THE SUBTEXT OF LIFE AND ITS MEANING
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 30, 2009
* * *
“There is general denial of the subtext of life. It is contained in a kind of culture that exists apart from the kind transmitted by schools and universities, a kind of culture that once flourished in typical neighborhoods across the country, but is gone now. It helped to stem lawlessness, greed, corruption and other social diseases. It was a kind of social resistance that is lacking today, something upheld by average citizens, but by people in authority as well. There was a subtext of restrain undefined, unwritten, unspoken, but nonetheless felt, practiced and experienced.
“Today, the gap between people’s dreams and experience is too large. People have resorted to living life on the edge, running without thinking, on automatic pilot in the rhythm of the content and context of things without a sense of restrain or penalty. We see this in general apathy as people react to the lead stories on television nightly news and in the headlines of morning newspapers regarding murder, mayhem, rape, fraud, and malfeasance with irritations but little more. It is the ghost in the room.
“The mind is homeless. It lacks roots. Most people aren’t from where they are. A kind of isolation from a sense of place and space breaks people. Easily forgotten is that shameful acts are committed by people, wounded human beings.
“Once upon a time, they were children, little ones running down the street at the start of school with their backpacks bouncing in cadence to their happy feet. They were on their way to school and on their way out into life. One wonders watching this parade if there goes a thief, a wife beater, an addict, a drug dealer, a murderer, a rapist, an embezzler, a gang member, a prostitute, a pimp, a drag on society, someone on the fringe that will garner those lead stories that we essentially ignore.
“Is this predetermined? Quite the opposite. But only if people use their intelligence and good will to get beyond surface issues of class and race, status and wealth, education and profession, immigration and ethnicity, religion and ideology, language and culture to consider the subtext of life to uncover what destroys social restrain and how to prepare the damage.
“The world gets better or worse one person at a time. Apathetic or psychopathologic behaviors occur because people are not acquainted with the subtext of their lives and therefore enslaved to surface issues. It was the same a hundred years ago and is likely to be so a hundred years hence.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy” (unpublished)
* * *
THE PRICE OF A CELEBRITY CULTURE – AN AVERSION TO SUBTEXT
Great talent wastes its gifts when it loses contact with its subtext. Richard Burton was the greatest Shakespearean actor of his generation but sold out to Hollywood. Norman Mailer saw himself as heir apparent to Ernest Hemingway and sold out to the false bravado and high jinx of that writer, and thus became a caricature of himself.
Albert Einstein was the exception. He had similar celebrity pressures although his most productive years were before he was thirty, and he lived into his seventies. He ignored this pull of celebrity because he was well acquainted with his subtext. It was not false modesty that he claimed to have been lucky in his discoveries. He was lucky because he got beyond the content and context of Newtonian physics to explore the subtext that was not readily apparent, a subtext that physicists for more than two hundred years had not visited because they thought the work of physics had been completed.
Talented people ultimately sell themselves out to the celebrity culture when they are adored for all the wrong reasons. The herd mentality wants the talented to appreciate it for appreciating the talented. Thus the talented form a symbiotic connection with the herd in a mock embrace.
The quest for celebrity allows critics that can’t write, personalities that can’t act, people with little more than good looks to be television journalists, and novelists with one idea captured in scores of books. The chiaroscuro of content and context pulsates with monotonous consistency. Gore Vidal is a good writer who has never been able to rise above his angst. Hundreds have copied him.
It is a different problem for John Updike. Critic Grandville Hicks of the Saturday Review of Literature said of him that he wrote like an angel but had nothing to say. Updike mastered content and context with his beautiful lyrical style, but was less attentive to subtext of the lives he created. He seemed satisfied to create thematic caricatures such as “Couples” and his “Rabbit” series.
Updike, a favorite of The New Yorker, approached the sex revolution, and the feminine and civil rights movements on a tactile level without getting caught up in the tangled web and contradictory subtext of American life that had abandoned the common good for personhood.
He first wanted to be a graphic artist, a cartoonist, where linearity of content and context is featured. He gravitated from that to studying as a painter, mastering the techniques of texture and graphic composition, but unable to grasp the subtext that makes a Picasso a Picasso, taking up his pen to write novels, short stories, and criticism of art with the fluid ease of a New England Puritan.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., from the middle of the United States, had a different problem. He lived in the subtext and tried desperately to reach an audience in content and context. The strain became the perplexity of his life. This frustration shows in his last book “Armageddon in Retrospect” (2008). There he challenged the Mona Lisa being a perfect painting. “Listen,” Vonnegut writes, “her nose is tilted to the right, OK? That means the right side of her face is a receding plane, going away from us, OK? But there is no foreshortening of her features on that side, giving the effect of three dimensions. And Leonardo could so easily have done that foreshortening. He was simply too lazy to do it.”
I don’t think so. Da Vinci lived in a casual subtext of his life. That is how he came to envision the airplane, human anatomy, the submarine, automation and other devices that rose from his subtext to breakthrough the world of content and context. It was enough to surface such issues and let posterity finish them.
“No wonder she (Mona Lisa) has such a cockeyed smile,” Vonnegut adds. But that is precisely it. She is meant to be enigmatic. The smile is a reflection of what is going on beyond the surface. It is the mystery of her that haunts us to this day. Were the painting as Vonnegut proposed, it is doubtful it would be a masterpiece.
There is a reason why the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Joyce are still read. They dealt with the subtext of their stories while telling the surface story on the popular level of content and context. Hemingway escaped all his bravado, while dealing primarily with subtext in “The Old Man and the Sea,” and won the Nobel Prize for Literature for the gamble.
* * *
Over the last sixty years, I have seen a tectonic shift from subtext to content and context as the issues, which drive behavior and are endemic to our culture are pushed aside for the superfluous. With the lack of restrain, without the tension to sublimate creatively but instead fell a niche, we have failed to produce great writers, composers, painters, and architects. Noise has become music, exhibitionism art, glass buildings architecture, and the shocking and bizarre popular entertainment. We have become a surface disposable culture with a damaged affect.
The reader may argue what about the great electronic breakthroughs, what about them? Alas, what could be a better example of the charge!
Computers have been around for sixty years, but have been perfected and made available to support people’s lives at the content and context level as never before. We have innovation, not invention, replication, not creation, fads and fantasies, not transcendence.
Jobs and Wozniak were making electronic games when Jobs happened on the personal computer at Xerox, which management refused to fund, and so Jobs stole it. Bill Gates won the software contract with IBM by default when the wife partner of a husband-wife company wanted more assurances. Gates wanted none because he basically had nothing but his boldness to sell. He quickly acquired the software from another fledgling company for peanuts and was off to the races, two decades later the richest man in the world on a foundation of other people’s ideas.
DOUBLE-EDGED “CUT & CONTROL” HISTORY OF HUMAN CULTURE
We have just experienced a global economic meltdown that terrified advanced societies from one end of the globe to the other, a meltdown that to this moment viewed in terms of content and context with hardly a glance at the subtext of the calamity. True, mention is made of our inclination to live high now and pay for it later. That is hardly profound.
Economics has proven a faulty profession, as has management. I wrote this in “Work Without Managers” (1990), twenty years ago:
“We desperately need minds with a natural affinity for culture in the boardrooms across America, as well as in every other walk of professional life. We need poetry in commerce, government and industry. Engineers, economists, and political scientists have done about all the damage we can stand, perhaps more than we can absorb.
“Economists, for one, readily admit they are operating in a fog. From former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns (“The rules of economics are not working quite the way they used to.”) to Milton Friedman (“I believe that we economists in recent years have done vast harm by claiming more than we can deliver.”); from former Secretary of Treasury Michael Blumenthal (“I really think the economic profession is close to bankruptcy in understanding the situation, before or after the fact.”) to Juanita Kreps, former Secretary of Commerce, when asked if she would go back to Duke University upon leaving government (“I wouldn’t know what to teach.”). (WWMs pp 253 – 254)
Economists have always been enamored of algorithms and mathematical models, analysis at the content and context level, while management has treated people as things to be managed. Now they all have egg on their faces.
Geopolitics has also proven a faulty profession. Little time has been devoted to the subtext of why the Twin Towers of New York City were destroyed. Instead, there has been a visceral response at the content and context level of military preemptive war. This response has put the United States and its future in economic and political jeopardy without yielding cost benefit equal to the investment in life and capital.
Much talk is about the recession being behind us, but what is ahead? Inflation? The world sits on the precipice of inflation and a repeat recession/depression to this moment, which is a matter of subtext.
* * *
We glory in instant communication where everyone has a cell phone, BlackBerry, computer, or laptop to busy him or herself with the nonsense of white noise. Electronics have become a form of addiction in this Information Age. No longer is drunk driving the only major cause of deaths on our highways and byways, but people twitting on their electronic contraptions.
No one seems to be looking at the downside of this paradigm shift, which has elevated content and context to the status of a new religion. We have cut existence away from the way it was into a new sense of reality, a reality that gained something desired – instant access and communication with others – but at the expense of something lost – personal intimacy and rational stability.
It has been a “cut and control” journey throughout man’s history. During the hunting and gathering period 12,000 years ago, matriarchal society ruled and there were no boundaries.
Agriculture followed under a patriarchal society where property and boundaries were defined and defended.
This led to an industrial society where owners ruled and cities grew. This broke up the cohesive harmony and domestic culture of life on the farm as young families flocked to the cities to work. They found themselves living in cramped unsanitary tenement houses imprisoned in blatant squalor and crushing poverty, slaves to inanimate machines.
The gap between haves and have nots grew, as society moved swiftly through the modern management class to and through the post modern era of capitalists, as managers first replaced owners, and they in turn were replaced by indifferent stockholders who valued profits above people.
This elevated finance, an industry that produces nothing but exchange rates, to the ultimate power broker of investment bankers and venture capitalists. They became the significant differentiators as power shifted from people to property to products to floating capital.
This all came down as a crushing nightmare in 2008 when the wonder of electronic transfer of complex derivatives sped out of control as capital was leveraged thousands of times greater than its capacity to honor its debt as the “cut & control” journey of 12,000 years found the subtext of life once more breaking through the content and context of existence. Man keeps pushing forward blindly and incomprehensively, and then wonders what he has done wrong.
ALL TOO HUMAN
As a person who has worked about the globe, and who has thought about such things, I have concluded the subtext of life is the controller. This is not the life presented to the public or to friends, but the one that is puppet master of each of our individual fates.
Imagine a rubber band with certain elasticity. We know a new rubber band has much more elasticity than a much-often used one. In the human psyche we don’t look at elasticity, or flexibility in terms of use or age. We think we have the moxie whatever the circumstances to find our way out. We don’t believe we have nine lives like a cat but ninety-nine lives, and of course that is where the fallacy lies.
Think of all the people who garner the headline stories, people caught in shameful acts. Now think of all the people who lie for them: parents, grandparents, siblings, relatives, and friends. Not only that, think of these same people bailing them out of their difficulty, feeling sorry for them, buying their cheap excuses for the shameful behavior, and you have the making of an emotional and psychological crippled culture.
* * *
That person cold in the morgue killed by a hit and run driver has no sense of social justice and goes to his maker without anyone taking responsibility for his early demise.
I once knew a young man who went to the bachelor party of a friend. He didn’t drink and when the party got ruckus he chose to leave and walk the two miles home. It was eleven o’clock.
He worked his job religiously, didn’t make much money, lived alone in a modest apartment, read books, and that is how I got to know him. He read mine. He would discuss them intelligently and critically and I grew to respect him. Then one day, 42-years-of-age, he was no more.
It is assumed some drunken fool hit him, knocked him a hundred feet leaving him to die, his shoes left at the point of impact. There is a chance the person was so intoxicated that he didn’t know he hit the man. The shoes however were fifteen feet off the road. His death is a cold case now ten years old, which is unlikely to ever be reopened.
* * *
I have no sympathy for drunks, no sympathy for people who smoke themselves to death, no sympathy for drug addicts because I have no sympathy for people who are unaware of the subtext of their lives, and friends and family don’t have the courage to remind them of this fact. There is complicity here. We don’t go bad, alone.
It is in the subtext that the health of the elasticity of life is discovered. Nor will I accept that alcoholism and drug addiction are diseases. They are choices. They are people who choose to ignore their reduced elasticity, which is apparent in the subtext of life. Through artificial stimulation they promote the illusion they have much greater flexibility and elasticity than they have. The subtext of life reminds us we are dying a little every day and therefore should make the most of our days, not hide from them.
* * *
The subtext of life will not allow us to fool ourselves. The embezzler knows he is committing a crime but deludes himself that he will never get caught, justifying the behavior in rationalizations: his wife is dying of cancer, his sons need money for prep school, and he has the right to a better lifestyle given the many years of service in which he has been taken for granted and shown little respect.
Rationalization is the product of content and context but never the subtext of the matter, which is the fear that life in sum total amounts to nothing. The embezzlers elasticity is gone, and so he says, “Why not!”
I have no sympathy for Bernard Madoff who bilked investors and companies of billions of dollars while denying the subtext of his life. He is not a bad man but a little man with an obsessive need to please and feel important, but why? The answer is in his subtext.
