THANK GOD FOR DIFFERENCES!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 21, 2009
“Management deals best with what it knows, which means people are often managed as things. People do not behave, react, or forgive the way things do, which is the basis of conflict. Relationships imply conflict. As sociologist Georg Simmel observed, conflict can be the very glue, which binds people to a task. Yet conflict is considered a pejorative. Disagreement is considered disruptive when it is a vital precursor to agreement. Managed conflict keeps the organization on course and is essential to its health.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Six Silent Killers” (1998), p. 119.
* * *
I was reading my third novel ("Train") by the excellent writer, Pete Dexter, an author who has won the National Book Award ("Paris Trout”), yet I could not find his books on the shelves of Barnes & Noble or Borders.
Thanks to the Internet I was able to order all his published works at discount prices, which made me wonder how could someone write so well, so honestly, and poignantly and not have an audience? I answered my own question.
It was another nail in the coffin of our barbaric times. But that is not why I am writing this today. I am writing about the marvel of television that despite all its inanities manages to connect us to "minds alive." Not everyone is asleep.
To take a break from reading, I checked the baseball games on television -- Reds and White Sox, Red Sox and Braves -- and at commercial break, I wandered over to C-Span. There I caught Jay Wesley Richards lecturing on his book, "Money, Greed and God" at the Enterprise Institute.
Richards, whose works I was not familiar, is an advocate of "intelligent design," which I only found out later looking him up on google. He is a young man with a point of view, an educated perspective, and a convincing way of presenting his argument. I thought, if I had known he was an apologist for "intelligent design," would I have listened to his ideas on capitalism (which he sees as the solution not the problem) or missed an opportunity to experience an engaged mind? I must confess I might have done so. It would have been my loss.
He covered a lot of territory that I have considered often with a different slant but honestly from his point of view. He reads Ayn Rand (on selfishness) the same way I've read her, but has a more sophisticated appreciation of greed and a more level interpretation of self-interest than I've been able to convey, although my sentiments are similar. I feel uncomfortable bringing a theistic point of view into my thinking although, I suspect, Richards has had similar training in that regard to my own.
I say this because he breaks down words into their Latin origins, as I do, and defines them in those etymological terms. For example, "altruism" does not mean "selflessness" but "other directed," from the Latin "alter." An individual doesn't abandon "self-interest," but is "other directed" to promote self-interest. This is consistent with Freud’s "quid pro quo," or something gained for something given. I feel self-interest is not only critical to success, but essential to survival.
Richards demonstrates more finesse than I've been able to display in making the connection, but we speak a similar language.
Looking him up on google, I learned that in January 2008 he had a debate with Christopher Hitchens on “intelligent design,” which must have been something. What an odd couple that must have been on stage, Richards, clean cut and well groomed, Hitchens the exact opposite. Hitchens is the darling of the liberals, and Richards, I would imagine, is relatively unknown by conservatives with the possible exception of Christian conservatives.
My point in writing this is that it is nice to see television sponsoring discussions of people of ideas, allowing them to have free reign in that climate. This may possibly reduce the shadow of existence a bit. We live in an age where people think to be heard rather than be heard to promote thinking, and authors write to attract an audience rather than have an audience discover itself through its authors. Despite appealing to the lowest common denominator, thanks to such programs, ideas have not died.
For example, Richards referred to a book about "bees," again a book with which I was not familiar, in which the author analyzed how combative, self-interested, and conflicting were these bees, but terribly productive. An experimenter introduced a chemical to make the bees less aggressive, and the hive fell apart.
I sat there and smiled to myself. Edward O. Wilson at Harvard has been telling us for years that the smallest creatures on earth, insects, behave precisely as man, or is it the other way around? Anyway, conflict has been a thesis in my books on OD. Conflict is the glue that holds an organization to its task. Harmony is what dissolves that cohesiveness. We have had sixty years of increasingly harmonious organizational life, giving workers everything but the kitchen sink, apologizing for their untoward behavior, and, thanks to human resources, have failed to learn what bees know intuitively.
We are so late smart when it comes to understanding what makes us tick and what does not. Remember this, whether you are an advocate of the theory of evolution or “intelligent design,” you can learn a lot about yourself, especially in the other camp. No one has a monopoly on ideas. No one.
Be always well,
Jim
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
ANNOUNCEMENT -- CHANGING FOCUS -- THE FUTURE IS NOW!
My literary agent has advised me that to improve traffic and traction on my blog I should send a paragraph or two of my missives to my emailers and include a link to my blog should they want to read the entire essay.
He suggests adding a "share this" button so visitors can share my articles with their friends or the entire missive -- there are over 400 complete missives posted on my blog.
I read and comment on books, articles and subjects as diverse as poetry and history to mathematics, from classical and current fiction, from the social and behavioral sciences to the physical sciences, from philosophy and theology to politics and current events, from management to culture and education.
I haven't as a rule sent out pieces on some of these disciplines, such as the curious world of chemistry and mathematics, but still have run into trouble with some readers when I describe my take on sensitive subjects such as religion, politics, patriotism, nationalism and economics.
Being an eclectic or catholic reader and thinker, I claim no expertise in any discipline other than the psychology of organizational development.
My agent wants me to "twitter" and, at this point, I have no idea what "twittering" is.
Some of you like my long essays, most of you don't, and many of you once they come to a sentence they don't like, hit the delete button. How do I know? You tell me.
That is the reader's right. It defeats my purpose of making connection, but it is okay. In any case, I don't plan to change my style.
My effort is to describe possible problems and let the reader work out the prescription for solving them. I am not a problem solving or solution guru, as I am not privy to all the variables that make up the reader's problem.
My sense is that we have too many solutions chasing too few problems, yes, I say "few problems."
If you look at a life, or a country, or a society, and really look at it, there are only a handful of problems. We have a mind, however, full of self-estrangement and conflict that chooses to invent problems exponentially, and throw up our hands finding them insoluble, which makes us vulnerable to "experts," when expertise is an oxymoron.
One reason I was successful as a young chemical sales engineer was that I worked out that I encountered no more than a half dozen problems again and again, developing an assortment of ways to deal with them.
It made my career very uncomplicated which everyone thought was lucky, that is, until they read CONFIDENT SELLING (1970), and found it had nothing to do with luck. What they saw as luck was simply focusing on the obvious and dispatching it, realizing that the biggest challenge was getting out of my own way.
I think that applies to life for everyone.
Be always well,
Jim
He suggests adding a "share this" button so visitors can share my articles with their friends or the entire missive -- there are over 400 complete missives posted on my blog.
I read and comment on books, articles and subjects as diverse as poetry and history to mathematics, from classical and current fiction, from the social and behavioral sciences to the physical sciences, from philosophy and theology to politics and current events, from management to culture and education.
I haven't as a rule sent out pieces on some of these disciplines, such as the curious world of chemistry and mathematics, but still have run into trouble with some readers when I describe my take on sensitive subjects such as religion, politics, patriotism, nationalism and economics.
Being an eclectic or catholic reader and thinker, I claim no expertise in any discipline other than the psychology of organizational development.
My agent wants me to "twitter" and, at this point, I have no idea what "twittering" is.
Some of you like my long essays, most of you don't, and many of you once they come to a sentence they don't like, hit the delete button. How do I know? You tell me.
That is the reader's right. It defeats my purpose of making connection, but it is okay. In any case, I don't plan to change my style.
My effort is to describe possible problems and let the reader work out the prescription for solving them. I am not a problem solving or solution guru, as I am not privy to all the variables that make up the reader's problem.
My sense is that we have too many solutions chasing too few problems, yes, I say "few problems."
If you look at a life, or a country, or a society, and really look at it, there are only a handful of problems. We have a mind, however, full of self-estrangement and conflict that chooses to invent problems exponentially, and throw up our hands finding them insoluble, which makes us vulnerable to "experts," when expertise is an oxymoron.
One reason I was successful as a young chemical sales engineer was that I worked out that I encountered no more than a half dozen problems again and again, developing an assortment of ways to deal with them.
It made my career very uncomplicated which everyone thought was lucky, that is, until they read CONFIDENT SELLING (1970), and found it had nothing to do with luck. What they saw as luck was simply focusing on the obvious and dispatching it, realizing that the biggest challenge was getting out of my own way.
I think that applies to life for everyone.
Be always well,
Jim
Thursday, June 11, 2009
HAITI'S "DIRT COOKIES" -- A PASSIONATE AND THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE
HAITI’S “DIRT COOKIES” – A PASSIONATE AND THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 11, 2009
* * *
“We are but stewards of what we falsely call our own; yet avarice is so insatiable that it is not in the power of abundance to content it.”
Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.), Roman stoic philosopher
* * *
“Greed is a mindset and lifestyle obsessed with having. Frugality is a mindset and lifestyle obsessed with accumulating. With greed spending holds the interests at the expense of saving, with frugality saving holds the interests at the expense of spending. Compulsion is the shared common denominator. The person of greed is reviled the person of frugality is revered. Either extreme is endemic to a sick society.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy”
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
I hope you enjoyed your Alaskan trip. I understand you were not likely to maintain contact during that journey and hope you are reading this after your return.
While there have been some interesting threads on your blog lately, none has encouraged me to tappity-tap on the keyboard.
The commentary on torture, a truly hot-button subject, has no answer. Maybe it never will. The power elite because the truth, the whole truth, will remain hides this from us. This is as it always was, just as your attempts to clarify our desire for subjugation is aptly highlighted.
Humans desire to hide our eyes from the reality of our distasteful world is real. Let someone else deal with the dirt, as if we elect politicians to be our housemaids. Don’t show me the pile you’ve swept under the rug. Just make sure it’s gone by the time I return from (work, vacation, movie, ballgame, whatever.) And, don’t put it in the cookies.
Dirt cookies and MBAs have striking similarities in the hollow sustenance each provides.
I earned an MBA over two and a half years taking evening classes at the Loyola Graduate School of Business. Was I enhancing my capabilities, advancing my career, feeding my ego, or making and eating dirt cookies?
Loyola has been noted for its emphasis on business ethics. It amused me somewhat that in ethics class everyone seemed to know the right answer and engaged in high-minded, self-congratulatory discussions.
The same people, in other classes, seldom struggled to find an ethical balance in their solutions to case studies. Of course, you know what I did. Playing devil’s advocate for the sake of discussion in an ethics course taught by a Jesuit priest is not a road to success. He even pulled me aside after one class and said, “Young man, you had better change your ways.” He actually thought I believed the positions I would argue. Sorry for the digression. Here’s the point.
