “leaders” muddying up the pot. Moore was referring to the financial crisis, among other things, driven by sins of omission and commission by people who make a lot of money but are plague with bad decisions, which gets in the way of workers that do from doing their jobs.
It reminded me of the Catholic Church and its College of Cardinals. I smiled and said to Beautiful Betty, “Well, there is some hope for Moore, bleeding heart liberal that he is; he can read.” She rolled her eyes, and went back to making dinner.
Incidentally, Edward Bellamy’s brother, Francis, gave us “The Pledge of Allegiance.” Moore pointed out that his pledge was much simpler, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the Republic for which it stands,” with no mention of “under God,” or any of the other stuff.
Moore suggested that it should be, “I pledge allegiance to the people of the Republic and to all the people of the World.” Like writer of scripture, writers in other endeavors over time keep changing the message and not necessarily improving it.
Then I read in the Sunday Parade magazine (October 19, 2008) that historian Jon Meacham has an article on “5 Ideas for our Next President.”
The article resonated with me as I’ve written rather extensively about President Andrew Jackson’s leadership, and so it was nice to see it emphasized in this entertaining Sunday supplement. Mecham’s five points follow with my elaboration:
(1) Find people who tell it like it is.
Jackson never looked for such people. He was such people;
(2) Turn weaknesses into strengths.
Jackson literally had no formal education, had been a soldier since the Revolutionary War, and nearly died in it as a boy of fourteen, showing singular bravery, and an instinct for survival.
He distrusted people with education, anyone from the East, or anyone who put on airs. He took pride in never having read a book, and told anyone who would listen he had no time for couth.
Thomas Jefferson considered him a buffoon, but the man created an “Age of Jackson,” and gave birth to the imperial presidency;
(3) Speak to the electorate.
How he did that, indeed! He ignored Congress and his Cabinet, and spoke to and courted the electorate, so much so that he was accused of creating the “spoils system.”
The White House was open to the people, who after a weekend, often left the place with stained carpets, cigarette burns in the furniture and discarded food. It was the source of his power so that he could take on the Eastern Establishment, mainly the banks, which he dissolved, and created a Federal System that he could control to their mortification;
(4) Keep church and state separate.
He did this with a vengeance. He didn’t trust the clergy, didn’t take to sanctimonious types, liked his liquor and pipe, as did his pipe smoking wife. She died before he was inaugurated;
(5) Always have a backup plan (or two).
Jackson was of Protestant Scotch Irish stock and believed in asking forgiveness rather than permission.
He made his reputation by the “Battle of New Orleans” and built on it by invading Florida without permission and sacking both the British and Spanish.
He was called “Old Hickory” because he was as hard as hickory, and called the bluff of Southern States when they threatened succession from the Union.
He was a generation before Lincoln but would have been an amazing general for him had their two careers coincided.
Jackson had a nimble mind and could read his enemies like a book, and counted on them not to be able to read him. He was a schemer more than a planner, and had several backup schemes when one would fail.
He was never derailed by failure but learned from it, and used it to seed his next move. It was why he constantly confounded and finessed his enemies. He needed enemies to orchestrate his combative spirit, and if he didn’t have them, he would have had to create them to function.
It is a strange feeling being a writer such as I am with only an audience of one, but working themes common to so many others. There is a message somewhere in there, but like the source of “dark matter,” I swear I don’t know what it is.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
PROVOCATIVE EXCHANGE TO "TEN DAYS THAT CHANGED AMERICA FOREVER!"
PROVOCATIVE EXCHANGE TO “TEN DAYS THAT CHANGED AMERICA FOREVER!”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 14, 2008
“The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965), American-born British poet, critic and dramatist
A CHICAGO READER COMMENTS:
Hello Jim,
It took a while to digest your annotated anthology of this watershed period in the world's history.
Following your lead, I try to assemble in my mind the meaning of all these events. And, it's difficult to do without allowing biased paranoia to color the thought process.
You have a unique view of the world. You are sort of a humanistic scientist, a chemical engineering side that provides a systemic, cause and effect perspective of events, and the OD side that gives you insight into the complex and less predictable influence human behavior has on the outcomes.
In this situation, I try to view it from a chemist's perspective.
It is easy for all of us to point fingers at irresponsible borrowers, greedy mortgage brokers, consumerism, irrational exuberance of the stock markets, lack of regulation, confusing mortgage securities and, ultimately, the swaps that guaranteed inordinate risk. Crash. People failed and we all fell together. Not true. None of it!
Think of this as a slow chemical reaction with a predictable outcome that required a catalyst along the way to complete. The desired outcome is a transfer of wealth. Is it odd that the only people paying here are the poor and the middle class, both as holders of equity and as taxpayers?
Yes, it's true that the top that earns 30% of income pays 40% of taxes. That leaves us to pay the other 60%. Our progeny and we will pay for this for generations. Why, because the middle class grew too large and the poor were no longer so poor. Wealth was being redistributed in a way that did not suit the rich. The wheels were set in motion at a time we were more worried about Y2K disasters, unaware that the sea change would be much more subtle and complex.
The dot com bust was the first indication that the recapture of wealth could work. It was the tease, the taste of the good life that brought people back for more. More was presented as an economy of ownership. Buy-sell-buy again. You can't lose. Real cash dollars were paid for those homes. Someone has that last peak price in his or her pocket.
Who owns those mortgage securities that were covered by swaps which the taxpayer guaranteed through the buyout of AIG and others?
We point the finger and shout greed at Wall Street. I have a feeling this is much more sinister than we can comprehend. In the past I have always dismissed the "new world order" talk as ravings of a paranoid sect. I am still not in that camp. With these recent events leading to us accepting with open arms governments buying banks and consolidating power I am starting to think a bit differently and in need of someone to talk me down.
Regards,
Michael
DR. FISHER RESPONDS
Michael, I thank you for your candor and your provocative response. At the outset, I want to assure you I don’t plan on talking you down from your views but filling in your broad outline.
I have watched little guys like me live well beyond their means ever since I was in my early twenties and had a family of my own. When I could afford a $100,000 house in 1964, I bought a $25,000 house. It was quite grand for the price in picturesque country.
It was a two story brick ranch home with a full basement with seven foot ceilings, a former living and dining room, a family room, two fire places, three bathrooms, a winding stairway with carpeted steps, hardwood floors in four bedrooms on the second floor, and a full kitchen, some nearly 4,000 square feet, including the finished basement.
I include the basement because, I had it completely paneled except for the utility room and divided into a playroom for the children on one side, and the other a study with a fireplace, built-in book cases floor to ceiling on two walls with all the floors tiled.
When I was promoted to form a new company in South Africa, I put it on sale for $30,000 in early 1968, and it sold in three days. The house was situated in a suburb of Louisville in a place called “Anchorage,” which had a history going back to the antebellum days. I visited the place on Dorsey Lane in 2003, and all the small evergreens planted so long ago were now 15 feet high and framed the backyard. The house was essentially as it was in 1964, but now valued at more than $300,000.
When I could afford a Cadillac, I bought a Chevrolet. There were only two exceptions to this frugality. I dressed the part and wore high-end Hickey Freeman three-piece suits, and topcoats, monogram shirts, pricey ties, calf high sox and Florsheim shoes. It was my uniform. We Irish love uniforms. I was a poor boy in a rich man’s world, and as my mother programmed me, I took advantage of being tall, good looking with a deep convincing voice and a presence.
The other extravagance was books, which incidentally, complemented my insecurity. My mother persuaded me at an early age that you get a report card every day, and you can never rest on your laurels. “Read and grow,” she would say.
This was my armament against a substantive world with many advantages that I did not have. It was also the weapons to take on the world on my terms and in my way. I can still hear my mother’s voice saying, “Go for it!” And my da’s caution, “You don’t belong, Jimmy, you’re not one of them.”
The conflict between these two voices I hear in your words, as they reverberate across the hinterland, and came for me to be like rubbing two sticks together to became my fire.
I’ve never looked up to any man, although I admire many; never felt any man superior to me, although I esteem some; never felt trapped by an olive branch or a golden parachute, although they have been offered. I am not better than any man, but no man is any better than I am. My da wanted to protect me from the many beatings I have taken, but my mother relished the opportunity to witness the fight.
Being a reader, especially of novels, it has always amazed me when engineers and scientists brag about not reading novels. Novels have provided me with a better insight into humanity than my social and psychological graduate education.
Reading taught me to conceptualize, to quickly find the flaw in the argument of others. Though they be my superiors, I often put them on notice because as I had to earn their respect they had to earn mine as well. Territorial imperatives were not justified by position power. In that sense, I feel I am still 50 years ahead of today’s professionals who remain obsequious and timid in the face of the status quo.
It was only because I was successful selling that I went up the ladder. It was quickly apparent as a research & development chemist that I was in the wrong pew. Selling was supposed to be temporary, but as my young family grew, I knew I made my bed and so made the most of it.
What I didn’t realize in the quiet of the laboratory, as I moved onto a world stage is that the stories of imperial exploitation once associated with the Spanish, British and Russian Empires were equally true of corporate America. I was now an agent to exploit Third World countries of their natural resources because if we didn’t do it someone would, and they would not be nearly as benevolent.
Miners in Jamaica and Surinam extracted the raw bauxite and our customers refined it into aluminum, and I went along with the rationale, knowing that the miners were paid only pennies on the dollar for their work.
Then as luck would have it I found myself in South Africa in the cauldron of apartheid. I might even have gone along with this self-deceit if my gardener had not been murdered on my property, and treated as if a dog was run over and killed.
Not able to deal with this, I went to my pastor for solace, and was given none. I talked to the nuns at my children’s school, and they were even more abrupt. The priests and nuns were missionaries from Ireland, and wanted no trouble with the government. Then I thought, they are quiet about the government, but I was equally quiet about corporate America.
The corporate game has not changed. What is happening now is not the Great Depression revisited; it is far greater and more obscene and duplicitous than any novelist could imagine. The morality of the times has allowed and even sanctioned it.
Now, every man, woman and child in America will pay in the four figures for this chicanery, for the absence of moral authority, for a quarter century of nobody in charge. That includes us all as nobody has questioned if making money is truly the pursuit of happiness, nobody has questioned an economy driven by credit and financed by speculators abroad, nobody has stopped to question the hype which is as ephemeral as air. We are not the first society to accept rhetoric as reality, and we won’t be the last.
There is no profit in blaming Wall Street or Main Street or some ethnic group. We are all complicit in this in one way or another. Nobody forced anyone to buy what they could not afford, to carry eight to ten credit cards in which they could only pay the minimum due each month, making the credit card companies rich and them poorer for the practice. People have been living this way not simply for months but for years.
Christopher Lasch went to an early grave trying to get our attention. “In the Culture of Narcissism” (1978) he profiled the anxious 1970s, when we were self-absorbed, obsessed with sexual liberation only to become imprisoned in our libidos, seeking therapy in unabashed consumption. He followed this with “The Minimal Self” (1984) in which people had lost confidence and negated superiority or elitism finding solace in becoming obsessively self-analytical. Dr. Phil, et al. now benefit from this obsession. Then he wrote “The True and Only Heaven” (1991) in which he addressed rising material expectations and falling competence, responsibility and citizenship. These studies illustrate the retreat from our values to become slave to our appetites.
Michael, it has been truly a bumpy economic ride of late, and nothing that you say is far off the mark. We as a society are changing, which is Lasch’s point, and not for the better.
A long time ago, I read a book by Edward Bellamy (1850 – 1898) titled “Looking Backward” (1888). It was a utopian romance looking back from 2000 to 1887. Bellamy envisioned the case of economic revolution with prophecies of a new world order in 2000 A.D. from his 1888 window. In his utopia, there is no money. The state has given everyone no matter what they do a card, which contains the same amount of credit for a year’s expenses with no chance for anyone to spend their credit foolishly or starve.
If a person cannot handle his credit wisely, a supervisor is provided to help him.
Crime is treated as a mental disease with criminals placed in hospitals and treated as mental cases. Theft is silly when everyone has the same things.
The head of government is the president, who is controlled by Congress, which has far greater power. Boards made up of old professionals, report to the president, and control education and medicine.
A woman chosen by the women of the country has the power to veto any bill concerning the rights of the female population.
There is no public discontent with government, and wonderful international cooperation. As I said, it is a utopian romance, but it made an impression on my young mind, and perhaps was a contributing factor in my writing “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007).
Bellamy’s society looks very much like socialism or communism, and it was neither, or perhaps both but in a democratic utopia. At least his society was not driven by the “Robber Barons” who were prominent in his time such men as Mellon, Carnegie and Rockefeller, among others.
The Robber Barons were great wealth creators who didn’t let the law of the land impede their conquests. There were the gangs of thugs employed by Carnegie to keep unions out of his steel mills, even resorting to murder, Secretary of Treasury Mellon resorting to exploit the tax code to award the rich, and Rockefeller creating an absolute monopoly over drilling, transportation, refinement and sale of petroleum until the government stepped in.
It was a lawless age for the rich when Bellamy wrote this little novel, which was widely popular, and predicted a new social order. Surprisingly, it came to influence economic thinking in both the United States and Europe.
These wealth creators assuaged their sins by creating free public libraries across the land (Carnegie), an important financial institute (Mellon), and a medical research institute (Rockefeller), and this is how these men are remembered. I’ve read books on them and they were not nice men but great Americans capitalists.
Your chemistry analogy on the transfer of wealth is captivating. A catalyst, as you know, either accelerates or retards a chemical reaction to completion. Stoichiometry implies that the mole fractions that go into the reaction must equal the mole fractions once the reaction is completed. It follows Newton’s Law that mass can neither be created nor destroyed, only transferred from one state to another.
Again, you are right about the wealth creators. To be winners there must be losers, for someone to accumulate great wealth someone must lose in the bargain, a zero sum game. Yes, they have paid more taxes than their numbers, but we wealth providers in our labor and consumption pay for their misadventures, folly, fraud, corruption, and incompetence as the current situation illustrates.
Gates, Jobs & company broke through this pattern when giants like IBM and Xerox ignored the new age of software and computers. These atypical wealth creators were college dropouts operating from garages. What happened once they became billionaires? They exploited the system, as did Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, et al.
It is as if there is no cure for the malady, lobbying government for their special interests, averting the law, price fixing and even suborning perjury by doing one thing and saying they have done another. Remember the cigarette companies? Wealth creators see themselves as a law unto themselves and essential to our economic survival.
Michael, I see them important but no longer intimidating dinosaurs. More than a hundred years ago wealth creators were saying and doing the same things we hear and see today. “We create jobs,” they say, “we are the backbone of the economy.” Fifty years ago CEO Wilson of GM said, “As GM goes so goes America!” Unfortunately, he was right.
There is change in the air. In a way, the current economic crisis is a good thing. People have placed nearly 100 percent of their trust and well being in the surrogate parent of their corporate employer. Now they realize they have been betrayed; now they have been forced to grow up; now it has finally dawn on them that they must trust themselves first and foremost to survive.
Now they know their brains, ingenuity and creativity are not to fill the coffers of a few, but to meet their own needs and those of their neighbors. We are moving back to the pre-industrial guilds, where there are no bosses, no performance appraisals, no pecking orders, no special parking, no bonuses for the few, and a Holiday turkey for the many, no shinny glass mega-structures blinding out the sun, but instead millions and millions of cottage industries in homes, garages, reclaimed defaulted buildings across the land.
These new grown up adults will prove the casinos that grace the landscape are but an apparition as they won’t count on luck but pluck as they use their computers and Internet to develop skills and sell their wares in a new day. This will force a new social, political and economic structure on society. It will not occur in my lifetime but it will occur.