Then there are people who have buried terrible deeds of their past in their subconscious. Now, they have resurrected themselves as religious fanatics feeling everyone else suffers from the same demons as they do.
What is incredible is that they convince people they do! Sin becomes their armor plate as they proselytize with zeal as the voice of salvation. A flock is formed as the proselytizer’s subtext becomes its own. No one seems to see the folly in this.
The flock is badgered to repent or it will be damned. By whom? By God, of course, because the proselytizer is the self-anointed messenger of God. The individual caught up in this charade may forget he has a right to question the messenger's legitimacy, or if there is an Almighty God or a God at all. What we cannot question is our decreasing elasticity, which limits what we can and cannot do.
* * *
In this business of coaching, counseling, studying and dealing with people for many years from the impersonal (consulting) to the personal, my role has been to observe, assess and suggest but not carry anyone or any organization when they best carry themselves. I have refused to carry my own children once they had left the home.
The irony is that my second child, a daughter, has attempted to carry her other siblings well into their adulthood forgiving them for their improprieties, which has stunted their growth resulting in none of them becoming truly adults.
Now, when she has come into a hard patch in her life, her siblings are not there for her. They are cruel, insensitive and unsympathetic to her ordeal, angry that she has little time to listen to them now, and no longer has the wherewithal to bail them out of their self-imposed miseries.
Has this made her bitter? No. Has this made her vindictive? No. Has this found her angry? No. It has made her resilient. The subtext of her life has proven to have much greater elasticity than one would expect. It came about when she stopped denying its existence and finally said, “Hey, that is where my strength lies. Hey, that is why I am so understanding of my siblings. Hey, that is why I can tolerate my parents. Hey, that is why I am me!”
With this resilience, she discovered she could refocus and reenergize her efforts to go forward accepting this bump in the road. That is what she is now doing. She finds she is a learner not a knower, a doer not a thinker, a problem solver but in the subtext of intuition not cognitive analysis. It is working for her.
She has two beautiful children who are a projection of her. She married a person like her siblings. She is the best thing that has happened to him. He gets into one economic strafe after another. Will he ever grow up? I don’t think so. Will he ever examine the subtext of his life? Not on a bet. Will he continue to repeat the same errors? Undoubtedly. Am I being cruel and non empathetic? After more than fifteen years of observations, I don’t think so.
* * *
In my subtext, there is a very strong moral authority that has little room for waste or variance from effective utilization of one’s inherent ability. This moral authority I have failed many times myself, but only I know and I have to live with that. I also know that my elasticity is practically gone. The little bit that I still possess I deposit into words, ideas, philosophies and projections of what I’ve learned and what I know, and what might prove helpful to others before I pass on.
Do I think I am an especially kind person? No, I’m just not malicious. I don’t get any satisfaction seeing other people being diminished or failing. Is it important for me to be liked? No, but it is important for me to be respected.
SUBTEXT UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL
The content and context of my life would suggest that I’m mainly intuitive because that is what I like to project, but the subtext of my life suggests that I am analytical, critical, and conceptual. The fact that the subtext has come to the surface in the evening of my years is representative of another quality, the need to leave something of value behind.
My life has been one of being very structured, disciplined and demanding of myself as well as others with little give – little elasticity – displayed. The irony of this is that the subtext of my life suggests I am most comfortable and in control in chaos and confusion.
Item:
I was only a junior corpsman in the medical division of the flagship (USS Salem CA-139). We were having military exercises in the Mediterranean with more than one hundred American ships and some 50,000 men. The gun mount in a destroyer escort “hang fired.” The blast of the explosion torched the gun crew of thirteen men, badly burning several. They were brought to the Salem and treated in our hospital. Three of them died while we were attending them.
Doctors from other ships were brought on board. It was general chaos. None of these doctors had experience with badly burned trauma cases nor did any of the corpsmen. Some could not deal with the carnage. By default, I had to assume a senior role to fill the void and received an accommodation for it. I was twenty-three-years-old, and learned something about myself that day that I didn’t know before. Highly emotional on the surface, there is a calm in my subtext that surfaced in that crisis. It has repeatedly surfaced since.
* * *
I am painfully aware of our limited elasticity. I know we all have a breaking point. Our elasticity can go from resilient to brittle to snapping. It may be referred to as “emotional exhaustion” or “hypertension” or “mental breakdown,” or some other psychiatric label such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or some other mental illness.
Dr. Thomas S. Szasz, author of “The Manufacture of Madness” (1970), “The Myth of Mental Illness” (1974), among other books, himself a psychiatrist, sees modern psychiatry using its ideology and insanity plea as a convenience to avoid confrontation with the hard moral conflicts and social problems of the day. Clear speech, what he calls the “second sin” is missing in the prognosis. Broadly speaking, Szasz is addressing subtext.
Of course, we all talk to ourselves; of course we all have dreams of loss, confusion and betrayal. That is part of the subtext that is the driver of behavior. Some people are made uncomfortable because they think you can read their minds. You can’t. But you can read their behavior, which is quite apparent for anyone paying attention.
You don’t do this with eye contact, which is supposed to indicate sincerity, but eyes lie. We have all become very good liars. Some people can even control their emotions to the point of passing polygraph tests with ease.
You can hear in what people say and the rhythm of what they do whether they are genuine or not. You can see in their gestures, the care of their nails, the texture of their skin whether they are or aren’t what they wish to project. Our faces are roadmaps of self-indulgence. The subtext of our lives oozes up to confirm and deny the content and context on display. We all become eventually what we are.
* * *
There are palpable warning signs before a person commits suicide; before a person takes that first dollar out of the till that doesn’t belong to him. There is no such thing as an innocent cup of coffee between a man and a woman married to other people. All of these indicators are there and all of them are rejections of the subtext of life.
When the subtext is ignored or rejected, life becomes a lie. There is no possibility for understanding the authentic self.
* * *
My nickname is “Rube,” which is commonly translated to mean a farmer, or a rustic and unsophisticated person, in other words, a derogatory identity.
At a dinner in New York City, someone once confronted me. “I understand your nickname is ‘Rube.’ Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“Are you comfortable with that?”
“Quite, why do you ask?”
“You’re not offended?”
“No.”
“Then you’re a country bumpkin?”
“If you like.”
“That doesn’t offend you?”
“No, why should it?”
“Do you like being called ‘Rube’?”
“I love being called ‘Rube’!”
“Why is that?”
“Because it's a name associated with the most wonderful time in my life growing up in the middle of the country in the middle of the century when I was catching baseball for the Courthouse Tigers as a kid. There was no actively I loved more. I took pride in that. I would watch catchers in the Industrial League with a dreamy like concentration as Quentin Tarantino watches film. I loved putting on the ‘tools of ignorance’ (catcher’s equipment) knowing I was the best catcher around for my age. I am Rube. Rube gave me my first taste of excellence and how to achieve it.”
The irony is that I come from a farm state and I’ve never actually ever been on a farm. My people in Ireland as well as America have always been city dwellers. My da was born in Chicago as was his parents, but his mother died in childbirth and his father took off never to be seen again. He was reared in Clinton, Iowa, a small industrial city on the Mississippi River by his grandmother. My siblings and all of my children have all gravitated to metropolitan areas no farmers in our family tree.
The subtext of the connection, however, is real. I have the down-to-earth values of the farmer, a love of the seasons of the year, of the planting fertilizing and growing of ideas, the earthy norms that identify a person with a particular place and space, the sense that a man’s word is his bond, the humility that Nature knows best, and that we are all connected. We are stuck with subtext; we take our geography wherever we go.
* * *
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is an industrial and organizational psychologist writing in the genre of organizational psychology, author of Confident Selling, Work Without Managers, The Worker, Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, Time Out for Sanity, Meet Your New Best Friend, Purposeful Selling, In the Shadow of the Courthouse and Confident Thinking and Confidence in Subtext. A Way of Thinking About Things, Who Put You in a Cage, and Another Kind of Cruelty are in Amazon’s KINDLE Library.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
FOR THOSE INTERESTED - AQP JOURNAL ARTICLES BY DR. FISHER
FOR THOSE INTERESTED – AQP JOURNAL ARTICLES BY DR. FISHER.
Go to www.aqp.org . That link directs you to the Team and Workplace Excellence Forum on the ASQ Website. This was the evolution after AQP "merged" with ASQ. The articles published in the Journal for Quality and Participation (AQP) are available in the ASQ on line archives as PDF files for ASQ members only.
For those interested, here are articles of mine published by the AQP Journal:
"How a Culture of Contribution Gives Your Company a Grow-up Call" (July/August 1999)
"What Will It Take to Transform Your Organization in the 21 Century" (November/December 1999)
"Why Professionals Can't Lead and What To Do About It" (Fall 2001)
Should you check them out, I'm confident you will find them as relevant today as if they were written moments ago.
Be always well,
Jim
Go to www.aqp.org . That link directs you to the Team and Workplace Excellence Forum on the ASQ Website. This was the evolution after AQP "merged" with ASQ. The articles published in the Journal for Quality and Participation (AQP) are available in the ASQ on line archives as PDF files for ASQ members only.
For those interested, here are articles of mine published by the AQP Journal:
"How a Culture of Contribution Gives Your Company a Grow-up Call" (July/August 1999)
"What Will It Take to Transform Your Organization in the 21 Century" (November/December 1999)
"Why Professionals Can't Lead and What To Do About It" (Fall 2001)
Should you check them out, I'm confident you will find them as relevant today as if they were written moments ago.
Be always well,
Jim
Friday, August 28, 2009
REACTION TO A REVIEW OF "AMERICAN LION" ANDREW JACKSON IN THE WHITE HOUSE
REACTION TO A REVIEW OF “AMERICAN LION” ANDREW JACKSON IN THE WHITE HOUSE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 29, 2009
Reference: This is an exchange that I thought might interest you with no comment other than the exchange.
J. Grattan says:
This is a review of the book? Delete it, get rid of the OD junk, and submit a book review.
Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Aug 26, 2009 2:04 PM PDT
Dr. James R. Fisher Jr. says:
OD isn't junk. As a matter of fact, it rules your life but apparently you don't know it. Jackson demonstrated an ability to understand the impact of climate and culture and how these ultimately dictate behavior. He was a way ahead of his time. I'm sorry you are not.
Be always well,
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
In reply to your post on Aug 26, 2009 5:27 PM PDT
J. Grattan says:
You're right, I'm deficient in OD and many other things. I wonder why all the eminent historians who have written on Jackson have not turned their books into a book on OD. They probably just don't know enough.
Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Aug 28, 2009 7:08 PM PDT
Dr. James R. Fisher Jr. says:
Historians write histories. Organization-industrial psychologists, as a rule, stay in their genre. I didn't. So, your comments were no surprise. Jackson fascinates me, and this book in particular because he framed his administration to my cultural formula:
(1) the structure of leadership; (2) determines the function of leadership; (3) the function of leadership creates the leadership culture; (4) the leadership culture dictates the dominate behavior of the Republic; (5) the dominant national behavior determines whether the nation will vegetate, flounder, or prosper and prevail.
"The Jackson Age" passed a critical test in our nation's history so that it would be ready to endure a bloody Civil War nearly three decades later.
Jackson's genius was that he had a leadership center, something that I find missing today. It gave him a moral compass -- he saw himself as a moralist and the father of his country -- to apply my formula a century and a half before I wrote it.
This is all in my book SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT'S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998), and also of possible interest: "Leadership Manifesto: Typology of Leaderless Leadership," which appeared in the AQP Journal (Winter 2002). See www.aqp.org or www.peripateticphilosopher.com
Be always well,
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 29, 2009
Reference: This is an exchange that I thought might interest you with no comment other than the exchange.
J. Grattan says:
This is a review of the book? Delete it, get rid of the OD junk, and submit a book review.
Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Aug 26, 2009 2:04 PM PDT
Dr. James R. Fisher Jr. says:
OD isn't junk. As a matter of fact, it rules your life but apparently you don't know it. Jackson demonstrated an ability to understand the impact of climate and culture and how these ultimately dictate behavior. He was a way ahead of his time. I'm sorry you are not.
Be always well,
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
In reply to your post on Aug 26, 2009 5:27 PM PDT
J. Grattan says:
You're right, I'm deficient in OD and many other things. I wonder why all the eminent historians who have written on Jackson have not turned their books into a book on OD. They probably just don't know enough.
Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Aug 28, 2009 7:08 PM PDT
Dr. James R. Fisher Jr. says:
Historians write histories. Organization-industrial psychologists, as a rule, stay in their genre. I didn't. So, your comments were no surprise. Jackson fascinates me, and this book in particular because he framed his administration to my cultural formula:
(1) the structure of leadership; (2) determines the function of leadership; (3) the function of leadership creates the leadership culture; (4) the leadership culture dictates the dominate behavior of the Republic; (5) the dominant national behavior determines whether the nation will vegetate, flounder, or prosper and prevail.
"The Jackson Age" passed a critical test in our nation's history so that it would be ready to endure a bloody Civil War nearly three decades later.