Was this learning? Or, was it dirt cookies? The similarity between tired women trudging up a hill to gather nutrient rich dirt, mixing it with fat then selling it to the hungry and MBA students dragging to class after a full day’s work, learning how to manipulate financial spread sheets and people, mixing in some ethics awareness, and then selling the package back to their employer or the highest bidder is striking.
There is some naiveté in thinking democracy would help either of these situations. There is no democracy in business. Our government has legislated human rights out of business. What happens in Haiti with the powerful capturing and holding onto “revenue” is no different than what happens in the corporate world. The economic order of the world today has been distorted to the point that parity is likely unattainable.
And, this is not a recent change. It has always been this way. There is less naiveté and more simplicity in thinking access to knowledge would make a difference. When one spends a majority of time in a survival mode - making dirt cookies or working to scrape together a few bucks to pay for dirt cookies; or dragging yourself to evening classes after a day of work hoping to “get ahead” – the real nurturing required to help a family grow is lost.
The ability to provide context for the awareness children gain from their window to the world is lost. Ted appears to be a bright man with some knowledge of the world, likely much more than I have. However, I think both you and he are missing the point or misunderstanding the context.
The thought that people of Haiti or those overpopulating any other resource poor island will ever be participants in a high-wage global economy let alone within the next decade is absurd.
There are millions of people here in our own country that will never realize that dream. And, we have tremendous resources. The reality is that some nations will always be handout cultures. And it will get worse. If projections are correct, in less than fifty years there will be 12 billion people on Earth. That is twice today’s population. Think of 3 billion people in China, 2.5 billion in India, 700 million in the US, and 17 million in Haiti.
Today, nearly two-thirds of Haiti’s population is employed in subsistence farming. What happens when 650 people per square kilometer becomes 1300? The same land that cannot feed the population now will have to feed twice as many people. Only 2% of its original forest cover exists today, meaning soil erosion will diminish further its ability to produce food. How will democracy and computers change this?
Humans are a parasite on the Earth. As with all parasites, they thrive unless checked eventually depleting the nutrients of the host faster than the host can regenerate them. Further, as the parasite overpopulates, it begins to choke on its own waste. Ideally, the parasite dies off before the host. But, more typically both
die.
Resource poor island nations are the “canary in the mine” for Mother Earth. We can’t save them. Their deaths are an alarm. We should heed it and learn from their bad examples.
I apologize for that last paragraph and its harsh attitude towards human life. Unfortunately, the lesson we should learn has not and never will be learned. To take the anti-Gekko approach, reversing a mantra of the Eighties, “Greed is bad.” Greed of the slave trade created Haiti and contributed to its over-populated, under-educated history.
Don’t be confused. Haiti throughout this discussion is a metaphor. The destitution represented by dirt cookies draws our attention away for the important broader issue. Focusing on raising-up the poor is a smokescreen. Nothing really changes until the economic order of the world changes.
This is why Obama has the right idea for the US. So what if this economic rescue will lead to higher taxes? Who gains from the rescue? We all get back some portion of our comfortable life-styles. Who gains the most from the rescue? The rich do. Who pays most of the taxes that will cover the debt used to finance the rescue? The rich and their rich children will. Who has been doing most of the complaining? The rich and their puppets in the media and right-wing talk radio do. Why? Because they want the US to become Haiti, with a majority of the nation poor and under their gilded thumbs, while all the wealth flows into their pockets. Greed is bad.
M
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
George Clooney in the 2009 film, “Michael Clayton” is asked if he is a miracle worker. He answers, “I’m not a miracle worker I’m a janitor. I clean up other people’s messes, and sweep them under the rug.”
You are not a janitor, and should be noted for speaking your mind. Moreover, there is no need to apologize for your metaphor of the parasite and its host, as it is an apt description of how we human beings are acting as parasites on our willing host, the planet earth, and that in the process we are killing our host, and therefore placing our own survival in considerable jeopardy.
The cartoon “Dilbert” by Scott Adams, which appears on the business page of The Tampa Tribune, has been bringing our attention recently to the insanity of our MBA culture, and by extension the duplicitous behavior of managers and human resources professionals in collusion in this chicanery.
“Dilbert’s” entertaining sting currently focuses on ground I’ve covered in books and articles, such as MBAs, skunk works, and now as I return from Alaska on Quality Control Circles, and the charade of leadership excellence. Here is one of the back issues of “Dilbert” saved for me:
FIRST SQUARE: Dilbert, the boss, and a female employee. The boss is speaking:
“Last week I attended the Circle of Excellence Conference for Managers.”
SECOND SQUARE: boss and female employee. Employee speaking:
“So, while we were doing actual work, you sat in a circle with a bunch of managers?”
THIRD SQUARE: Dilbert, the boss, and female employee.
Boss: “It wasn’t like that.”
Female Employee: “Oh, I think it was.”
“Dilbert” is popular, and is placed on the business page, I suspect, because it resonates with readers, but, alas, nothing changes.
* * *
Tom Brokaw wrote “The Greatest Generation” (1998), pointing out the sacrifices made, the courage displayed, and the resolve and determination exhibited by an entire generation to realize total victory and unconditional surrender of its adversaries in WWII.
What is not celebrated, but which David Halberstam addressed in “The Next Century” (1991) was the massive mobilization effort that took the United States from a handicapped military posture in 1942 (US soldiers were being trained with wooden rifles) to become the greatest military power in the history of mankind by 1944. This was achieved largely due to a superior management model. Halberstam writes:
"With our great assembly lines and our ever-expanding industrial core (and protected as we were by two great oceans in an age when weaponry could not yet cross an ocean), we became the industrial arsenal for the mightiest of war efforts. In 1942 and 1943 America alone produced almost twice as many airplanes as the entire Axis (German, Italy and Japan). In 1943 and 1944, we were producing one ship a day and an airplane every five minutes.” (p 59)
The management paradigm took off after the war with a momentum that made “management” the dominant profession of the twentieth century, as the nineteenth was “the engineer,” the eighteenth “the lawyer,” the seventeenth “the pilgrim,” the sixteenth “the theologian,” and the fifteenth “the explorer.”
See my missive on this typology posted on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) February 23, 2005 with the title, “Cold Shower 6: Advent of the Professional Worker, Vol. I, Article VI.” “The professional worker” was profiled as the dominant profession of the twenty-first century.
You are a professional, and your anxiety is noted. The professional worker has been limited, controlled, misdirected and exploited in an MBA culture dominated by an anachronistic management model. The corporation remains committed to this model, finding managers refusing to step aside and make way for the new leader, “the professional worker.”
Perhaps I am impatient. After all, management played surrogate parent to workers during the last half of the twentieth century, and continues to do so. This has produced a counterdependent worker, professional or otherwise, who reacts, rather than acts, and who is paid a dollar more an hour than to challenge atavistic management.
Consequently, even with all his education and expertise, “the professional worker” remains complacent, resigned, obedient and passive to a system that no longer exists.
As you know, I’ve described this in a series of books, but I cannot change it. Indeed, I have written volumes on the need for the mature adult worker to step forward to establish a culture of contribution. Despite management’s impotency and the opportunity for professionals in these trying times, professionals wait for a “miracle worker” when only janitors show up.
* * *
Your point is well taken that the “have nots” in Haiti and elsewhere are likely to grow in the next fifty years if humanity as parasite does not come up with a plan of population control, pollution control, and social justice.
It is a complicated problem because even with an army of miracle workers you cannot force people out of poverty. Mindset and lifestyle count here as in the most sophisticated of societies. You cannot coerce people out of their natural habitat as impoverished as it might be. The barrio is home to them despite the most grinding poverty.
Were $100 billion spent tomorrow in Haiti to provide potable water for all citizens, restore the forests, provide state-of-the-art farming methods, install modern sanitation, and develop a master plan of education, community development, and industrial development consistent with the climate, culture, and creative verve of the people, the results would not appear for several generation, and then only modestly.
Poverty is a mindset and as well as a human condition. Hunger cannot be obliterated by a constant supply of ships landing with food supplies. We have seen this drama repeated again and again in Africa where pirates interdict these supplies and then use them to buy arms, or demand exorbitant prices for what was meant to be free. Then too, such humanitarian efforts have been nullified by government corruption.
The most effective efforts have been by those in the Peace Corps, the International Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders, as well as religious and humanitarian groups that deal directly with the people at the level of consequences.
Imagine a veritable army of such people protected by the military to discourage hostile tribes from insinuating themselves in the effort. Idealistic? Of course. Yet grass root efforts have made an impact on Haiti, and other impoverished Third World countries.
Social justice starts with the:
(1) Creation of a climate of peace in freedom.
(2) Moves forward with having potable drinking water and modern sanitation.
(3) Continues with teaching people how to maintain potable water and sanitation.
(4) Educates people in the practice of good hygiene to ensure good health.
(5) Moves on to cultivate the land with adequate topsoil, fertilization, and irrigation.
(6) Provides farmers with education in modern farm technology including the proper use and maintenance of farm machinery.
(7) Demonstrates how to rotate crops and practice soil conservation.
(8) Establishes a reforestation plan, which means finding alternative energy sources including municipal power plants.
(9) Develops diversified industries that will support the population, and improve the quality of life.
(10) Creates an infrastructure and governance to implement and monitor these developments.
(11) Constructs continuing education facilities for all adults as well as schools for young people.
This agenda will take the next hundred years to achieve, but it can be done step-by-step leaving no citizen out of the intervention.
Notice I don’t speak of laptops and other electronics, which are the equivalent of placing ice cream on the dirt cookies at this stage. A primitive society must grasp the bottom rung of the ladder and hold on securely before it can pull itself out of the swamp of despair.
* * *
As for greed, it will always be with us. So often the compulsion for wealth possesses the person rather than the person taken possession of the wealth. This was apparently the case with Bernard Madoff and his $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Greed attracts greed and eventually nullifies itself, whereas the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett continue to accumulate wealth the hard way, by working for it.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 11, 2009
* * *
“We are but stewards of what we falsely call our own; yet avarice is so insatiable that it is not in the power of abundance to content it.”
Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.), Roman stoic philosopher
* * *
“Greed is a mindset and lifestyle obsessed with having. Frugality is a mindset and lifestyle obsessed with accumulating. With greed spending holds the interests at the expense of saving, with frugality saving holds the interests at the expense of spending. Compulsion is the shared common denominator. The person of greed is reviled the person of frugality is revered. Either extreme is endemic to a sick society.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy”
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
I hope you enjoyed your Alaskan trip. I understand you were not likely to maintain contact during that journey and hope you are reading this after your return.
While there have been some interesting threads on your blog lately, none has encouraged me to tappity-tap on the keyboard.
The commentary on torture, a truly hot-button subject, has no answer. Maybe it never will. The power elite because the truth, the whole truth, will remain hides this from us. This is as it always was, just as your attempts to clarify our desire for subjugation is aptly highlighted.
Humans desire to hide our eyes from the reality of our distasteful world is real. Let someone else deal with the dirt, as if we elect politicians to be our housemaids. Don’t show me the pile you’ve swept under the rug. Just make sure it’s gone by the time I return from (work, vacation, movie, ballgame, whatever.) And, don’t put it in the cookies.
Dirt cookies and MBAs have striking similarities in the hollow sustenance each provides.
I earned an MBA over two and a half years taking evening classes at the Loyola Graduate School of Business. Was I enhancing my capabilities, advancing my career, feeding my ego, or making and eating dirt cookies?
Loyola has been noted for its emphasis on business ethics. It amused me somewhat that in ethics class everyone seemed to know the right answer and engaged in high-minded, self-congratulatory discussions.
The same people, in other classes, seldom struggled to find an ethical balance in their solutions to case studies. Of course, you know what I did. Playing devil’s advocate for the sake of discussion in an ethics course taught by a Jesuit priest is not a road to success. He even pulled me aside after one class and said, “Young man, you had better change your ways.” He actually thought I believed the positions I would argue. Sorry for the digression. Here’s the point.
Was this learning? Or, was it dirt cookies? The similarity between tired women trudging up a hill to gather nutrient rich dirt, mixing it with fat then selling it to the hungry and MBA students dragging to class after a full day’s work, learning how to manipulate financial spread sheets and people, mixing in some ethics awareness, and then selling the package back to their employer or the highest bidder is striking.
There is some naiveté in thinking democracy would help either of these situations. There is no democracy in business. Our government has legislated human rights out of business. What happens in Haiti with the powerful capturing and holding onto “revenue” is no different than what happens in the corporate world. The economic order of the world today has been distorted to the point that parity is likely unattainable.
And, this is not a recent change. It has always been this way. There is less naiveté and more simplicity in thinking access to knowledge would make a difference. When one spends a majority of time in a survival mode - making dirt cookies or working to scrape together a few bucks to pay for dirt cookies; or dragging yourself to evening classes after a day of work hoping to “get ahead” – the real nurturing required to help a family grow is lost.
The ability to provide context for the awareness children gain from their window to the world is lost. Ted appears to be a bright man with some knowledge of the world, likely much more than I have. However, I think both you and he are missing the point or misunderstanding the context.
The thought that people of Haiti or those overpopulating any other resource poor island will ever be participants in a high-wage global economy let alone within the next decade is absurd.
There are millions of people here in our own country that will never realize that dream. And, we have tremendous resources. The reality is that some nations will always be handout cultures. And it will get worse. If projections are correct, in less than fifty years there will be 12 billion people on Earth. That is twice today’s population. Think of 3 billion people in China, 2.5 billion in India, 700 million in the US, and 17 million in Haiti.
Today, nearly two-thirds of Haiti’s population is employed in subsistence farming. What happens when 650 people per square kilometer becomes 1300? The same land that cannot feed the population now will have to feed twice as many people. Only 2% of its original forest cover exists today, meaning soil erosion will diminish further its ability to produce food. How will democracy and computers change this?
Humans are a parasite on the Earth. As with all parasites, they thrive unless checked eventually depleting the nutrients of the host faster than the host can regenerate them. Further, as the parasite overpopulates, it begins to choke on its own waste. Ideally, the parasite dies off before the host. But, more typically both
die.
Resource poor island nations are the “canary in the mine” for Mother Earth. We can’t save them. Their deaths are an alarm. We should heed it and learn from their bad examples.
I apologize for that last paragraph and its harsh attitude towards human life. Unfortunately, the lesson we should learn has not and never will be learned. To take the anti-Gekko approach, reversing a mantra of the Eighties, “Greed is bad.” Greed of the slave trade created Haiti and contributed to its over-populated, under-educated history.
Don’t be confused. Haiti throughout this discussion is a metaphor. The destitution represented by dirt cookies draws our attention away for the important broader issue. Focusing on raising-up the poor is a smokescreen. Nothing really changes until the economic order of the world changes.
This is why Obama has the right idea for the US. So what if this economic rescue will lead to higher taxes? Who gains from the rescue? We all get back some portion of our comfortable life-styles. Who gains the most from the rescue? The rich do. Who pays most of the taxes that will cover the debt used to finance the rescue? The rich and their rich children will. Who has been doing most of the complaining? The rich and their puppets in the media and right-wing talk radio do. Why? Because they want the US to become Haiti, with a majority of the nation poor and under their gilded thumbs, while all the wealth flows into their pockets. Greed is bad.
M
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
George Clooney in the 2009 film, “Michael Clayton” is asked if he is a miracle worker. He answers, “I’m not a miracle worker I’m a janitor. I clean up other people’s messes, and sweep them under the rug.”
You are not a janitor, and should be noted for speaking your mind. Moreover, there is no need to apologize for your metaphor of the parasite and its host, as it is an apt description of how we human beings are acting as parasites on our willing host, the planet earth, and that in the process we are killing our host, and therefore placing our own survival in considerable jeopardy.
The cartoon “Dilbert” by Scott Adams, which appears on the business page of The Tampa Tribune, has been bringing our attention recently to the insanity of our MBA culture, and by extension the duplicitous behavior of managers and human resources professionals in collusion in this chicanery.
“Dilbert’s” entertaining sting currently focuses on ground I’ve covered in books and articles, such as MBAs, skunk works, and now as I return from Alaska on Quality Control Circles, and the charade of leadership excellence. Here is one of the back issues of “Dilbert” saved for me:
FIRST SQUARE: Dilbert, the boss, and a female employee. The boss is speaking:
“Last week I attended the Circle of Excellence Conference for Managers.”
SECOND SQUARE: boss and female employee. Employee speaking:
“So, while we were doing actual work, you sat in a circle with a bunch of managers?”
THIRD SQUARE: Dilbert, the boss, and female employee.
Boss: “It wasn’t like that.”
Female Employee: “Oh, I think it was.”
“Dilbert” is popular, and is placed on the business page, I suspect, because it resonates with readers, but, alas, nothing changes.
* * *
Tom Brokaw wrote “The Greatest Generation” (1998), pointing out the sacrifices made, the courage displayed, and the resolve and determination exhibited by an entire generation to realize total victory and unconditional surrender of its adversaries in WWII.
What is not celebrated, but which David Halberstam addressed in “The Next Century” (1991) was the massive mobilization effort that took the United States from a handicapped military posture in 1942 (US soldiers were being trained with wooden rifles) to become the greatest military power in the history of mankind by 1944. This was achieved largely due to a superior management model. Halberstam writes:
"With our great assembly lines and our ever-expanding industrial core (and protected as we were by two great oceans in an age when weaponry could not yet cross an ocean), we became the industrial arsenal for the mightiest of war efforts. In 1942 and 1943 America alone produced almost twice as many airplanes as the entire Axis (German, Italy and Japan). In 1943 and 1944, we were producing one ship a day and an airplane every five minutes.” (p 59)
The management paradigm took off after the war with a momentum that made “management” the dominant profession of the twentieth century, as the nineteenth was “the engineer,” the eighteenth “the lawyer,” the seventeenth “the pilgrim,” the sixteenth “the theologian,” and the fifteenth “the explorer.”
See my missive on this typology posted on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) February 23, 2005 with the title, “Cold Shower 6: Advent of the Professional Worker, Vol. I, Article VI.” “The professional worker” was profiled as the dominant profession of the twenty-first century.
You are a professional, and your anxiety is noted. The professional worker has been limited, controlled, misdirected and exploited in an MBA culture dominated by an anachronistic management model. The corporation remains committed to this model, finding managers refusing to step aside and make way for the new leader, “the professional worker.”
Perhaps I am impatient. After all, management played surrogate parent to workers during the last half of the twentieth century, and continues to do so. This has produced a counterdependent worker, professional or otherwise, who reacts, rather than acts, and who is paid a dollar more an hour than to challenge atavistic management.
Consequently, even with all his education and expertise, “the professional worker” remains complacent, resigned, obedient and passive to a system that no longer exists.
As you know, I’ve described this in a series of books, but I cannot change it. Indeed, I have written volumes on the need for the mature adult worker to step forward to establish a culture of contribution. Despite management’s impotency and the opportunity for professionals in these trying times, professionals wait for a “miracle worker” when only janitors show up.
* * *
Your point is well taken that the “have nots” in Haiti and elsewhere are likely to grow in the next fifty years if humanity as parasite does not come up with a plan of population control, pollution control, and social justice.
It is a complicated problem because even with an army of miracle workers you cannot force people out of poverty. Mindset and lifestyle count here as in the most sophisticated of societies. You cannot coerce people out of their natural habitat as impoverished as it might be. The barrio is home to them despite the most grinding poverty.
Were $100 billion spent tomorrow in Haiti to provide potable water for all citizens, restore the forests, provide state-of-the-art farming methods, install modern sanitation, and develop a master plan of education, community development, and industrial development consistent with the climate, culture, and creative verve of the people, the results would not appear for several generation, and then only modestly.
Poverty is a mindset and as well as a human condition. Hunger cannot be obliterated by a constant supply of ships landing with food supplies. We have seen this drama repeated again and again in Africa where pirates interdict these supplies and then use them to buy arms, or demand exorbitant prices for what was meant to be free. Then too, such humanitarian efforts have been nullified by government corruption.
The most effective efforts have been by those in the Peace Corps, the International Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders, as well as religious and humanitarian groups that deal directly with the people at the level of consequences.
Imagine a veritable army of such people protected by the military to discourage hostile tribes from insinuating themselves in the effort. Idealistic? Of course. Yet grass root efforts have made an impact on Haiti, and other impoverished Third World countries.
Social justice starts with the:
(1) Creation of a climate of peace in freedom.
(2) Moves forward with having potable drinking water and modern sanitation.
(3) Continues with teaching people how to maintain potable water and sanitation.