A hundred years ago we were not even 100 million strong, and less than ten percent of Americans were high school graduates, and less than five percent college trained. A hundred years ago the majority of workers could not read or do simple mathematical calculations, now literacy across the country is as high as 80 percent with more than 75 percent of adults high school graduates and more than 50 percent college trained. A hundred years ago the workforce was male driven with females not able to vote or prove their mettle in the workplace. Now, that has all changed. The old rhetoric no longer computes yet it never tires of being offered.
So, I have no intentions of backing you down from your strong views. I do offer a caveat. We all have biases and many of them are a product of our home, school, church, workplace, community and the media. It is how they claim power and control over us. In subtle ways, they project our angst on this or that group as the source of our failure to make adequate progress when it is never the case.
We are likely to feel the full weight of this pressure when we start acting and thinking for ourselves, and rely on our direct experience, not secondary and tertiary sources. It is times like now that chaos feeds change, and change looks for scapegoats to justify departure from the status quo. Those with the most to lose have been known to turn group against group leaving them free from the free for all.
We are programmed in our ethnic cultures to be insulated and even isolated, seeing other groups as the culprit to our disadvantage when this is only an orchestration from the highest levels.
Christopher Lasch saw this and attacked it with academic panache. The other night I watched a panel of experts discussed the financial crisis, many of them Jews. Paul Krugman received the Nobel Laureate for Economics for 2008, who is also a Jew. It would be wrong minded to say Wall Street and the financial crisis is the result of a Jewish cabal.
My wife is business manager of a Jewish Day School, a place that cost parents as much as $7,000 for preschool and twice that much for the upper grammar school grades, and most of these parents are hardly rich. Many parents have to make deep sacrifices to send their children to such a school that is dedicated to academic excellence and the Jewish culture. It is no accident that many scientists, academics, writers and intellectuals are of the Jewish ethnicity because they believe in the power of “the word” and study harder than most.
When I was a college student home during the holidays, and would go to the library, my mother would ask me if I saw any of my friends there, and I would answer, “Only my Jewish friends.”
Similar arguments could be given for Hispanics that have come to dominate the southern part of my state of Florida. Dade and Broward counties have become Hispanic. Florida even has a Hispanic U.S. Senator born in Cuba. Some say, what about the African Americans that have been in this state for more than 300 years?
The answer is that Brown vs. the Board of Education was in 1954, only 54 years ago. You cannot make up 300 years in one-sixth of the time. You cannot overcome the mindset of subservience by the stroke of a pen. You have to work the problem. Some of the smartest students in my classes in graduate school in the 1970s were blacks, whereas I had none in undergraduate school in the 1950s. In a peculiar way, Hispanics who once were native to this land are returning. This is not wrong, but inevitable. We cannot put up barriers between borders in the new global world. We might as well try to capture the wind.
The common bias most blacks are on the dole is not only inaccurate but wrong minded. In point of fact more whites are on welfare than blacks in raw numbers and as a percentage of their respective populations. Studies over the past century have shown that unions preferred to support welfare to keep blacks out of the union job market competing with them for jobs. So, the so-called “Welfare State” was not a magnanimous proposition but kept people down and in their place. That, too, is changing.
Sadly, Native Americans have received little attention getting their vengeance by a rash of casinos across Indian reservations. Now, entrepreneurs are spreading the same pox from sea to shining sea.
Remember, it was not many years ago that businesses put up signs in their windows, “Irish Need Not Apply.” Now, Irish like Jews and Italians and other ethnicities are totally assimilated into the American culture.
Michael, I write for people like you, thinking people who are not slaves to the slogans, the promises and the planned actions that now fill the air from our two presidential candidates. Most political platforms are quickly forgotten once “their man” is in office. We elect a president, and then expect change to occur miraculously when that person is a flawed human being much like we all are with limited capabilities and vision.
It is the candidate that recognizes his weakness and complements it with strength is the true leader. People of great strengths have great weaknesses; and people of great weaknesses are often unaware of their great strengths. It is not 1929 or 1933 when FDR took office. FDR was said by one observer to have a first class personality and a second-class mind. This was no surprise to him. So, he surrounded himself with people with first class minds.
It will be January 20, 2009 soon when the new president takes office to face a very different world. .
Finally, with regard to my scribbling, it is an oral inclination that has gravitated to a writing fixation in my dotage. Permit me to explain.
I had a favorite colleague in Nalco Chemical named Bob Barney whom I used to have coffee with of a Monday morning before we hit the road. He thought me prescient because I looked inside developments in the company, never taking them at face value. This was true when the CEO addressed us at a regional meeting.
Over our Monday morning coffee the following week, he said excitedly, “I think things are going to be great, what do you think?”
“How will things affect you personally?” I answered.
His brow furrowed, and he repeated the question.
“I mean,” I continued, “how are they going to help you?”
He lit a fresh cigarette on the end of the one he was smoking, and said, “I don’t know do I?”
“Yes, you do,” I insisted, “that is why we met, that is why he addressed us, he used the same methods we use in selling, hitting our hot spots.”
“What hot spots?”
“Our security hot spots, our comfort zone, saying he’s going to take care of us, to increase commissions, improve the retirement package, provide more vacation days.”
“Well, they’re all great, so what’s your point?”
“First, are they beneficial to you, and if so, at what price? The package is designed to advance his agenda to increase his leverage to bump up productivity in the short term to increase his stock portfolio that is now traded over the counter. If you look at his stock options, he pays a fraction of the current price but needs to hold the stock for a minimum of six months before he cashes it in. He’s protecting his potential profit.”
“How do you know this?”
“It’s all in the annual report if you read it.”
“But that’s not fair, is it?”
“Fairness has nothing to do with it. It is legal. He’s worried about what is legal, not fair, or morally right. It’s the American way. It’s the capitalistic system.”
He looked at me suspiciously. “You’re one cynical bastard.”
“I believe I am,” I agreed with a smile.
“Why do you smile?”
“Did I smile?”
“Yes, you did.”
“I suppose it is because it is something that I have to hear out loud.”
“What is that?”
“That I’m not for sale.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 14, 2008
“The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965), American-born British poet, critic and dramatist
A CHICAGO READER COMMENTS:
Hello Jim,
It took a while to digest your annotated anthology of this watershed period in the world's history.
Following your lead, I try to assemble in my mind the meaning of all these events. And, it's difficult to do without allowing biased paranoia to color the thought process.
You have a unique view of the world. You are sort of a humanistic scientist, a chemical engineering side that provides a systemic, cause and effect perspective of events, and the OD side that gives you insight into the complex and less predictable influence human behavior has on the outcomes.
In this situation, I try to view it from a chemist's perspective.
It is easy for all of us to point fingers at irresponsible borrowers, greedy mortgage brokers, consumerism, irrational exuberance of the stock markets, lack of regulation, confusing mortgage securities and, ultimately, the swaps that guaranteed inordinate risk. Crash. People failed and we all fell together. Not true. None of it!
Think of this as a slow chemical reaction with a predictable outcome that required a catalyst along the way to complete. The desired outcome is a transfer of wealth. Is it odd that the only people paying here are the poor and the middle class, both as holders of equity and as taxpayers?
Yes, it's true that the top that earns 30% of income pays 40% of taxes. That leaves us to pay the other 60%. Our progeny and we will pay for this for generations. Why, because the middle class grew too large and the poor were no longer so poor. Wealth was being redistributed in a way that did not suit the rich. The wheels were set in motion at a time we were more worried about Y2K disasters, unaware that the sea change would be much more subtle and complex.
The dot com bust was the first indication that the recapture of wealth could work. It was the tease, the taste of the good life that brought people back for more. More was presented as an economy of ownership. Buy-sell-buy again. You can't lose. Real cash dollars were paid for those homes. Someone has that last peak price in his or her pocket.
Who owns those mortgage securities that were covered by swaps which the taxpayer guaranteed through the buyout of AIG and others?
We point the finger and shout greed at Wall Street. I have a feeling this is much more sinister than we can comprehend. In the past I have always dismissed the "new world order" talk as ravings of a paranoid sect. I am still not in that camp. With these recent events leading to us accepting with open arms governments buying banks and consolidating power I am starting to think a bit differently and in need of someone to talk me down.
Regards,
Michael
DR. FISHER RESPONDS
Michael, I thank you for your candor and your provocative response. At the outset, I want to assure you I don’t plan on talking you down from your views but filling in your broad outline.
I have watched little guys like me live well beyond their means ever since I was in my early twenties and had a family of my own. When I could afford a $100,000 house in 1964, I bought a $25,000 house. It was quite grand for the price in picturesque country.
It was a two story brick ranch home with a full basement with seven foot ceilings, a former living and dining room, a family room, two fire places, three bathrooms, a winding stairway with carpeted steps, hardwood floors in four bedrooms on the second floor, and a full kitchen, some nearly 4,000 square feet, including the finished basement.
I include the basement because, I had it completely paneled except for the utility room and divided into a playroom for the children on one side, and the other a study with a fireplace, built-in book cases floor to ceiling on two walls with all the floors tiled.
When I was promoted to form a new company in South Africa, I put it on sale for $30,000 in early 1968, and it sold in three days. The house was situated in a suburb of Louisville in a place called “Anchorage,” which had a history going back to the antebellum days. I visited the place on Dorsey Lane in 2003, and all the small evergreens planted so long ago were now 15 feet high and framed the backyard. The house was essentially as it was in 1964, but now valued at more than $300,000.
When I could afford a Cadillac, I bought a Chevrolet. There were only two exceptions to this frugality. I dressed the part and wore high-end Hickey Freeman three-piece suits, and topcoats, monogram shirts, pricey ties, calf high sox and Florsheim shoes. It was my uniform. We Irish love uniforms. I was a poor boy in a rich man’s world, and as my mother programmed me, I took advantage of being tall, good looking with a deep convincing voice and a presence.
The other extravagance was books, which incidentally, complemented my insecurity. My mother persuaded me at an early age that you get a report card every day, and you can never rest on your laurels. “Read and grow,” she would say.
This was my armament against a substantive world with many advantages that I did not have. It was also the weapons to take on the world on my terms and in my way. I can still hear my mother’s voice saying, “Go for it!” And my da’s caution, “You don’t belong, Jimmy, you’re not one of them.”
The conflict between these two voices I hear in your words, as they reverberate across the hinterland, and came for me to be like rubbing two sticks together to became my fire.
I’ve never looked up to any man, although I admire many; never felt any man superior to me, although I esteem some; never felt trapped by an olive branch or a golden parachute, although they have been offered. I am not better than any man, but no man is any better than I am. My da wanted to protect me from the many beatings I have taken, but my mother relished the opportunity to witness the fight.
Being a reader, especially of novels, it has always amazed me when engineers and scientists brag about not reading novels. Novels have provided me with a better insight into humanity than my social and psychological graduate education.
Reading taught me to conceptualize, to quickly find the flaw in the argument of others. Though they be my superiors, I often put them on notice because as I had to earn their respect they had to earn mine as well. Territorial imperatives were not justified by position power. In that sense, I feel I am still 50 years ahead of today’s professionals who remain obsequious and timid in the face of the status quo.
It was only because I was successful selling that I went up the ladder. It was quickly apparent as a research & development chemist that I was in the wrong pew. Selling was supposed to be temporary, but as my young family grew, I knew I made my bed and so made the most of it.
What I didn’t realize in the quiet of the laboratory, as I moved onto a world stage is that the stories of imperial exploitation once associated with the Spanish, British and Russian Empires were equally true of corporate America. I was now an agent to exploit Third World countries of their natural resources because if we didn’t do it someone would, and they would not be nearly as benevolent.
Miners in Jamaica and Surinam extracted the raw bauxite and our customers refined it into aluminum, and I went along with the rationale, knowing that the miners were paid only pennies on the dollar for their work.
Then as luck would have it I found myself in South Africa in the cauldron of apartheid. I might even have gone along with this self-deceit if my gardener had not been murdered on my property, and treated as if a dog was run over and killed.
Not able to deal with this, I went to my pastor for solace, and was given none. I talked to the nuns at my children’s school, and they were even more abrupt. The priests and nuns were missionaries from Ireland, and wanted no trouble with the government. Then I thought, they are quiet about the government, but I was equally quiet about corporate America.
The corporate game has not changed. What is happening now is not the Great Depression revisited; it is far greater and more obscene and duplicitous than any novelist could imagine. The morality of the times has allowed and even sanctioned it.
Now, every man, woman and child in America will pay in the four figures for this chicanery, for the absence of moral authority, for a quarter century of nobody in charge. That includes us all as nobody has questioned if making money is truly the pursuit of happiness, nobody has questioned an economy driven by credit and financed by speculators abroad, nobody has stopped to question the hype which is as ephemeral as air. We are not the first society to accept rhetoric as reality, and we won’t be the last.
There is no profit in blaming Wall Street or Main Street or some ethnic group. We are all complicit in this in one way or another. Nobody forced anyone to buy what they could not afford, to carry eight to ten credit cards in which they could only pay the minimum due each month, making the credit card companies rich and them poorer for the practice. People have been living this way not simply for months but for years.
Christopher Lasch went to an early grave trying to get our attention. “In the Culture of Narcissism” (1978) he profiled the anxious 1970s, when we were self-absorbed, obsessed with sexual liberation only to become imprisoned in our libidos, seeking therapy in unabashed consumption. He followed this with “The Minimal Self” (1984) in which people had lost confidence and negated superiority or elitism finding solace in becoming obsessively self-analytical. Dr. Phil, et al. now benefit from this obsession. Then he wrote “The True and Only Heaven” (1991) in which he addressed rising material expectations and falling competence, responsibility and citizenship. These studies illustrate the retreat from our values to become slave to our appetites.
Michael, it has been truly a bumpy economic ride of late, and nothing that you say is far off the mark. We as a society are changing, which is Lasch’s point, and not for the better.
A long time ago, I read a book by Edward Bellamy (1850 – 1898) titled “Looking Backward” (1888). It was a utopian romance looking back from 2000 to 1887. Bellamy envisioned the case of economic revolution with prophecies of a new world order in 2000 A.D. from his 1888 window. In his utopia, there is no money. The state has given everyone no matter what they do a card, which contains the same amount of credit for a year’s expenses with no chance for anyone to spend their credit foolishly or starve.
If a person cannot handle his credit wisely, a supervisor is provided to help him.
Crime is treated as a mental disease with criminals placed in hospitals and treated as mental cases. Theft is silly when everyone has the same things.
The head of government is the president, who is controlled by Congress, which has far greater power. Boards made up of old professionals, report to the president, and control education and medicine.
A woman chosen by the women of the country has the power to veto any bill concerning the rights of the female population.
There is no public discontent with government, and wonderful international cooperation. As I said, it is a utopian romance, but it made an impression on my young mind, and perhaps was a contributing factor in my writing “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007).
Bellamy’s society looks very much like socialism or communism, and it was neither, or perhaps both but in a democratic utopia. At least his society was not driven by the “Robber Barons” who were prominent in his time such men as Mellon, Carnegie and Rockefeller, among others.
The Robber Barons were great wealth creators who didn’t let the law of the land impede their conquests. There were the gangs of thugs employed by Carnegie to keep unions out of his steel mills, even resorting to murder, Secretary of Treasury Mellon resorting to exploit the tax code to award the rich, and Rockefeller creating an absolute monopoly over drilling, transportation, refinement and sale of petroleum until the government stepped in.