Jackson's genius was that he had a leadership center, something that I find missing today. It gave him a moral compass -- he saw himself as a moralist and the father of his country -- to apply my formula a century and a half before I wrote it.
This is all in my book SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT'S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998), and also of possible interest: "Leadership Manifesto: Typology of Leaderless Leadership," which appeared in the AQP Journal (Winter 2002). See www.aqp.org or www.peripateticphilosopher.com
Be always well,
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Monday, August 24, 2009
REPORT OF THE DECLINE OF THE UNITED STATES IS PREMATURE!
REPORT OF THE DECLINE OF THE UNITED STATES IS PREMATURE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 23, 2009
REFERENCE:
A regular blog visitor to www.peripatetic philosopher.com sent me an article by Conrad Black titled “Much ado about China,” which deals with the false decline of the United States (US). Mr. Black was reacting to Maclean’s magazine banners across the top of its cover, “When China Rules the World.” He took umbrage at this assessment and wrote a narrow perspective of changing global climate vis-à-vis the US and China. A more cogent perspective is offered in Josef Joffe’s “The Default Power: The False Prophecy of America’s Decline” in Foreign Affairs (September/October 2009).
* * *
Mr. Black is right. We have been there before. Japan wrote the US off as it soared economically in the 1980s and 1990s. In “Work Without Managers” (1990), I recorded author Akio Morita’s remark from his book, “The Japan That Can Say, No!”(1989): “Americans look ahead 10 minutes, while Japanese look ahead 10 years.” By 1999, Japan was looking ahead to a crippling recession. So much for prophesy of gloom and doom.
* * *
Joseph Joffe, co-editor of “Die Zeit," is a senior fellow at Stanford University. He captures the panic that is endemic to the American mindset through the decades as the economy fluctuates like a heartbeat but its hegemony remains a constant. Linearity is not a good predictor of a country any better than it is of an individual’s changing status.
That said Americans find it easier to register indices of decline than indices of expansion. We have never been comfortable having so much with the rest of the world having so little. It is almost as if we deserve to be beaten up, by others as well as ourselves, to tolerate our own good fortune.
Joffe notes our pessimism in the 1950s with Sputnik shock, the “missile gap” trumpeted by JFK in the 1960 presidential campaign, Nixon and Kissinger signaling world polarity in the 1970s, followed by the Jimmy Carter complaint of cultural “malaise” and a “crisis in confidence,” and then a decade later historian Paul Kennedy, among others, predicting the ruin of the USA, and so it goes until today.
The fact remains, as Joffe shows, “The United States remains first on any scale of power that matters, whether it is economic, military, diplomatic, or cultural.” (p. 22)
GLEE AND GLOOM
Joffe sees America as a construct from its first thirteen colonies until the present as an endless projection of the world’s fondest dreams and fiercest nightmares. It is as if the US is not a real place but a consoling or disturbing mirage of the imagination:
“The canvas is painted in two colors: glee and gloom. Glee is celebrated mainly abroad. The gloom is mainly Made in the USA.” (p. 24)
“Latter-day prophets use the language of decay to pursue a domestic agenda,” he insists, “whether it is a libertarian vision of isolationism and low taxes or a liberal one of more welfare and less militarism.” Then he quotes John Quincy Adams who did not want the US to turn into “the dictatress of the world.” If she did, “she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit,” as expansionism equals the loss of America’s soul
* * *
The American spirit and the freedom to express that spirit are our greatest treasury. I’ve benefited from this greatly, often expressing controversial things because they were in my heart to express without worrying about censure or punishment.
America is an idea, and that idea releases the human spirit to fill its potential in some creative way, or not. Freedom and expression are universal needs and America will remain strong and great, and yes powerful as well as long as it is sanctuary for the expression of such needs. John Quincy Adams understood the American conscience.
JUST THE FACTS
The US economy is worth $14.3 trillion, three times as much as the world’s second-biggest economy, Japans, and only slightly less than Japan, China, Germany and France combined. (p 25)
The US military budget is in a league of its own. In 2008, the US spent $607 billion, representing almost half of the world total military spending. China, India, Japan and Russia spend together a total of $219 billion. In 2005, Robert Work, a defense analyst and now under secretary of the US Navy, has shown, the US Navy commanded a naval tonnage exceeding the world’s next 17 fleets combined. (p. 25)
FALSE IDOLS
Efforts are made to show China’s rise in breathtaking linear terms. “Life is not linear,” Joffe insists, as we all know it is not. Statistics don’t lie but liars like to fudge statistics with false syllogisms.
“History sounded a warning against straight-line projections in 1989,” Joffe writes, “the year of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, when growth plummeted (for China) to four percent, compared with 11.3 percent the previous year. Karl Marx asserted that economics drives everything else – such turmoil suggests that politics is mightier still.” (p. 27)
LAST MAN STANDING
Power is not simply a matter of growth rates. “A large population, a large economy, and a large military are necessary but not sufficient conditions to exact power.” (p. 29). What puts the US in a league of its own is this: “the world’s most sophisticated military panoply fed by a defense budge that dwarfs all comers and gives the US the means to intervene anywhere on the planet.” (pp. 29-30)
It doesn’t stop there. It is the unmatched intellectual drive toward excellence of the research and higher education establishment. Projections of China surpassing the US in the first half of the twenty-first century leave out these unspectacular but critical sources of power. Nothing on earth touches the constant creating, innovating, restructuring, reinventing and reconstituting every phase of human society as this in the face of Nature’s entropy. This is what sets the US apart, the dynamic of the US university system.
“Of the world’s top 20 universities, all but three are American; of the tope 50 universities, all but 11 of them are located in the US. By contrast, India’s two best universities are tucked away in the world’s 300-to-400 tier. China does a bit better, its top three are in the 200-to-300 group of the world’s best 500.
“China’s public spending on education has been in the range of 2.0 – 2.5 percent of GDP over the last quarter century – this for a population four times as large as the US and an economy four times as small. The US spends close to 6 percent of its GDP on education, higher than that of India, Japan, Russian and the European Union combined.” (p. 39)
While the world often delights in a picture of the US as soft, fat, complacent and oblivious to a threatening reality, Joffe points out “national power is a warrior culture,” and the US still has one, as does the United Kingdom, but Europe doesn’t. “Europe does not think like a global power, nor can it move with the speed or the decisiveness of a real state.”(p. 30)
Joffe sees the US taking all these body blows of criticism feeling obliged to point out: “While acting on its own interests, it twice saved Europe from itself, and then served it a third time, during the Cold War, from the Soviet Union.” (p. 31)
It is from this growing spike in pessimism in the face of substantive performance that he concludes the US is a default power. “The US is the default power, the country that occupies center stage because there is nobody else with the requisite power and purpose.” (p. 31). For so great a power to be so benign in its enabling has caused him to observe: “The British Empire’s rule over India was more benign than Belgium’s over the Congo under the rapacious reign of King Leopold, and it was also more pleasant than is China’s in Tibet or Russia’s in its former Soviet empire.” (p. 32) What could be more poignant to confirm this? “China’s rebellious students put up a replica of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square, and not one of Lenin’s mausoleum.” (p. 32)
A PRINCE AND HIS KINGDOM
Joffe demonstrates an implicit understanding of Barack Obama’s soaring world popularity while at home it has been eroding: he is telling the world what it wants to hear but at the expense of American capital. Popularity waxes and wanes, but a consistency of another type has legs: “To capture a wider swath of the political imagination, it takes a country that is not just rich but also democratic and free.” (p. 33)
We have seen evidence of this democracy and freedom on display at town hall meetings across the US in recent days on Obama’s healthcare reform. Far from being bad for the country, it was a window to the world how democracy works when people are allowed to express their will without recrimination.
He cautions: “the default power is still an uberpower,” a term he uses to negate decline while promoting a balance of power akin to what Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft have advocated (p. 33). Joffe senses “China lacks the legitimacy that transforms muscle into leadership,” noting that “a default power always gains stature when the demand for its services soar. It does what others cannot or will not do. Only the default power has the power to harness a coalition against Iran, the new pretender to the Middle East," or to step in when a perturbation flares up somewhere else (p. 34).
Joffe concludes: “The facts and figures and the story of the resistible rise of previous contenders should give pause to those who either cheer or fear the US’ abdication. Linearity is not a good predictor. As the twenty-first century unfolds, the US will be younger and more dynamic than its competitors. Who would actually want to live in a world dominated by China, India, Japan, Russia, or even Europe? Not even those who have been trading in glee and gloom decade after decade would prefer any of them to take over as housekeeper of the world” (p. 35)
Josef Joffe believes the US will resist the imperial temptation of uberpower and will triumph in its own unique way as long as it heeds the words of John Quincy Adams and the American idea of freedom, and so do I.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 23, 2009
REFERENCE:
A regular blog visitor to www.peripatetic philosopher.com sent me an article by Conrad Black titled “Much ado about China,” which deals with the false decline of the United States (US). Mr. Black was reacting to Maclean’s magazine banners across the top of its cover, “When China Rules the World.” He took umbrage at this assessment and wrote a narrow perspective of changing global climate vis-à-vis the US and China. A more cogent perspective is offered in Josef Joffe’s “The Default Power: The False Prophecy of America’s Decline” in Foreign Affairs (September/October 2009).
* * *
Mr. Black is right. We have been there before. Japan wrote the US off as it soared economically in the 1980s and 1990s. In “Work Without Managers” (1990), I recorded author Akio Morita’s remark from his book, “The Japan That Can Say, No!”(1989): “Americans look ahead 10 minutes, while Japanese look ahead 10 years.” By 1999, Japan was looking ahead to a crippling recession. So much for prophesy of gloom and doom.
* * *
Joseph Joffe, co-editor of “Die Zeit," is a senior fellow at Stanford University. He captures the panic that is endemic to the American mindset through the decades as the economy fluctuates like a heartbeat but its hegemony remains a constant. Linearity is not a good predictor of a country any better than it is of an individual’s changing status.
That said Americans find it easier to register indices of decline than indices of expansion. We have never been comfortable having so much with the rest of the world having so little. It is almost as if we deserve to be beaten up, by others as well as ourselves, to tolerate our own good fortune.
Joffe notes our pessimism in the 1950s with Sputnik shock, the “missile gap” trumpeted by JFK in the 1960 presidential campaign, Nixon and Kissinger signaling world polarity in the 1970s, followed by the Jimmy Carter complaint of cultural “malaise” and a “crisis in confidence,” and then a decade later historian Paul Kennedy, among others, predicting the ruin of the USA, and so it goes until today.
The fact remains, as Joffe shows, “The United States remains first on any scale of power that matters, whether it is economic, military, diplomatic, or cultural.” (p. 22)
GLEE AND GLOOM
Joffe sees America as a construct from its first thirteen colonies until the present as an endless projection of the world’s fondest dreams and fiercest nightmares. It is as if the US is not a real place but a consoling or disturbing mirage of the imagination:
“The canvas is painted in two colors: glee and gloom. Glee is celebrated mainly abroad. The gloom is mainly Made in the USA.” (p. 24)
“Latter-day prophets use the language of decay to pursue a domestic agenda,” he insists, “whether it is a libertarian vision of isolationism and low taxes or a liberal one of more welfare and less militarism.” Then he quotes John Quincy Adams who did not want the US to turn into “the dictatress of the world.” If she did, “she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit,” as expansionism equals the loss of America’s soul
* * *
The American spirit and the freedom to express that spirit are our greatest treasury. I’ve benefited from this greatly, often expressing controversial things because they were in my heart to express without worrying about censure or punishment.
America is an idea, and that idea releases the human spirit to fill its potential in some creative way, or not. Freedom and expression are universal needs and America will remain strong and great, and yes powerful as well as long as it is sanctuary for the expression of such needs. John Quincy Adams understood the American conscience.
JUST THE FACTS
The US economy is worth $14.3 trillion, three times as much as the world’s second-biggest economy, Japans, and only slightly less than Japan, China, Germany and France combined. (p 25)
The US military budget is in a league of its own. In 2008, the US spent $607 billion, representing almost half of the world total military spending. China, India, Japan and Russia spend together a total of $219 billion. In 2005, Robert Work, a defense analyst and now under secretary of the US Navy, has shown, the US Navy commanded a naval tonnage exceeding the world’s next 17 fleets combined. (p. 25)
FALSE IDOLS
Efforts are made to show China’s rise in breathtaking linear terms. “Life is not linear,” Joffe insists, as we all know it is not. Statistics don’t lie but liars like to fudge statistics with false syllogisms.
“History sounded a warning against straight-line projections in 1989,” Joffe writes, “the year of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, when growth plummeted (for China) to four percent, compared with 11.3 percent the previous year. Karl Marx asserted that economics drives everything else – such turmoil suggests that politics is mightier still.” (p. 27)
LAST MAN STANDING
Power is not simply a matter of growth rates. “A large population, a large economy, and a large military are necessary but not sufficient conditions to exact power.” (p. 29). What puts the US in a league of its own is this: “the world’s most sophisticated military panoply fed by a defense budge that dwarfs all comers and gives the US the means to intervene anywhere on the planet.” (pp. 29-30)
It doesn’t stop there. It is the unmatched intellectual drive toward excellence of the research and higher education establishment. Projections of China surpassing the US in the first half of the twenty-first century leave out these unspectacular but critical sources of power. Nothing on earth touches the constant creating, innovating, restructuring, reinventing and reconstituting every phase of human society as this in the face of Nature’s entropy. This is what sets the US apart, the dynamic of the US university system.
