HAVE WE BECOME A MADOFF NATION?

HAVE WE BECOME A MADOFF NATION?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 22, 2008

“The corruptions of the country are closely allied to those of the town, with no difference but what is made by another mode of thought and living.”

Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist, Dean of St. Patrick’s, author of “Gulliver’s Travels”

“In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product), up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing – as it probably was – we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.”

Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Laureate in Economic, The New York Times


* * * * *

A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD! BERNARD MADOFF – ARE WE FOREVER DOOMED TO MORE OF THE SAME?

Bernard Madoff is one of those nondescript people you may bump into while going to high school. You could lose him going to your student locker between classes, have no idea what happened to him, but rumor have it he married well, and then one day you see him all over television with baseball cap down over his eyes, coat collar of his jacket turned up, smirk on his face, hands stuffed in his pockets, as if not a care in the world.

This unremarkable character is alleged to have swindled his father-in-law’s charity out of $175 million and the family fortune of another $400 million, which is a drop in the bucket to the alleged $55 billion he has taken from high stakes investors, banks, philanthropies and other institutions across the globe. Most people, who have suffered these huge losses, have no idea who Bernard Madoff is much less what he looks like. Thanks to his fall from grace and television now they know.

The immediate aftermath was the suicide of Rene-Thierry, 65, who was found dead at his desk in the New York office of Access International Advisors, having cut his wrists with a box cutter. He was responsible for the loss of $1.4 billion of his clients’ money, and tens of millions of dollars of his own fortune, being virtually ruined financially along with his clients. When life is so synthetic that material wealth is the primary identifier, this action should be expected.

We have lost our moral compass and our way. We no longer feel real to ourselves, but chase synthetic arbiters as dollars or euros to seed our folly.

Look Back! We have been there before, in fact, over and over again. We are stuck in absurdity. While applauding our brilliance, we fail to see our weakness. We complain of shock, surprise, disgust, but vulnerability is native to our one-dimensional society.

Herbert Marcuse argues in “One Dimensional Society” (1964) that Western societies since WWII have moved to new forms of control in thought and education, resulting in the closing of the political universe so that opposing parties are nearly identical. He saw psychiatry in its quest to defeat unhappy consciousness desublimating depression with happy pill addictions.

He saw the ruse of closing off dialectical debate by attacking the dissenters rather than the subject at issue. One-dimensional attacks used negative thinking to defeat the logic of protest. Marcuse anticipated technological rationality and its logic of domination. This logic spawned patent optimism in face of all evidence to the contrary, crystallizing this in the one-dimensional philosophy: “technology will save us from all our sins!”

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) observed:

“America’s one sided one-dimensional progress has reached the alarming stage. This situation is so contradictory that it borders on insanity. We can control a soft landing of a spacecraft on distant planets, but we cannot control the polluting fumes emanating from our automobiles and factories. We propose utopian communities in gigantic space colonies, but cannot manage crime in our cities. The business community salutes the terrific growth of the pet food and cosmetic industries as signs of progress, but we cannot afford to feed the homeless or provide health care for the needy. We are among the best educated of Western nations in terms of per capita high school and college graduates – with arguably the best university system in the West – but few Americans read books, are multilingual, or are familiar with the culture or geography of other nations, much less their own. In fact, some see the American educational system as ‘killing the spirit’ of the American student to learn.”

I have been tracking this one-dimensional progress most of my life. Some 35 years ago, I wrote an essay in my journal about our vulnerability. At the time, we were experiencing the high jinx of corporate dalliance with double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation. Corporate CEOs cackle it was not their fault, while professors and self-appointed gurus in all forms of media painted the air blue in psychobabble about the “Age of Anxiety,” “Crisis in Confidence,” “Lack of Leadership,” as if these were surprised discoveries. Listen up! We have been stuck since WWII.

One day in 2006, I happened again on this journal and decided to publish. My God, I said to myself, why can’t we see we are stuck? The book was a wake up call knowing waking up is not on our agenda.