It was a lawless age for the rich when Bellamy wrote this little novel, which was widely popular, and predicted a new social order. Surprisingly, it came to influence economic thinking in both the United States and Europe.
These wealth creators assuaged their sins by creating free public libraries across the land (Carnegie), an important financial institute (Mellon), and a medical research institute (Rockefeller), and this is how these men are remembered. I’ve read books on them and they were not nice men but great Americans capitalists.
Your chemistry analogy on the transfer of wealth is captivating. A catalyst, as you know, either accelerates or retards a chemical reaction to completion. Stoichiometry implies that the mole fractions that go into the reaction must equal the mole fractions once the reaction is completed. It follows Newton’s Law that mass can neither be created nor destroyed, only transferred from one state to another.
Again, you are right about the wealth creators. To be winners there must be losers, for someone to accumulate great wealth someone must lose in the bargain, a zero sum game. Yes, they have paid more taxes than their numbers, but we wealth providers in our labor and consumption pay for their misadventures, folly, fraud, corruption, and incompetence as the current situation illustrates.
Gates, Jobs & company broke through this pattern when giants like IBM and Xerox ignored the new age of software and computers. These atypical wealth creators were college dropouts operating from garages. What happened once they became billionaires? They exploited the system, as did Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, et al.
It is as if there is no cure for the malady, lobbying government for their special interests, averting the law, price fixing and even suborning perjury by doing one thing and saying they have done another. Remember the cigarette companies? Wealth creators see themselves as a law unto themselves and essential to our economic survival.
Michael, I see them important but no longer intimidating dinosaurs. More than a hundred years ago wealth creators were saying and doing the same things we hear and see today. “We create jobs,” they say, “we are the backbone of the economy.” Fifty years ago CEO Wilson of GM said, “As GM goes so goes America!” Unfortunately, he was right.
There is change in the air. In a way, the current economic crisis is a good thing. People have placed nearly 100 percent of their trust and well being in the surrogate parent of their corporate employer. Now they realize they have been betrayed; now they have been forced to grow up; now it has finally dawn on them that they must trust themselves first and foremost to survive.
Now they know their brains, ingenuity and creativity are not to fill the coffers of a few, but to meet their own needs and those of their neighbors. We are moving back to the pre-industrial guilds, where there are no bosses, no performance appraisals, no pecking orders, no special parking, no bonuses for the few, and a Holiday turkey for the many, no shinny glass mega-structures blinding out the sun, but instead millions and millions of cottage industries in homes, garages, reclaimed defaulted buildings across the land.
These new grown up adults will prove the casinos that grace the landscape are but an apparition as they won’t count on luck but pluck as they use their computers and Internet to develop skills and sell their wares in a new day. This will force a new social, political and economic structure on society. It will not occur in my lifetime but it will occur.
A hundred years ago we were not even 100 million strong, and less than ten percent of Americans were high school graduates, and less than five percent college trained. A hundred years ago the majority of workers could not read or do simple mathematical calculations, now literacy across the country is as high as 80 percent with more than 75 percent of adults high school graduates and more than 50 percent college trained. A hundred years ago the workforce was male driven with females not able to vote or prove their mettle in the workplace. Now, that has all changed. The old rhetoric no longer computes yet it never tires of being offered.
So, I have no intentions of backing you down from your strong views. I do offer a caveat. We all have biases and many of them are a product of our home, school, church, workplace, community and the media. It is how they claim power and control over us. In subtle ways, they project our angst on this or that group as the source of our failure to make adequate progress when it is never the case.
We are likely to feel the full weight of this pressure when we start acting and thinking for ourselves, and rely on our direct experience, not secondary and tertiary sources. It is times like now that chaos feeds change, and change looks for scapegoats to justify departure from the status quo. Those with the most to lose have been known to turn group against group leaving them free from the free for all.
We are programmed in our ethnic cultures to be insulated and even isolated, seeing other groups as the culprit to our disadvantage when this is only an orchestration from the highest levels.
Christopher Lasch saw this and attacked it with academic panache. The other night I watched a panel of experts discussed the financial crisis, many of them Jews. Paul Krugman received the Nobel Laureate for Economics for 2008, who is also a Jew. It would be wrong minded to say Wall Street and the financial crisis is the result of a Jewish cabal.
My wife is business manager of a Jewish Day School, a place that cost parents as much as $7,000 for preschool and twice that much for the upper grammar school grades, and most of these parents are hardly rich. Many parents have to make deep sacrifices to send their children to such a school that is dedicated to academic excellence and the Jewish culture. It is no accident that many scientists, academics, writers and intellectuals are of the Jewish ethnicity because they believe in the power of “the word” and study harder than most.
When I was a college student home during the holidays, and would go to the library, my mother would ask me if I saw any of my friends there, and I would answer, “Only my Jewish friends.”
Similar arguments could be given for Hispanics that have come to dominate the southern part of my state of Florida. Dade and Broward counties have become Hispanic. Florida even has a Hispanic U.S. Senator born in Cuba. Some say, what about the African Americans that have been in this state for more than 300 years?
The answer is that Brown vs. the Board of Education was in 1954, only 54 years ago. You cannot make up 300 years in one-sixth of the time. You cannot overcome the mindset of subservience by the stroke of a pen. You have to work the problem. Some of the smartest students in my classes in graduate school in the 1970s were blacks, whereas I had none in undergraduate school in the 1950s. In a peculiar way, Hispanics who once were native to this land are returning. This is not wrong, but inevitable. We cannot put up barriers between borders in the new global world. We might as well try to capture the wind.
The common bias most blacks are on the dole is not only inaccurate but wrong minded. In point of fact more whites are on welfare than blacks in raw numbers and as a percentage of their respective populations. Studies over the past century have shown that unions preferred to support welfare to keep blacks out of the union job market competing with them for jobs. So, the so-called “Welfare State” was not a magnanimous proposition but kept people down and in their place. That, too, is changing.
Sadly, Native Americans have received little attention getting their vengeance by a rash of casinos across Indian reservations. Now, entrepreneurs are spreading the same pox from sea to shining sea.
Remember, it was not many years ago that businesses put up signs in their windows, “Irish Need Not Apply.” Now, Irish like Jews and Italians and other ethnicities are totally assimilated into the American culture.
Michael, I write for people like you, thinking people who are not slaves to the slogans, the promises and the planned actions that now fill the air from our two presidential candidates. Most political platforms are quickly forgotten once “their man” is in office. We elect a president, and then expect change to occur miraculously when that person is a flawed human being much like we all are with limited capabilities and vision.
It is the candidate that recognizes his weakness and complements it with strength is the true leader. People of great strengths have great weaknesses; and people of great weaknesses are often unaware of their great strengths. It is not 1929 or 1933 when FDR took office. FDR was said by one observer to have a first class personality and a second-class mind. This was no surprise to him. So, he surrounded himself with people with first class minds.
It will be January 20, 2009 soon when the new president takes office to face a very different world. .
Finally, with regard to my scribbling, it is an oral inclination that has gravitated to a writing fixation in my dotage. Permit me to explain.
I had a favorite colleague in Nalco Chemical named Bob Barney whom I used to have coffee with of a Monday morning before we hit the road. He thought me prescient because I looked inside developments in the company, never taking them at face value. This was true when the CEO addressed us at a regional meeting.
Over our Monday morning coffee the following week, he said excitedly, “I think things are going to be great, what do you think?”
“How will things affect you personally?” I answered.
His brow furrowed, and he repeated the question.
“I mean,” I continued, “how are they going to help you?”
He lit a fresh cigarette on the end of the one he was smoking, and said, “I don’t know do I?”
“Yes, you do,” I insisted, “that is why we met, that is why he addressed us, he used the same methods we use in selling, hitting our hot spots.”
“What hot spots?”
“Our security hot spots, our comfort zone, saying he’s going to take care of us, to increase commissions, improve the retirement package, provide more vacation days.”
“Well, they’re all great, so what’s your point?”
“First, are they beneficial to you, and if so, at what price? The package is designed to advance his agenda to increase his leverage to bump up productivity in the short term to increase his stock portfolio that is now traded over the counter. If you look at his stock options, he pays a fraction of the current price but needs to hold the stock for a minimum of six months before he cashes it in. He’s protecting his potential profit.”
“How do you know this?”
“It’s all in the annual report if you read it.”
“But that’s not fair, is it?”
“Fairness has nothing to do with it. It is legal. He’s worried about what is legal, not fair, or morally right. It’s the American way. It’s the capitalistic system.”
He looked at me suspiciously. “You’re one cynical bastard.”
“I believe I am,” I agreed with a smile.
“Why do you smile?”
“Did I smile?”
“Yes, you did.”
“I suppose it is because it is something that I have to hear out loud.”
“What is that?”
“That I’m not for sale.”
Monday, October 13, 2008
COMMENT & RESPONSE TO "TEN DAYS THAT CHANGED AMERICA FOREVER!
COMMENT AND RESPONSE TO “TEN DAYS THAT CHANGED AMERICA FOREVER!”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 13, 2008
“As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men’s native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying.”
Robert Boyle (1626 – 1691), English Chemist and Philosopher
* * * * * * * * *
COMMENT OF A CANADIAN
“Ten Days the World Would Like to Forget" might be a good alternate title.
So many people are confused and anxious, having been fed a steady diet of bad news for several weeks.
It's true; the real economy has been disconnected from the financial economy for a long long time. While it seems no one knows how to fix the system, a certain group does have the answer, but they will keep that information to themselves, ready to cash in when they can buy up the world at 10 cents on the dollar.
But it's not like there were no warnings. We all knew the party would end someday.
DR. FISHER RESPONSE:
The comment of this Canadian is an astute observation of the current uncoupling of the real economy from the financial economy. He is a person I’ve known only through this medium for several years now.
Where I think we see the situation a little differently is his reference to “a certain group does have the answer, but they will keep that information to themselves.” If it were only so!
It has been our dependence on our leaders to take care of us, to do the heavy lifting, “the right thing,” to be sagacious when we have felt foolish or fool hardy that has vanished. That is the monumental change in the firmament.
Folly now belongs to us all! We are all lost and must find our way as leaders because that has been the problem: we are all quintessential followers from the highest to the lowest, waiting for someone else to save us from ourselves.
My Canadian friend made me reflect on the importance of “the word.” It so happens that I’ve been reading the book of the biblical scholar Dr. Bart D. Ehrman titled “Misquoted Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why” (2005).
What is apparent is that the Bible is a very human book. First, the New Testament was written centuries after the Life of Jesus, and then the surviving manuscripts appear to be copies of copies of copies, ad infinitum, with no clear appreciation of how closely they reflect or relate to the original documents.
Moreover, as much as 90 percent of the early copiers of the New Testament, as late as the fourth century, were illiterate, and copied letter by letter without punctuation or word separation. In 1707 the biblical scholar John Mill of Queens College, Oxford, published the “Greek New Testament,” reporting some 30,000 textual errors. Subsequent scholars have reported hundreds of thousands of such errors.
Since letters were not separated, “godisnowhere” could mean “God is now here” or “God is nowhere.” Then author Ehrman, to illustrate the difficulty, asks does “lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable” report a normal or supernatural event?
I make reference to this human phenomenon for reason.
It made me realize that most information we receive and process comes from secondary and tertiary sources, and not from our experience or from each other. It comes from outside us not from inside us. We then bless this information as fact, echo its sentiments and then share it with each other, changing it as our exchanges multiply, mimicking the colossal errors biblical scholars have found in the Sacred Word, and then acting on this suspect information only to wonder why we are so lost.
Today, I watched the “Charlie Rose” show on PBS television in which he had a Wall Street critic, a journalist and a hedge fund manager discuss the current financial crisis. It is apparent that they don’t have a clue, none of them. In fact, they can’t even define the problem in precise terms but echo the rhetoric that we have heard for the past several days.
Then I turned to C-Span in which Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi gathered a cadre of experts around the rostrum to give one minute dissertations of how each of them saw the current financial crisis, and what should be done about it.
Were this “Saturday Night Live!” I would have marveled at this tragic comedy charade, but this was a collection of serious people taking themselves and their views seriously, expecting to assure us, the watcher and listener for their collective effort. I found this theater chilling and unsettling. It gave me the distinct feeling “no one is in charge.”
One of Charlie Rose’s guests said that experts were falling over each other to get to Wall Street to give their two cents, when they should be calling on the White House. Imagine that. We call the President of the United States the “most powerful leader in the world,” and these experts are treating the White House as if nobody is at home.
Listening to these experts, and being a small investor long retired, it is disconcerting to see people we have elected, or people placed in positions of authority, power, trust, integrity and loyalty show a fawning deference to their respective roles, while displaying little appreciation of the mess they have engineered either by commission or omission. They appear so full of themselves on camera that they seem unaware of the empty suits they appear to be, or to appreciate the fact that they have failed us, and in failing us have failed themselves and the world.
We are a reactive society, which has failed in memoriam to appreciate we don’t anticipate but react to crises. The crises we react to are the crises we create. Have no doubt the people who resolve this current financial crisis will be treated as heroes. Where were these heroes before the financial crisis got out of hand? They were either feeding it, or too entrenched in their careers to raise their voices more than a mummer.
I’ve been writing more than thirty years now about the “leaderless leadership” syndrome. Leadership calls for a vision to see and an ability to serve, for having the character and courage not only to commit to the challenges, but also to become totally involved in the process. So, if the ship goes down the leader goes down with it, and doesn’t get lifted to safety out of the fray by a helicopter.
We have created a “cult of leadership” which sees itself above the fray and not to be measured by the same criteria as the working stiffs in the trenches. We have allowed this cult to flourish with failed executives getting tens of millions of dollars in golden parachutes as they depart the bridge from their failed helm, as the ship goes down.
The “cult of leadership” subscribes to the dictum that self-interests take precedence over duty. At the highest levels, and I’m speaking from my own corporate experience, it is more important to get along and go along than to rock the boat with disturbing information or contrary analysis. In this cult the sycophant rises to the top as "pyramid climber." These ambitious types are always campaigning for the next job never having time to do the job paid to do. It is a nostalgic post World War Two fixation that American enterprise still holds close to its heart.
Personality is more important than perception, being a loyal member of the team more important than seeing the emperor is naked and reporting the same.
My message, which has not been heard, has been directed to millions like myself who have risen from the lowest social economic situations in our society to some level of influence.
People are afraid to voice their views for fear of losing their job, failing to be promoted, or indeed, being made redundant. I have spoken for them and to them. They hear me but do not heed me because it is too dangerous. Now, that danger has turned into a possible total social economic collapse.
Should China, for one, call in its note on the trillions of dollars she has loaned us, dollars that continue to fuel our economy, our financial house of cards would collapse. We are counting on China not doing this because we are her best customer.
Dr. Fisher, I am asked repeatedly, why do you still write if this is so painful for you? Good question.
To be published, it is not necessary that you write well, or even that you write meaningfully, but like everything else, it is important that you coach your words palatable to your audience, flattering the reader that he or she possess gravitas when that is unlikely.
Readers are looking for answers, not questions, for solutions, not problems, for someone else to do the heavy lifting, not them. Unfortunately, no one can do the heavy lifting for anyone else. This is the dilemma and why problems go unanswered or exacerbate to the current financial crisis.
I’ve self-published most of my views, or have been published by periodicals that appeal to consultants who find this as a means to free advertisement. Actually, it is not free. I have been paid in the four-figures for similar pieces in more commercial venues. Currently, I have had 341 such articles published. Do the math. It’s not chump change.
