DEJA VU: A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD!

DÉJÀ VU: A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 10, 2008

“Experience is the shroud of illusion.”

J. De Finod (cc 1875), American author


Yesterday, Tuesday, December 9, 2008, the CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, executives that came away with millions of dollars in salary and stock options, architects of tens of millions of bankrupt home owners, appeared again before a Congressional Hearing. Four executives from these two firms claimed no guilt, no responsibility, and no regrets for what has happened in the subprime meltdown. It was not their fault. They acted as astute businessmen. No learning here.

In the 1970s, a similar meltdown was nobody's fault.

The CEOs of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, too, have been appearing before Congress with their hands out with the "penalty of delay" gimmick as their sales strategy. They must have $15 billion by Christmas, or the Tooth Fairy will die, and Detroit and the nation will see 2 million workers lose their jobs. And it will be all the fault of Congress if it happens, not theirs!

A similar bailout was given to Chryler in the 1970s, when, incidentally, the technology for 80mpg automobiles were on the drawing boards, but that would not be good for Detroit that preferred to build gas-guzzling SUV tanks and trucks. Nor were 80mpg vehicles high on the wish list of the oil industry. No interest in learning there.

The Governor of Illinois was indicted yesterday for attempting to sell President-elect Barak Obama's Illinois US Senate seat to the highest bidder. This wasn't the first, second, or third time an Illinois governor was indicted, but the fourth, many of whom have had long stays in prison for corruption and malfeasance. Little learning here.

The country is in its worst recession since -- yes, the 1970s -- with the prospects of double digit unemployment and double digit inflation. Recessions and economic bubbles have been common since The Great Depression: 1937, 1945, 1948, 1953, 1957, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2007, which now continues.

Can the world stave off another Great Depression? One wonders as so little learning seems to be evident, despite all the Nobel Laureates in economics in the United States.

The learned ones from our established think tanks, universities, and gurus in newspapers, magazines, radio, television and the Internet, along with talking heads rushing about the country for high speaking fees fill the air with their claptrap providing further evidence of a pandemic of runaway anxiety.

I just completed John Dos Passos' monumental novel of 1352 pages titled "USA," which was written about the early twentieth century. I first read it forty years ago when I was programmed by my masters into thinking they had answers and people like me need only behave and trust them.

"USA" was a novel and I read as fiction. How was I to know that I would work and travel the world and see many of the things Dos Passos wrote about, not in the early twentieth century, but the late twentieth century. I sensed in this experience that we are stuck on a dime and can't get off it, repeating the same snafus over and over again, only with different people and different names.

Dos Passos wrote about the divided stream between the rich and the poor, the self-indulgent and the righteous, the powerful and the powerless, and was called "the poet against the world." Imagine that?

I find that label amusing since he was writing the truth of that world as he saw it, a world that lived deeply in its own illusion, a world not unlike our own. That of course was part of the reason for WWII with the mad German corporal setting the table.

Much talk is made of the feeble response of the government to Katrina, but power has always proven pusillanimous when the unexpected is introduced. Hitler never talked in code but in bold terms of what he was about and the world was powerless. Why? Because he changed the whole game and the world was still playing as if it were the nineteenth century. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)with all its razzle dazzle electronic sophistication and layers on layers of corpocracy couldn't get to victims of Hurrican Katrina, but reporters could. The hype of US superpower status was brought down as Katrina stuck a pin in its ballooned hubris. No learning here.

Two senseless world wars, yes, and many equally senseless smaller wars, wars that historians now ponder if at all necessary. It is estimated that between 50 and 100 million people died in twentieth century wars. Some believe these estimates are low. It is one of the reasons Germany and Russia have been unable to grow their populations with the zero or below zero birth rate of ethnic Germans and Russians .

Dos Passos was writing out of what he saw and experienced, "out of the land," traveling throughout the United States, and a greater part of the world during the first quarter of the twentieth century. He was a merchant seaman, an ambulance driver and soldier in WWI, and ultimately a great writer.

Most readers know who Hemingway was, Faulkner and Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and Joyce, all writers out of that period, but not Dos Passos. He never reached their celebrity.

It might be because he was a serious writer of social commentary. He certainly didn't practice the macho he-man esthetics of Hemingway or the romance of self-destruction of Fitzgerald. Dos Passos was peripatetic, a wanderer, observer and reporter not as an academic, although he graduated from Harvard. Hemingway was a high school graduate and Fitzgerald a Princeton drop out. These writers wanted to belong; Dos Passos preferred the psychological detachment of the perpetual outsider.

You that read me know I am a kindred spirit of that perspective. That is why I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, indeed, that is why I write all my books.

Colin Wilson wrote in "The Outsider" (1956) something about truth that seems to hold little interest today. We would apparently prefer to be stuck, to create crisis, and then manage ourselves out of them; to become literate but not educated and certainly not intellectual; to describe our problems rather than solve them; to never grow up with the mindset and gamesmanship of sixth graders, and expect to suffer nothing untowards for the insociance.

We burn the candle at both ends and wonder why the middle won't hold the flame. We are optimist and treat pessimism as if a terminal disease, and not the wake up call to reality that it is. The world is a horrific place for 5 billion of the six and half billion souls on this planet. That is pessimism.

In the first go around, The CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler flew to Washington, DC in separate private jets to acquire a $30 billion bailout or rescue package. It became one of the monumental public relations snafus of recent times. Then they compounded this extragance by the opposite extreme. They each drove hybrid vehicles the 500 miles from Detroit for yet another Congressional Committee appearance. It strikes me as incredulous to the absurd. Have they never heard of Sartre's "The Absurd"? Well, they personify it.

People, listen up! These are our leaders today. The indicted governor of Illinois is not the first that has demonstrated such arrogance. "You can't touch me. I'm a law unto myself. I have constitutional authority to govern as I see fit. Citizens, take note!" No learning here.

We have created a corporate class that has run not only the United States, but the world into the ground or the current state of affairs. The Governor of Illinois is quick to point out he's involved in no Watergate! If the alleged charges prove true, he belongs to the same fraternity.

Watergate is a benchmark. President Nixon personifies the corporate class, but he didn't create it. Post WWII did that. Corpocracy gradually came to believe it was untouchable, a law unto itself, that it could give itself extravagant stock options and bonuses and golden parachutes and no one would be the wiser. It became insensitive to public opinion, or even opinions within its own ranks. An executive in risk management warned the Fannie Mae CEO that subprime loans were toxic and was fired! Trust me, I know about messengers being killed in corpocracy.

It is all in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, and it has not changed anything. It didn't change for John Dos Passos, and it certainly won't change for James R. Fisher, Jr.

Colin Wilson writes in "The Outsider":

"The problem for the civilization is the adoption of a religious attitude that can be assimilated as objectively as the headlines of last Sunday's newspaper. But the problem for the individual always will be the opposite of this, the conscious striving not to limit the amount of experience seen and touched; the intolerable struggle to expose the sensitive areas of being to what may possibly hurt them; the attempt to see as a whole, although the instinct of self-preservation fights against the pain of the internal widening, and all the impulses of spiritual laziness build into waves of sleep with every new effort. The individual begins that long effort as an OUTSIDER, he may finish it as a saint."

Be always well,

Jim

PS I'm glad people and businesses are not afraid to say CHRISTMAS this year, even though I know it is an economic and not a spiritual motive. So, MERRY CHRISTMAS to you all!