“Of the world’s top 20 universities, all but three are American; of the tope 50 universities, all but 11 of them are located in the US. By contrast, India’s two best universities are tucked away in the world’s 300-to-400 tier. China does a bit better, its top three are in the 200-to-300 group of the world’s best 500.
“China’s public spending on education has been in the range of 2.0 – 2.5 percent of GDP over the last quarter century – this for a population four times as large as the US and an economy four times as small. The US spends close to 6 percent of its GDP on education, higher than that of India, Japan, Russian and the European Union combined.” (p. 39)
While the world often delights in a picture of the US as soft, fat, complacent and oblivious to a threatening reality, Joffe points out “national power is a warrior culture,” and the US still has one, as does the United Kingdom, but Europe doesn’t. “Europe does not think like a global power, nor can it move with the speed or the decisiveness of a real state.”(p. 30)
Joffe sees the US taking all these body blows of criticism feeling obliged to point out: “While acting on its own interests, it twice saved Europe from itself, and then served it a third time, during the Cold War, from the Soviet Union.” (p. 31)
It is from this growing spike in pessimism in the face of substantive performance that he concludes the US is a default power. “The US is the default power, the country that occupies center stage because there is nobody else with the requisite power and purpose.” (p. 31). For so great a power to be so benign in its enabling has caused him to observe: “The British Empire’s rule over India was more benign than Belgium’s over the Congo under the rapacious reign of King Leopold, and it was also more pleasant than is China’s in Tibet or Russia’s in its former Soviet empire.” (p. 32) What could be more poignant to confirm this? “China’s rebellious students put up a replica of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square, and not one of Lenin’s mausoleum.” (p. 32)
A PRINCE AND HIS KINGDOM
Joffe demonstrates an implicit understanding of Barack Obama’s soaring world popularity while at home it has been eroding: he is telling the world what it wants to hear but at the expense of American capital. Popularity waxes and wanes, but a consistency of another type has legs: “To capture a wider swath of the political imagination, it takes a country that is not just rich but also democratic and free.” (p. 33)
We have seen evidence of this democracy and freedom on display at town hall meetings across the US in recent days on Obama’s healthcare reform. Far from being bad for the country, it was a window to the world how democracy works when people are allowed to express their will without recrimination.
He cautions: “the default power is still an uberpower,” a term he uses to negate decline while promoting a balance of power akin to what Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft have advocated (p. 33). Joffe senses “China lacks the legitimacy that transforms muscle into leadership,” noting that “a default power always gains stature when the demand for its services soar. It does what others cannot or will not do. Only the default power has the power to harness a coalition against Iran, the new pretender to the Middle East," or to step in when a perturbation flares up somewhere else (p. 34).
Joffe concludes: “The facts and figures and the story of the resistible rise of previous contenders should give pause to those who either cheer or fear the US’ abdication. Linearity is not a good predictor. As the twenty-first century unfolds, the US will be younger and more dynamic than its competitors. Who would actually want to live in a world dominated by China, India, Japan, Russia, or even Europe? Not even those who have been trading in glee and gloom decade after decade would prefer any of them to take over as housekeeper of the world” (p. 35)
Josef Joffe believes the US will resist the imperial temptation of uberpower and will triumph in its own unique way as long as it heeds the words of John Quincy Adams and the American idea of freedom, and so do I.
* * *
Sunday, August 23, 2009
WE ARE ALL LEADERS -- WHY?
WE ARE ALL LEARDERS – WHY?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 23, 2009
REFERENCE:
I asked an author friend if she got many request to read other people’s manuscripts. This is her reply. She also mentions her nine-year-old grandson who has written two books, both published. The author heads a publishing company. Her grandson dictates his stories to her and she puts them down on the computer. Mozart was writing music with his father taking down the notes when he was that age. Interesting! Leadership has no age restrictions. It is nascent to us all but few make its acquaintance. As Beckett might say, we're "Waiting for Godot."
* * *
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
I do receive requests. Of course, they are works of a different nature than your genre.
I even had a friend ask me to write her book for her. I told her I couldn't, as the story was her passion not mine and I must find my own plot and characters. I told her I'd be happy to look at it as she wrote it, which I have done.
She has a thin story and I fattened it immensely. She said recently, "I write it and you make it beautiful." She is elderly and has sent me an outline and asked that if she becomes too ill to write if I will finish it for her. I have agreed but told her she absolutely has to take care of herself and finish this book! I feel it is good for her health to have this project. Other authors and I exchange favors.
If you hear anything from Pat on Ryan's book, please pass it on to me so I can post it. Today was his first day of school and when he got there, his teacher had the recent newspaper article taped to the door.
I will be reading at two upcoming appearances for one of the authors we have published. She was born with Freiderich Ataxia and can no longer hold her head or book still enough to read. It is the wonderfully heartwarming story of her amazing life.
Best,
D
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
D,
You are so diplomatic and enabling. I'm afraid I am not. I say "no" without too much trouble. The lady flatters you but age notwithstanding she needs to do the work.
Writing, as you know, is hard work and most people don't like to commit to hard work especially when the outcome is not certain.
Publishers can be indifferent and critics brutal.
I wrote a book for a consultant nearly 30 years ago. He asked me how much. I said "$10,000." He didn't flinch. He gave me a large box of his scattered notes, ideas, interventions, and I do meant scattered. I whipped the potpourri of material into a manuscript in six weeks, asking for $2,500 when I started, $2,500 when I showed him a chapter and the outline of the book, $2,500 when I gave him the manuscript, and $2,500 when it was published.
With $7,500 in my hands, I waited for the final $2,500. It never came claiming extensive editing and revision (by HIM!) had to be done. I got this notice of his intensions in a letter from his attorney.
When the book came out, it was my book, but hell, I said to myself, it was an easy six weeks of work, and I probably would have done it for nothing (at the time) if I liked the guy, which I didn't. He died never paying me the final $2,500.
It is an old story with me not being one to win friends and influence people. I did a consulting job here in Hillsborough County for a county agency, and they failed to pay me my final $3,750 because I put the blame for the agency's failure clearly on the agency's director. The title of my intervention was, "Why the Agency Can't Get Its Work Done!"
A reporter wanted me to confirm my outrage (at not being paid my final sum) in a derogatory piece he planned to write on the director -- the director had recently been given a $25,000 raise -- but I wouldn't. One of my friends, who still worked for the agency, would have had the toxic waste dumped on him, and so I let it go.
I am not impressed with money. I've always had more than enough to do precisely what I wanted to do yet I am not rich in a monetary sense.
What I'm saying is that the profit motive is not why I write. Nor do I measure my worth in how many books I sell. I do like to get published but I am satisfied if one reader finds my work worthwhile.
One thing is certain. I won't behave. I didn't when I was half the age I am now and I'm not likely to in the evening of my life. I don't see this as immaturity. It is my Joycean cause for integrity in a time when integrity has been reduced to rhetoric.
As I insist we are all leaders or none of us are, I think we are all writers but most of us don't have the patience or inclination to devote the time or energy to perfect the craft. It is a craft like carpentry, taking things apart and putting them together, rearranging and reordering. I have always liked the quote of Goethe, "Architecture is frozen music." Writing is architecture.
Regarding Ryan's book (the nine-year-old author), I did talk to my sister, and she said, "That boy can really write. What an imagination. I think this book was better than his first." I'll copy her on this but she doesn't check her email too frequently.
Keep up the good work and try to keep your sanity in these strange times.
I just read the late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s last book -- "Armageddon In Retrospect" (2008) -- and what a painful wit he had.
Vonnegut saw the brutality of life so clearly but with affection for all people. He is another Midwesterner! He came from Indianapolis. He was at Iowa at the time in Iowa’s world famous "Writer's Workshop." when I was there.
I would sneak into some of his seminars watch him smoke, waves his arms and fell the place with scathing wisdom. That was more than fifty years ago. I still remember some of the things he said.
For instance, he told students to go out and interview workers in their jobs and report back their findings.
One student visited the local power plant generating electricity for Iowa City and the University of Iowa. The student said the superintendent of the utility was quiet, composed, lean, trim, reticent to express himself, succinct when he did, with a steadiness that the student found disconcerting and comforting at once.
Vonnegut said something like, "That fits! He had the hum of the turbines and the compact energy of their power with no need to impress." He asked the student, "Did you ask the man how long he was in the job?" He had. It was his only job since college some twenty years before. Vonnegut answered, "That fits, too. He is the job, and the job is him."
By chance, I would one day be a consultant to major utilities across Indiana and Kentucky, and I found these men like this superintendent. Then when I retired the first time, I read Krishnamurti, and realized how esoteric Vonnegut had been.
You're right. My genre is a bit different from yours, but I must tell you that I was always taking electives far removed from chemistry courses such as the American Novel, Understanding Fiction, American Poetry, and Shakespeare.
Shakespeare was a graduate course and I was an undergraduate far out of my depth. Although Shakespeare wrote in the vernacular of his times, I was lost during those initial excursions into his world. Then, one day I found my mind connecting with the rhythm and language of his poetry. Thereafter, it was smooth sailing. I've quoted Shakespeare ever since.
To give you an idea how parochial I was as a new college student, I dropped a required course in Western Civilization because the first lecturer in that initial session damned the Catholic Church.
It wasn't until my senior year that I got this requirement out of the way. During the intervening years, I took other electives in history, including History of the Roman Catholic Church. Teaching the course was a relative, a Father Kelly, who didn't make the connection that I was related to him. It was my first introduction to how human Catholicism is, and again by chance, I would be far more damning in my own writing than that earlier professor some thirty years later.
I am happy for your success as a writer. It must give you much pleasure although, as we both know, it doesn't come easy.
Incidentally, my move from hard science to soft science to the arts has not been as strange a move as it might at first seem. I've been attempting to learn to write since I retired the first time in 1969 writing "Confident Selling" (Prentice-Hall 1970) and then going into social-industrial psychology.
I'm still working on my South Africa novel and don't think I will finish until late next year. The setting of the novel is 1968, a transitional period for me. I can churn out my nonfiction books without much trouble but novels, well, that is another matter.
I admire you for your productivity.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 23, 2009
REFERENCE:
I asked an author friend if she got many request to read other people’s manuscripts. This is her reply. She also mentions her nine-year-old grandson who has written two books, both published. The author heads a publishing company. Her grandson dictates his stories to her and she puts them down on the computer. Mozart was writing music with his father taking down the notes when he was that age. Interesting! Leadership has no age restrictions. It is nascent to us all but few make its acquaintance. As Beckett might say, we're "Waiting for Godot."
* * *
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
I do receive requests. Of course, they are works of a different nature than your genre.
I even had a friend ask me to write her book for her. I told her I couldn't, as the story was her passion not mine and I must find my own plot and characters. I told her I'd be happy to look at it as she wrote it, which I have done.
She has a thin story and I fattened it immensely. She said recently, "I write it and you make it beautiful." She is elderly and has sent me an outline and asked that if she becomes too ill to write if I will finish it for her. I have agreed but told her she absolutely has to take care of herself and finish this book! I feel it is good for her health to have this project. Other authors and I exchange favors.
If you hear anything from Pat on Ryan's book, please pass it on to me so I can post it. Today was his first day of school and when he got there, his teacher had the recent newspaper article taped to the door.
I will be reading at two upcoming appearances for one of the authors we have published. She was born with Freiderich Ataxia and can no longer hold her head or book still enough to read. It is the wonderfully heartwarming story of her amazing life.
Best,
D
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
D,
You are so diplomatic and enabling. I'm afraid I am not. I say "no" without too much trouble. The lady flatters you but age notwithstanding she needs to do the work.
Writing, as you know, is hard work and most people don't like to commit to hard work especially when the outcome is not certain.
Publishers can be indifferent and critics brutal.
I wrote a book for a consultant nearly 30 years ago. He asked me how much. I said "$10,000." He didn't flinch. He gave me a large box of his scattered notes, ideas, interventions, and I do meant scattered. I whipped the potpourri of material into a manuscript in six weeks, asking for $2,500 when I started, $2,500 when I showed him a chapter and the outline of the book, $2,500 when I gave him the manuscript, and $2,500 when it was published.
With $7,500 in my hands, I waited for the final $2,500. It never came claiming extensive editing and revision (by HIM!) had to be done. I got this notice of his intensions in a letter from his attorney.
When the book came out, it was my book, but hell, I said to myself, it was an easy six weeks of work, and I probably would have done it for nothing (at the time) if I liked the guy, which I didn't. He died never paying me the final $2,500.
It is an old story with me not being one to win friends and influence people. I did a consulting job here in Hillsborough County for a county agency, and they failed to pay me my final $3,750 because I put the blame for the agency's failure clearly on the agency's director. The title of my intervention was, "Why the Agency Can't Get Its Work Done!"