Given my views, however, I can say emphatically that I’ve never received work from this exposure. In fact, more than 250 of such articles are still in print, many now on www.google.com. That said I’ve invested more than $100,000 of my own money in this venture because I wanted someone, some ordinary soul like myself to give voice to the little guy. I might add I don’t regret a moment of my time or money in this pursuit. I would do it all over again, and yes, probably in the same way.
* * * * * * * * *
PS Today, economist Paul Krugman of Princeton University was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics.
Krugman is the exception to what I’ve said here, a lone voice that got it right, but couldn’t budge the Bush Administration.
My first contact with the economist was about eight years ago in the pages of the “New York Review.” I’ve been a fan of his ever since. I mention him here because he has advocated for some time the banking policy now proposed here and being adopted in Europe – i.e., government takeover of banks. He was interviewed tonight on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer” about his Nobel Laureate, and modestly didn’t mention this.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 13, 2008
“As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men’s native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying.”
Robert Boyle (1626 – 1691), English Chemist and Philosopher
* * * * * * * * *
COMMENT OF A CANADIAN
“Ten Days the World Would Like to Forget" might be a good alternate title.
So many people are confused and anxious, having been fed a steady diet of bad news for several weeks.
It's true; the real economy has been disconnected from the financial economy for a long long time. While it seems no one knows how to fix the system, a certain group does have the answer, but they will keep that information to themselves, ready to cash in when they can buy up the world at 10 cents on the dollar.
But it's not like there were no warnings. We all knew the party would end someday.
DR. FISHER RESPONSE:
The comment of this Canadian is an astute observation of the current uncoupling of the real economy from the financial economy. He is a person I’ve known only through this medium for several years now.
Where I think we see the situation a little differently is his reference to “a certain group does have the answer, but they will keep that information to themselves.” If it were only so!
It has been our dependence on our leaders to take care of us, to do the heavy lifting, “the right thing,” to be sagacious when we have felt foolish or fool hardy that has vanished. That is the monumental change in the firmament.
Folly now belongs to us all! We are all lost and must find our way as leaders because that has been the problem: we are all quintessential followers from the highest to the lowest, waiting for someone else to save us from ourselves.
My Canadian friend made me reflect on the importance of “the word.” It so happens that I’ve been reading the book of the biblical scholar Dr. Bart D. Ehrman titled “Misquoted Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why” (2005).
What is apparent is that the Bible is a very human book. First, the New Testament was written centuries after the Life of Jesus, and then the surviving manuscripts appear to be copies of copies of copies, ad infinitum, with no clear appreciation of how closely they reflect or relate to the original documents.
Moreover, as much as 90 percent of the early copiers of the New Testament, as late as the fourth century, were illiterate, and copied letter by letter without punctuation or word separation. In 1707 the biblical scholar John Mill of Queens College, Oxford, published the “Greek New Testament,” reporting some 30,000 textual errors. Subsequent scholars have reported hundreds of thousands of such errors.
Since letters were not separated, “godisnowhere” could mean “God is now here” or “God is nowhere.” Then author Ehrman, to illustrate the difficulty, asks does “lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable” report a normal or supernatural event?
I make reference to this human phenomenon for reason.
It made me realize that most information we receive and process comes from secondary and tertiary sources, and not from our experience or from each other. It comes from outside us not from inside us. We then bless this information as fact, echo its sentiments and then share it with each other, changing it as our exchanges multiply, mimicking the colossal errors biblical scholars have found in the Sacred Word, and then acting on this suspect information only to wonder why we are so lost.
Today, I watched the “Charlie Rose” show on PBS television in which he had a Wall Street critic, a journalist and a hedge fund manager discuss the current financial crisis. It is apparent that they don’t have a clue, none of them. In fact, they can’t even define the problem in precise terms but echo the rhetoric that we have heard for the past several days.
Then I turned to C-Span in which Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi gathered a cadre of experts around the rostrum to give one minute dissertations of how each of them saw the current financial crisis, and what should be done about it.
Were this “Saturday Night Live!” I would have marveled at this tragic comedy charade, but this was a collection of serious people taking themselves and their views seriously, expecting to assure us, the watcher and listener for their collective effort. I found this theater chilling and unsettling. It gave me the distinct feeling “no one is in charge.”
One of Charlie Rose’s guests said that experts were falling over each other to get to Wall Street to give their two cents, when they should be calling on the White House. Imagine that. We call the President of the United States the “most powerful leader in the world,” and these experts are treating the White House as if nobody is at home.
Listening to these experts, and being a small investor long retired, it is disconcerting to see people we have elected, or people placed in positions of authority, power, trust, integrity and loyalty show a fawning deference to their respective roles, while displaying little appreciation of the mess they have engineered either by commission or omission. They appear so full of themselves on camera that they seem unaware of the empty suits they appear to be, or to appreciate the fact that they have failed us, and in failing us have failed themselves and the world.
We are a reactive society, which has failed in memoriam to appreciate we don’t anticipate but react to crises. The crises we react to are the crises we create. Have no doubt the people who resolve this current financial crisis will be treated as heroes. Where were these heroes before the financial crisis got out of hand? They were either feeding it, or too entrenched in their careers to raise their voices more than a mummer.
I’ve been writing more than thirty years now about the “leaderless leadership” syndrome. Leadership calls for a vision to see and an ability to serve, for having the character and courage not only to commit to the challenges, but also to become totally involved in the process. So, if the ship goes down the leader goes down with it, and doesn’t get lifted to safety out of the fray by a helicopter.
We have created a “cult of leadership” which sees itself above the fray and not to be measured by the same criteria as the working stiffs in the trenches. We have allowed this cult to flourish with failed executives getting tens of millions of dollars in golden parachutes as they depart the bridge from their failed helm, as the ship goes down.
The “cult of leadership” subscribes to the dictum that self-interests take precedence over duty. At the highest levels, and I’m speaking from my own corporate experience, it is more important to get along and go along than to rock the boat with disturbing information or contrary analysis. In this cult the sycophant rises to the top as "pyramid climber." These ambitious types are always campaigning for the next job never having time to do the job paid to do. It is a nostalgic post World War Two fixation that American enterprise still holds close to its heart.
Personality is more important than perception, being a loyal member of the team more important than seeing the emperor is naked and reporting the same.
My message, which has not been heard, has been directed to millions like myself who have risen from the lowest social economic situations in our society to some level of influence.
People are afraid to voice their views for fear of losing their job, failing to be promoted, or indeed, being made redundant. I have spoken for them and to them. They hear me but do not heed me because it is too dangerous. Now, that danger has turned into a possible total social economic collapse.
Should China, for one, call in its note on the trillions of dollars she has loaned us, dollars that continue to fuel our economy, our financial house of cards would collapse. We are counting on China not doing this because we are her best customer.
Dr. Fisher, I am asked repeatedly, why do you still write if this is so painful for you? Good question.
To be published, it is not necessary that you write well, or even that you write meaningfully, but like everything else, it is important that you coach your words palatable to your audience, flattering the reader that he or she possess gravitas when that is unlikely.
Readers are looking for answers, not questions, for solutions, not problems, for someone else to do the heavy lifting, not them. Unfortunately, no one can do the heavy lifting for anyone else. This is the dilemma and why problems go unanswered or exacerbate to the current financial crisis.
I’ve self-published most of my views, or have been published by periodicals that appeal to consultants who find this as a means to free advertisement. Actually, it is not free. I have been paid in the four-figures for similar pieces in more commercial venues. Currently, I have had 341 such articles published. Do the math. It’s not chump change.
Given my views, however, I can say emphatically that I’ve never received work from this exposure. In fact, more than 250 of such articles are still in print, many now on www.google.com. That said I’ve invested more than $100,000 of my own money in this venture because I wanted someone, some ordinary soul like myself to give voice to the little guy. I might add I don’t regret a moment of my time or money in this pursuit. I would do it all over again, and yes, probably in the same way.
* * * * * * * * *
PS Today, economist Paul Krugman of Princeton University was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics.
Krugman is the exception to what I’ve said here, a lone voice that got it right, but couldn’t budge the Bush Administration.
My first contact with the economist was about eight years ago in the pages of the “New York Review.” I’ve been a fan of his ever since. I mention him here because he has advocated for some time the banking policy now proposed here and being adopted in Europe – i.e., government takeover of banks. He was interviewed tonight on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer” about his Nobel Laureate, and modestly didn’t mention this.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
TEN DAYS THAT CHANGED AMERICA FOREVER!
TEN DAYS THAT CHANGED AMERICA FOREVER
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 8, 2008
“A map does not exhibit a more distinct view of the situation and boundaries of every country, than its news does a picture of the genius and morals of its inhabitants.”
Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774). English poet, dramatist, and novelist.
THE PREMISE OF THIS VIEW
From the end of September to the first week in October of this year, 2008, my wife, Betty, and I traveled across the country from Tampa, Florida to north central Minnesota, a distance of some 1,800 miles to visit her ailing father, 91, and our grandchildren, twin girls of 3, and a baby sister, six months old.
During the course of this trek across country were the first presidential debate, the vice presidential debate, the panic on Wall Street, the ambivalent posture of Congress on the proposed $700 billion bailout or rescue package, the frustration of driving through southern states that had no gas at the pump or signs calling for regular at as much as $409.9 a gallon, and the seemingly bottomless drop of the Dow Jones Industrials as we saw our life savings continuously shrink daily with no end in sight.
There was also the collapse of banks across the country, escalating unemployment, plant closings, home foreclosures and bankruptcies with construction companies defaulting in the middle of projects. This was all reminiscent of the Great Depression.
Warren Buffett has called this an “economic Pearl Harbor,” but even he seems to be understating the crisis. The government is considering a move to take over American banks, as the sins of deregulation seem a harbinger of draconian regulation and oversight.
Panic is on Main Street and Wall Street, as Americans no longer feel secure with trust and loyalty evaporating at all levels.
The economic panic has spread to countries across the globe with similar infrastructure collapse followed by precipitous government interventions including bailouts and bank takeovers in painful imitation of the American economic collapse and reaction.
It is a global problem echoing the mantra of the United States: “Progress is our most important product,” always pushing for a greater Gross Domestic Product, never imagining the elasticity of the economic bubble could possibly break, and now the consequences. Several G-7 nations have simultaneously cut the prime interest rate banks lend to each other by five basis points, or half a percent, a clear indication of a global meltdown.
Yet, it is apparent with the bailouts, bank takeovers, and interest rate manipulations that no one is in charge, clearly understands what is happening, or why, much less what to do about it. Nor is anyone sure the tactics proposed will work for there is no grand strategy in this panic situation. All moves are by the seat-of-the-pants with crossed fingers.
A quarter century ago, corporate guru Peter Drucker said that the uncoupling of the real economy (i.e. productivity, innovation, and markets) would be devastating should it separate from the financial economy, which appears to be the case.
Former chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker under president Jimmie Carter recently said, “We need more electrical engineers, chemical engineers, and civil engineers to rebuild our infrastructure and less financial engineers.” He also said that ordinary Americans contributed to the current crisis by increasingly living on credit, buying more than they could afford and not saving.
Managing Director of the IMF Dominique Strauss-Kahn claims that in a global economy we need a global economic policy, which is not possible because domestic considerations of nations take precedence over the impact on their neighbors. This was the case of the Irish Republic’s guaranteeing Irish bank accounts, resulting in a flood of currency going from Great Britain to Ireland forcing the Gordon Brown government bailout.
Director Strauss-Kahn also cited the importance of leadership that sponsors coordination of executive efforts to restore confidence and defuse panic.
Fifty or a hundred years from now, these ten days may be seen as a defining moment in human history, a time, incidentally, when my wife, Betty, and I were on the road. As we trekked across the hinterland, we could sense our personal, domestic, commercial and institutional world changing under our wheels.
Listening to and reading experts, it is apparent they agree, bad as the subprime meltdown, bad as the disastrous credit policies of commercial banks, and self-indulgent as consumers who refuse to save, productivity of workers remains high. They also agree that the real economy has uncoupled from the financial economy, which is driven by speculative hope and precipitous despair, making it hard to separate fact from fiction. They agree the financial economy is broken but no one knows for sure how much, or why, much less how to fix it.
A LOVE OF NEWSPAPERS
Being a habitual newspaper reader, especially of newspapers of the locale in which I find myself, it is hard to see these newspapers struggling to stay in print.
We returned to Tampa to find The Tampa Tribune reduced to comic book size with the op-editorial page completely erased reducing the editorial page to a combination of editorial, comment and letters-to-the-editor. The shrinking of hard copy news and a newsroom staff of professionally trained journalists marks an unhappy development.
Comments that followed are taken from newspapers read during this trek. Where appropriate, I have given my two cents. Regarding the new Tampa Tribune, I sense it is only ahead of the curve. Newsprint is dying replaced by legends on the Internet.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2008, THE TAMPA TRIBUNE, “Other Views.”
“The High Cost of Racial Hype”: Thomas Sowell
Sowell writes of black identity and compares the “navel-gazing” of the present generation to worrying about losing touch with black roots and black brothers in the hood. “Like most good things,” he writes, “it can be carried to the point where it is both ridiculous and counterproductive for all concerned.” He continues:
“In a world where an absolute majority of black children are born and raised in fatherless homes, where most black kids never finish high school, and where the murder rate among blacks is several times the national average, surely there must be more urgent priorities than preserving a lifestyle and an identity.”
Sowell acknowledges that blacks, like the Irish and Jews have gone through periods of strong tribal identity for survival, but that is no longer the case. The Irish and Jews have become assimilated into the American culture without sacrificing or becoming preoccupied with their ethnic identity. He says it is time for blacks to do the same.
Sowell, a syndicated columnist who happens to be black, asks the challenging question: “Will time and energy spent on rap music and wearing low-riding baggy pants like guys in prison – as badges of identity – provide as good a future for young people as learning math, computers, and the English language?” He concludes, romantic self-indulgence and self-deception are luxuries most of us, whatever our ethnic origins, can ill afford
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2008, THE TAMPA TRIBUNE, “Other Voices”
“Protecting Marriage Protects Our Children”: David Blankenhorn
Blankenhorn admits to being a liberal Democrat who does not favor same-sex marriage. “I spent a year studying the history and anthropology of marriage, and I’ve come to a different conclusion.”
He admits that marriage as a human institution is constantly evolving, but it is not primarily designed to receive benefits or social recognition, but is primarily a license to have children. He writes:
“Marriage is a gift that society bestows on its next generation. Marriage (and only marriage) unites the three core dimensions of parenthood – biological, social and legal – into one pro-child form: the married couple.
“Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you.
“Marriage says to society as a whole: for every child born, there is a recognized mother and a father, accountable to the child and to each other.”
Anthropologist Helen Fisher: “People wed primarily to reproduce.”
While acknowledging that same-sex relationships have a foundation in love, Blankenhorn quotes the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who posited the conundrum: “The real conflict we face is not good vs. bad, but good vs. good.” Blankenhorn adds, “Reducing homophobia is good. Protecting the birthright of the child is good.” Thus, the conflict of two goods.
David Blankenhorn is president of the Institute for American Values, and author of “The Future of Marriage.”
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2008, THE TAMPA TRIBUNE, “Other Views”
“It’s 1929 Again”: William H. Chafe
This article speaks with a similar voice to my book, “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007), which attempted to alert readers to the lessons of the destabilizing 1970s. It could just as well have been 1929, as William Chafe points out:
“Sadly, history has a way of repeating itself. It is particularly alarming to note the parallels between the economic crisis that devastated America in the late 1920s and the implosion in the financial markets that is occurring today.”