A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) argued:

“It is apparent in the early days of the twenty-first century that America is not unlike the 1970s when young people were forced to participate in an unpopular war; when political upheaval was in the air; when corrupt politicians who lied and deceived the electorate reached a crescendo with Watergate; when drugs were ruining lives; when morality took a holiday; when new forms of bigotry and hatred were hatching; when the automotive industry was in sharp decline, while foreign automakers were eating our lunch; when an energy crisis rocked the land with OPEC’s oil embargo; when a paranoid president hunkered down and became a law unto himself; when Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs.”

Why do we fail to learn from our mistakes? Why do we insist in repeating them? Why do we wear masks of confidence in the midst of chaos and collapse? Why are we stuck in history? The answer is in the words of Spanish philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it:“

THE SUCKING SOUND OF CORRUPTION

Remember the “Keating Five” of the Savings & Loan Scandal of the 1980s? They were alleged to be coconspirators in the Keating scandal. Charles H. Keating, Jr., a big time campaign contributor to members of Congress, took investors and depositors of the S&L’s for billions, people who felt their money was safe in a system they trusted.

Who were the “Keating Five”? Our best and brightest. I say this because we elected them to the highest public offices, and if they weren’t, shame on us!

You see the “Keating Five” were members of Congress and the United States Senate. There was Senator John McCain, the recently defeated Republican presidential candidate, and Senator John Glenn, the great American astronaut. Both men despite the scandal were reelected to the Senate. Not so the other Congressmen: Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ) and Donald Riegle (D-MI).

Keating was chairman of the Lincoln Savings & Loan Association. He went to prison for his deeds. What happened?

No less than 747 S&L’s went belly up. The ultimate cost of the crisis was $160.1 billion, about $124.6 billion of which was directly paid for by the U.S. taxpayers. The 1990 – 1991 economic recession followed. Between 1986 and 1991, the number of new homes constructed per year dropped from 1.8 million to 1 million, the lowest rate since World War II. Tens of thousands lost their jobs, many thousands their homes, and the manufacturing industry, which was reeling from competition from Japan and South East Asia, and emerging competition from Europe, was never to recover.

All the wrenching of hands, all the pointing of fingers, all the Congressional hearings, all the calls for greater regulation and oversight, all the new laws on the books, and all of the media books produced by experts and critics detailing the S&L scandal and demanding change could now be reissued from the old tag line of “S&L Scandal” to the new tag line “Bernard Madoff Scandal,” and you wouldn’t even have to edit the content. Along with the same duplication and replication of events, accusations and declarations of resolve to correct would be the same tired formulas that nobody plans to observe much less implement. The more things change the more they remain stuck.

But why?

CORPORATE SOCIETY & THE DEVILS IS IN THE DETAILS

Management guru Peter Drucker is acclaimed as “The Man Who Invented The Corporate Society,” which, incidentally, is the title of John J. Tarrant’s 1976 biography of the Austrian-American. It is a catchy title and powerful identity, but, unfortunately more than one hundred years off the mark. Not surprisingly, The Wall Street Journal and Wall Street took the Drucker mantra as gospel into the embodiment of “corpocracy.” This is explained in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998):

“Corporate management as corpocracy: (1) treats employees as numbers not persons; (2) supports company politics at the expense of productivity; (3) uses stealth as a measure of communication; (4) finds data collection its principle product; (5) disguises its confusion with endless meetings; (6) allows markets to drift away for its fanatical internal focus; (7) hides indecision in excessive planning; (8) fears individual initiative as you never know where it might lead; (9) lives in a box walled off from the reality of work; (10) exudes overt praise for innovation while harboring covert hostility to it.”

Corporate society is a product of the Civil War, not of Peter Drucker. The Civil War allowed the Industrial Revolution to hit its full stride, explode on all its cylinders, and drive Western society out of a 600-year stalemate as essentially an agricultural and trade culture into modernity. At what price?

From the beginning of our 12,000-year history, a “cut and control” policy has prevailed. Each age sacrificed “what was” for something new, something that was desired but at the expense of something that was lost never to be regained.

This was true of the nomadic tribes of hunters and gatherers to the establishment of farms and households where property became important, then on to the age of the arts, craftsmanship and trade to the Industrial Revolution and modernity. Progress has been a double-edged blade throughout human culture. In studying this, I wrote “Near Journey’s End? Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent Man? (2004, unpublished). My thesis was that progress has been our most important product, but with little appreciation at what price to our small planet and ourselves.