A reporter wanted me to confirm my outrage (at not being paid my final sum) in a derogatory piece he planned to write on the director -- the director had recently been given a $25,000 raise -- but I wouldn't. One of my friends, who still worked for the agency, would have had the toxic waste dumped on him, and so I let it go.
I am not impressed with money. I've always had more than enough to do precisely what I wanted to do yet I am not rich in a monetary sense.
What I'm saying is that the profit motive is not why I write. Nor do I measure my worth in how many books I sell. I do like to get published but I am satisfied if one reader finds my work worthwhile.
One thing is certain. I won't behave. I didn't when I was half the age I am now and I'm not likely to in the evening of my life. I don't see this as immaturity. It is my Joycean cause for integrity in a time when integrity has been reduced to rhetoric.
As I insist we are all leaders or none of us are, I think we are all writers but most of us don't have the patience or inclination to devote the time or energy to perfect the craft. It is a craft like carpentry, taking things apart and putting them together, rearranging and reordering. I have always liked the quote of Goethe, "Architecture is frozen music." Writing is architecture.
Regarding Ryan's book (the nine-year-old author), I did talk to my sister, and she said, "That boy can really write. What an imagination. I think this book was better than his first." I'll copy her on this but she doesn't check her email too frequently.
Keep up the good work and try to keep your sanity in these strange times.
I just read the late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s last book -- "Armageddon In Retrospect" (2008) -- and what a painful wit he had.
Vonnegut saw the brutality of life so clearly but with affection for all people. He is another Midwesterner! He came from Indianapolis. He was at Iowa at the time in Iowa’s world famous "Writer's Workshop." when I was there.
I would sneak into some of his seminars watch him smoke, waves his arms and fell the place with scathing wisdom. That was more than fifty years ago. I still remember some of the things he said.
For instance, he told students to go out and interview workers in their jobs and report back their findings.
One student visited the local power plant generating electricity for Iowa City and the University of Iowa. The student said the superintendent of the utility was quiet, composed, lean, trim, reticent to express himself, succinct when he did, with a steadiness that the student found disconcerting and comforting at once.
Vonnegut said something like, "That fits! He had the hum of the turbines and the compact energy of their power with no need to impress." He asked the student, "Did you ask the man how long he was in the job?" He had. It was his only job since college some twenty years before. Vonnegut answered, "That fits, too. He is the job, and the job is him."
By chance, I would one day be a consultant to major utilities across Indiana and Kentucky, and I found these men like this superintendent. Then when I retired the first time, I read Krishnamurti, and realized how esoteric Vonnegut had been.
You're right. My genre is a bit different from yours, but I must tell you that I was always taking electives far removed from chemistry courses such as the American Novel, Understanding Fiction, American Poetry, and Shakespeare.
Shakespeare was a graduate course and I was an undergraduate far out of my depth. Although Shakespeare wrote in the vernacular of his times, I was lost during those initial excursions into his world. Then, one day I found my mind connecting with the rhythm and language of his poetry. Thereafter, it was smooth sailing. I've quoted Shakespeare ever since.
To give you an idea how parochial I was as a new college student, I dropped a required course in Western Civilization because the first lecturer in that initial session damned the Catholic Church.
It wasn't until my senior year that I got this requirement out of the way. During the intervening years, I took other electives in history, including History of the Roman Catholic Church. Teaching the course was a relative, a Father Kelly, who didn't make the connection that I was related to him. It was my first introduction to how human Catholicism is, and again by chance, I would be far more damning in my own writing than that earlier professor some thirty years later.
I am happy for your success as a writer. It must give you much pleasure although, as we both know, it doesn't come easy.
Incidentally, my move from hard science to soft science to the arts has not been as strange a move as it might at first seem. I've been attempting to learn to write since I retired the first time in 1969 writing "Confident Selling" (Prentice-Hall 1970) and then going into social-industrial psychology.
I'm still working on my South Africa novel and don't think I will finish until late next year. The setting of the novel is 1968, a transitional period for me. I can churn out my nonfiction books without much trouble but novels, well, that is another matter.
I admire you for your productivity.
Be always well,
Jim
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
WE ARE ALL LEADERS OR NONE OF US ARE!
WE ARE ALL LEADERS OR NONE OF US ARE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 19, 2009
Reference: The Don Farr Network is not a website but an email network of some 300 hundred participants who have in common having come from a community in the middle of America growing up in the middle of the century, having been born in the Great Depression, and seeing the values with which they identify eroding if not disappearing. They are not timid in expressing their opinions about the world in which we live. The Don Farr Network is an open forum. This is a typical response to one of my missives in this case to my review of Jon Meacham’s “American Lion” – Andrew Johnson in the White House. My response to her remarks: “We are all leaders are none of us are.”
A WRITER RESPONDS:
Jim,
Your thoughts on Andrew Jackson a few days ago were really very interesting to me, considering my faint knowledge of details that occurred at that time.
I have a friend that is very interested in our political situation and we discuss it regularly (not difficult since we are mostly of the same mind on that subject) and since she is one of those who do not like to read long missives, I keep telling her to be PATIENT.
You did bring in the status we find ourselves in now and I found your comparison of Jackson to what is happening now…. a new insight for me and I think a line has to be drawn and a stand has to be made!
Maybe you recall that before the election I decided I couldn’t take the smears on the Don Farr Network, so I opted out. I’ve been told it is going on again with name calling (Nazi’s, dictator’s, socialists, etc.) and I am glad I don’t have to read all that bull!
I do enjoy your writing and long as it is…well worth reading. I can understand why Dick Asmussen wanted your input on his efforts. He’s a good man and a long time friend of my brother.
I have never traveled east except by plane to Florida and on 9/20/09 we are leaving for a two week auto trip to Washington DC (I have always wanted to see the Capitol and sit in the gallery when Congress is in session) and see the Lincoln Memorial and White House).
We plan to be in DC for several days and see most everything, that is, the Smithsonian and space museums, etc. We will go on to Boston attending a Red Sox game on the 27th with tickets behind home plate; and visiting the Freedom Trail, then on to seeing the Statue of Liberty, and from there on to my ancestor’s memorial in Andover, Mass., after that to baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and lastly Niagara Falls.
I hope these old legs don’t give out! When I told our son David we wanted to go but were afraid of traffic, and probably wouldn’t go because of that, he discussed it with his wife and called to say he has a lot of vacation he needs to use before years end from his company in Chicago, (Lucent Tech). He said he’s been there twice and would love to go again and would go with us. That’s all I needed to hear; no more worries about auto travel.
His wife will be working at the school and can’t go along but we can’t think of anyone we would rather go with than David.
Most people I talk to have already been there and considering my age, I’d better get going. Gene has never cared for traveling but will go when I say, “we’re going!” He’s not much for politics either and will probably not care about the gallery visits I am planning! Ha ha.
Anyway Jim, I enjoy your writing. Our best to you and Betty and your family.
Your friend and classmate,
Carole
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Carole,
Thank you for your note.
As for the Don Farr Network, imagine if people didn't have an opportunity to vent their frustrations and the ghosts that haunt their souls, imagine that. I like you and others don't see much intelligence in such ranting but I am glad there is some outlet for such emotions, and the Don Farr Network provides it.
As you say, you have a like-minded friend and enjoy discussing things with her. The network looks for somebody to hear them, to feel their anger and anxiety, to empathize with what irritates them.
Politicians exploit this both from the left and right, and from the middle as well. Don is not a politician but a conduit to ventism, if there is such a word, bringing some balance into the dialogue by the mere fact that the Farr Network exists.
I keep seeing again and again in the current situation a repeat of what happened in the recent past, and wonder how much actual control politicians have over anything. My suspicions are that lobbyist's rule the game now, then, and perhaps always, the unelected but ever present influence peddlers.
Obama is making some of the same mistakes Bush made. Much as many would like to think otherwise, Bush and Obama have this in common -- they want to do the right thing for the American people, but somehow the will or instinct or courage or stamina deserts them at critical times. We are all too human including our leaders.
We can't judge Obama in six months, but he made a terrible mistake by listening to the media and attempting to be FDR and do wonders in his first 100 days.
Bush wanted to be a compassionate conservative and he let that vicious band of neocons wreck his agenda with the exception of Africa. In Africa, Bush has done wonders, more than any president before with his disease relief funding. Somehow this is getting through the corruption in Africa to make a difference. Otherwise, much of his administration was a disaster.
Obama went to Africa, talked to Africans, made Africans proud to be men of color and then got on a plane and came home.
Let's see what he does for the next four or eight years for Africans. God love her, Hillary Clinton followed him with an exhaustive schedule, and tried to plan substantive relief, relief we don't have the funding for, and made that one blunder about "I'm Secretary of State, not Bill Clinton," and that is all the comedians on television can remember, and the op-ed cartoonists in newspapers.
If you follow my writing, and I know you do, I find myself more an independent than any other label when it comes to politics. They are all creatures of a system slave to the media, and the media, paradoxically is a dying, so where does that put government?
We are living in the incipient chaos of democracy. Government as we know it is being replaced by instant news created and recorded by ordinary citizens on their various electronic contraptions. Everything we know is true is not; everything we once relied on is now irrelevant. It is scary and wonderful at once.
We are in a new world, a world we never saw coming, a world in which freedom of thought and action, of belief and values, of place and space is becoming a reality across the globe.
No government of the East or West can contain it. No government of representative democracy or totalitarianism can survive without recognizing that to govern governance must be congruent with the will of the people.
The other day I saw the octogenarian physicist Freeman Dyson being interviewed on Charlie Rose on PBS. Dyson is of Quantum mechanic fame. He applauded the economic rise of India and China because two-thirds of the world population resides in that quadrant of world society and the poor cannot help but get a boost.
Now, the test comes. Can China and India, two nations that are spending huge amounts of their respective GDPs in "national defense" budgets, can remain peaceful and not become paranoid?
This may seem like a quantum leap but paranoia is based on fear and anxiety, on believing in legends and figments of the imagination, on ghosts of the soul. When people have an outlet to express these ghosts, such as the Don Farr Network, when they can get them out of their systems bizarre as they may be, there is hope that reason will triumph over imagined fears in the end.
I have a saying in my writing, "We are all leaders or none of us are." You are a leader. You have always been a leader. You have passions and beliefs, and you need not apologize for them. You want to get to the source of your values by visiting the institutions in Washington, DC that are fundamental to your beliefs, as they are fundamental to all Americans. I applaud you for this.
But at the same time, I would say you should listen to others that think differently than you do, not to change your mind, but to understand what undercurrents reside in the ghosts of their souls.
Our danger as a people is when we remain silent and are too timid to express ourselves. The current anger, confusion and conflict over healthcare reform are the best evidence I have seen in a long time of democracy in action. It demonstrates my premise of "everyone is a leader."
A TIMELESS FORMULA
The greatest stranger in our existence is ourselves. Remember what cartoonist Walt Kelley says in Pogo: "I've met the enemy and it is us!” We rationalize that we are other directed as if it is a good thing failing to understand self-direction is key to everything including accepting ourselves as we are and others as we find them. Richard Dawkins wrote a book called “The Selfish Gene” (1976) showing in the context of evolution that genes meet their needs first and foremost, and that socially we do this as well as a matter of survival. We may think we are altruistic but our chemistry suggests otherwise.
That said I have developed a simple formula to describe this inclination:
BELIEF + BELONGING = BEHAVIOR
That is why “true believers” are so vehement in their beliefs. They have support of like-minded spirits. At its most toxic state, it becomes a satanic broth as with the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, the John Birch Society in the middle of the last century, the Ku Klux Klan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Catholic) and the Ulster Unionist Volunteers (Protestants). To this day, with peace somewhat restored in Northern Ireland, a giant wall separates Catholic and Protestant residents from each other in the same neighborhood.
Demigods, religious fanatics, totalitarian rulers, mystical gurus and churches, exploit intolerance and differences to their respective advantages. What would South and Central America be like today if the indigenous cultures had been allowed to survive? What would the United States be like? The question is moot because these cultures have been destroyed.
What are gangs but loose federations of beliefs and tenuous belonging where it is “us” against “them,” whoever gang leaders choose to be them? Gang tribal rituals of initiation often include murdering someone at random. Ludicrous? Yes. Insane? Yes. But it is people following this simple formula. And so it has been throughout time.
If you want to get inside what motivates a group, examine it in terms of this formula. Even the hysteria of “American Idol” follows this equation. It is the belief that celebrities are different than the rest of us. They are not although they practice indulgences and excesses that we can only imagine. It is having a sense of belonging to others who equally adore these synthesized celebrities that translates into hysterical adoration and frenzy behavior. It provides identity, a sense of authenticity, a sense of being someone connected to someone bigger than self, but of course it is all phony.
When belief is based on someone else’s values and experiences that are believed to be superior to one’s own, and belonging is the sense these significant others have a key to unlock the mysteries of your own existence, then you will behave apelike imitating the way they speak, dress, swagger and behave. It will be as if you are a clone of them while your authentic self withers and dies. Ultimately, you are likely to reach the point where you don’t know who or where you are, or what you are about. You feel everyone has let you down, but you never point a finger at the only one that has, yourself.