(4) Educates people in the practice of good hygiene to ensure good health.
(5) Moves on to cultivate the land with adequate topsoil, fertilization, and irrigation.
(6) Provides farmers with education in modern farm technology including the proper use and maintenance of farm machinery.
(7) Demonstrates how to rotate crops and practice soil conservation.
(8) Establishes a reforestation plan, which means finding alternative energy sources including municipal power plants.
(9) Develops diversified industries that will support the population, and improve the quality of life.
(10) Creates an infrastructure and governance to implement and monitor these developments.
(11) Constructs continuing education facilities for all adults as well as schools for young people.
This agenda will take the next hundred years to achieve, but it can be done step-by-step leaving no citizen out of the intervention.
Notice I don’t speak of laptops and other electronics, which are the equivalent of placing ice cream on the dirt cookies at this stage. A primitive society must grasp the bottom rung of the ladder and hold on securely before it can pull itself out of the swamp of despair.
* * *
As for greed, it will always be with us. So often the compulsion for wealth possesses the person rather than the person taken possession of the wealth. This was apparently the case with Bernard Madoff and his $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Greed attracts greed and eventually nullifies itself, whereas the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett continue to accumulate wealth the hard way, by working for it.
Be always well,
Jim
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
FAT NATION, WHITE NOISE, SLOPPY LANGUAGE, AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS!
FAT NATION, WHITE NOISE, SLOPPY LANGUAGE, AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 11, 2009
REFERENCE: Reflections on an Alaskan cruise in late May and early June 2009.
* * *
“I just been on a trip to Minnesota, where I can kindly describe most of the people I saw as little houses.”
Anna Wintour, editor of VOGUE, on the prevalence of obesity in the United States as reported in Time (June 1, 2009).
* * *
“I had the advantage,” Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world, reflects on his success, “of living in a home where people talked about interesting things. I had intelligent parents and I went to decent schools. I didn’t get money from my parents, and I really didn’t want it. But I was born at the right time, and place. I won the ‘Ovarian Lottery’.”
“Making It,” an article by Sue Halpern in the NEW YOUR REVIER (May 28, 2009)
* * *
My life has been a trajectory in which, I suspect, in my idealism I have struggled rather fruitlessly to make reality conform to my ideals. My attempt, I suppose, has been to produce an arc of significance when experience resembles little more than a flat line. Somewhere in the corner of my mind, however, I am unwilling to abandon the belief life has purpose, and not simply an interval of inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.
This rather bleak assessment does not fill me with despair, as Robert “trucking on” Crumb might suggest, but makes me attentive to the little minds that guide my every move with their collective nonsense. I am speaking, of course, of the movers and shakers and shapers of my life, people who control all aspects of my culture.
I still hold to the value that only a reflected life is worth living, while being fully aware that reflection may impede that living because it is easier to be unconscionable and on automatic pilot, submissive and obedient than to challenge its authority. Culture has a constant cacophony of noise masquerading as news to so enjoin me to its beat.
It is impossible for me to watch this submissive self-destruction without like Chicken Little running around frantically crying, “the sky is falling,” when I see our collective heads buried in Don Delillo’s “White Noise” (1985), which he claims is our fear of death, when I contend it is more likely our fear of life.
* * *
The pleasure of a vacation is it eventually comes to an end. Traveling is tiring, sometimes boring, often disheartening as you see humanity up close and personal in all its nakedness.
Cruising with 2,000 like-minded souls, and another 1,000 serving us, I was reminded of Katherine Anne Porter’s novel, “Ship of Fools” (1962). The title was taken from the fifteenth century Latin moral allegory, which symbolized “the ship of the world on its voyage to eternity.” Porter’s book is based on her own trip from Mexico to Europe in 1941 during WWII, and is notable for its pessimistic view of humanity. It was later made into a successful 1965 film as a tragic comedy.
Nearly seventy years after Porter’s trip, I was entertained on a grand hotel at sea with a similar view of the human condition, but not in terms of stereotypical anti-Semitism, racism, or assumed superiority, but in the context of excess, superficiality and banality.
* * *
This more active observation of a cross-section of society was a product of circumstances. BB was suffering from a terrible cold during the cruise and relegated to limited activities. We were unable to attend a single show during the evening as BB lacked the energy and didn’t want to spread her cold.
Our compensation was having a lovely room with a private terrace to which we spent more time than we might have otherwise. The weather during the cruise was perfect with sunny days and moderate temperatures, and the most incredible view of nature. Alaska is priceless in its beauty, and a crown jewel of Nature’s Paradise.
We are television viewers, but thankfully carry only the minimum cable package, meaning we do not have access to a zillion channels being confined to the major television networks, the education channels, and a 24/7 news and weather channel. We have been spared having to watch the ongoing inanities of CNN’s “unnews” news, or the multiple sports channels, which continuously chortle the ungrammatical absurdities of former jocks and their adulating commentators, rehashing and reassessing sport events beyond the point of idiocy. It makes the head hurt, and so I hit the mute button and look only at the bottom score line to see how the Tampa Bay Rays and Chicago Cubs are doing, along with how the French Open is going, of course rooting for Federer.
I love baseball, and enjoy watching it, but BB prefers football and finds baseball slow and boring, and so I watch little, although baseball is seemingly on fifty channels.
How these sportscasters and sports analysts can hype contests on baseball diamonds, racetracks, golf courses, and basketball courts until the diet is indigestible is beyond me. Someone must be watching this stuff because players make it huge, which begs the question: is this how mindless and passive our collective existence has become?
* * *
Speaking of mindless, I was standing at the urinal in the Seattle airport, and there were guys on either side of me standing there, as if at the starting gate ready to start the race, only these horses were not paying attention to the releasing body fluids. They were totally preoccupied with their handheld electronic devices while taking a piss. It made me leery that their hoses might be misdirected, and so I quickly departed while both were still so engaged.
* * *
Years ago when I traveled the world to make a living, people in airport terminals were likely to be reading a book, magazine, or newspaper waiting for their next flight. Not anymore. No wonder these media outlets are in trouble. Being somewhat frugal, I would often pick up a discarded newspaper, magazine, or paperback book to read left behind. Commercial airlines in those days also distributed journals, newspapers and popular magazines to passengers once on board. Not any more. Today, travelers are buried in their laptops, cell phones, BlackBerrys or electronic games, while overhead CNN blares its incessant message in the terminal that no one hears, or is given the option of a film during the flight in which you pay for the rent of the ear phones.
* * *
CNN’s Campbell Brown and Larry King make news that makes me snooze. I can’t believe people watch them and their orchestrated dialectics. That is not to say they are any worse than Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, but come on now, do they preach to our common denominator or only perceive it as close to zero? I’m afraid they do.
I had never watched a Campbell Brown, Larry King, or any other CNN program before being confined to this cruise ship. CNN has clones of these two and so the beat goes on and on. More shocking is seeing people on these shows that I have read in book form, such as Fareed Zakaria. My wonder is why they appear. They must know the conversation will be banal, brusque, and meaningless. To add insult to injury these programs are repeated ad infinitum like the commercials they are. CNN is light years away from Jim Lehrer’s “News Hour,” and “Charlie Rose” on PBS, and these are commercial free broadcasts.
Then I chanced upon a program that was pathetic to the extreme. Parents of a young woman being held in custody in Florida awaiting trial on the alleged murder of her child were shown in split screen talking to their daughter.
“Is my granddaughter alive?” the grandmother asks. The young mother knows at this point that she is not, as do the viewers as the child’s body had been discovered in a shallow grave near the mother’s home some time ago.
The question must be asked: have we become so schadenfreude that we delight in the private miseries of others? Why do we have to broadcast the fact this young mother is a liar? Do we take satisfaction in that knowledge?
I don’t know if this young lady killed her daughter or not, but it was obvious she was lying to her parents like an Academy Award actress. Every time I came back to this program while surfing the channels the young lady was still lost in her lying.
That said whatever happened to due process, or being innocent until proven guilty? Why would the parents allow this invasive subterfuge? To my mind it is not far from the delight some people once derived from watching public executions. Whatever happened to the words, “He without sin cast the first stone?”
* * *
“You know what I am saying is true, you know, as you know we have all had experiences that, you know, we would like to forget if we could, but you know that is not possible because, you know, we have to hide from ourselves, you know, as much as from others, don’t you know?”
It is like the screeching sound of chalk across a blackboard every time I hear “you know,” which is meaningless, thoughtless, and utterly ridiculous. We all do it, and that includes the President of the United States. We are all guilty of flippancy and imprecise language.
I have noticed that “you knows” sneak into the conversation if ever so quietly of President Barak Obama when he is adlibbing his remarks.
“You knows” equally lace the conversations of Senators, Congressmen, churchmen, business executives, entertainers, while it is the essential pronoun of professional athletes. They can sneak ten “you knows” in a single sentence. No one seems able to speak American English in a simple declarative sentence without a collection of “you knows.”
If we cannot speak precisely, how can we expect to think precisely? Language has deteriorated to animal babble.
We live in a sloppy age of sloppy language, and massive contradictions.
(1) We have the precise language of mathematics in science where scientists cannot write comprehensively and understandably in the vernacular of the majority.
(2) Most CEOs of major corporations in the United States have engineering backgrounds supported by MBAs, neither of which prepares them for leadership, which is grounded in communications.
(3) Academics take pride in expressing themselves in code failing to realize everyone regardless of education understands truth revealed.
Scientists, CEOs and academics live in an isolated cultural world of jargon, which winds them into a zone of incomprehension. Paradoxically, writers on the periphery of science, business and technology have become their respective interpreters, or a power in their own right, as were the scribes more than 1000 years ago. Then, most rulers could neither read nor write, as they were too busy making war. Charlemagne in the ninth century was one of the first rulers to master these skills. Rulers were dependent on this special class of scribes to connect them to the people. It was the original power of the clerics and one of the reasons why the Catholic Church rose to such prominence.
In this sloppy age of sloppy language, it is why Rush Limbaugh can command $100 million a year broadcasting his nonsense, why Bill O’Reilly can claim he only speaks the truth when he wouldn’t recognize the truth if he went to bed with it, or why Campbell Brown, Larry King, et al, have the careers they have. This is the Age of Communication with the absurdity that Samuel Beckett predicted, an age in which we suffer from too much information and not enough common knowledge. We are all swimming in a tsunami of irrelevancies.