The Civil War has its industrial footprints all over it in weapons and armaments, uniforms and supplies, transportation and logistical support. Warfare was now planned, organized, coordinated, communicated, controlled, managed, and dispatched with mechanistic efficiency.

No longer was approximation good enough. Weapons and training required a precision not previously felt necessary. Virtually everything from paperwork to armaments had to meet specifications, standardization, and measurable stipulations as to efficiency, effectiveness, relevance and performance. Canons grew more sophisticated, the repeating rifle was invented, as was the submarine, and railroads became a weapon of critical import.

Sacrificed to this new high church of standardization were individuality, idiosyncrasy, independence and singular creativity that had been endemic to the American character.

Think back! Since the Civil War (1861 – 1865), American society has moved from primarily agrarian to essentially industrial to now mainly service. Complex manufacturing moved work from small guilds of individuals working together to large groups working in factories. Small towns and villages dried up with a mass exodus to new cities penciling the landscape where the jobs were.

The nuclear family of paternal dominance, which was centered on the community church was first fragmented and then destroyed. Pastoral identity where land and nature gave people a sense of place and space was gone forever. From open space where experience was direct and identity self-evident came group identity, group norms, and then identity by numbers. The close connection between doing and being was slipping away replaced by alienation from self, from work and finally from life, as it had been known. As Marcuse argues, this process has neither been acknowledge nor resolved but explained away by an ever-growing army of explainers.

Craftsmanship gave way to machines with standardized specifications, which ensured every product produced would be precisely the same. People became a product through social engineering to be classified, categorized and controlled. People were tunneled, pummeled and channeled into a predictable mass culture through compulsory public education, a rhetorical press, and an obliging clerical hierarchy. There was no room in this scheme of things for the idiosyncratic. It was important to fit in order to belong, to be like everyone else, to think, behave, believe and value what the corporate mantra claimed important.

Paradoxically, one group escaped this conforming the longest in America, and that was the African American community. During the Great Depression more than 80 percent of African Americans were in two parent families. The African American community church was center to their lives. Crime was uncommon while community support of each other was the norm.

The Civil Rights Movement was successful in desegregating schools, in passing the voting rights act, and equal opportunity under the law, thus improving upward mobility, but at what price? African Americans were last to embrace corpocracy, and now they share the same corporate identity and angst.

From birth to death, we measure our significance on what we have as a measure of what we are. It is so ingrained in our consciousness we don’t question it. We neither question the absurdity of political polls and best selling lists, and now thousands of websites that instruct us in how to live our lives, nor do we question the morbid absurdity of celebrity worship. Think of it. Celebrities are people we don’t know, will never meet, and have no idea who they are. Politicians, CEOs, and leaders everywhere are measuring their worth in terms of their celebrity pollster appeal. We have become an empty suit society.

We are also a nation of strangers who takes the word of an expert to our own experience. We have lost something since the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln was self-taught with no formal education, a captain in the militia during the Black Hawk War, where he never saw action. In contrast, the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was a graduate of West Point, a decorated regiment commander in the Mexican War, and Secretary of War in President Franklin Pierce’s administration (1853 – 1857). Davis was a groomed corporate type. Lincoln was not.

Lincoln, however, read and absorbed works on military history and strategy so that historian T. Harry Williams concluded: “Lincoln stands out as a great war president, probably the greatest in our history, and a great natural strategist, a better one than any of his generals.” Lincoln was an outsider; Davis an insider.

Today, we are obsessed with being insiders. You aren’t considered intelligent unless you have a high “I.Q”; not ready for college without a superior SAT score, or graduate school without the required GRE levels.

So what do students do to boost their scores? They take courses that focus on the test, not on the learning they have acquired. Indeed, elementary and secondary education today is geared to a test score, not to learning, per se. Learning is not relevant! Blame the government that insists on classifying schools in terms of standardized test scores to determine allocation of Federal Funds. Psychometrics is a product of corpocracy.

Fifty years after the Civil War, corporate society became so embedded in the American culture that no one thereafter could remember the difference.

In the “Electronic Age,” this has grown from the sublime to the ridiculous. Even president-elect Barak Obama will not be without his BlackBerry. Nerds across America see this as good. I see it as scary. Everything is being reduced to an electronic grid.