FOUR SIGNPOSTS FOR UNDERSTANDING OTHERS
Much as we might like it to be otherwise, we are like that selfish gene, and knowing that promotes understanding, and in turn being understandable to others. I have found the key to understanding other people can be reduced to four signposts:
(1) We all love ourselves. Since our egos are fragile, we'll do about anything to protect them.
(2) We all are more interested in ourselves than in anyone else in the world. That is why we attempt to turn conversation around to ourselves no matter how bizarre that is.
(3) Every person you meet wants to feel important. Treat that person with respect, whatever that person's station or circumstance, and it will be returned tenfold.
(4) We crave the approval of others so that we may in turn approve of ourselves. The hardest person in the world to truly be friends with and to like and to give the benefit of the doubt is not someone else, but ourselves.
Incidentally, the TIMELESS FORMULA and FOUR SIGNPOSTS are in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).
Be always well, and enjoy the Capitol, a Major League baseball game, Cooperstown, and all the rest.
And always be well,
Jim
PS BB gave me a subscription to the SMITHSONIAN magazine. Pick up a copy of it and you will want one, too. It is delightful and informative.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 19, 2009
Reference: The Don Farr Network is not a website but an email network of some 300 hundred participants who have in common having come from a community in the middle of America growing up in the middle of the century, having been born in the Great Depression, and seeing the values with which they identify eroding if not disappearing. They are not timid in expressing their opinions about the world in which we live. The Don Farr Network is an open forum. This is a typical response to one of my missives in this case to my review of Jon Meacham’s “American Lion” – Andrew Johnson in the White House. My response to her remarks: “We are all leaders are none of us are.”
A WRITER RESPONDS:
Jim,
Your thoughts on Andrew Jackson a few days ago were really very interesting to me, considering my faint knowledge of details that occurred at that time.
I have a friend that is very interested in our political situation and we discuss it regularly (not difficult since we are mostly of the same mind on that subject) and since she is one of those who do not like to read long missives, I keep telling her to be PATIENT.
You did bring in the status we find ourselves in now and I found your comparison of Jackson to what is happening now…. a new insight for me and I think a line has to be drawn and a stand has to be made!
Maybe you recall that before the election I decided I couldn’t take the smears on the Don Farr Network, so I opted out. I’ve been told it is going on again with name calling (Nazi’s, dictator’s, socialists, etc.) and I am glad I don’t have to read all that bull!
I do enjoy your writing and long as it is…well worth reading. I can understand why Dick Asmussen wanted your input on his efforts. He’s a good man and a long time friend of my brother.
I have never traveled east except by plane to Florida and on 9/20/09 we are leaving for a two week auto trip to Washington DC (I have always wanted to see the Capitol and sit in the gallery when Congress is in session) and see the Lincoln Memorial and White House).
We plan to be in DC for several days and see most everything, that is, the Smithsonian and space museums, etc. We will go on to Boston attending a Red Sox game on the 27th with tickets behind home plate; and visiting the Freedom Trail, then on to seeing the Statue of Liberty, and from there on to my ancestor’s memorial in Andover, Mass., after that to baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and lastly Niagara Falls.
I hope these old legs don’t give out! When I told our son David we wanted to go but were afraid of traffic, and probably wouldn’t go because of that, he discussed it with his wife and called to say he has a lot of vacation he needs to use before years end from his company in Chicago, (Lucent Tech). He said he’s been there twice and would love to go again and would go with us. That’s all I needed to hear; no more worries about auto travel.
His wife will be working at the school and can’t go along but we can’t think of anyone we would rather go with than David.
Most people I talk to have already been there and considering my age, I’d better get going. Gene has never cared for traveling but will go when I say, “we’re going!” He’s not much for politics either and will probably not care about the gallery visits I am planning! Ha ha.
Anyway Jim, I enjoy your writing. Our best to you and Betty and your family.
Your friend and classmate,
Carole
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Carole,
Thank you for your note.
As for the Don Farr Network, imagine if people didn't have an opportunity to vent their frustrations and the ghosts that haunt their souls, imagine that. I like you and others don't see much intelligence in such ranting but I am glad there is some outlet for such emotions, and the Don Farr Network provides it.
As you say, you have a like-minded friend and enjoy discussing things with her. The network looks for somebody to hear them, to feel their anger and anxiety, to empathize with what irritates them.
Politicians exploit this both from the left and right, and from the middle as well. Don is not a politician but a conduit to ventism, if there is such a word, bringing some balance into the dialogue by the mere fact that the Farr Network exists.
I keep seeing again and again in the current situation a repeat of what happened in the recent past, and wonder how much actual control politicians have over anything. My suspicions are that lobbyist's rule the game now, then, and perhaps always, the unelected but ever present influence peddlers.
Obama is making some of the same mistakes Bush made. Much as many would like to think otherwise, Bush and Obama have this in common -- they want to do the right thing for the American people, but somehow the will or instinct or courage or stamina deserts them at critical times. We are all too human including our leaders.
We can't judge Obama in six months, but he made a terrible mistake by listening to the media and attempting to be FDR and do wonders in his first 100 days.
Bush wanted to be a compassionate conservative and he let that vicious band of neocons wreck his agenda with the exception of Africa. In Africa, Bush has done wonders, more than any president before with his disease relief funding. Somehow this is getting through the corruption in Africa to make a difference. Otherwise, much of his administration was a disaster.
Obama went to Africa, talked to Africans, made Africans proud to be men of color and then got on a plane and came home.
Let's see what he does for the next four or eight years for Africans. God love her, Hillary Clinton followed him with an exhaustive schedule, and tried to plan substantive relief, relief we don't have the funding for, and made that one blunder about "I'm Secretary of State, not Bill Clinton," and that is all the comedians on television can remember, and the op-ed cartoonists in newspapers.
If you follow my writing, and I know you do, I find myself more an independent than any other label when it comes to politics. They are all creatures of a system slave to the media, and the media, paradoxically is a dying, so where does that put government?
We are living in the incipient chaos of democracy. Government as we know it is being replaced by instant news created and recorded by ordinary citizens on their various electronic contraptions. Everything we know is true is not; everything we once relied on is now irrelevant. It is scary and wonderful at once.
We are in a new world, a world we never saw coming, a world in which freedom of thought and action, of belief and values, of place and space is becoming a reality across the globe.
No government of the East or West can contain it. No government of representative democracy or totalitarianism can survive without recognizing that to govern governance must be congruent with the will of the people.
The other day I saw the octogenarian physicist Freeman Dyson being interviewed on Charlie Rose on PBS. Dyson is of Quantum mechanic fame. He applauded the economic rise of India and China because two-thirds of the world population resides in that quadrant of world society and the poor cannot help but get a boost.
Now, the test comes. Can China and India, two nations that are spending huge amounts of their respective GDPs in "national defense" budgets, can remain peaceful and not become paranoid?
This may seem like a quantum leap but paranoia is based on fear and anxiety, on believing in legends and figments of the imagination, on ghosts of the soul. When people have an outlet to express these ghosts, such as the Don Farr Network, when they can get them out of their systems bizarre as they may be, there is hope that reason will triumph over imagined fears in the end.
I have a saying in my writing, "We are all leaders or none of us are." You are a leader. You have always been a leader. You have passions and beliefs, and you need not apologize for them. You want to get to the source of your values by visiting the institutions in Washington, DC that are fundamental to your beliefs, as they are fundamental to all Americans. I applaud you for this.
But at the same time, I would say you should listen to others that think differently than you do, not to change your mind, but to understand what undercurrents reside in the ghosts of their souls.
Our danger as a people is when we remain silent and are too timid to express ourselves. The current anger, confusion and conflict over healthcare reform are the best evidence I have seen in a long time of democracy in action. It demonstrates my premise of "everyone is a leader."
A TIMELESS FORMULA
The greatest stranger in our existence is ourselves. Remember what cartoonist Walt Kelley says in Pogo: "I've met the enemy and it is us!” We rationalize that we are other directed as if it is a good thing failing to understand self-direction is key to everything including accepting ourselves as we are and others as we find them. Richard Dawkins wrote a book called “The Selfish Gene” (1976) showing in the context of evolution that genes meet their needs first and foremost, and that socially we do this as well as a matter of survival. We may think we are altruistic but our chemistry suggests otherwise.
That said I have developed a simple formula to describe this inclination:
BELIEF + BELONGING = BEHAVIOR
That is why “true believers” are so vehement in their beliefs. They have support of like-minded spirits. At its most toxic state, it becomes a satanic broth as with the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, the John Birch Society in the middle of the last century, the Ku Klux Klan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Catholic) and the Ulster Unionist Volunteers (Protestants). To this day, with peace somewhat restored in Northern Ireland, a giant wall separates Catholic and Protestant residents from each other in the same neighborhood.
Demigods, religious fanatics, totalitarian rulers, mystical gurus and churches, exploit intolerance and differences to their respective advantages. What would South and Central America be like today if the indigenous cultures had been allowed to survive? What would the United States be like? The question is moot because these cultures have been destroyed.
What are gangs but loose federations of beliefs and tenuous belonging where it is “us” against “them,” whoever gang leaders choose to be them? Gang tribal rituals of initiation often include murdering someone at random. Ludicrous? Yes. Insane? Yes. But it is people following this simple formula. And so it has been throughout time.
If you want to get inside what motivates a group, examine it in terms of this formula. Even the hysteria of “American Idol” follows this equation. It is the belief that celebrities are different than the rest of us. They are not although they practice indulgences and excesses that we can only imagine. It is having a sense of belonging to others who equally adore these synthesized celebrities that translates into hysterical adoration and frenzy behavior. It provides identity, a sense of authenticity, a sense of being someone connected to someone bigger than self, but of course it is all phony.
When belief is based on someone else’s values and experiences that are believed to be superior to one’s own, and belonging is the sense these significant others have a key to unlock the mysteries of your own existence, then you will behave apelike imitating the way they speak, dress, swagger and behave. It will be as if you are a clone of them while your authentic self withers and dies. Ultimately, you are likely to reach the point where you don’t know who or where you are, or what you are about. You feel everyone has let you down, but you never point a finger at the only one that has, yourself.
FOUR SIGNPOSTS FOR UNDERSTANDING OTHERS
Much as we might like it to be otherwise, we are like that selfish gene, and knowing that promotes understanding, and in turn being understandable to others. I have found the key to understanding other people can be reduced to four signposts:
(1) We all love ourselves. Since our egos are fragile, we'll do about anything to protect them.
(2) We all are more interested in ourselves than in anyone else in the world. That is why we attempt to turn conversation around to ourselves no matter how bizarre that is.
(3) Every person you meet wants to feel important. Treat that person with respect, whatever that person's station or circumstance, and it will be returned tenfold.
(4) We crave the approval of others so that we may in turn approve of ourselves. The hardest person in the world to truly be friends with and to like and to give the benefit of the doubt is not someone else, but ourselves.
Incidentally, the TIMELESS FORMULA and FOUR SIGNPOSTS are in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).
Be always well, and enjoy the Capitol, a Major League baseball game, Cooperstown, and all the rest.
And always be well,
Jim
PS BB gave me a subscription to the SMITHSONIAN magazine. Pick up a copy of it and you will want one, too. It is delightful and informative.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
THE PERILS OF PUBLISHING & THE UNDERSTANDABLE URGE TO EXPRESS PERTINENT IDEAS!
THE PERILS OF PUBLISHING & THE UNDERSTANDABLE URGE TO EXPRESS PERTINENT IDEAS!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 19, 2009
REFERENCE: I’m always getting request to read writers’ manuscripts. Some of them are already published authors; others are people with solid ideas that would like to get published. I must confess that I sometimes fail to answer them at all, especially when they mount up to a significant backlog, but his comes from someone I know and respect. I wish I could give him better advice.
A WOULD-BE-AUTHOR WRITES:
Dear Jim,
I very much enjoy your learned and insightful comments; especially your recent one on Jackson interested me. I saw that book, hesitated spending the money to buy it but see now I must. I am a history buff, especially ante-bellum history, acquired since living in South Carolina, and teaching South Carolina history to 7th graders for two years. I became a fan of John C. Calhoun, reading about him.
It actually is a shame I think that he either wasn't smart enough, considered brilliant and finishing No.1 in his 1804 class at Yale, to either see slavery to a better conclusion, preventing the Civil War, and/or becoming president, in which position he may have accomplished that. As Webster maintained, if the north left slavery to be settled by the south, it would have phased itself out.
Anyway, finding there was no school-agers biography on John C. Calhoun in print, in libraries--school or public, I attempted to write one as my first or one and only book. I believe I might have been successful if I wrote it 30 years ago when kids read such books, even if reluctantly, before computers and power point presentations.
I submitted it to a few children's book publishers, received a little encouragement though not much. I felt my book would even appeal to those adults who liked that history period and would buy and read a short, interesting biography. I mean look at the length and complexity of the book on Jackson that you previewed. One publisher told me they hire their biographers to write on topics the publisher chooses for a fee, like $5000, and they weren't sold on Calhoun being a viable topic. I think his abilities and accomplishments are grossly overlooked, partly because of him not being a president and partly because of his strong slavery, white supremist stance.