In my day, it was not “you know” that was so prominent, but “I think” this or that, when the person speaking wasn’t thinking at all. Saying the word sufficed for thought, which of course it didn’t. Thinking occurs when the mind is empty and quiet and mindless of itself. We sometimes call this contemplation. A quiet mind is not possible when a climate of noise where activity is synonymous with action, and action is synonymous with thinking. The result is what we have, or the haze in which we live.
A carryover from my day was the expression “to tell you the truth,” or “to be honest with you,” or “to be totally frank,” when truth, honesty or frankness were orphans from the exchange. When spoken, it should alert the listener to these red flags.
* * *
Anna Wintour’s remark (see above) that Minnesotans looked like “little houses” they were so fat could be extended to all the little houses on board this cruise ship, as well as what I had seen in the airports of Philadelphia, Seattle, Houston and Tampa.
We are a nation of little walking houses wherever you go. Our President of the United States is pencil thin but his electorate is so fat that many suffer an assortment of ailments prompting his major domestic policy to be health insurance reform.
Fatness is what drives health insurance cost sky high, not insurance companies. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman notwithstanding – who sees insurance companies as the evil instigators, and not gluttonous Americans as perpetrators – we don’t need the president to be the janitor to sweep the issue under the rug, or to clean house with insurance companies. The president would be more effective if he launched a campaign to get people to eat to live rather than live to eat. No one wants to admit it, but gluttony is what keeps our economy going, and insurance companies are not the culprits in this conspiracy. It is a cultural mind fault. Food is a drug more dangerous than any illicit substance, as more people die from indiscriminate eating than drug addiction. Check the records.
We are fond to make cigarette smoking and alcohol drinking as the main nails in our coffins, but where do you see television commercials addressing far more insidious killers that accompany obesity? The answer is “nowhere!”
Cruise ships attract fat people like a moth to light. That is because you can eat all you want on a cruise at any time, day or night, in a score of restaurants, or have constant room service without any additional cost for the cruise. It is heart attack heaven, and you don’t have to die to enjoy it.
Cruise passengers are drugged with food, and then when they hit the cities along the cruise they shop until they drop buying worthless trinkets that will be quickly forgotten once they are home. They are not aware of it but shopping is a form of the same addiction as it is a hunger that feeds on itself. Most of the stuff available in these tourist traps is junk like junk food, and so it goes.
I’ve done an unscientific study on this cruise, and have come to the conclusion from my observations of some 2,000 cruise guests, and some 1,000 cruise servers, that there is an observable striking paradox:
(1) Eighty (80) percent of the cruise guests are overweight to obese;
(2) Not a member of the cruise staff at any level in the hierarchy is less than in prime health including the ship’s captain.
I have also concluded, also unscientific, why this is so. Incidentally, members of the thousand-member crew are from thirty or more different countries with very few Americans among them.
My determinations:
(1) If you were born in the early years of the Great Depression, you find most women are slim and most men are slim as well;
(2) If you were born in the latter years of the Great Depression, you find most women are bordering on fat, while most men have a 34-36 inch waist and a 55-inch belly;
(3) If you were born in the early years of the Baby Boom, you find many women surprising stout but not fat, but nearly all the men with high “beer” bellies and low waists several inches smaller;
(4) If you were born in the late stages of the Baby Boom, you find many women statuette while nearly all the men have protruding bellies and under developed bodies;
(5) Children of early and late Baby Boomers are nearly all fat, as well as showing a palpable arrogance bordering on petulance that gives them the look of being needy and weak;
(6) If you were born in the 1970s to the 1980s, women are surprisingly fit, men are equally fit, but their children are fat;
(7) If parents are fat, regardless of when they were born, it appeared almost axiomatic that all their children were fat as well as their children and grandchildren.
Of the two thousand aboard, the few African Americans on board were likely to be overweight, as were the majority of white Americans. Oriental Americans were almost to a person trim and healthy, as were many other foreigners. Hispanics, like white Americans were likely to be overweight to obese. Europeans, especially those of Latin extraction were usually found to be trim, especially the French.
* * *
BB has a stressful job as business manager of a Jewish Day School, and was hoping for a respite from that ordeal on this holiday, only to find herself sick with this cold and continually coughing. I marveled at her patience, as I am an absolute pain when sick. BB, on the other hand, could not have been a better gamer under the circumstances. She went ashore visiting every town on the cruise, took some 500 pictures with her wonderful new camera, and never complained during the whole ordeal.
What I learned about my wife is that she operates on the premise of mind over matter. She managed to keep her wits about her and to have a reasonably good time, although she missed the cruise shows that she loves, and went on only one tour. It was, as always, a joy to be with her.
* * *
Many people go on holiday to meet and commiserate with strangers. I do not. I am most comfortable in the company of BB, or at home in my study, surrounded by the thousands of dead authors who are my most intimate companions. If this sounds sick, or you feel sorry for me, don’t! Privacy is a natural aspect of my temperament as it has been for countless souls over time that appreciates the reflective and contemplative life. I have been fortunate to have such a life now.
My only regret is that I had not started sooner. Privacy and semi-seclusion is common to many writers, after all, writing is a singular profession. It is the necessary climate to create and record stories and observations lodged in your heart. One day I suspect I will be a dead author in someone’s library as the many dead authors surround me now. My talent, if that is the correct word, is that I write out of my own conscience and experience as clearly and as comprehensively as I am able.
* * *
You will note my reference to Warren Edward Buffet at the beginning of these reflections. Buffett, who soon will turn 79, is the second richest man in the world, and the world’s most astute investor in history. Forbes magazine estimates his current net worth at more than $37 billion dollars, much of which is to be turn over to the Bill and Kathy Gates Foundation, as he has great faith in their humanity and philanthropic ventures.
Beyond that, the similarity between Great Depression Buffett and Baby Boomer Gates come to an end, and the reason for its inclusion here. I sensed that I saw many potential “Bill Gates” on this cruise, but, alas, no “Warren Buffetts.”
Despite his extreme wealth, Buffett still lives in the five-bedroom house where he has lived for the last 52-years. He pays himself a salary of $100,000 and manages to save more than 10 percent of it each year. More remarkable, should a call be placed to his residence or business, chances are he will answer. He still drives his American made automobile, which is more than a decade old.
To put this in perspective, Bill Gates, who has managed to be the richest or second richest man in the world most of his adult life, lives in a 66,000 square-foot house with six kitchens, and cutting edge electronics. Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia has twenty-six bathrooms and as many bedrooms in his mansion, reminiscent of J. Paul Getty’s. Getty installed coin pay telephones in his mansion to control the phone abuses of his guests, which of course Gates has not had to suffer, as conventional phones are no longer relevant. Bernard Madoff had a Mercedes, Lexus, Range Rover and a Cadillac fleet. Mark Cuban has a Gulfstream V jet, while the King of Morocco wears $50,000 vicuna suits.
Buffett and Getty are of the Great Depression era, while these other wealth creators are early or late Baby Boomers. In any case, frugality is Buffett’s brand name. His personal disregard for money, as such, is real. He is not greedy, but is good at what he does, measuring and managing the Berkshire Hathaway fund. To give you a sense of this, an early investment of $10,000 in this fund when he first formed is worth more than $100 million today. Is Buffett a genius?
Not according to Malcolm Gladwell, author of “Outliers” (2009). According to him, success cannot be explained by what a person is “like,” but only by where that person is “from.”
Buffett is a Midwesterner from Nebraska. People in the Midwest are not impressed by wealth or brilliance or even success, but with the person. Gates, on the other hand, comes from the West where daring and show and flamboyance register traction. Successful people are expected to demonstrate their brilliance and separation from the rank and file.
Gates early career involved exploiting the works of others for which he was and to this day is constantly being sued. This is not the case with Buffett. Wealth creation for him began around the age of six. He started buying packs of gum and selling them to the neighbors for a few pennies’ profit. He switched to Coke, which he peddled door-to-door in the summer, then to “pre-owned” golf balls.
His first visit to Wall Street was at the age of ten. It was around then that he bought three shares of stock for $35 and sold them for $40, which unfortunately soon reached a value of $200. He read a book at eleven that suggested 100 ways to make a $1,000, which gave him a goal – to make $1 million by the age of 35. When he reached that age, he was worth $5 million.
For Buffett, making money was not a means to an end but a vocation. Getting money interested him more than having money, or spending money. Money is an intellectual pursuit evaluating a company’s assets, exploring and buying undervalued businesses (Dairy Queen for instance), and studying the relationship of companies’ management to shareholders. To summarize, he sees the market as his servant and not his master (see “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder, 2009; “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell, 2009; and “Making It” by Sue Halpern, The New York Review, May 28, 2009)
* * *
Another reason I was watching so much television is because I only brought three books plus recent copies of “Smithsonian” magazine articles I had not yet read, along with the latest issue of “The New York Review.”
I am a fan of Robert Littell and was especially mesmerized with his most recent book, “The Stalin Epigram” (2009). It is based on historical fact but a fictional rendering of the life of Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century.
Mandelstam was twice imprisoned, tortured and twice sent to Siberia, mainly for the writing but not publishing “The Stalin Epigram,” where he died at the age of 47 (1891 – 1938). This is his epigram to the dictator Stalin:
“We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer.
His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.
Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders –
Fawning half-men for him to play with.
They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin,
And every killing is a treat
For the broach-chested Ossete.”
The novel is cleverly built around Mendalstam’s naïve and suicidal gesture in a climate of unfreedom. The Soviet Union was feeling a mounting threat from the West. The Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler was on the rise. Stalin was naturally paranoid, had no tolerance for dissension, and was particularly intimidated by intellectuals. This gives you a sense of the conflict and intrigue.
It gave me pause. Given my turn of mind in his time and place, confessing to being equally naïve, I, too, would have perished at an early age. God Bless America!
* * *
Pete Dexter’s novel “Brotherly Love” (1991) was a new experience for me, as I had not read the author before. Charlie Rose on PBS asked Elmore Leonard, the premiere mystery writer, “Whom do you read?”
“Pete Dexter,” he answered matter-of-factly.
I have enjoyed Leonard’s tight prose so thought I might enjoy Dexter’s. I had no idea what a treat “Brotherly Love” would be. He is by far the best writer I have read in some time. His economy of style, crispness of dialogue, episodic development, and characterization lodge in the mind long after the book is finished.
I find myself wanting to rewrite what I have already written of GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA and dividing the chapters, as did Littell with various people speaking, and to wax less eloquent and concentrating more in telling the story as does Dexter.