Notice that the Secretary of Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve came up with a $700 billion bailout of the subprime real estate meltdown with no idea why it was $700 billion instead of $200 billion, or a $1 trillion. It was a number picked out of a rabbit’s hat with sophisticated algorithms of justification, reflecting the corporate sense of being trapped. Marcuse anticipated this when he said a one-dimensional society is locked in to its technological rationality with no escape. Notice, too, that those receiving billions of this bailout have not behaved as expected.

This is not all that surprising. Corporate society expects people to act like inanimate objects to be manipulated. Having killed the spirit of individuals, corpocracy has made people into empty constructs. This fits nicely into electronic algorithms, but doesn’t set too well with man’s primordial instinct to survive. As T. S. Eliot puts it:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw, Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

And elsewhere:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

We see this shadow in television comedy. We don’t want to be reminded of the shabby equipment of the neglected self. Instead, we prefer to retreat into sexual innuendo which is not funny, but entertains a blunted mindset that fails to see the ridiculous in self- ridicule. If we do not respect ourselves, who should; if we don’t display dignity, who should we blame?

Television drama is not of human conflict but a menu of mechanistic violence for an audience that has forgotten how to feel. The corporate mind has to be shocked to attention with the display of body parts, guts and gore in heinous crime. Men with the smirk of knowing and the women with uplifting bras to give them cleavage of authenticity solve these crimes with robotic precision. No one seems to wonder about this. Hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler had more heart

Celebrity corrals the juvenile mind of all ages into obedience with the likes of “American Idol.” Here young people surrender the coin of dignity to corporate embarrassment. For shame, they mount a dream of passion, which might better be spent learning how to read a book and master Euclidean geometry to a more satisfying and predictable end. They seek celebrity as if corporate adoration could supplant self-approval.

There is no heart in corpocracy. So, it substitutes fame, fortune and promotion. Corporations rise, and fall, writing off their demise as a matter of business as other corporate jackals pick up the pieces to realize a return on the carcass. Nary a thought is paid to the tens of thousands of wrecked lives due to corporate indifference. Corporate speak, “We had no choice.”

For the longest time, I’ve thought the problem was a matter of leadership, and it is, but it is impossible to produce leaders out of corpocracy. It is the antithesis of leadership.

WHY CORPORATE SOCIETY CANNOT LEAD

Corpocracy produced Jefferson Davis but not Abraham Lincoln. Davis had his eye on the prize of saving his southern lifestyle (instrumental value); Lincoln had his eye on the political objective of saving the union (terminal value). Lincoln’s objective was always political, never military, per se.

The antebellum culture of the prairie produced Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln and never anyone close to them since. Without leadership, we have followed not led technological change.

After the Civil War, America had no room for individuality. The Republic had moved progressively away from individuality to systemic relevance with increasing regimentation, integration and control.

In last forty years, television has gone from Beta to VHS to DVD to HDTV, and now in February 2009 all television programming will be digital. Explosive change has become a norm, but at what expense? I claim it has left the individual behind. Newspapers and magazines, and even books are disappearing as our world revolves around an impersonal grid of bouncing electrons across a flat screen while GPS tracking devices capture our every move. George Orwell anticipated this in “1984,” seeing us being constantly watched by such devices so that privacy once enjoyed was sinking away like a fading star.

Corpocracy is not about people. It is about numbers, always numbers. Its indicators are numbers; its planning are numbers; its long and short term decisions are numbers; its calibrated priorities are numbers. Is it any wonder that corporate accountancy should be flawed; that scandals should be associated with a society that values numbers more than it values people? We have become Eliot’s “hollow men”:

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear;
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star

And elsewhere:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to Dust.

The Civil War created the momentum, which found home schooling on the farm moving inevitably to compulsory education in the schoolhouse. Compulsory education was geared to a controlled classroom with a fixed curriculum designed to serve corporate society’s needs. This extended to uniform dress, manners, mores, and morals conducive to conforming behavior. Students were channeled into narrow roles consistent with the demands of skilled and unskilled labor. Whereas farm hands and farm owners centered on the farm, now work centered on the corporate workplace and its owners who more than likely owned workers’ dwellings as well as the company store.