Anyway to the reason writing you (I did buy read and enjoyed your book, IN the Shadow of the Courthouse (2003), and I did also grow up in Clinton/Lyons roughly during the time you did, graduating from LHS in 1950).
What I would like to ask you is if you would read and editorialize or critique my efforts. Should I attempt to self-publish it or just keep it for my own enjoyment? Biographies are much harder to properly write and edit, and publish than are novels. I rigorously researched Calhoun before trying to write my manuscript and am sure of the accuracy.
Is it readable and interesting enough to worry about for a teenage and casual adult readership? I tried to keep it to 25,000 words as suggested by an editor; it is a little over 30K. I developed his childhood and his family more than most biographies would because I was trying to show him as a total person and how he got to his positions. Anyway, if you'd allow me to do so, I'd like to send you a copy for you to read and comment on however you saw fit to do.
Thank you,
Dick
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Dick,
I admire your effort to write a book on Calhoun. It is obvious you have put a lot of time and effort into the project. There wouldn't be much point to read your manuscript, first, because quite frankly I don't have the time, and second, because I cannot give you much encouragement for a viable outcome.
The publishing business has been decimated by technology, a change in tastes and by a new college age generation with a short attention span.
Young people today are smart, quick, impatient and hip to what is going on "now," without much understanding or interest in what has happened before 1990.
Scary? Yes. At least for us that see a connection with the past that determines the future.
Nearly forty years ago, I published my first book, Confident Selling (Prentice-Hall). It sold like hot cakes, and went through printing after printing. It stayed in print for twenty years (1970 - 1990).
Since then, I've published eight books, seven of them in the genre of organizational psychology, and the one memoir you mentioned, IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE.
The courthouse book was published-on-demand (POD) through AuthorHouse. It has sold well over a thousand copies and I've broken even on it, but I didn't make any money. I wrote it to remember Bobby Witt and a time, and have been repaid in kind. That has been my satisfaction.
Three other books were published through The Delta Group Florida. I lost close to $100,000 in that venture. Three others were published through AuthorHouse. I've come close to breaking even on those books. Confident Selling is the only book that made money.
So, you ask, why do I write? A writer is what I am.
You have taken on a subject that deserves an audience, namely the life of John Calhoun, but the stigma of historical intransigence, plus young people today worrying mainly about their cell phone and Internet social connections, along with the changing nature of the publishing industry, give a sense of the challenge.
Should you self-published? Should you contact a POD publisher? That is up to you. I can only tell you from the standpoint of experience that marketing is 80 percent of the publishing business and writing 20 percent of it.
Chances of making money with POD books is not impossible, but I would venture to say that most people who publish through such outlets do not recover their initial investment, which is likely a few thousand dollars.
Why? Newspapers traditionally will not review POD books, nor will periodicals. It cost tons of money to advertise, and that is even a bigger gamble. An entrepreneurial writer with an angle can breakthrough this barrier. This makes writing more of a business than an art. I've never been interested in that end. You may be so inclined.
Now, if you are a magician on the computer and the Internet -- which I am not -- it opens a whole new world to you.
That is the problem and opportunity. Millions of people surf the net, and who knows if they might be interested in your book. I will tell you this. If you self-publish, you should expect to lose money, and be pleasantly surprised if you don't. Discouraging? Yes, but unfortunately true.
Americans don't read but Europeans and people of the Far East do. I'm reading Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s last book, "Armageddon In Retrospect" (2008). He writes:
"My son, Mark (a medical doctor), was on the Admissions Committee of the Harvard Medical School, and he said that if they had played the admission game fairly, half of the entering class would be Asian women."
But of course Harvard cheats, as does everyone else to make up for lazy Americans. The tide is not coming in for us, as I've often pointed out.
How do I know? Independent bookstores are dinosaurs and Borders is threatening to go out of business with Barnes & Noble going more for pabulum to stay afloat.
Then there are those handheld computer books with a library on a single device. One day it might be the only way books are packaged.
That said I would not discourage you from continuing to pound on doors, of thinking creatively, perhaps illustrating your work, of celebrating the antebellum South, but with no guarantee anything might happen.
Margaret Mitchell wrote "Gone With The Wind" (1936), a book I read in high school, but a book that was said not to be "literature," now it is deemed a "classic." Why? Not so much for the Civil War, but for the people brought to life such as Scarlet O'Hara and Rhett Butler as representative of the times.
I mention that because of the temper of Calhoun's times. Meacham in his "American Lion" makes the people come alive by quoting personal letters and journals. As you know, Calhoun was a stuff shirt, but so was his wife to complete the imagery.
It may not seem like much but publishers have responded to your work! I've had tons of publishers who didn't display that courtesy.
Perhaps it's my age, or perhaps I'm mellowing. I say that because I have empathy for publishers and booksellers. They are up against it. I don't know what the answer is.
I don't read any of the books on the bestseller lists yet I buy books and read books every single week. I am told I am one-tenth of one percent of the American populace. Do the math! That's not much support to an entire industry.
Finally, consider turning the book into a novel. Make Calhoun a tragic figure of history. Show how he was trying to hold back history, when Nat Turner and others had already crippled the South’s hold on slavery.
William Styron wrote a novel, "Confessions of Nat Turner" (1993), which was a national best seller as the narrative of a man with a mission. He used James Baldwin, the great African American novelist, as his source.
Baldwin's novels are rich lyrical pieces of why today we have an African American in the White House. I've read them all.
Momentum! That's what stirs the drink. What I'm saying, Dick is that Calhoun is a tragic figure, and his essence lies in exploiting this. Good luck.
And always be well,
Jim
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 19, 2009
REFERENCE: I’m always getting request to read writers’ manuscripts. Some of them are already published authors; others are people with solid ideas that would like to get published. I must confess that I sometimes fail to answer them at all, especially when they mount up to a significant backlog, but his comes from someone I know and respect. I wish I could give him better advice.
A WOULD-BE-AUTHOR WRITES:
Dear Jim,
I very much enjoy your learned and insightful comments; especially your recent one on Jackson interested me. I saw that book, hesitated spending the money to buy it but see now I must. I am a history buff, especially ante-bellum history, acquired since living in South Carolina, and teaching South Carolina history to 7th graders for two years. I became a fan of John C. Calhoun, reading about him.
It actually is a shame I think that he either wasn't smart enough, considered brilliant and finishing No.1 in his 1804 class at Yale, to either see slavery to a better conclusion, preventing the Civil War, and/or becoming president, in which position he may have accomplished that. As Webster maintained, if the north left slavery to be settled by the south, it would have phased itself out.
Anyway, finding there was no school-agers biography on John C. Calhoun in print, in libraries--school or public, I attempted to write one as my first or one and only book. I believe I might have been successful if I wrote it 30 years ago when kids read such books, even if reluctantly, before computers and power point presentations.
I submitted it to a few children's book publishers, received a little encouragement though not much. I felt my book would even appeal to those adults who liked that history period and would buy and read a short, interesting biography. I mean look at the length and complexity of the book on Jackson that you previewed. One publisher told me they hire their biographers to write on topics the publisher chooses for a fee, like $5000, and they weren't sold on Calhoun being a viable topic. I think his abilities and accomplishments are grossly overlooked, partly because of him not being a president and partly because of his strong slavery, white supremist stance.
Anyway to the reason writing you (I did buy read and enjoyed your book, IN the Shadow of the Courthouse (2003), and I did also grow up in Clinton/Lyons roughly during the time you did, graduating from LHS in 1950).
What I would like to ask you is if you would read and editorialize or critique my efforts. Should I attempt to self-publish it or just keep it for my own enjoyment? Biographies are much harder to properly write and edit, and publish than are novels. I rigorously researched Calhoun before trying to write my manuscript and am sure of the accuracy.
Is it readable and interesting enough to worry about for a teenage and casual adult readership? I tried to keep it to 25,000 words as suggested by an editor; it is a little over 30K. I developed his childhood and his family more than most biographies would because I was trying to show him as a total person and how he got to his positions. Anyway, if you'd allow me to do so, I'd like to send you a copy for you to read and comment on however you saw fit to do.
Thank you,
Dick
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Dick,
I admire your effort to write a book on Calhoun. It is obvious you have put a lot of time and effort into the project. There wouldn't be much point to read your manuscript, first, because quite frankly I don't have the time, and second, because I cannot give you much encouragement for a viable outcome.
The publishing business has been decimated by technology, a change in tastes and by a new college age generation with a short attention span.
Young people today are smart, quick, impatient and hip to what is going on "now," without much understanding or interest in what has happened before 1990.
Scary? Yes. At least for us that see a connection with the past that determines the future.
Nearly forty years ago, I published my first book, Confident Selling (Prentice-Hall). It sold like hot cakes, and went through printing after printing. It stayed in print for twenty years (1970 - 1990).
Since then, I've published eight books, seven of them in the genre of organizational psychology, and the one memoir you mentioned, IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE.
The courthouse book was published-on-demand (POD) through AuthorHouse. It has sold well over a thousand copies and I've broken even on it, but I didn't make any money. I wrote it to remember Bobby Witt and a time, and have been repaid in kind. That has been my satisfaction.
Three other books were published through The Delta Group Florida. I lost close to $100,000 in that venture. Three others were published through AuthorHouse. I've come close to breaking even on those books. Confident Selling is the only book that made money.
So, you ask, why do I write? A writer is what I am.
You have taken on a subject that deserves an audience, namely the life of John Calhoun, but the stigma of historical intransigence, plus young people today worrying mainly about their cell phone and Internet social connections, along with the changing nature of the publishing industry, give a sense of the challenge.
Should you self-published? Should you contact a POD publisher? That is up to you. I can only tell you from the standpoint of experience that marketing is 80 percent of the publishing business and writing 20 percent of it.
Chances of making money with POD books is not impossible, but I would venture to say that most people who publish through such outlets do not recover their initial investment, which is likely a few thousand dollars.
Why? Newspapers traditionally will not review POD books, nor will periodicals. It cost tons of money to advertise, and that is even a bigger gamble. An entrepreneurial writer with an angle can breakthrough this barrier. This makes writing more of a business than an art. I've never been interested in that end. You may be so inclined.
Now, if you are a magician on the computer and the Internet -- which I am not -- it opens a whole new world to you.
That is the problem and opportunity. Millions of people surf the net, and who knows if they might be interested in your book. I will tell you this. If you self-publish, you should expect to lose money, and be pleasantly surprised if you don't. Discouraging? Yes, but unfortunately true.
Americans don't read but Europeans and people of the Far East do. I'm reading Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s last book, "Armageddon In Retrospect" (2008). He writes:
"My son, Mark (a medical doctor), was on the Admissions Committee of the Harvard Medical School, and he said that if they had played the admission game fairly, half of the entering class would be Asian women."
But of course Harvard cheats, as does everyone else to make up for lazy Americans. The tide is not coming in for us, as I've often pointed out.
How do I know? Independent bookstores are dinosaurs and Borders is threatening to go out of business with Barnes & Noble going more for pabulum to stay afloat.
Then there are those handheld computer books with a library on a single device. One day it might be the only way books are packaged.
That said I would not discourage you from continuing to pound on doors, of thinking creatively, perhaps illustrating your work, of celebrating the antebellum South, but with no guarantee anything might happen.
Margaret Mitchell wrote "Gone With The Wind" (1936), a book I read in high school, but a book that was said not to be "literature," now it is deemed a "classic." Why? Not so much for the Civil War, but for the people brought to life such as Scarlet O'Hara and Rhett Butler as representative of the times.
I mention that because of the temper of Calhoun's times. Meacham in his "American Lion" makes the people come alive by quoting personal letters and journals. As you know, Calhoun was a stuff shirt, but so was his wife to complete the imagery.
It may not seem like much but publishers have responded to your work! I've had tons of publishers who didn't display that courtesy.
Perhaps it's my age, or perhaps I'm mellowing. I say that because I have empathy for publishers and booksellers. They are up against it. I don't know what the answer is.
I don't read any of the books on the bestseller lists yet I buy books and read books every single week. I am told I am one-tenth of one percent of the American populace. Do the math! That's not much support to an entire industry.
Finally, consider turning the book into a novel. Make Calhoun a tragic figure of history. Show how he was trying to hold back history, when Nat Turner and others had already crippled the South’s hold on slavery.
William Styron wrote a novel, "Confessions of Nat Turner" (1993), which was a national best seller as the narrative of a man with a mission. He used James Baldwin, the great African American novelist, as his source.
Baldwin's novels are rich lyrical pieces of why today we have an African American in the White House. I've read them all.
Momentum! That's what stirs the drink. What I'm saying, Dick is that Calhoun is a tragic figure, and his essence lies in exploiting this. Good luck.
And always be well,
Jim
* * *
Monday, August 17, 2009
"AMERICAN LION" -- Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham -- An Organizational Development Perspective!
"AMERICAN LION" - Andrew Jackson in the White House - by Jon Meacham
An Organizational Development (OD) Perspective
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Organization-Industrial Psychologist
© August 17, 2009
NOTE TO PRESIDENT BARAK OBAMA - "American Lion" is a learner's leadership manual on OD!