Chafe goes on to identify the period as the “roaring twenties,” or “jazz age,” with
”flappers in their bobbed hair dancing all night,” and “half of all families going to the movies at least once a week.” The 1920s had an appetite for mass consumption. The Middle American mantra was: “a Ford in every garage and a Frigidaire in every kitchen.”
Beneath the surface, professor Chafe notes structural weaknesses flashed warning signs that were too easily ignored. Workers begin buying on credit. The distance between worker wages and executives salaries widened. Wall Street profits soared as investors bought stock on the “margin,” paying cash for only 10 percent of the stock price, certain the price would go up. The constant boom fueled economic growth. Savings of most consumers verged on zero. “Buy today and pay tomorrow” became the tune.
Then came the collapse. Wall Street went bust. Inflation and unemployment reached 30 percent or more.
(I was born after this collapse and remember soup kitchens in my hometown. We never had a refrigerator but an icebox, or owned an automobile. Through high school, I rode my bicycle the 2 miles to school. Since we never owned an automobile, I never learned to drive or acquired a driver’s license until I was a senior in college. No surprise, I have never bought into the narcissistic philosophy of consumption. The memory of my da on the WPA and the soup kitchens has sobered me to a conservative existence.)
Chafe writes:
“Clearly, there is a similarity between what happened then and what is happening now.” He points out the growing income gap between the rich and the middle class. In the 1920s, “CEO earnings on average were 48 times as much as an average worker, now he or she earns 480 times as much.” Savings were nonexistent in the 1920s; they remain nonexistent today.
(In my book “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders & Dissonant Workers,” 2000, the “wage gap” is covered in some detail in “Something is wrong with this picture,” pp. 136 – 142.)
Chafe claims the subprime mortgage scandal is only the tip of the iceberg, concluding with regard to the approaching presidential election: “The real issue is who recognizes the historical parallels between 1929 and 2008, and which of our candidates is willing to address the structural flaws that have brought us to where we are.”
William H. Chafe is professor of history at Duke University, and author of “The Rise and Fall of the American Century: The United States from 1890 – 2010”).
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2008, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, ENTERTAINMENT
“Mr. Longfellow is waiting in the parlor”: Julia Keller/Lit Life
Julia Keller writes a delightful column on visiting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (1807 – 1882) home in Portland, Maine: “Longfellow was one of those shaggy, solemn versifiers from the nineteenth century whose poems helped establish a distinctive American literature.” It made him rich and famous although Keller admits his melancholy narrative is out of touch with the times. Yet, she reminds us that these lines breathe life into our common culture:
“I heard the bells on Christmas Day/Their old, familiar carols play.”
“Listen, my children, and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”
“I shot an arrow into the air/It fell to earth, I know not where.”
“By the shores of Gitche Gumee/By the shining Big Sea Water.”
“Under the spreading chestnut tree/The village smithy stands.”
Keller ends her piece celebrating this poet as she runs her hands along the banister of his home, standing on the threshold of the parlor and hall, feeling transformed without apologies. “You could do a lot worse than Longfellow,” she says, “whose poems about the United States are filled with the sort of golden exhortations we could surely use right about now, as the nation’s troubles mount.
To wit, take “The Building of the Ship”:
“Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State/Sail on, O Union, strong and great/Humanity with all its fears/With all the hopes of future years/Is hanging breathless on thy fate!”
(We don’t write bombastic poems like this today. We are too sophisticated, too worldly, alas, too out of touch with our soul.)
MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2008, “The Campaign”
“Candidates contrasting leadership Styles”: Liz Sidoti, Associated Press
(One of the misnomers of the twenty-first century, a holdover from the 1960s is the emphasis on “leadership style.” If only leadership style were a determining factor, which it is not, it would be so simple to create an algorithm of some predictability.
Unfortunately, the content of character is what counts, and character defies definition. Throughout American history, leadership of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson, and the two Roosevelts down to the 43rd president has proven “style” is superfluous but character essential.
Whatever a president’s style, such character flaws as an inflexible temperament, poor judgment and poor choice of key support staff, along with an impulsive nature has proven devastating. Character stimulates confidence and rallies people to embrace the times and to mount the sacrifices required. Character flaws have been endemic to presidents caught up in their personal obsessions while out of touch with imploding events. This was true in 1929 and in 2008.
Since Douglas McGregor and his “Theory X & Y” to Robert Blake and Jane Mouton and their “Managerial Grid,” along with the various motivational theories, the “right leadership style” has been equated to winning results. It is the basis of this article.)
Sidoti sees Senator John McCain to be action-oriented; Senator Barak Obama to be reflective and cautious, yet there is a time for action and a time for reflection given the circumstances.
McCain and Obama are seen to view the current tanking of markets from their “personal scripts,” according to professor Paul Light of New York University. McCain is emotive, seeing Main Street is paying for Wall Street excess, while Obama is measured in his response with a series of proposals to protect taxpayers.
The final assessment is that Republican McCain can be too hot, and Democratic Obama too cool. It is interesting to reflect that Jackson was considered a hot head, but an “Age of Jackson” followed his presidency, while Jefferson was considered super cool, yet his letters suggest he was quite hot under the collar dealing with the two Adams, and even launched a smear campaign against rival John Quincy Adams for the presidency.
(Leadership is a very human pursuit fed by ambition with a toxic appetite for power. Success is seldom a matter of style, but more a matter of the mastering this toxicity to do the people’s business.)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2008, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, COMMENTARY
“How to avoid next housing collapse”: Clarence Page.
(I confess to being a big fan of Clarence Page, seeing him on television regularly on PBS with the McLaughlin Group.)
“What we now call the Big Financial Crisis of 2008,” he writes, “began with the well-intentioned goal of helping more working class renters become homeowners. But as more and more money chased fewer and fewer qualified home buyers, the needy were elbowed aside by the greedy.”
The carrot used was no money down interest only for higher home prices than the mortgage applicant could afford. Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, eased credit requirements on loans it would purchase from banks and other lenders. The purpose was to increase home ownership among minorities whose credit ratings and savings were too low to qualify for conventional loans. These alternative “subprime” loans could charge 3 or 4 percentage points higher than conventional rates.
It all started with president Bill Clinton, but president George Bush also embraced the expansion of higher risk home loans, indeed, calling on the housing industry to help at least 5.5 million minority families become homeowners by the end of the decade. Page ends the piece by saying, “we need the regulations and oversight that take into account human nature, including the inevitable tendency to make an easy buck off of someone else’s good intentions.”
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, OP-ED PAGE
“The bailout: Couldn’t make this stuff up”: Garrison Keillor
Making reference to a recent avoidable train wreck, Keillor writes, “It’s just human nature that some calamities register in the brain and others don’t. The train engineer texting at the throttle and missing the red light and 25 people die in the crash – oh God, that is way too real – everyone has had a moment of supreme stupidity that came close to killing somebody.”
“On the other hand,” he continues, “the federal bailout of the financial market (YAWN) is a calamity that people accept as if it were just one more hurricane.” Then he takes after Senator John McCain:
“John McCain is a lifelong deregulator and believer in letting brokers and bankers do as they please – remember Lincoln Savings and Loan and his intervention with federal regulators on behalf of his friend Charles Keating, who then went to prison? Remember Neil Bush the brother of the C.O., who as a director of Silverado S&L, bestowed enormous loans on his friends without telling fellow directors that the friends were friends who, when the loans failed, paid a small fine and went skipping off to other things? McCain now decries greed on Wall Street and suggests a commission be formed to look into the problem. This is like Casanova coming out for chastity.”
(Keillor is not one of my favorite pundits, but he has a point, which masks the greater question: whatever happened to integrity in responsible office? I’m not just addressing politicians but authorities in all disciplines.
Take cigarette companies CEOs who told Congress there was no health hazard to cigarette smoking, when they had research data which clearly showed the linkage; or academics that promoted multiculturalism as a discipline when skills from such pursuit limited the horizons of students, not to mention colored their approach to community.
Whatever ever happened to leadership? There can be no leadership that puts special interests above integrity, personal advantage over service; personal good over commitment to the common good.)
Keillor, who admits to being a liberal, wonders what happened to lead the Republican Party’s “gimlet-eyed, steel-rim, crepe-soled common sense” to being taken over “by crooked preachers who demand we trust them because they’re packing a Bible and God sent on a mission to enact lower taxes, and less government.” They are there, he says, “except when things crash, and then government has to pick up the pieces.”
(The irony here is that George W. Bush’s presidency has managed the most bloated budget in the history of our nation, not only on the military but domestic front as well.)
“What we are seeing,” Keillor concludes, “is the stuff of a novel, the public corruption of an American war hero (i.e., McCain). It is painful. First, there was his exploitation of a symbolic woman, an eager zealot who is so far out of her depth (Sarah Palin) that it isn’t funny anymore. Anyone with a heart has to hurt for how McCain has made a fool of her. Never mind the persistent cheesiness of his attack ads. And now this chasm of debt and loss and the gentleman pretends to be shocked. He was there. He turned out the lights. He sent the regulators home.”
(The power of commentary is that you may not like what is said, but know that contained therein is more than a grain of truth. I felt for Sarah Palin when television’s Katie Couric interviewed her and asked what periodicals she read. It was apparent she is not a reader. She is a maverick like McCain mimicking his rustic action and cowboy economics.)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, ECONOMY
HOW WE GOT IN THIS MESS (Informational Editorial)
“Housing values never go down.” That simple premise enticed American consumers and Wall Street to load up on mortgage debt. Plunging home values now threaten to drag down the global economy.
l. The Boom 2000 – 2006
The Clinton and Bush administrations and Congress push to increase homeownership from about 63 percent of U.S. homeowners to 68 percent. Underwriting regulations are eased to allow more low-income borrowers to obtain a mortgage.
In 2000, the dot-com bubble bursts in March followed by 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Stock market prices tumble, interests rates cut to 40-year low by 2003. New home constructions and sales surge. Lenders use cheap money including adjustable rates. Subprime loans are made to borrowers with poor or no credit. Lenders pool the mortgages to sell on Wall Street with promise of high return.
Credit rating agencies bless these mortgage packages with the safest rating, AAA with the assumption home values will increase. Banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, pension funds and foreign governments gobble up these supposedly safe mortgage-backed securities. Firms buy insurance policies from American International Group (AIG) to protect their investments from default.
2. The subprime crisis: Late 2006 to Early 2008.
The Federal Reserve raises interest rates in June 2004, the first of 16 increases. The bubble begins to deflate a year later with the first wave of foreclosures, a slowdown in home construction and a slide in home values.
January 2006 Ameriquest Mortgage Company settles 49-state probe into deceptive subprime practices for $325 million.
April 2006 Fed Chairman Ben Bernake acknowledges signs of softening in the housing market. Median price of sales stalls, and then falls. Housing starts fall.
February 2007, new home sales drop 20 percent; sales of existing homes fall. The consumer economy stalls as home sales fall. Teaser rates give way to higher monthly payments. Owners unable to refinance miss payments. Foreclosures mount. Value of mortgage backed securities sinks.
3. The Meltdown 2008
Accounting rules require owners of the mortgage-backed securities to “write down” their value. As the housing market worsens, confidence in the value of any mortgage-backed security evaporates. Investors are forced to write off hundreds of billions of dollars.
February 2008, AIG and other agencies that sold insurance against defaults have to pay up and take similar writedowns.
March 2008, Bear Stearns, a major investment bank and underwriter of mortgage-backed securities, runs out of capital, and is sold to J.P. Morgan Chase.
April 2008, New Century Financial, the second largest subprime lender, files for bankruptcy.
September 7, 2008, mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, with more than $5 trillion in mortgage-back securities, are taken over by the federal government to avert bankruptcy after their market value fell by more than 50 percent.
September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers investment bank goes bankrupt.
September 2008, Merrill Lynch hastily accepts a purchase offer from the Bank of America to avoid Lehman’s fate.
September 2008, the Federal Reserve rescues AIG with an $85 billion secured loan in exchange for a 79.9 percent government stake.
September 2008, Bankers unsure of their total exposure to bad mortgages, raise interest rates for their best customers and shy away from lending money to others.
September 2008, fear of a deep global recession grows.
September 2008, saying piecemeal interventions are not enough Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Ben Bernake propose a $700 billion bailout under which the government would buy and then attempt to resell mortgage-backed securities.
4. The Proposal
The bailout package proposed by the Treasury Department is bigger than the entire 2009 budget appropriation for Social Security. The plan also calls for increasing the limit on the national debt, which has risen rapidly since 2001.
(This was a presentation of the chronological sequence of this economic catastrophe and reflects the value of newspapers.)
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, OPINION
ONE VIEW
“Whatever momentum McCain had is now gone,” writes E. J. Dionne, Jr., “his derisive approach may help explain why the instant polls gave Obama an edge in a debate that many pundits rated a tie – and why women seemed especially inclined toward Obama.”
He continues, “When McCain lectured or attacked Obama, the Republican ratings would drop, and the fall was especially steep among women.” He goes on the say Sarah Palin was a reckless choice for vice president. “Palin has proved herself to be spectacularly unprepared for a national campaign and embarrassingly inarticulate and unreflective.”
ANOTHER VIEW
“A wild week and McCain comes out admirably,” writes Debra J. Saunders. She gives McCain high marks for intervening in the $700 billion bailout stall. “McCain was in a corner,” she says, “He clearly feared that if Congress did not approve a bailout measure, the economy would tank. Then, his bid for the White House would be doomed.” She continues, “Going to Washington, while political, showed America a candidate who will risk his electoral fortune to deliver the right policy.”
(It is clear that this quadrennial madness we must suffer every four years is a most human drama of fragile and vulnerable candidates, whom it could be argued embrace masochistic madness to seek such office, yet there is never a shortage of such madness. Soon it will be over, and perhaps as many as 90 percent of the promises of the duly elected new president will be quickly and arbitrarily forgotten.)
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, BUSINESS
SUN COUNTRY WORKERS FACE 50% TEMPORARY PAY CUT
(Sometimes newspaper stories are almost impossible to comprehend. Sun Country Airlines is squeezed for cash and told workers on Monday it would cut their pay in half beginning next week and reimburse them in 2009. This is a promise, not a guarantee.)
Sun Country Airlines lost $47 million on $251 million operating revenue for the 12 months ending in June. The airline employs 1,000 during the winter season. Employees at this writing had not yet agreed to what CEO Stan Gadek claims is a survival strategy. Meanwhile, Tom Petters, CEO of Petters Group Worldwide, the holding company of which Sun Country Airlines is an affiliate, is under a Federal Securities investigation for fraud.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, CAMPAIGN
The editorial page had a strong case for Wall Street rescue, but it paled with the anticipating vice presidential debate between Republican Governor Sarah Palin and Senator Joseph Biden.
The inclination of both vice president candidates for gaffs was noted, which has become fodder for comedy writers. Biden, an Irishman, has a tendency to run his mouth before engaging his brain, while Palin, a proud tomboy, is more at home in the wild than behind a rostrum. Both candidates were chosen to appeal to needed constituencies for the head of their respective tickets to win election.
The debate on Thursday was viewed by more people than the American Idol finals, which says something, I’m not sure what.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, OPINION
“Rural virtue, urban vice? Simplistic”: Steven Chapman
Chapman writes quoting Sarah Palin, “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity. They are the ones who do some of the hardest work in American, who grow our food, run our factories and fight our wars. They love their country, in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America.” In other words, Chapman continues, “they are not like those idle, insincere, lying city folks who dare to suggest that America can sometimes be wrong.”