THE FORGOTTEN AMERICAN

Americans have had a history of being energetic, positive, optimistic, creative, independent, individualistic and self-determining. Much of this has been lost or turned into catchy slogans and synthetic models, leaving the genuine article behind.

Think back! In the early to late nineteenth century, America produced artists, artisans, philosophers, poets, dramatists and authentic heroes.

James Fenimore Cooper wrote “The Spy” (1821) and “The Last of the Mohicans” (1826); Herman Melville wrote the greatest American novel, “Moby Dick” (1851); Walt Whitman, wrote America’s greatest poem, “Leaves of Grass” (1855); Stephen Crane, wrote America’s first great war novel, “The Red Badge of Courage” (1895); Henry David Thoreau, showed America’s independent spirit moving to the Walden woods of Concord, and wrote “Walden” (1854); Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote “The Scarlet Letter” (1850), Ralph Waldo Emerson, arguably America’s greatest philosopher, wrote a series of essays that captured the American conscience (1841 – 1844), as well as being the leader of Transcendentalism, an intuitional religious movement; Edgar Allan Poe, wrote The Raven” (1845).

These mainly forgotten Americans had no choice but to grow from the inside out. Walt Whitman went to school until he was eleven and then did odd jobs most of his life inventing the prosody of language that came to be his poetry. Herman Melville went to sea as his Yale. Edgar Allan Poe’s brief stormy life included a short stint at college and in the military. He became the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living at the craft. Although dying at the age of 40, he managed to perfect the American short story, invent the mystery novel, and write lyrical poetry.

Henry James gave us “The American” (1877) and “The European” (1878) revealing his ambivalent allegiance. William James, Henry’s older brother, turned away from his brother’s European pique to immerse himself in Americana. He produced America’s own psychology (“The Principles of Psychology,” 1890), an American take on religion (“The Varieties of Religious Experience,” 1902) and America’s own philosophy (“Pragmatism,” 1907).

These Americans, hardly corporate types, have been much copied but seldom surpassed.

It wasn’t only the United States, but Europe was in a creative verve before corporate society took hold, a vitality that corporate society would exploit to its advantage in the twentieth century capitalizing on the inventions of the nineteenth century with technological dominance. To wit:

English chemist Humphry Davy invents the first electric light – the first arc lamp (1809) that American Thomas Edison makes practical with the carbon-filament light bulb (1879). Edison also invents the phonograph and motion picture (1877), which Eadweard Muybridge tops with the first motion picture machine (1877). Edison also discovers thermionic emission (1883), the basis of the electronic valve.

W. A. Burt, an American, invents the typewriter (1829), which Christopher Scholes makes practical with his invention (1867). Frenchmen, Barthelemy Thimonnier invents a sewing machine (1830), improved by the invention of American Elias Howe (1845), and made commercial with Isaac Singer’s sewing machine (1851). Cyrus McCormick, an American, invents the first commercially successful reaper (1831).

Englishman Michael Faraday invents an electric dynamo (1831. Henry Talbot invents photography (1834); Samuel Morse invents Morse code (1838). American Charles Goodyear invents rubber vulcanization (1839). Samuel Slocum patents the stapler (1841).

Dr. William Morton, an American, is the first to use anesthesia for tooth extraction (1846). Walter Hunt invents the safety pin (1849); Joel Houghton receives a patent for a dishwasher (1849). John Tyndall demonstrates the principles of fiber optics (1854), which 150 years later will change the world of communication.

Louis Pasteur invents pasteurization (1856). Hamilton Smith patents the rotary washing machine (1858). Jean Lenoir invents an internal combustion engine (1858). Alfred Nobel invents dynamite (1866).

Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone (1876). Nicolaus August Otto invents first practical four-stroke internal combustion engine (1876). Rudolf Diesel invents the diesel-fueled internal combustion engine (1892). James Dewar invents the Dear vacuum flask. W. L. Judson invents the zipper (1893); Lumiere Brothers invent the portable motion-picture camera.

Significant of a majority of these inventions is that they were by non-scientists, non-academics and in relative isolation with little or no access to others working on the same things, thus the replication.

