IT ISN'T ONLY THE OSTRICH THAT HAS ITS HEAD IN THE SAND!

IT ISN’T ONLY THE OSTRICH THAT HAS ITS HEAD IN THE SAND!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 14, 2009

"Scholars are paying less attention to questions about how their work relates to the policy world, and in many departments a focus on policy can hurt one's career. Advancement comes faster for those who develop mathematical models, new methodologies or theories expressed in jargon that is unintelligible to policymakers.

"A survey of articles published over the lifetime of the American Political Science Review found that about one in five dealt with policy prescription or criticism in the first half of the century, while only a handful did so after 1967. Editor Lee Sigelman observed in the journal's centennial issue that "if 'speaking truth to power' and contributing directly to public dialogue about the merits and demerits of various courses of action were still numbered among the functions of the profession, one would not have known it from leafing through its leading journal."

Clipped from www.washingtonpost.com


As far back as I can remember, I was told to tell the truth when asked a question. One day I was listening to my da’s railroad buddies, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in our living room, and one of them told a story. Everyone laughed and he looked to me who didn’t.

“You didn’t think that funny, Jimmy?”

“No, I thought it was crude.”

The story was about a Polish person who showed his ignorance of English by looking for the commode in the restroom marked “women.”

I had hell to pay when they all left. My da told me never to be disrespectful to his buddies again.

Stubbornly, I replied, “If someone asks me a question, I’m going to answer honestly or not at all.” I was nine-years-old.

The clip from the Washington Post speaks volumes not only about political science but life in general in this early part of the twenty-first century. People want to be popular, want to be accepted, want to be appreciated, want to included, and want to belong.

Eric Hoffer, a self-educated longshoreman, lost his sight as a little boy only to have it return mysteriously when he was nineteen. He found he had an insatiable appetite for the printed word.

Hoffer spoke with a heavy German accent, had few acquaintances and no real friends, but the public library. There he would go every day after work and read until it closed.

The first book he bought was the thickest with the smallest print so he would get his money’s worth. It was a book of essay by the French philosopher Montesquieu.

The philosopher started him on his trek of self-discovery through self-expression. He would carry a little notebook and a pencil to work with him, and when they had breaks, he would write down his thoughts.

At night he would return to his single boarding house room, and laboriously record his thoughts systematically in long looping characters. When he finished, he checked the newspapers to see what was the premier publisher of the times. He decided it was Harper & Row.

He sent this handwritten manuscript to the publisher, and miracle of miracles, it was not only read but published. It was 1950. Today without an agent the manuscript would be tossed in the dustbin. The book was “The True Believer” (1951).

Eric Sevareid, who did the commentary to Walter Cronkite’s newscasts on CBSTV, read the book and invited Hoffer for a series of interviews. It was the late 1960s and America was having a crisis in confidence. Hoffer was a national hit.

The appeal of Hoffer was that the ostrich took its head out of the sand. The true believer, Hoffer said, was the hitchhiker hitching a ride on popular mass movements, the fanatic needing a Stalin or a Christ to worship and die for, the mortal enemy of reality or things as they are, the masochist that would sacrifice all for the tinsel of a dream.

That was forty years ago. The Washington Post saw a change in political criticism in 1967. I have said elsewhere that the world made a seismic shift in 1968 when I was in South Africa. It was not an accident this was when babyboomers were becoming adults, at least in terms of age if not emotional and psychological maturity. It was a time when people wanted to stay forever young and therefore need never to grow up. It was a time when the synthetic culture was reaching full strength. It was also a time when the real economy separated from reality.

The frightening thing now is that there is even less inclination to speak your mind than there was a year ago, and even then most would never utter a word that might hurt them for fear of damaging their career. After all, we're in a debilitating recession.

We are looking today not for a leader of flesh and bones, a person of flawed character that may stumble and occasionally fall from grace, but a messiah. I’ve read a good deal on Abraham Lincoln, and I like the man, no small part because of sectional bias him having come from my part of the country. But he was a flawed man, and for some reason we don’t want to see him as a man but as a messiah that came just in the nick of time to save the nation.

We are placing that same heavy load on president Barak Obama. I have indicated elsewhere that I watched the interview of Dr. Ivan Eland with Congressman Dr. Ron Paul on C-Span, and attempted to purchase two of Eland’s books, first at Barnes & Noble, and then at Borders. Both stores told me they could special order Eland's books but had no intention to stock them.

The books I sought were “Recarving Rushmore” and “The Empire Has No Close.” I suspect they think these books won't sell, books most unlikely politically correct. That is sad.

Those that read me, and know of my checkered career in industry and life, know that I have never flinched from speaking my mind because I live in a great country, which allows me that freedom, that great privilege.

Don’t for one moment think I don’t realize this. In many other parts of the world, for some of the things I have said and written I could be imprisoned or worse. Here in the United States of America people can simply delete my words or not read my books, and pay me no mind.

The reason I speak the truth, as I know it, is because even as a boy I could never perfect the lie. What’s more, if I told a lie, I could never remember what I had said. My daughter, Jennifer, once said she would be a rich woman if she got a penny for every time I told the same story. I tell the same story because it is the truth, as I know it, not from what someone else has said, but from what I have observed, felt or experienced. It is my life's lessons.

During the 1970s, Time magazine brought out an issue with the cover headline, “What you should think about Vietnam.” That story so incensed me that I wrote Time and told them so. Time, to its credit, responded in a letter – that was before the Internet -- saying that simply informing the reader was not its role but influencing public opinion. Touche!

Managed news, and even blogs are managed news to a degree, as both are looking for an audience of like-minded souls. With the commercial media, they have a payroll to meet; with the bloggers, they have ego needs to meet. So both are somewhat in the same business only the coin is different.

Over the last several months, I have been reading a series of scholarly works on the establishment of early Christianity. I have learned that it is largely an invented faith, which doesn’t diminish its importance as a religion because men have invented all faiths. No god came down out of the clouds and carved his words into stone as much as some would like to believe.

This movement away from reality caused me to write an essay recently, which I haven’t posted, but which I will send to those that would like to read it. The piece is titled, “Why I am a renegade Irish Roman Catholic.”

Hoffer puts this all this self-hiding in perspective in the closing words of his “The True Believer”:

“J. B. S. Haldane counts fanaticism among the only four really important inventions between 3000 BC and 1400 AD. It was a Judaic-Christian invention. And it is strange to think that in receiving this malady of the soul the world also received a miraculous instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead – an instrument of resurrection.” (p 151)

We are in danger of losing this advantage by the fear of speaking the truth to power. The current economic crisis of the world is a manifestation of this reluctance. My focus in my essay on the Catholic Church is a feeble attempt to remedy this. I am not attacking the importance of belief or faith, or in fact religion but registering my disappointment at morality matching the reality of the times.

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