“The myth of rural virtue and urban vice,” he writes, is an old one in this country, and it persists no matter what they change in the landscape. Most Americans, it seems, can tolerate hearing of the superiority of the small town, as long as they don’t have to live in one. You wouldn’t know it from listening to country music, but four out of every five Americans choose not to reside in rural areas.”
Then Chapman lowers the boom:
“In 2007, a survey of eighth-graders by the Monitoring the Future project of the University of Michigan found that country kids were 26 percent more likely to experiment with drugs than middle-schoolers elsewhere. Overall methamphetamine consumption among adults and teens is more than 50 percent higher in the country.”
The story with alcohol is worse still. “Relative to their urban counterparts, rural youth ages 12 to 17 are significantly more likely to report consuming alcohol,” says a 2006 study by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, “
Nor is the countryside exempt from social problems. “The highest rates of births to unwed mothers are in the mainly rural states of Mississippi and New Mexico. The most urban states, New Jersey and California, do better than the average in out-of-wedlock births.
Crime is much more common in the city than in the country. Alfred Blumstein at Carnegie Mellon University thinks the explanation is pretty simple: “It’s a matter of social control. Small towns have networks of family and friends, and most everyone knows everyone else.” This deters crime in two ways: one doesn’t want to damage his reputation; nor is he likely to rob someone who can easily identify him.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, OPINION
“Congress, so far, has traveled the easy roads in this crisis”: George F. Will
Will’s open the article quoting “Babbitt” (1922) written by America’s Nobel Laureate Sinclair Lewis:
“His name was George F. Babbitt. He was 46 years old now, in April 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.”
Babbitt, which I read as a boy, is a pungent satire of complacent mediocrity, about a man who revels in his own popularity, his ability to make money, his fine automobile, and his penny-pinching generosity. Babbitt also worships gadgets. He praises prohibition while drinking bootleg whiskey, bullies his wife, and ogles his manicurist. Although discontented with life, he is thoroughly satisfied with George F. Babbitt. Because his character is grounded in realism, realism that still haunts our American character to this day, it remains one of the most convincing characterizations in American literature.
Will writes: “We are waist-deep in evasions because one cannot talk sense about the cultural roots: Never shall be heard a discouraging word about the public.
“Beneath Americans’ perfunctory disapproval of government deficits lurks an inconvenient truth: They (the public) enjoy deficits, by which they are charged less than a dollar for a dollar’s worth of government.”
Like government, he claims, we prefer to buy and pay later, hitching outlays to appetites. This finds 1.5 billion credit cards floating “out there,” or nine per cardholder. Subsidized loans and cheap money has separated the pleasure of purchasing from the pain of paying. This is compounded by an entitlement mentality fostered by a welfare state believing a high standard of living is deserved untethered from savings or sacrifice.
Populism flatters people with a scapegoat to neutralize their despair. Today it is “Wall Street greed” which is contrasted with the virtue of “Main Street” sobriety.
Sinclair Lewis also wrote “Main Street” (1920) to puncture the egos of smug, self-satisfied Americans who considered their hometowns flawless. Will updates this, writing: “When people on Main Street misbehave by, say, buying houses for more than they can afford to pay, they blame the wily knaves who made them do it, such as the nimble Babbitt.” And so we have the $700 billion government bailout of these indiscretions illustrating the “enormous enlargement of government’s power.”
Then George Will adds: “Suppose that in 1979 the government had not engineered the bailout of Chrysler (now Ford and GM are in line for the same), might there have been a more sober approach to risk throughout corporate America?”
(At another level, I wrote in “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (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 of ourselves.” And, yes, corporate America as well.
The human group is a reflection of the individual. In that sense, there has been a century slide from rights to privileges, from opportunities to entitlements, from risks to the certainty of government intervention to break the fall, and for it we have the nation that has evolved.)
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2008, MINNEAPLIS STAR TRIBUNE, EDITORIAL
“Early focus on math builds a foundation” with eighth grade algebra key to success in later grades.”
The editorial quotes a study made by the Brookings Institution, which indicated that algebra was important, but many eighth-graders fail to grasp a fundamental facility with the multiplication tables and long division in arithmetic. The caveat of the editorial is the race to the future must build a bridge to it by mastering the fundamentals first.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, METRO
“2.6 million check lands her in workhouse, not easy street.”: Rochelle Olson
Sabrina Walker, erroneously received a $2.6 million check from the state of Minnesota. She immediately went on a spending spree that included purchasing a car and jewelry for a total of $267,000. Once caught, and arrested, and in court for criminal sentencing, she said, “Indeed this was a mistake. I didn’t create this. I didn’t swindle the state. I didn’t trick anyone. I have suffered greatly from the moment this has been done. My dreams have been shattered.”
Walker, 38, could not see how she had done anything wrong, yet she admitted the money was not hers, that she did not earn it, and asked the judge for mercy and compassion. The judge sentenced her to nine months in the workhouse.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, OPINION
“We needed united; we got ideology.”: Michael Gerson
Gerson writes, “America’s economic crisis has become a political crisis – with the second compounding and exceeding the first.”
This was Gerson’s claim before the $700 bailout was passed, blaming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as the culprit: “Pelosi has an unrivaled record for lacking achievement. In retrospect, it seems incomprehensible that Democrats chose a grating, partisan, San Francisco liberal to lead both parties in the House.”
Then he adds, “Congress is broken; Congress doesn’t work.” This he claims is especially true of the House of Representatives: “America is left with one portion of one branch of government that does not seem to work. House Democrats (the majority) seem temperamentally incapable of building genuine consensus on issues that matter.”
(For the past 170 years, or since the “Age of Jackson,” and the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the imperial presidency has grown in the body politic, yet Congress, which has suffered great decline, is always the “fall guy” when things go awry. Go figure!)
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2008, THE DAILY NEWS JOURNAL, MURFREESBORO, NATION
“Emotions connect old O.J. acquittal, new conviction: Simpson found guilty on all 12 counts against him.”
Jurors were asked to ignore O.J. Simpson’s past, but that is like ignoring the stripes on a zebra. “The former NFL star’s murder acquittal last decade and his new conviction for robbing memorabilia peddlers couldn’t have been clearer. The attorney for the family of Ronald Goldman – who was killed along with Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson in Los Angeles in 1995 – said he thought his hounding of Simpson for years to collect a $33.5 million wrongful death judgment pushed him to a desperate gambit to recover personal items he had lost.”
(Whatever you think of O.J. Simpson, and his acquittal for the death of his wife and young Ronald Goldman, this trial, which reads like a lynching, is unlikely to give the Goldman family peace or the American people closure. It is sad to see a man who rose from so little to become so much, from the greatest college and professional football player of his era, a film and television presence, and spokesman for many products to fall to this end. There go I but for the grace of God! Simpson is likely to end his days in prison, a situation that reads like Victor Hugo novel.)
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2008, THE DAILY NEWS JOURNAL, MURREESBORO, STATE
“Smoking ban eclipses 1-year mark in Tennessee; many businesses say they’re glad.”
“Industry and health groups in Tennessee say the vast majority of restaurants chose to ban smoking a year ago rather than banish those under 21 years old, and most appear glad they did. The state Health Department said that of the more than 20,000 hotels, motels, and restaurants statewide that it inspects, only 145 warning letters were issued for violating the law within the last 12 months. Of those, only seven escalated into fines.”
(We only encountered one place where smoking was allowed and that was at a service station-restaurant where we got gas and a quick meal, which was in Kentucky.)
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, THE DAILY NEWS JOURNAL, OPINION
“Our leaders can’t communicate”: Stephen Shirley
The young columnist quotes from the movie “Cool Hand Luke” for the title of his piece.
He starts with Congress: “Government leaders have failed to formulate and articulate to the American people a coherent argument in favor of the ($700 billion) rescue plan.”
He then takes on Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen’s renovation of the governor’s residence with no clear input from citizens calling it “Bredesen’s Bunker.”
This leads to the why and wherefore of local business leaders and the ensuing snafu in the construction of a new park.
He then takes on a local law enforcement officer asking how he could justify handcuffing a child. Next it is local school officials whom he finds clueless when they refuse a blind girl from enrolling in school. Lastly, it is the local school board that is on his radar. He finds its debate on a Hispanic donkey puppet on a children’s television show as pointless, ludicrous and a waste of time.
He writes: “I don’t understand why any of this is so hard for our leaders. If you want to propose something, do so in a public forum and be prepared to answer any naysayers. If you screw up, face up to your mistakes and your critics. Listen first and talk second.”
SUNDAY, THE DAILY NEWS JOURNAL, MURFREESBORO, OTHER VOICES
“Don’t blame meltdown on minorities”: Cynthia Tucker
(This Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page editor I esteem and this article is no exception to this regard.)
After quoting various television and on-line pundits that use the race card to blame for the meltdown, she quotes: “The heart of the crisis was caused by unregulated and lightly regulated mortgage brokers and independent mortgage bankers and affiliates that are not subject to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).”
She quotes University of Michigan law professor Michael Bar: “It would be quite odd if an act caused institutions not subject to its purview to do things that were inappropriate.”
This she finds important since the CRA made mortgages available to people without much in the way of income, assets, or credit. She writes:
“I hold no brief for dumb homebuyers, be they white, black or brown. But minority homeowners were frequently the victims of aggressive practices by mortgage brokers who received high commissions for steering buyers into high cost, subprime loans, even if the buyer would have qualified for a prime loan. The Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit research group, examined 50,000 subprime loans nationwide and found that blacks and Hispanics were 30 percent more likely than whites to be charged higher interest rates, even among borrowers with similar credit ratings.
“Again, lenders didn’t push those loans to comply with any affirmative action on lending programs. They did it to make money. That’s the same reason Wall Street’s masters of the universe created all those exotic investment vehicles – instruments they didn’t understand any better than some homebuyers understood their adjustable rates.
“If Wall Street was motivated by greed, President Bush was motivated by his belief in an ‘ownership society.’ In 2003, about the time that conventional lending standards evaporated, he said, ‘we want more people owning their own home. It is in our national best interest that more people own their home.’”
The FHA gave mortgages without a down payment, and Alan Greenspan – who Robert Woodward claimed to be a “maestro” – dismissed the idea of a housing bubble.
Tucker concludes, “Suffice it to say, the credit crisis is an all-American disaster, a melting pot of greed, recklessness and myopia. Those all-too-human traits aren’t limited to any particular race or ethnic group.”
(Pointing fingers never solved anything.)
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2008, THE DAILY NEWS JOURNAL, MURFREESBORO, OTHER VOICES
“No clear U.S. leader in McCain, Obama”
This is an editorial roundup of recent Tennessee editorial of the Associated Press. They come from The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, The Jackson Sun, and The Leaf-Chronicle of Clarksville. The underlying message implicit in these editorials while making specific charges relating to current crises is that we are failing to produce demonstrable leaders.
(It is one of the ironies of our times that with so much transparency, instant news and instant access to information via the Internet, with the capability of stripping our candidates intellectually and psychologically naked, we don’t know them and they don’t seem to know us.
More importantly, they don’t give us the confidence that they know how to lead, and as a consequence, we don’t seem to know how to follow, or even if we should. We elect a president if he forgives us our sins, and then cut him down when our sins cause us collective pain.
Presidential candidates quote history that we want to forget, and from which neither they nor we seem to have learned. They flatter us during the campaign, ask nothing of us, nor accuse of any excess. We all know that the bed we sleep in is the bed we make, and the problems we put to them are problems we know they can’t solve because they belong to us. Yet we dance this merry dance of lies every four years, while they spend a $ trillion to get elected knowing what corrections exist are already in place, and that the occupant of the Oval Office is cursed or benefited by a series of accidents.
It is quadrennial madness, and all these editorial writers know it, and should not be treated too harshly for being a little jaded for it.
Leaders today are atavistic and leadership is anachronistic. We have reached the unhappy and unsettling status in which everyone is a leader or no one is.
This long piece is my contribution to noting the ten days that changed America forever.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 8, 2008
“A map does not exhibit a more distinct view of the situation and boundaries of every country, than its news does a picture of the genius and morals of its inhabitants.”
Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774). English poet, dramatist, and novelist.
THE PREMISE OF THIS VIEW
From the end of September to the first week in October of this year, 2008, my wife, Betty, and I traveled across the country from Tampa, Florida to north central Minnesota, a distance of some 1,800 miles to visit her ailing father, 91, and our grandchildren, twin girls of 3, and a baby sister, six months old.
During the course of this trek across country were the first presidential debate, the vice presidential debate, the panic on Wall Street, the ambivalent posture of Congress on the proposed $700 billion bailout or rescue package, the frustration of driving through southern states that had no gas at the pump or signs calling for regular at as much as $409.9 a gallon, and the seemingly bottomless drop of the Dow Jones Industrials as we saw our life savings continuously shrink daily with no end in sight.
There was also the collapse of banks across the country, escalating unemployment, plant closings, home foreclosures and bankruptcies with construction companies defaulting in the middle of projects. This was all reminiscent of the Great Depression.
Warren Buffett has called this an “economic Pearl Harbor,” but even he seems to be understating the crisis. The government is considering a move to take over American banks, as the sins of deregulation seem a harbinger of draconian regulation and oversight.
Panic is on Main Street and Wall Street, as Americans no longer feel secure with trust and loyalty evaporating at all levels.
The economic panic has spread to countries across the globe with similar infrastructure collapse followed by precipitous government interventions including bailouts and bank takeovers in painful imitation of the American economic collapse and reaction.
It is a global problem echoing the mantra of the United States: “Progress is our most important product,” always pushing for a greater Gross Domestic Product, never imagining the elasticity of the economic bubble could possibly break, and now the consequences. Several G-7 nations have simultaneously cut the prime interest rate banks lend to each other by five basis points, or half a percent, a clear indication of a global meltdown.
Yet, it is apparent with the bailouts, bank takeovers, and interest rate manipulations that no one is in charge, clearly understands what is happening, or why, much less what to do about it. Nor is anyone sure the tactics proposed will work for there is no grand strategy in this panic situation. All moves are by the seat-of-the-pants with crossed fingers.
A quarter century ago, corporate guru Peter Drucker said that the uncoupling of the real economy (i.e. productivity, innovation, and markets) would be devastating should it separate from the financial economy, which appears to be the case.
Former chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker under president Jimmie Carter recently said, “We need more electrical engineers, chemical engineers, and civil engineers to rebuild our infrastructure and less financial engineers.” He also said that ordinary Americans contributed to the current crisis by increasingly living on credit, buying more than they could afford and not saving.
Managing Director of the IMF Dominique Strauss-Kahn claims that in a global economy we need a global economic policy, which is not possible because domestic considerations of nations take precedence over the impact on their neighbors. This was the case of the Irish Republic’s guaranteeing Irish bank accounts, resulting in a flood of currency going from Great Britain to Ireland forcing the Gordon Brown government bailout.
Director Strauss-Kahn also cited the importance of leadership that sponsors coordination of executive efforts to restore confidence and defuse panic.
Fifty or a hundred years from now, these ten days may be seen as a defining moment in human history, a time, incidentally, when my wife, Betty, and I were on the road. As we trekked across the hinterland, we could sense our personal, domestic, commercial and institutional world changing under our wheels.
Listening to and reading experts, it is apparent they agree, bad as the subprime meltdown, bad as the disastrous credit policies of commercial banks, and self-indulgent as consumers who refuse to save, productivity of workers remains high. They also agree that the real economy has uncoupled from the financial economy, which is driven by speculative hope and precipitous despair, making it hard to separate fact from fiction. They agree the financial economy is broken but no one knows for sure how much, or why, much less how to fix it.