Moreover, it was Thomas Edison, among others, in the late nineteenth century that took up the corporate idea of a place (Menlo Park) with several people working on inventions for which he would take full credit for more than a thousand patents. This was true of Nikola Tesla, the Croatian electrical engineer, who immigrated to America and worked for Edison at Menlo Park (see “Tesla: Man Out of Time” by Margaret Cheney). Tesla was responsible for scores of patents including alternating current (A/C), which Edison attempted to first take credit for, and when he couldn’t, attempted to sabotage.

It is no accident that one of the first things you sign over when you become an employee of Corporate America is anything you might create, invent or improve upon while so employed.

THE LOST GARDEN OF INDIVIDUALITY

We Americans are nostalgic, and when we are lost, as we are now, there is an incessant need to go back to our roots, to the garden of our beliefs, myths and invented history. We no longer embrace reality and struggle. We choose to deny them.

When corpocracy was in its infancy, a phenomenon such as American born British poet, T. S. Eliot, had the audacity to create, “The Waste Land” (1922), which captured the future in crystallized prosody. It is difficult to imagine such originality and daring today.

Instead, corruption is on our plate. It is a recipe for self-destruction. It spoils achievement with its fraudulent premise. We don’t like to see ourselves as we are, but as we would like to be seen. We chase the buck; we no longer chase the dream. For the past quarter century, the best and brightest have opted for financial engineering to electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineering, earning MBA’s to develop financial instruments to make money out of money, but produce nothing real, nothing substantial, nothing that could justify their careers. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman puts a $400 billion price tag on this annual “waste, fraud and abuse.” The future has caught up with us, and it is not a pretty sight. We have lost our brassy boldness to self-conscious self-pity.

It is no accident that the presidency of Andrew Jackson and the “Age of Jackson” is producing a spate of books, films, articles, doctorate studies, profiles, monographs and interviews of people producing this avalanche of materials. Why, you ask, is Jackson so important now?

Jackson embodies the America left behind. He is not the plastic man in the empty suit that Garry Wills writes about in “John Wayne’s America” (1997) with the subtitle “Politics of Celebrity.” Wayne didn’t opt to fight for his country in WWII, he instead decided to play heroes on the screen while men his age sweated and died for real in that war. He became the personification of corporate man out for himself but with a swagger and a drawl. Garry Wills writes:

“He (John Wayne) embodies the American myth. The archetypal American is a displaced person – arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, a killer for cleansing the world of things that ‘need killing,’ loving but not bound down by love, rootless but carrying the center in himself, a gyroscopic direction-setter, a traveling norm.”

Reading this you can see how it reflects the one-dimensional American character.

Now, Jackson was a different sort. He rose out of the wild, fought bravely as a boy of fourteen in the American Revolution, seeing his brother murdered, seething with revenge all his life against the British, and getting his satisfaction at the “Battle of New Orleans.’

Thomas Jefferson found Jackson bizarre, uncouth, unschooled, and a danger to American society. Jackson never attended regular school, was a frontiersman and climbed the latter of success by pure grip, guts, gumption and grizzle. He never read books, and prided himself in reading people and events. He was the real deal, not a one-dimensional man like John Wayne. Jackson was the quintessential man-of-action, and decisive to a fault.

To this day, moving into 2009, the eastern United States remains a different country than Jackson’s hinterland, where he put his indelible mark. The east still looks to Europe for its grandness, society, its manners and culture, which is quite different to countrified Jacksonians. The Washington, DC beltway is a surreal cocoon of politicians and lobbyists living in a satellite world that has little in common with twenty-first Jackson country.

There was corruption in Jackson’s day. Indeed, he was so direct about his favoritism that his administration was tagged the “spoils system.” On his first inauguration as president – he had actually won the office four years before but was denied the presidency – he often went over Congress to rally the people. President Barak Obama should keep this in mind.

Dr. Fisher, is this another one of your polemics? I don’t think so. New York Times columnist and popular author Thomas Friedman shows similar concern as 2008 winds down. He writes:

“Our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors as a result of our national drift. That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need to reboot. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis -- we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely. It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing-infrastructure-without building white elephants. . If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us. . . Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.”

To do that, we will have to supplant our dependence on a corporate mentality that is the negative of all these positives. We need to return to the restless energy and the common drive of individualism of the past. We need to recast the nation in substantive work