Elmore Leonard says, “When the reader senses ‘this is really good writing,’ the author has failed. ‘Good writing’ has gotten in the way of the story.”
Dexter doesn’t get in the way of his story but yet his writing is superb.
The author had a life-changing experience in 1981 when thirty drunken Philadelphians, armed with baseball bats, and upset with one of his recent columns about a drug deal gone wrong, beat him severely.
Dexter was hospitalized with a broken back, pelvic fracture, brain damage, and knocked out teeth. Once he recovered after a long convalescence, he turned from being a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News to a novelist writing “God’s Pocket” (1984), and the National Book Award for fiction in 1988 of “Paris Trout.”
I have on order “Deadwood” (1986), “The Paperboy” (1995), “Train” (2003) and “Paris Trout” (1988). I suspect I’ll have more to say when I’ve read these books. I recommend “Brotherly Love” (1991) for anyone who enjoys good writing, mystery pathos, pace, plot, and surprise.
* * *
The third novel I read was “Cold Company” (2002) by Sue Henry. During our first trip to Alaska in 2002, I came across a book by the author in Haines City, and learned that she wrote exclusively about Alaska through the characters of Jessie Arnold, a dogsled driver and Phil Becker, a Canadian Monty Police Officer in homicide.
BB and I fell in love with Alaska on that 2002 excursion, which motivated me to read Henry’s books. They have provided me with a window into the soul and substance of the forty-ninth state, while being entertained with a thriller.
Alaska has only three-to-four months of mild weather, and we happened upon Alaskan weather at its best with mild to warm temperatures, no rain, and sparkling sunshiny days and spectacular nights. We chose a late May and early June visit thinking the weather would be ideal, and it was. The ship’s captain said it rained every day during the previous cruise.
* * *
In the airports of Tampa, Philadelphia, Seattle and Houston, I checked out the books on sale at the various outlets. Now, I read hundreds of books every year and seldom read a book on the bestseller list so I should not register surprise when I see few books to my taste. It was a puzzle, however, a kind of chicken and egg perplexity, as I perused these book titles.
Did these outlets create the bestsellers or did bestsellers create these outlets?
I say this in all seriousness as virtually every kiosk had the same fifty to one hundred titles at every terminal.
A long time ago, Joseph Kennedy, the father of JFK, recognized this phenomenon, purchasing thousands of copies across the nation of his son’s alleged book “Profiles In Courage” to secure its bestseller status. He accomplished his objective and then some. The double irony is that Ted Sorenson ghostwrote the book, and the late president won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1956. It represents the contrived status of this industry, and would become a reflection of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s public life, which historians still treat in hagiographic terms.
* * *
The last day at sea BB was well enough to attend the art auction. We are modest collectors of original art, and enjoy the Park West professionals who lecture and sell art on these cruises. There had been other art lectures and auctions on this cruise, but I refused to attend without BB. As expected, we found something “we must have,” and made the purchase. As I told my high school classmate, Ron McGauvran, when he visited us in January 2009, our more than 4,000 books hold our modest home together, and our art collection is perhaps of more value than our house, which is an exaggeration but not a blatant one.
* * *
In our shrinking world, I suppose I should not have been that surprised that the young lady who sold us the artwork shared a natural bond. She had an accent and I asked her where she was from. “South Africa.” I asked her where in South Africa. “Johannesburg.” I told her I lived there in the late 1960s facilitating the formation of a new conglomerate. She asked me where I lived. “Rosebank.” She looked at me and said, “Rosebank is a most impressive section of the city.” I then described our estate, mentioned my modest roots and the fact I was writing a novel about the times. I got a hard kick under the table from BB. I asked her later, “What was that for?”
“You always give more information out than you should.”
I know that is fair, and I’m glad she keeps me in check.
But I do believe there is something to this “six degrees of separation,” which claims a person is one step away from each person they know, and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on earth.
This idea was popularized by a play written by John Guare, and has now spread to websites, and books, including salient treatments by the eminent OD psychologist Stanley Milgram, along with the extrapolations of mathematicians Manfred Kochen and Ithiel de Sola Pool in the book “Contacts and Influences” (1978).
The young lady, an Afrikaner, understood her country’s history and could follow the outline of my story in a time more common to her grandparents. BB forgives me my occasional excesses when I meet a person of interest, as otherwise I seldom talk to strangers. She also knows when I do, like now, I transport myself back in time, in this case forty years, and talk as if it were yesterday. Memory is an aid to a writer, but it is in everyone’s possession. It is also common for an introvert to step out of character with a rush when so exhilarated.
* * *
Since we have been home, BB has downloaded on her computer some 500 pictures she had taken on this cruise, many from our private patio on the ship as we traveled through Alaska’s breathtaking Inside Passage.
She also managed to take pictures when we stopped at the various port cities. The pictures are special. I suggested we should publish a book of at least one hundred of these photographs along with brief commentaries to go with the pictures, but she demurred, “Wait on that!”
I wish all my readers could see these 500 photographs because BB is an astute observer and creative composer. The viewer of the pictures feels he is actually there. For example, in Prince Rupert, Canada, we sat on the lawn of a high school and watched a pickup volley ball game of high school boys and girls, in rotating teams, enjoying a sunny afternoon of sport and camaraderie now that school was out. BB caught players spiking the ball and making spectacular saves. Many of the young people were Orientals and of small stature, but possessed amazing vertical leaping ability. We spent more than an hour being so entertained.
* * *
Malcolm Gladwell remarks in the “Outliers” that people who have truly succeeded have invested a minimum of 10,000 hours of not only hard work, but also much harder work than normal. He profiles the Beatles, Bill Gates, Bill Joy (of Sun Microsystems) and Tiger Woods, who all started early and all worked extraordinarily hard and always with purpose.
I started late as a writer, am unlikely to live to complete my 10,000 hours of hard work, but I do persist. I plan on writing a piece on “10,000 Hours” sometime in the future. It is an interesting benchmark.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 11, 2009
REFERENCE: Reflections on an Alaskan cruise in late May and early June 2009.
* * *
“I just been on a trip to Minnesota, where I can kindly describe most of the people I saw as little houses.”
Anna Wintour, editor of VOGUE, on the prevalence of obesity in the United States as reported in Time (June 1, 2009).
* * *
“I had the advantage,” Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world, reflects on his success, “of living in a home where people talked about interesting things. I had intelligent parents and I went to decent schools. I didn’t get money from my parents, and I really didn’t want it. But I was born at the right time, and place. I won the ‘Ovarian Lottery’.”
“Making It,” an article by Sue Halpern in the NEW YOUR REVIER (May 28, 2009)
* * *
My life has been a trajectory in which, I suspect, in my idealism I have struggled rather fruitlessly to make reality conform to my ideals. My attempt, I suppose, has been to produce an arc of significance when experience resembles little more than a flat line. Somewhere in the corner of my mind, however, I am unwilling to abandon the belief life has purpose, and not simply an interval of inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.
This rather bleak assessment does not fill me with despair, as Robert “trucking on” Crumb might suggest, but makes me attentive to the little minds that guide my every move with their collective nonsense. I am speaking, of course, of the movers and shakers and shapers of my life, people who control all aspects of my culture.
I still hold to the value that only a reflected life is worth living, while being fully aware that reflection may impede that living because it is easier to be unconscionable and on automatic pilot, submissive and obedient than to challenge its authority. Culture has a constant cacophony of noise masquerading as news to so enjoin me to its beat.
It is impossible for me to watch this submissive self-destruction without like Chicken Little running around frantically crying, “the sky is falling,” when I see our collective heads buried in Don Delillo’s “White Noise” (1985), which he claims is our fear of death, when I contend it is more likely our fear of life.
* * *
The pleasure of a vacation is it eventually comes to an end. Traveling is tiring, sometimes boring, often disheartening as you see humanity up close and personal in all its nakedness.
Cruising with 2,000 like-minded souls, and another 1,000 serving us, I was reminded of Katherine Anne Porter’s novel, “Ship of Fools” (1962). The title was taken from the fifteenth century Latin moral allegory, which symbolized “the ship of the world on its voyage to eternity.” Porter’s book is based on her own trip from Mexico to Europe in 1941 during WWII, and is notable for its pessimistic view of humanity. It was later made into a successful 1965 film as a tragic comedy.
Nearly seventy years after Porter’s trip, I was entertained on a grand hotel at sea with a similar view of the human condition, but not in terms of stereotypical anti-Semitism, racism, or assumed superiority, but in the context of excess, superficiality and banality.
* * *
This more active observation of a cross-section of society was a product of circumstances. BB was suffering from a terrible cold during the cruise and relegated to limited activities. We were unable to attend a single show during the evening as BB lacked the energy and didn’t want to spread her cold.
Our compensation was having a lovely room with a private terrace to which we spent more time than we might have otherwise. The weather during the cruise was perfect with sunny days and moderate temperatures, and the most incredible view of nature. Alaska is priceless in its beauty, and a crown jewel of Nature’s Paradise.
We are television viewers, but thankfully carry only the minimum cable package, meaning we do not have access to a zillion channels being confined to the major television networks, the education channels, and a 24/7 news and weather channel. We have been spared having to watch the ongoing inanities of CNN’s “unnews” news, or the multiple sports channels, which continuously chortle the ungrammatical absurdities of former jocks and their adulating commentators, rehashing and reassessing sport events beyond the point of idiocy. It makes the head hurt, and so I hit the mute button and look only at the bottom score line to see how the Tampa Bay Rays and Chicago Cubs are doing, along with how the French Open is going, of course rooting for Federer.
I love baseball, and enjoy watching it, but BB prefers football and finds baseball slow and boring, and so I watch little, although baseball is seemingly on fifty channels.
How these sportscasters and sports analysts can hype contests on baseball diamonds, racetracks, golf courses, and basketball courts until the diet is indigestible is beyond me. Someone must be watching this stuff because players make it huge, which begs the question: is this how mindless and passive our collective existence has become?
* * *
Speaking of mindless, I was standing at the urinal in the Seattle airport, and there were guys on either side of me standing there, as if at the starting gate ready to start the race, only these horses were not paying attention to the releasing body fluids. They were totally preoccupied with their handheld electronic devices while taking a piss. It made me leery that their hoses might be misdirected, and so I quickly departed while both were still so engaged.