A LOVE OF NEWSPAPERS
Being a habitual newspaper reader, especially of newspapers of the locale in which I find myself, it is hard to see these newspapers struggling to stay in print.
We returned to Tampa to find The Tampa Tribune reduced to comic book size with the op-editorial page completely erased reducing the editorial page to a combination of editorial, comment and letters-to-the-editor. The shrinking of hard copy news and a newsroom staff of professionally trained journalists marks an unhappy development.
Comments that followed are taken from newspapers read during this trek. Where appropriate, I have given my two cents. Regarding the new Tampa Tribune, I sense it is only ahead of the curve. Newsprint is dying replaced by legends on the Internet.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2008, THE TAMPA TRIBUNE, “Other Views.”
“The High Cost of Racial Hype”: Thomas Sowell
Sowell writes of black identity and compares the “navel-gazing” of the present generation to worrying about losing touch with black roots and black brothers in the hood. “Like most good things,” he writes, “it can be carried to the point where it is both ridiculous and counterproductive for all concerned.” He continues:
“In a world where an absolute majority of black children are born and raised in fatherless homes, where most black kids never finish high school, and where the murder rate among blacks is several times the national average, surely there must be more urgent priorities than preserving a lifestyle and an identity.”
Sowell acknowledges that blacks, like the Irish and Jews have gone through periods of strong tribal identity for survival, but that is no longer the case. The Irish and Jews have become assimilated into the American culture without sacrificing or becoming preoccupied with their ethnic identity. He says it is time for blacks to do the same.
Sowell, a syndicated columnist who happens to be black, asks the challenging question: “Will time and energy spent on rap music and wearing low-riding baggy pants like guys in prison – as badges of identity – provide as good a future for young people as learning math, computers, and the English language?” He concludes, romantic self-indulgence and self-deception are luxuries most of us, whatever our ethnic origins, can ill afford
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2008, THE TAMPA TRIBUNE, “Other Voices”
“Protecting Marriage Protects Our Children”: David Blankenhorn
Blankenhorn admits to being a liberal Democrat who does not favor same-sex marriage. “I spent a year studying the history and anthropology of marriage, and I’ve come to a different conclusion.”
He admits that marriage as a human institution is constantly evolving, but it is not primarily designed to receive benefits or social recognition, but is primarily a license to have children. He writes:
“Marriage is a gift that society bestows on its next generation. Marriage (and only marriage) unites the three core dimensions of parenthood – biological, social and legal – into one pro-child form: the married couple.
“Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you.
“Marriage says to society as a whole: for every child born, there is a recognized mother and a father, accountable to the child and to each other.”
Anthropologist Helen Fisher: “People wed primarily to reproduce.”
While acknowledging that same-sex relationships have a foundation in love, Blankenhorn quotes the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who posited the conundrum: “The real conflict we face is not good vs. bad, but good vs. good.” Blankenhorn adds, “Reducing homophobia is good. Protecting the birthright of the child is good.” Thus, the conflict of two goods.
David Blankenhorn is president of the Institute for American Values, and author of “The Future of Marriage.”
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2008, THE TAMPA TRIBUNE, “Other Views”
“It’s 1929 Again”: William H. Chafe
This article speaks with a similar voice to my book, “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007), which attempted to alert readers to the lessons of the destabilizing 1970s. It could just as well have been 1929, as William Chafe points out:
“Sadly, history has a way of repeating itself. It is particularly alarming to note the parallels between the economic crisis that devastated America in the late 1920s and the implosion in the financial markets that is occurring today.”
Chafe goes on to identify the period as the “roaring twenties,” or “jazz age,” with
”flappers in their bobbed hair dancing all night,” and “half of all families going to the movies at least once a week.” The 1920s had an appetite for mass consumption. The Middle American mantra was: “a Ford in every garage and a Frigidaire in every kitchen.”
Beneath the surface, professor Chafe notes structural weaknesses flashed warning signs that were too easily ignored. Workers begin buying on credit. The distance between worker wages and executives salaries widened. Wall Street profits soared as investors bought stock on the “margin,” paying cash for only 10 percent of the stock price, certain the price would go up. The constant boom fueled economic growth. Savings of most consumers verged on zero. “Buy today and pay tomorrow” became the tune.
Then came the collapse. Wall Street went bust. Inflation and unemployment reached 30 percent or more.
(I was born after this collapse and remember soup kitchens in my hometown. We never had a refrigerator but an icebox, or owned an automobile. Through high school, I rode my bicycle the 2 miles to school. Since we never owned an automobile, I never learned to drive or acquired a driver’s license until I was a senior in college. No surprise, I have never bought into the narcissistic philosophy of consumption. The memory of my da on the WPA and the soup kitchens has sobered me to a conservative existence.)
Chafe writes:
“Clearly, there is a similarity between what happened then and what is happening now.” He points out the growing income gap between the rich and the middle class. In the 1920s, “CEO earnings on average were 48 times as much as an average worker, now he or she earns 480 times as much.” Savings were nonexistent in the 1920s; they remain nonexistent today.
(In my book “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders & Dissonant Workers,” 2000, the “wage gap” is covered in some detail in “Something is wrong with this picture,” pp. 136 – 142.)
Chafe claims the subprime mortgage scandal is only the tip of the iceberg, concluding with regard to the approaching presidential election: “The real issue is who recognizes the historical parallels between 1929 and 2008, and which of our candidates is willing to address the structural flaws that have brought us to where we are.”
William H. Chafe is professor of history at Duke University, and author of “The Rise and Fall of the American Century: The United States from 1890 – 2010”).
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2008, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, ENTERTAINMENT
“Mr. Longfellow is waiting in the parlor”: Julia Keller/Lit Life
Julia Keller writes a delightful column on visiting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (1807 – 1882) home in Portland, Maine: “Longfellow was one of those shaggy, solemn versifiers from the nineteenth century whose poems helped establish a distinctive American literature.” It made him rich and famous although Keller admits his melancholy narrative is out of touch with the times. Yet, she reminds us that these lines breathe life into our common culture:
“I heard the bells on Christmas Day/Their old, familiar carols play.”
“Listen, my children, and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”
“I shot an arrow into the air/It fell to earth, I know not where.”
“By the shores of Gitche Gumee/By the shining Big Sea Water.”
“Under the spreading chestnut tree/The village smithy stands.”
Keller ends her piece celebrating this poet as she runs her hands along the banister of his home, standing on the threshold of the parlor and hall, feeling transformed without apologies. “You could do a lot worse than Longfellow,” she says, “whose poems about the United States are filled with the sort of golden exhortations we could surely use right about now, as the nation’s troubles mount.
To wit, take “The Building of the Ship”:
“Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State/Sail on, O Union, strong and great/Humanity with all its fears/With all the hopes of future years/Is hanging breathless on thy fate!”
(We don’t write bombastic poems like this today. We are too sophisticated, too worldly, alas, too out of touch with our soul.)
MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2008, “The Campaign”
“Candidates contrasting leadership Styles”: Liz Sidoti, Associated Press
(One of the misnomers of the twenty-first century, a holdover from the 1960s is the emphasis on “leadership style.” If only leadership style were a determining factor, which it is not, it would be so simple to create an algorithm of some predictability.
Unfortunately, the content of character is what counts, and character defies definition. Throughout American history, leadership of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson, and the two Roosevelts down to the 43rd president has proven “style” is superfluous but character essential.
Whatever a president’s style, such character flaws as an inflexible temperament, poor judgment and poor choice of key support staff, along with an impulsive nature has proven devastating. Character stimulates confidence and rallies people to embrace the times and to mount the sacrifices required. Character flaws have been endemic to presidents caught up in their personal obsessions while out of touch with imploding events. This was true in 1929 and in 2008.
Since Douglas McGregor and his “Theory X & Y” to Robert Blake and Jane Mouton and their “Managerial Grid,” along with the various motivational theories, the “right leadership style” has been equated to winning results. It is the basis of this article.)
Sidoti sees Senator John McCain to be action-oriented; Senator Barak Obama to be reflective and cautious, yet there is a time for action and a time for reflection given the circumstances.
McCain and Obama are seen to view the current tanking of markets from their “personal scripts,” according to professor Paul Light of New York University. McCain is emotive, seeing Main Street is paying for Wall Street excess, while Obama is measured in his response with a series of proposals to protect taxpayers.
The final assessment is that Republican McCain can be too hot, and Democratic Obama too cool. It is interesting to reflect that Jackson was considered a hot head, but an “Age of Jackson” followed his presidency, while Jefferson was considered super cool, yet his letters suggest he was quite hot under the collar dealing with the two Adams, and even launched a smear campaign against rival John Quincy Adams for the presidency.
(Leadership is a very human pursuit fed by ambition with a toxic appetite for power. Success is seldom a matter of style, but more a matter of the mastering this toxicity to do the people’s business.)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2008, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, COMMENTARY
“How to avoid next housing collapse”: Clarence Page.
(I confess to being a big fan of Clarence Page, seeing him on television regularly on PBS with the McLaughlin Group.)
“What we now call the Big Financial Crisis of 2008,” he writes, “began with the well-intentioned goal of helping more working class renters become homeowners. But as more and more money chased fewer and fewer qualified home buyers, the needy were elbowed aside by the greedy.”
The carrot used was no money down interest only for higher home prices than the mortgage applicant could afford. Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, eased credit requirements on loans it would purchase from banks and other lenders. The purpose was to increase home ownership among minorities whose credit ratings and savings were too low to qualify for conventional loans. These alternative “subprime” loans could charge 3 or 4 percentage points higher than conventional rates.
It all started with president Bill Clinton, but president George Bush also embraced the expansion of higher risk home loans, indeed, calling on the housing industry to help at least 5.5 million minority families become homeowners by the end of the decade. Page ends the piece by saying, “we need the regulations and oversight that take into account human nature, including the inevitable tendency to make an easy buck off of someone else’s good intentions.”
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, OP-ED PAGE
“The bailout: Couldn’t make this stuff up”: Garrison Keillor
Making reference to a recent avoidable train wreck, Keillor writes, “It’s just human nature that some calamities register in the brain and others don’t. The train engineer texting at the throttle and missing the red light and 25 people die in the crash – oh God, that is way too real – everyone has had a moment of supreme stupidity that came close to killing somebody.”
“On the other hand,” he continues, “the federal bailout of the financial market (YAWN) is a calamity that people accept as if it were just one more hurricane.” Then he takes after Senator John McCain:
“John McCain is a lifelong deregulator and believer in letting brokers and bankers do as they please – remember Lincoln Savings and Loan and his intervention with federal regulators on behalf of his friend Charles Keating, who then went to prison? Remember Neil Bush the brother of the C.O., who as a director of Silverado S&L, bestowed enormous loans on his friends without telling fellow directors that the friends were friends who, when the loans failed, paid a small fine and went skipping off to other things? McCain now decries greed on Wall Street and suggests a commission be formed to look into the problem. This is like Casanova coming out for chastity.”
(Keillor is not one of my favorite pundits, but he has a point, which masks the greater question: whatever happened to integrity in responsible office? I’m not just addressing politicians but authorities in all disciplines.
Take cigarette companies CEOs who told Congress there was no health hazard to cigarette smoking, when they had research data which clearly showed the linkage; or academics that promoted multiculturalism as a discipline when skills from such pursuit limited the horizons of students, not to mention colored their approach to community.
Whatever ever happened to leadership? There can be no leadership that puts special interests above integrity, personal advantage over service; personal good over commitment to the common good.)
Keillor, who admits to being a liberal, wonders what happened to lead the Republican Party’s “gimlet-eyed, steel-rim, crepe-soled common sense” to being taken over “by crooked preachers who demand we trust them because they’re packing a Bible and God sent on a mission to enact lower taxes, and less government.” They are there, he says, “except when things crash, and then government has to pick up the pieces.”
(The irony here is that George W. Bush’s presidency has managed the most bloated budget in the history of our nation, not only on the military but domestic front as well.)
“What we are seeing,” Keillor concludes, “is the stuff of a novel, the public corruption of an American war hero (i.e., McCain). It is painful. First, there was his exploitation of a symbolic woman, an eager zealot who is so far out of her depth (Sarah Palin) that it isn’t funny anymore. Anyone with a heart has to hurt for how McCain has made a fool of her. Never mind the persistent cheesiness of his attack ads. And now this chasm of debt and loss and the gentleman pretends to be shocked. He was there. He turned out the lights. He sent the regulators home.”
(The power of commentary is that you may not like what is said, but know that contained therein is more than a grain of truth. I felt for Sarah Palin when television’s Katie Couric interviewed her and asked what periodicals she read. It was apparent she is not a reader. She is a maverick like McCain mimicking his rustic action and cowboy economics.)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, ECONOMY
HOW WE GOT IN THIS MESS (Informational Editorial)
“Housing values never go down.” That simple premise enticed American consumers and Wall Street to load up on mortgage debt. Plunging home values now threaten to drag down the global economy.
l. The Boom 2000 – 2006
The Clinton and Bush administrations and Congress push to increase homeownership from about 63 percent of U.S. homeowners to 68 percent. Underwriting regulations are eased to allow more low-income borrowers to obtain a mortgage.
In 2000, the dot-com bubble bursts in March followed by 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Stock market prices tumble, interests rates cut to 40-year low by 2003. New home constructions and sales surge. Lenders use cheap money including adjustable rates. Subprime loans are made to borrowers with poor or no credit. Lenders pool the mortgages to sell on Wall Street with promise of high return.
Credit rating agencies bless these mortgage packages with the safest rating, AAA with the assumption home values will increase. Banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, pension funds and foreign governments gobble up these supposedly safe mortgage-backed securities. Firms buy insurance policies from American International Group (AIG) to protect their investments from default.
2. The subprime crisis: Late 2006 to Early 2008.
The Federal Reserve raises interest rates in June 2004, the first of 16 increases. The bubble begins to deflate a year later with the first wave of foreclosures, a slowdown in home construction and a slide in home values.
January 2006 Ameriquest Mortgage Company settles 49-state probe into deceptive subprime practices for $325 million.
April 2006 Fed Chairman Ben Bernake acknowledges signs of softening in the housing market. Median price of sales stalls, and then falls. Housing starts fall.
February 2007, new home sales drop 20 percent; sales of existing homes fall. The consumer economy stalls as home sales fall. Teaser rates give way to higher monthly payments. Owners unable to refinance miss payments. Foreclosures mount. Value of mortgage backed securities sinks.
3. The Meltdown 2008
Accounting rules require owners of the mortgage-backed securities to “write down” their value. As the housing market worsens, confidence in the value of any mortgage-backed security evaporates. Investors are forced to write off hundreds of billions of dollars.
February 2008, AIG and other agencies that sold insurance against defaults have to pay up and take similar writedowns.
March 2008, Bear Stearns, a major investment bank and underwriter of mortgage-backed securities, runs out of capital, and is sold to J.P. Morgan Chase.
April 2008, New Century Financial, the second largest subprime lender, files for bankruptcy.
September 7, 2008, mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, with more than $5 trillion in mortgage-back securities, are taken over by the federal government to avert bankruptcy after their market value fell by more than 50 percent.
September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers investment bank goes bankrupt.
September 2008, Merrill Lynch hastily accepts a purchase offer from the Bank of America to avoid Lehman’s fate.
September 2008, the Federal Reserve rescues AIG with an $85 billion secured loan in exchange for a 79.9 percent government stake.