* * *
Years ago when I traveled the world to make a living, people in airport terminals were likely to be reading a book, magazine, or newspaper waiting for their next flight. Not anymore. No wonder these media outlets are in trouble. Being somewhat frugal, I would often pick up a discarded newspaper, magazine, or paperback book to read left behind. Commercial airlines in those days also distributed journals, newspapers and popular magazines to passengers once on board. Not any more. Today, travelers are buried in their laptops, cell phones, BlackBerrys or electronic games, while overhead CNN blares its incessant message in the terminal that no one hears, or is given the option of a film during the flight in which you pay for the rent of the ear phones.
* * *
CNN’s Campbell Brown and Larry King make news that makes me snooze. I can’t believe people watch them and their orchestrated dialectics. That is not to say they are any worse than Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, but come on now, do they preach to our common denominator or only perceive it as close to zero? I’m afraid they do.
I had never watched a Campbell Brown, Larry King, or any other CNN program before being confined to this cruise ship. CNN has clones of these two and so the beat goes on and on. More shocking is seeing people on these shows that I have read in book form, such as Fareed Zakaria. My wonder is why they appear. They must know the conversation will be banal, brusque, and meaningless. To add insult to injury these programs are repeated ad infinitum like the commercials they are. CNN is light years away from Jim Lehrer’s “News Hour,” and “Charlie Rose” on PBS, and these are commercial free broadcasts.
Then I chanced upon a program that was pathetic to the extreme. Parents of a young woman being held in custody in Florida awaiting trial on the alleged murder of her child were shown in split screen talking to their daughter.
“Is my granddaughter alive?” the grandmother asks. The young mother knows at this point that she is not, as do the viewers as the child’s body had been discovered in a shallow grave near the mother’s home some time ago.
The question must be asked: have we become so schadenfreude that we delight in the private miseries of others? Why do we have to broadcast the fact this young mother is a liar? Do we take satisfaction in that knowledge?
I don’t know if this young lady killed her daughter or not, but it was obvious she was lying to her parents like an Academy Award actress. Every time I came back to this program while surfing the channels the young lady was still lost in her lying.
That said whatever happened to due process, or being innocent until proven guilty? Why would the parents allow this invasive subterfuge? To my mind it is not far from the delight some people once derived from watching public executions. Whatever happened to the words, “He without sin cast the first stone?”
* * *
“You know what I am saying is true, you know, as you know we have all had experiences that, you know, we would like to forget if we could, but you know that is not possible because, you know, we have to hide from ourselves, you know, as much as from others, don’t you know?”
It is like the screeching sound of chalk across a blackboard every time I hear “you know,” which is meaningless, thoughtless, and utterly ridiculous. We all do it, and that includes the President of the United States. We are all guilty of flippancy and imprecise language.
I have noticed that “you knows” sneak into the conversation if ever so quietly of President Barak Obama when he is adlibbing his remarks.
“You knows” equally lace the conversations of Senators, Congressmen, churchmen, business executives, entertainers, while it is the essential pronoun of professional athletes. They can sneak ten “you knows” in a single sentence. No one seems able to speak American English in a simple declarative sentence without a collection of “you knows.”
If we cannot speak precisely, how can we expect to think precisely? Language has deteriorated to animal babble.
We live in a sloppy age of sloppy language, and massive contradictions.
(1) We have the precise language of mathematics in science where scientists cannot write comprehensively and understandably in the vernacular of the majority.
(2) Most CEOs of major corporations in the United States have engineering backgrounds supported by MBAs, neither of which prepares them for leadership, which is grounded in communications.
(3) Academics take pride in expressing themselves in code failing to realize everyone regardless of education understands truth revealed.
Scientists, CEOs and academics live in an isolated cultural world of jargon, which winds them into a zone of incomprehension. Paradoxically, writers on the periphery of science, business and technology have become their respective interpreters, or a power in their own right, as were the scribes more than 1000 years ago. Then, most rulers could neither read nor write, as they were too busy making war. Charlemagne in the ninth century was one of the first rulers to master these skills. Rulers were dependent on this special class of scribes to connect them to the people. It was the original power of the clerics and one of the reasons why the Catholic Church rose to such prominence.
In this sloppy age of sloppy language, it is why Rush Limbaugh can command $100 million a year broadcasting his nonsense, why Bill O’Reilly can claim he only speaks the truth when he wouldn’t recognize the truth if he went to bed with it, or why Campbell Brown, Larry King, et al, have the careers they have. This is the Age of Communication with the absurdity that Samuel Beckett predicted, an age in which we suffer from too much information and not enough common knowledge. We are all swimming in a tsunami of irrelevancies.
In my day, it was not “you know” that was so prominent, but “I think” this or that, when the person speaking wasn’t thinking at all. Saying the word sufficed for thought, which of course it didn’t. Thinking occurs when the mind is empty and quiet and mindless of itself. We sometimes call this contemplation. A quiet mind is not possible when a climate of noise where activity is synonymous with action, and action is synonymous with thinking. The result is what we have, or the haze in which we live.
A carryover from my day was the expression “to tell you the truth,” or “to be honest with you,” or “to be totally frank,” when truth, honesty or frankness were orphans from the exchange. When spoken, it should alert the listener to these red flags.
* * *
Anna Wintour’s remark (see above) that Minnesotans looked like “little houses” they were so fat could be extended to all the little houses on board this cruise ship, as well as what I had seen in the airports of Philadelphia, Seattle, Houston and Tampa.
We are a nation of little walking houses wherever you go. Our President of the United States is pencil thin but his electorate is so fat that many suffer an assortment of ailments prompting his major domestic policy to be health insurance reform.
Fatness is what drives health insurance cost sky high, not insurance companies. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman notwithstanding – who sees insurance companies as the evil instigators, and not gluttonous Americans as perpetrators – we don’t need the president to be the janitor to sweep the issue under the rug, or to clean house with insurance companies. The president would be more effective if he launched a campaign to get people to eat to live rather than live to eat. No one wants to admit it, but gluttony is what keeps our economy going, and insurance companies are not the culprits in this conspiracy. It is a cultural mind fault. Food is a drug more dangerous than any illicit substance, as more people die from indiscriminate eating than drug addiction. Check the records.
We are fond to make cigarette smoking and alcohol drinking as the main nails in our coffins, but where do you see television commercials addressing far more insidious killers that accompany obesity? The answer is “nowhere!”
Cruise ships attract fat people like a moth to light. That is because you can eat all you want on a cruise at any time, day or night, in a score of restaurants, or have constant room service without any additional cost for the cruise. It is heart attack heaven, and you don’t have to die to enjoy it.
Cruise passengers are drugged with food, and then when they hit the cities along the cruise they shop until they drop buying worthless trinkets that will be quickly forgotten once they are home. They are not aware of it but shopping is a form of the same addiction as it is a hunger that feeds on itself. Most of the stuff available in these tourist traps is junk like junk food, and so it goes.
I’ve done an unscientific study on this cruise, and have come to the conclusion from my observations of some 2,000 cruise guests, and some 1,000 cruise servers, that there is an observable striking paradox:
(1) Eighty (80) percent of the cruise guests are overweight to obese;
(2) Not a member of the cruise staff at any level in the hierarchy is less than in prime health including the ship’s captain.
I have also concluded, also unscientific, why this is so. Incidentally, members of the thousand-member crew are from thirty or more different countries with very few Americans among them.
My determinations:
(1) If you were born in the early years of the Great Depression, you find most women are slim and most men are slim as well;
(2) If you were born in the latter years of the Great Depression, you find most women are bordering on fat, while most men have a 34-36 inch waist and a 55-inch belly;
(3) If you were born in the early years of the Baby Boom, you find many women surprising stout but not fat, but nearly all the men with high “beer” bellies and low waists several inches smaller;
(4) If you were born in the late stages of the Baby Boom, you find many women statuette while nearly all the men have protruding bellies and under developed bodies;
(5) Children of early and late Baby Boomers are nearly all fat, as well as showing a palpable arrogance bordering on petulance that gives them the look of being needy and weak;
(6) If you were born in the 1970s to the 1980s, women are surprisingly fit, men are equally fit, but their children are fat;
(7) If parents are fat, regardless of when they were born, it appeared almost axiomatic that all their children were fat as well as their children and grandchildren.
Of the two thousand aboard, the few African Americans on board were likely to be overweight, as were the majority of white Americans. Oriental Americans were almost to a person trim and healthy, as were many other foreigners. Hispanics, like white Americans were likely to be overweight to obese. Europeans, especially those of Latin extraction were usually found to be trim, especially the French.
* * *
BB has a stressful job as business manager of a Jewish Day School, and was hoping for a respite from that ordeal on this holiday, only to find herself sick with this cold and continually coughing. I marveled at her patience, as I am an absolute pain when sick. BB, on the other hand, could not have been a better gamer under the circumstances. She went ashore visiting every town on the cruise, took some 500 pictures with her wonderful new camera, and never complained during the whole ordeal.
What I learned about my wife is that she operates on the premise of mind over matter. She managed to keep her wits about her and to have a reasonably good time, although she missed the cruise shows that she loves, and went on only one tour. It was, as always, a joy to be with her.
* * *
Many people go on holiday to meet and commiserate with strangers. I do not. I am most comfortable in the company of BB, or at home in my study, surrounded by the thousands of dead authors who are my most intimate companions. If this sounds sick, or you feel sorry for me, don’t! Privacy is a natural aspect of my temperament as it has been for countless souls over time that appreciates the reflective and contemplative life. I have been fortunate to have such a life now.
My only regret is that I had not started sooner. Privacy and semi-seclusion is common to many writers, after all, writing is a singular profession. It is the necessary climate to create and record stories and observations lodged in your heart. One day I suspect I will be a dead author in someone’s library as the many dead authors surround me now. My talent, if that is the correct word, is that I write out of my own conscience and experience as clearly and as comprehensively as I am able.
* * *
You will note my reference to Warren Edward Buffet at the beginning of these reflections. Buffett, who soon will turn 79, is the second richest man in the world, and the world’s most astute investor in history. Forbes magazine estimates his current net worth at more than $37 billion dollars, much of which is to be turn over to the Bill and Kathy Gates Foundation, as he has great faith in their humanity and philanthropic ventures.
Beyond that, the similarity between Great Depression Buffett and Baby Boomer Gates come to an end, and the reason for its inclusion here. I sensed that I saw many potential “Bill Gates” on this cruise, but, alas, no “Warren Buffetts.”
Despite his extreme wealth, Buffett still lives in the five-bedroom house where he has lived for the last 52-years. He pays himself a salary of $100,000 and manages to save more than 10 percent of it each year. More remarkable, should a call be placed to his residence or business, chances are he will answer. He still drives his American made automobile, which is more than a decade old.
To put this in perspective, Bill Gates, who has managed to be the richest or second richest man in the world most of his adult life, lives in a 66,000 square-foot house with six kitchens, and cutting edge electronics. Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia has twenty-six bathrooms and as many bedrooms in his mansion, reminiscent of J. Paul Getty’s. Getty installed coin pay telephones in his mansion to control the phone abuses of his guests, which of course Gates has not had to suffer, as conventional phones are no longer relevant. Bernard Madoff had a Mercedes, Lexus, Range Rover and a Cadillac fleet. Mark Cuban has a Gulfstream V jet, while the King of Morocco wears $50,000 vicuna suits.
Buffett and Getty are of the Great Depression era, while these other wealth creators are early or late Baby Boomers. In any case, frugality is Buffett’s brand name. His personal disregard for money, as such, is real. He is not greedy, but is good at what he does, measuring and managing the Berkshire Hathaway fund. To give you a sense of this, an early investment of $10,000 in this fund when he first formed is worth more than $100 million today. Is Buffett a genius?
Not according to Malcolm Gladwell, author of “Outliers” (2009). According to him, success cannot be explained by what a person is “like,” but only by where that person is “from.”
Buffett is a Midwesterner from Nebraska. People in the Midwest are not impressed by wealth or brilliance or even success, but with the person. Gates, on the other hand, comes from the West where daring and show and flamboyance register traction. Successful people are expected to demonstrate their brilliance and separation from the rank and file.
Gates early career involved exploiting the works of others for which he was and to this day is constantly being sued. This is not the case with Buffett. Wealth creation for him began around the age of six. He started buying packs of gum and selling them to the neighbors for a few pennies’ profit. He switched to Coke, which he peddled door-to-door in the summer, then to “pre-owned” golf balls.
His first visit to Wall Street was at the age of ten. It was around then that he bought three shares of stock for $35 and sold them for $40, which unfortunately soon reached a value of $200. He read a book at eleven that suggested 100 ways to make a $1,000, which gave him a goal – to make $1 million by the age of 35. When he reached that age, he was worth $5 million.
For Buffett, making money was not a means to an end but a vocation. Getting money interested him more than having money, or spending money. Money is an intellectual pursuit evaluating a company’s assets, exploring and buying undervalued businesses (Dairy Queen for instance), and studying the relationship of companies’ management to shareholders. To summarize, he sees the market as his servant and not his master (see “The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder, 2009; “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell, 2009; and “Making It” by Sue Halpern, The New York Review, May 28, 2009)
* * *
Another reason I was watching so much television is because I only brought three books plus recent copies of “Smithsonian” magazine articles I had not yet read, along with the latest issue of “The New York Review.”
I am a fan of Robert Littell and was especially mesmerized with his most recent book, “The Stalin Epigram” (2009). It is based on historical fact but a fictional rendering of the life of Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century.
Mandelstam was twice imprisoned, tortured and twice sent to Siberia, mainly for the writing but not publishing “The Stalin Epigram,” where he died at the age of 47 (1891 – 1938). This is his epigram to the dictator Stalin:
“We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer.
His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.
Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders –
Fawning half-men for him to play with.
They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin,
And every killing is a treat
For the broach-chested Ossete.”
The novel is cleverly built around Mendalstam’s naïve and suicidal gesture in a climate of unfreedom. The Soviet Union was feeling a mounting threat from the West. The Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler was on the rise. Stalin was naturally paranoid, had no tolerance for dissension, and was particularly intimidated by intellectuals. This gives you a sense of the conflict and intrigue.
It gave me pause. Given my turn of mind in his time and place, confessing to being equally naïve, I, too, would have perished at an early age. God Bless America!
* * *
Pete Dexter’s novel “Brotherly Love” (1991) was a new experience for me, as I had not read the author before. Charlie Rose on PBS asked Elmore Leonard, the premiere mystery writer, “Whom do you read?”
“Pete Dexter,” he answered matter-of-factly.
I have enjoyed Leonard’s tight prose so thought I might enjoy Dexter’s. I had no idea what a treat “Brotherly Love” would be. He is by far the best writer I have read in some time. His economy of style, crispness of dialogue, episodic development, and characterization lodge in the mind long after the book is finished.
I find myself wanting to rewrite what I have already written of GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA and dividing the chapters, as did Littell with various people speaking, and to wax less eloquent and concentrating more in telling the story as does Dexter.
Elmore Leonard says, “When the reader senses ‘this is really good writing,’ the author has failed. ‘Good writing’ has gotten in the way of the story.”
Dexter doesn’t get in the way of his story but yet his writing is superb.
The author had a life-changing experience in 1981 when thirty drunken Philadelphians, armed with baseball bats, and upset with one of his recent columns about a drug deal gone wrong, beat him severely.
Dexter was hospitalized with a broken back, pelvic fracture, brain damage, and knocked out teeth. Once he recovered after a long convalescence, he turned from being a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News to a novelist writing “God’s Pocket” (1984), and the National Book Award for fiction in 1988 of “Paris Trout.”
I have on order “Deadwood” (1986), “The Paperboy” (1995), “Train” (2003) and “Paris Trout” (1988). I suspect I’ll have more to say when I’ve read these books. I recommend “Brotherly Love” (1991) for anyone who enjoys good writing, mystery pathos, pace, plot, and surprise.
* * *
The third novel I read was “Cold Company” (2002) by Sue Henry. During our first trip to Alaska in 2002, I came across a book by the author in Haines City, and learned that she wrote exclusively about Alaska through the characters of Jessie Arnold, a dogsled driver and Phil Becker, a Canadian Monty Police Officer in homicide.
BB and I fell in love with Alaska on that 2002 excursion, which motivated me to read Henry’s books. They have provided me with a window into the soul and substance of the forty-ninth state, while being entertained with a thriller.
Alaska has only three-to-four months of mild weather, and we happened upon Alaskan weather at its best with mild to warm temperatures, no rain, and sparkling sunshiny days and spectacular nights. We chose a late May and early June visit thinking the weather would be ideal, and it was. The ship’s captain said it rained every day during the previous cruise.
* * *
In the airports of Tampa, Philadelphia, Seattle and Houston, I checked out the books on sale at the various outlets. Now, I read hundreds of books every year and seldom read a book on the bestseller list so I should not register surprise when I see few books to my taste. It was a puzzle, however, a kind of chicken and egg perplexity, as I perused these book titles.
Did these outlets create the bestsellers or did bestsellers create these outlets?
I say this in all seriousness as virtually every kiosk had the same fifty to one hundred titles at every terminal.
A long time ago, Joseph Kennedy, the father of JFK, recognized this phenomenon, purchasing thousands of copies across the nation of his son’s alleged book “Profiles In Courage” to secure its bestseller status. He accomplished his objective and then some. The double irony is that Ted Sorenson ghostwrote the book, and the late president won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1956. It represents the contrived status of this industry, and would become a reflection of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s public life, which historians still treat in hagiographic terms.
* * *
The last day at sea BB was well enough to attend the art auction. We are modest collectors of original art, and enjoy the Park West professionals who lecture and sell art on these cruises. There had been other art lectures and auctions on this cruise, but I refused to attend without BB. As expected, we found something “we must have,” and made the purchase. As I told my high school classmate, Ron McGauvran, when he visited us in January 2009, our more than 4,000 books hold our modest home together, and our art collection is perhaps of more value than our house, which is an exaggeration but not a blatant one.
* * *
In our shrinking world, I suppose I should not have been that surprised that the young lady who sold us the artwork shared a natural bond. She had an accent and I asked her where she was from. “South Africa.” I asked her where in South Africa. “Johannesburg.” I told her I lived there in the late 1960s facilitating the formation of a new conglomerate. She asked me where I lived. “Rosebank.” She looked at me and said, “Rosebank is a most impressive section of the city.” I then described our estate, mentioned my modest roots and the fact I was writing a novel about the times. I got a hard kick under the table from BB. I asked her later, “What was that for?”
“You always give more information out than you should.”
I know that is fair, and I’m glad she keeps me in check.
But I do believe there is something to this “six degrees of separation,” which claims a person is one step away from each person they know, and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on earth.
This idea was popularized by a play written by John Guare, and has now spread to websites, and books, including salient treatments by the eminent OD psychologist Stanley Milgram, along with the extrapolations of mathematicians Manfred Kochen and Ithiel de Sola Pool in the book “Contacts and Influences” (1978).
The young lady, an Afrikaner, understood her country’s history and could follow the outline of my story in a time more common to her grandparents. BB forgives me my occasional excesses when I meet a person of interest, as otherwise I seldom talk to strangers. She also knows when I do, like now, I transport myself back in time, in this case forty years, and talk as if it were yesterday. Memory is an aid to a writer, but it is in everyone’s possession. It is also common for an introvert to step out of character with a rush when so exhilarated.
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Since we have been home, BB has downloaded on her computer some 500 pictures she had taken on this cruise, many from our private patio on the ship as we traveled through Alaska’s breathtaking Inside Passage.
She also managed to take pictures when we stopped at the various port cities. The pictures are special. I suggested we should publish a book of at least one hundred of these photographs along with brief commentaries to go with the pictures, but she demurred, “Wait on that!”
I wish all my readers could see these 500 photographs because BB is an astute observer and creative composer. The viewer of the pictures feels he is actually there. For example, in Prince Rupert, Canada, we sat on the lawn of a high school and watched a pickup volley ball game of high school boys and girls, in rotating teams, enjoying a sunny afternoon of sport and camaraderie now that school was out. BB caught players spiking the ball and making spectacular saves. Many of the young people were Orientals and of small stature, but possessed amazing vertical leaping ability. We spent more than an hour being so entertained.
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Malcolm Gladwell remarks in the “Outliers” that people who have truly succeeded have invested a minimum of 10,000 hours of not only hard work, but also much harder work than normal. He profiles the Beatles, Bill Gates, Bill Joy (of Sun Microsystems) and Tiger Woods, who all started early and all worked extraordinarily hard and always with purpose.
I started late as a writer, am unlikely to live to complete my 10,000 hours of hard work, but I do persist. I plan on writing a piece on “10,000 Hours” sometime in the future. It is an interesting benchmark.
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