September 2008, Bankers unsure of their total exposure to bad mortgages, raise interest rates for their best customers and shy away from lending money to others.
September 2008, fear of a deep global recession grows.
September 2008, saying piecemeal interventions are not enough Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Ben Bernake propose a $700 billion bailout under which the government would buy and then attempt to resell mortgage-backed securities.
4. The Proposal
The bailout package proposed by the Treasury Department is bigger than the entire 2009 budget appropriation for Social Security. The plan also calls for increasing the limit on the national debt, which has risen rapidly since 2001.
(This was a presentation of the chronological sequence of this economic catastrophe and reflects the value of newspapers.)
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, OPINION
ONE VIEW
“Whatever momentum McCain had is now gone,” writes E. J. Dionne, Jr., “his derisive approach may help explain why the instant polls gave Obama an edge in a debate that many pundits rated a tie – and why women seemed especially inclined toward Obama.”
He continues, “When McCain lectured or attacked Obama, the Republican ratings would drop, and the fall was especially steep among women.” He goes on the say Sarah Palin was a reckless choice for vice president. “Palin has proved herself to be spectacularly unprepared for a national campaign and embarrassingly inarticulate and unreflective.”
ANOTHER VIEW
“A wild week and McCain comes out admirably,” writes Debra J. Saunders. She gives McCain high marks for intervening in the $700 billion bailout stall. “McCain was in a corner,” she says, “He clearly feared that if Congress did not approve a bailout measure, the economy would tank. Then, his bid for the White House would be doomed.” She continues, “Going to Washington, while political, showed America a candidate who will risk his electoral fortune to deliver the right policy.”
(It is clear that this quadrennial madness we must suffer every four years is a most human drama of fragile and vulnerable candidates, whom it could be argued embrace masochistic madness to seek such office, yet there is never a shortage of such madness. Soon it will be over, and perhaps as many as 90 percent of the promises of the duly elected new president will be quickly and arbitrarily forgotten.)
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, BUSINESS
SUN COUNTRY WORKERS FACE 50% TEMPORARY PAY CUT
(Sometimes newspaper stories are almost impossible to comprehend. Sun Country Airlines is squeezed for cash and told workers on Monday it would cut their pay in half beginning next week and reimburse them in 2009. This is a promise, not a guarantee.)
Sun Country Airlines lost $47 million on $251 million operating revenue for the 12 months ending in June. The airline employs 1,000 during the winter season. Employees at this writing had not yet agreed to what CEO Stan Gadek claims is a survival strategy. Meanwhile, Tom Petters, CEO of Petters Group Worldwide, the holding company of which Sun Country Airlines is an affiliate, is under a Federal Securities investigation for fraud.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, CAMPAIGN
The editorial page had a strong case for Wall Street rescue, but it paled with the anticipating vice presidential debate between Republican Governor Sarah Palin and Senator Joseph Biden.
The inclination of both vice president candidates for gaffs was noted, which has become fodder for comedy writers. Biden, an Irishman, has a tendency to run his mouth before engaging his brain, while Palin, a proud tomboy, is more at home in the wild than behind a rostrum. Both candidates were chosen to appeal to needed constituencies for the head of their respective tickets to win election.
The debate on Thursday was viewed by more people than the American Idol finals, which says something, I’m not sure what.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, OPINION
“Rural virtue, urban vice? Simplistic”: Steven Chapman
Chapman writes quoting Sarah Palin, “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity. They are the ones who do some of the hardest work in American, who grow our food, run our factories and fight our wars. They love their country, in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America.” In other words, Chapman continues, “they are not like those idle, insincere, lying city folks who dare to suggest that America can sometimes be wrong.”
“The myth of rural virtue and urban vice,” he writes, is an old one in this country, and it persists no matter what they change in the landscape. Most Americans, it seems, can tolerate hearing of the superiority of the small town, as long as they don’t have to live in one. You wouldn’t know it from listening to country music, but four out of every five Americans choose not to reside in rural areas.”
Then Chapman lowers the boom:
“In 2007, a survey of eighth-graders by the Monitoring the Future project of the University of Michigan found that country kids were 26 percent more likely to experiment with drugs than middle-schoolers elsewhere. Overall methamphetamine consumption among adults and teens is more than 50 percent higher in the country.”
The story with alcohol is worse still. “Relative to their urban counterparts, rural youth ages 12 to 17 are significantly more likely to report consuming alcohol,” says a 2006 study by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, “
Nor is the countryside exempt from social problems. “The highest rates of births to unwed mothers are in the mainly rural states of Mississippi and New Mexico. The most urban states, New Jersey and California, do better than the average in out-of-wedlock births.
Crime is much more common in the city than in the country. Alfred Blumstein at Carnegie Mellon University thinks the explanation is pretty simple: “It’s a matter of social control. Small towns have networks of family and friends, and most everyone knows everyone else.” This deters crime in two ways: one doesn’t want to damage his reputation; nor is he likely to rob someone who can easily identify him.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, OPINION
“Congress, so far, has traveled the easy roads in this crisis”: George F. Will
Will’s open the article quoting “Babbitt” (1922) written by America’s Nobel Laureate Sinclair Lewis:
“His name was George F. Babbitt. He was 46 years old now, in April 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.”
Babbitt, which I read as a boy, is a pungent satire of complacent mediocrity, about a man who revels in his own popularity, his ability to make money, his fine automobile, and his penny-pinching generosity. Babbitt also worships gadgets. He praises prohibition while drinking bootleg whiskey, bullies his wife, and ogles his manicurist. Although discontented with life, he is thoroughly satisfied with George F. Babbitt. Because his character is grounded in realism, realism that still haunts our American character to this day, it remains one of the most convincing characterizations in American literature.
Will writes: “We are waist-deep in evasions because one cannot talk sense about the cultural roots: Never shall be heard a discouraging word about the public.
“Beneath Americans’ perfunctory disapproval of government deficits lurks an inconvenient truth: They (the public) enjoy deficits, by which they are charged less than a dollar for a dollar’s worth of government.”
Like government, he claims, we prefer to buy and pay later, hitching outlays to appetites. This finds 1.5 billion credit cards floating “out there,” or nine per cardholder. Subsidized loans and cheap money has separated the pleasure of purchasing from the pain of paying. This is compounded by an entitlement mentality fostered by a welfare state believing a high standard of living is deserved untethered from savings or sacrifice.
Populism flatters people with a scapegoat to neutralize their despair. Today it is “Wall Street greed” which is contrasted with the virtue of “Main Street” sobriety.
Sinclair Lewis also wrote “Main Street” (1920) to puncture the egos of smug, self-satisfied Americans who considered their hometowns flawless. Will updates this, writing: “When people on Main Street misbehave by, say, buying houses for more than they can afford to pay, they blame the wily knaves who made them do it, such as the nimble Babbitt.” And so we have the $700 billion government bailout of these indiscretions illustrating the “enormous enlargement of government’s power.”
Then George Will adds: “Suppose that in 1979 the government had not engineered the bailout of Chrysler (now Ford and GM are in line for the same), might there have been a more sober approach to risk throughout corporate America?”
(At another level, I wrote in “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (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 of ourselves.” And, yes, corporate America as well.
The human group is a reflection of the individual. In that sense, there has been a century slide from rights to privileges, from opportunities to entitlements, from risks to the certainty of government intervention to break the fall, and for it we have the nation that has evolved.)
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2008, MINNEAPLIS STAR TRIBUNE, EDITORIAL
“Early focus on math builds a foundation” with eighth grade algebra key to success in later grades.”
The editorial quotes a study made by the Brookings Institution, which indicated that algebra was important, but many eighth-graders fail to grasp a fundamental facility with the multiplication tables and long division in arithmetic. The caveat of the editorial is the race to the future must build a bridge to it by mastering the fundamentals first.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, METRO
“2.6 million check lands her in workhouse, not easy street.”: Rochelle Olson
Sabrina Walker, erroneously received a $2.6 million check from the state of Minnesota. She immediately went on a spending spree that included purchasing a car and jewelry for a total of $267,000. Once caught, and arrested, and in court for criminal sentencing, she said, “Indeed this was a mistake. I didn’t create this. I didn’t swindle the state. I didn’t trick anyone. I have suffered greatly from the moment this has been done. My dreams have been shattered.”
Walker, 38, could not see how she had done anything wrong, yet she admitted the money was not hers, that she did not earn it, and asked the judge for mercy and compassion. The judge sentenced her to nine months in the workhouse.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2008, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, OPINION
“We needed united; we got ideology.”: Michael Gerson
Gerson writes, “America’s economic crisis has become a political crisis – with the second compounding and exceeding the first.”
This was Gerson’s claim before the $700 bailout was passed, blaming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as the culprit: “Pelosi has an unrivaled record for lacking achievement. In retrospect, it seems incomprehensible that Democrats chose a grating, partisan, San Francisco liberal to lead both parties in the House.”
Then he adds, “Congress is broken; Congress doesn’t work.” This he claims is especially true of the House of Representatives: “America is left with one portion of one branch of government that does not seem to work. House Democrats (the majority) seem temperamentally incapable of building genuine consensus on issues that matter.”
(For the past 170 years, or since the “Age of Jackson,” and the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the imperial presidency has grown in the body politic, yet Congress, which has suffered great decline, is always the “fall guy” when things go awry. Go figure!)
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2008, THE DAILY NEWS JOURNAL, MURFREESBORO, NATION
“Emotions connect old O.J. acquittal, new conviction: Simpson found guilty on all 12 counts against him.”
Jurors were asked to ignore O.J. Simpson’s past, but that is like ignoring the stripes on a zebra. “The former NFL star’s murder acquittal last decade and his new conviction for robbing memorabilia peddlers couldn’t have been clearer. The attorney for the family of Ronald Goldman – who was killed along with Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson in Los Angeles in 1995 – said he thought his hounding of Simpson for years to collect a $33.5 million wrongful death judgment pushed him to a desperate gambit to recover personal items he had lost.”
(Whatever you think of O.J. Simpson, and his acquittal for the death of his wife and young Ronald Goldman, this trial, which reads like a lynching, is unlikely to give the Goldman family peace or the American people closure. It is sad to see a man who rose from so little to become so much, from the greatest college and professional football player of his era, a film and television presence, and spokesman for many products to fall to this end. There go I but for the grace of God! Simpson is likely to end his days in prison, a situation that reads like Victor Hugo novel.)
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2008, THE DAILY NEWS JOURNAL, MURREESBORO, STATE
“Smoking ban eclipses 1-year mark in Tennessee; many businesses say they’re glad.”
“Industry and health groups in Tennessee say the vast majority of restaurants chose to ban smoking a year ago rather than banish those under 21 years old, and most appear glad they did. The state Health Department said that of the more than 20,000 hotels, motels, and restaurants statewide that it inspects, only 145 warning letters were issued for violating the law within the last 12 months. Of those, only seven escalated into fines.”
(We only encountered one place where smoking was allowed and that was at a service station-restaurant where we got gas and a quick meal, which was in Kentucky.)
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, THE DAILY NEWS JOURNAL, OPINION
“Our leaders can’t communicate”: Stephen Shirley
The young columnist quotes from the movie “Cool Hand Luke” for the title of his piece.
He starts with Congress: “Government leaders have failed to formulate and articulate to the American people a coherent argument in favor of the ($700 billion) rescue plan.”
He then takes on Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen’s renovation of the governor’s residence with no clear input from citizens calling it “Bredesen’s Bunker.”
This leads to the why and wherefore of local business leaders and the ensuing snafu in the construction of a new park.
He then takes on a local law enforcement officer asking how he could justify handcuffing a child. Next it is local school officials whom he finds clueless when they refuse a blind girl from enrolling in school. Lastly, it is the local school board that is on his radar. He finds its debate on a Hispanic donkey puppet on a children’s television show as pointless, ludicrous and a waste of time.
He writes: “I don’t understand why any of this is so hard for our leaders. If you want to propose something, do so in a public forum and be prepared to answer any naysayers. If you screw up, face up to your mistakes and your critics. Listen first and talk second.”
SUNDAY, THE DAILY NEWS JOURNAL, MURFREESBORO, OTHER VOICES
“Don’t blame meltdown on minorities”: Cynthia Tucker
(This Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page editor I esteem and this article is no exception to this regard.)
After quoting various television and on-line pundits that use the race card to blame for the meltdown, she quotes: “The heart of the crisis was caused by unregulated and lightly regulated mortgage brokers and independent mortgage bankers and affiliates that are not subject to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).”
She quotes University of Michigan law professor Michael Bar: “It would be quite odd if an act caused institutions not subject to its purview to do things that were inappropriate.”
This she finds important since the CRA made mortgages available to people without much in the way of income, assets, or credit. She writes:
“I hold no brief for dumb homebuyers, be they white, black or brown. But minority homeowners were frequently the victims of aggressive practices by mortgage brokers who received high commissions for steering buyers into high cost, subprime loans, even if the buyer would have qualified for a prime loan. The Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit research group, examined 50,000 subprime loans nationwide and found that blacks and Hispanics were 30 percent more likely than whites to be charged higher interest rates, even among borrowers with similar credit ratings.
“Again, lenders didn’t push those loans to comply with any affirmative action on lending programs. They did it to make money. That’s the same reason Wall Street’s masters of the universe created all those exotic investment vehicles – instruments they didn’t understand any better than some homebuyers understood their adjustable rates.
“If Wall Street was motivated by greed, President Bush was motivated by his belief in an ‘ownership society.’ In 2003, about the time that conventional lending standards evaporated, he said, ‘we want more people owning their own home. It is in our national best interest that more people own their home.’”
The FHA gave mortgages without a down payment, and Alan Greenspan – who Robert Woodward claimed to be a “maestro” – dismissed the idea of a housing bubble.
Tucker concludes, “Suffice it to say, the credit crisis is an all-American disaster, a melting pot of greed, recklessness and myopia. Those all-too-human traits aren’t limited to any particular race or ethnic group.”
(Pointing fingers never solved anything.)
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2008, THE DAILY NEWS JOURNAL, MURFREESBORO, OTHER VOICES
“No clear U.S. leader in McCain, Obama”
This is an editorial roundup of recent Tennessee editorial of the Associated Press. They come from The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, The Jackson Sun, and The Leaf-Chronicle of Clarksville. The underlying message implicit in these editorials while making specific charges relating to current crises is that we are failing to produce demonstrable leaders.
(It is one of the ironies of our times that with so much transparency, instant news and instant access to information via the Internet, with the capability of stripping our candidates intellectually and psychologically naked, we don’t know them and they don’t seem to know us.
More importantly, they don’t give us the confidence that they know how to lead, and as a consequence, we don’t seem to know how to follow, or even if we should. We elect a president if he forgives us our sins, and then cut him down when our sins cause us collective pain.
Presidential candidates quote history that we want to forget, and from which neither they nor we seem to have learned. They flatter us during the campaign, ask nothing of us, nor accuse of any excess. We all know that the bed we sleep in is the bed we make, and the problems we put to them are problems we know they can’t solve because they belong to us. Yet we dance this merry dance of lies every four years, while they spend a $ trillion to get elected knowing what corrections exist are already in place, and that the occupant of the Oval Office is cursed or benefited by a series of accidents.
It is quadrennial madness, and all these editorial writers know it, and should not be treated too harshly for being a little jaded for it.
Leaders today are atavistic and leadership is anachronistic. We have reached the unhappy and unsettling status in which everyone is a leader or no one is.
This long piece is my contribution to noting the ten days that changed America forever.
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