* * *
When I purchased this book, my wife looked at me and said, "Haven't you read enough books on Jackson? You must have read a dozen by now. How could there be anything new to say?"
True, I've read Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s celebrated "The Age of Jackson" (1971), Gloria Jahoda's "The Trail of Tears" (1975), the part Schlesinger left out, about Jackson's forced migration of American Indians to the North West, "Young Hickory" by Hendrik Booream (2001) about the making of Jackson, "Jackson's Way" by John Buchanan (2001) about his special appeal to the masses, "The Passions of Andrew Jackson" (2003) by Andrew Burstein written with an obvious bias, "Andrew Jackson" (2005) by H. W. Brands about Jackson's life and times, "From Sea to Shining Sea" (2005) by Robert Leckie about the War of 1812 where Jackson made his reputation and seeded the expansion westward, and now "American Lion" (2008) by Jon Meacham about Jackson's White House years and his presidential leadership, which was nothing like television's "West Wing."
Each biography displayed another dimension of the man with the "American Lion" focusing on Jackson's eight years as president (1829 - 1837) from the perspective of his contentious loyalty to family and friends and consuming passion for the American people and the preservation of the Union.
"American Lion" can be viewed from the perspective of organizational development (OD), particularly in terms of leadership. OD looks at the whole and assesses behavior in terms of its parts - culture, climate, demographics, geography, personalities and histories -- something Jackson did surprisingly well, as he attempted to preserve the Union against such pesky enemies as Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Nicholas Biddle of the Bank of the United States. Clay saw him as a want-to-be monarch, Calhoun, as enemy to states' rights for the South, and Biddle as a manageable nuisance.
Author Jon Meacham paints a vivid portrait of Jackson and his tumultuous years in power. In doing so, he creates a manual on leadership. At the same time, he shows how talented people can horribly misread events and their times and apply the wrong leadership. "The Age of Jackson," as his influence became known, is testimony this didn't apply to Jackson.
Such leaders apply the wrong rules because that is all they know. Consequently, they oppose new rules of engagement, which lead to glaring errors of judgment. Jackson intuited his times and the rising power of the people. He seldom confused role demands (the job) with self-demands (ego needs) and defined testy situations with a clarity that often escaped his enemies. Moreover, he believed with great confidence he was the father of his country ordained to preserve and protect his family, the Union, at all costs.
He was a flawed, conflicted and contradictory man, beloved and hated, venerated and reviled, crude and sophisticated, rude and mannered, calloused and sensitive, confrontational and compromising, brutish and kind. He often got in his own way but read big events with clear-cut simplicity. A country bumpkin and poorly educated, he had the carriage of a monarch. He was a highly prejudiced man with a gift for giving power to ordinary men. He was, in short, a lot like his country that was moving from an agrarian to an industrial society, and ever westward.
He would change the presidency forever, and in so doing, change America itself. He was the first president to recognize the burgeoning power of the Office of President, while like Washington, a student of its symbolic influence.
* * *
Abraham Lincoln admired Henry Clay, Jackson's bitter enemy, and had the Kentucky senator's picture on the wall of his law office in Springfield, Illinois, yet he had far more in common with Jackson. Lincoln did agree with Jackson, however, that the will of the people was majestic, even magical. Perhaps Jackson being an unapologetic slave owner colored Lincoln's sentiment. That said Lincoln used Jackson's new rules of presidential leadership during his presidency including suspending habeas corpus.
John Quincy Adams, an abolitionist, has a meaningful role in "American Lion," which is revealed through his diaries and letters. He had visceral contempt for Jackson yet could appreciate his leadership. Unlike Clay and Calhoun, he understood why Jackson resonated with the people.
In contrast, Thomas Jefferson saw Jackson as nothing less than a scoundrel, uncouth and unlawful: "He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place (as president). He has very little respect for the law or constitution. He is a dangerous man."
Great men often misread other great men. John F. Kennedy was once hosting a state dinner, and toasted his guests: "Never has such a distinguished assembly dined here than when Jefferson dined alone." It is impossible to imagine him saying this of Jackson. Some presidents, such as Jefferson, get a free pass but never the likes of Jackson.
* * *
We have a classless society of distinct classes. It is defined by money, which is our civil religion according to Lewis Lapham in "Money and Class in America" (1988). Money and power have been pivotal in our nation's history. This was true of Jackson as he took on the establishment and the bank, an outsider without pedigree but with an iron will. Ever since he had read of a failed land scheme in England, Jackson confessed, "I have been afraid of banks." He had also learned to fear debt and lenders in the most personal way.
In 1795, Jackson became involved with a speculator in Philadelphia and ended up in "great difficulty" narrowly escaping. From that point forward, he remained skeptical of promissory notes, land speculation, financial maneuvers, and banks. This mindset, Meacham shows, changed American history forever.
He was a self-possessed man confident in the knowledge who he was without apologies. By a combination of intuition and rational determinism, he read the times from the perspective of the common people that escaped his more celebrated contemporaries.
* * *
Orphaned at fourteen, Jackson never knew his own father, who died the year he was born. From childhood on, he was in search of a structure in which he could fit, find reassurance and stability, and come to control. He took this into his adulthood treating the personal and political as a common core.
When the Union was threatened by John Calhoun's proclamation of nullification, insisting that states could choose what federal laws they would obey, he wrote, "I call upon you in the language of truth, and with the feelings of a Father to retrace your steps."
Indeed, he saw the Union as his family, as he had no family of his own, with his wife, Rachel dying as he was about to be president. With no children from the marriage, he adopted the American people as his family and he as its father.
His White House years roiled with intrigue, war and sexual scandal, patronage, and corruption. It left a permanent mark on the nation. Author Meacham provides a portrait of these complex relationships within Jackson's intimate circle that reads like a soap opera. Yet, it never threw the president off his game. On the contrary, he seemed to thrive on the chaos and intrigue.
Jackson's vision was to take the pomp out of the presidency and to establish a political culture in which a majority of the voters chose a president, a president chose his administration, and his administration governed by its lights in full view of the people. He made no apologies for his federal appointments, which became known as the "spoils system," believing he better than anyone knew who could best serve and reform the Republic. This legacy has helped shape the way we live now.
WHY READ "AMERICAN LION"?
Jackson was not afraid to express his passions or display his loyalties. This troubles historian Andrew Burstein. He insists Jackson conceived of no political direction for the country, acquired wealth, and achieved prominence although virtually uneducated, while displaying the confidence that he alone could restore virtue to American politics as the people's president implying Jackson was a Machiavellian leader. This is far from the case.
In organizational development (OD) terms, Burstein inadvertently gives legitimacy to Jackson's leadership by detailing his development and interventions. Meacham, on the other hand, provides the basis for my declaring Jackson was the first OD practitioner in the White House.
Since the personal and political were regarded as the same, Jackson reacted vehemently to attacks to people close to him, the most celebrated being that of Margaret Eaton, the wife of one of his advisers, John Henry Eaton. The power of OD is when subject and predicate are one as feelings trigger the mind to action.
Eaton was an architect of Jackson's political career and a trusted secretary of war. The claim was the Eaton's had lived together in sin before marriage and Mrs. Eaton had had a series of affairs with other men before and during the marriage. It created social as well as political turmoil and resulted in Jackson dissolving his cabinet, and creating the "the kitchen cabinet," which reflected the will of the president. Jackson never wavered in his loyalty, or in his actions against those disloyal to him.
* * *
Such passion and loyalty calls to mind President Truman's letter to the Washington Post music critic Paul Hume (December 6, 1950) who had written of the president's daughter's operatic singing: "She cannot sing very well and cannot sing with anything approaching professional finish."
Truman wrote to the critic, "Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!"
* * *
In the 1988 presidential campaign, Bernard Shaw asked Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in a debate with George H. W. Bush, "If Kitty Dukakis was raped and murdered would you support the death penalty?"
The governor showed no passion only analytical detachment and composure as he gave a legalese answer, and lost the election. The Bush campaign capitalized on his bland affect with a series of devastating Willie Horton television ads.
Horton was serving a life sentence for murder without the possibility of parole, but was released from prison on a furlough program in Massachusetts supported by Governor Dukakis. While on parole, Horton committed assault, armed robbery and rape.
If Jackson had been asked that same question by Bernard Shaw, he wouldn't have hesitated to say, "You wouldn't have to worry about the death penalty. I'd have killed the bastard with my bare hands!"
This would not have been an idle boast. In 1806, he challenged Charles Dickinson to a duel over a horserace and a slur against his wife, Rachel. He allowed Dickinson to shoot first, carrying the bullet in his chest for the rest of his life, and then shot the man dead.
The media may have applauded the detached manner of the Massachusetts governor but the people didn't. They identify with passion. Dukakis was the darling of the media, but media couldn't rescue him after this display of dispassion.
* * *
In the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican vice president candidate, Sarah Palin, who comes out of the same passion gene pool as Jackson, was asked in a television interview with Katie Couric, what newspapers and magazines she had read over the years to be informed.
Palin answered, "All of them, everything." When Couric tried for a more specific answer, Palin became defensive. The interviewer neutralized Palin's strength, her passion, by killing her appeal as a serious candidate by appearing a nonreader. Yet, was the questioning fair or even meaningful?
Of some 320 million American citizens perhaps less than 10 percent are serious readers of such publications as The Washington Post, The New York Times and other periodicals such as Foreign Affairs and The Economist.
Are we to assume HYPE (Harvard Yale Princeton Elite) should guide us into the future and that those of us of ordinary lights should oblige them? Jackson certainly wouldn't have as he had a contentious relationship with them in his day. Jackson spoke the language of the people. Palin did as well until she stumbled in this interview.
The Alaskan governor, born in 1964, educated at state universities, may not be a reader, but she belongs to the iconoclastic generation of doers of their own thing, who are now assuming leadership rolls. She has defied the programming of the establishment and embraced the untamed world of Alaska as Jackson embraced the untamed world west of the Allegany Mountains.
Imagine a Couric interview with Jackson who read hardly at all and didn't trust newspapers. Jackson would likely have said, "What a damn silly question to ask! I don't make my mind up by what you people print."
Palin is cut from the same cloth as the seventh president and needs to make no apologies for being so or for the passions that have brought her from the Wasilla shores into national prominence.
* * *.
Organization development (OD) is physician to the organization as the medical doctor is to the individual. OD accesses the relative health, stability and efficacy of the organization to accomplish its mission. It does this by taking readings of its culture and readiness to deal with internal stress and strain and accelerating external demands.
OD leadership is passionate but not necessarily polite, timely but not necessarily preemptive, empathetic but not necessarily accommodating. It is self-interested and makes no apologies for being so. It knows and uses its strengths and is not afraid to be a bit paranoid. OD knows what it does well (strengths) and what it does not (weaknesses) and makes corrections (acts). Jackson practiced this formula to perfection.
The "American Lion," while not intended, is an exercise in OD. Jackson was clearly a practitioner. While his critics chastised him for going over the head of Congress directly to the people, saying it was outside his constitutional authority, he recognized it was the only way to get things done.
John Calhoun believed the people should not be trusted with too much power. Jackson believed the opposite. Calhoun retreated into legalese, saying, "He (Jackson) claims to be the immediate representative of the people! What effrontery! Why, he never received a vote from the American people. He was elected by electors." Calhoun never grasped the power of symbolic interaction and symbolic leadership. Jackson did.
Jackson believed a congressional-financial-bureaucratic complex controlled the country. Imagine what he would think of the tens of thousands of lobbyists that feast on the pickings of Congress in Washington D.C. today. As president, he positioned the will of the people to crush the will of the few, never questioning his moral authority.
Was Jackson excessive? Meacham implies he was. He suggests government (Congress and the Supreme Court) failed to appreciate the new rules of engagement or the new role of the United States as an international power. Instead, they were consumed with regional disputes and provincial concerns.
Jackson wouldn't allow an inward-looking Congress to limit him. It threatened to impeach him for his bravado, especially going directly to the people to compromise congressional authority. Congress saw itself as representative of the people, and the president limited to working through it. Nearly two centuries (177 years) later, the problem is academic.
Remarkably, Jackson even looked at corruption in OD terms. He didn't look at it from its symptoms, but discerned it causes. Corruption wasn't limited to scandals and mismanagement, but in the broader sense was marshaled by how institutions used power and influence. With the few profiting at the expense of the many, Jackson saw the problem in system terms.
Jackson was not against competition in the marketplace of goods and ideas putting faith in the capacity of free individuals to work out their destinies. When institutional barriers prevented such possibilities, it was seen as his role as agent of the people to remove such barriers.
He worried in particular about the power of the Second Bank of the United States, an institution that held the public's money but was not subject to the public's control, or to the president's.
He was to meet his match in its president, Nicholas Biddle, who was brilliant, arrogant, and as willful in his way as he was in his. It became war. He saw the Bank of the United States a threat to the common good and believed nothing less than destroying it was on order. The battle consumed his administration, but he eventually won.
In January 1832, Biddle challenged Jackson (never a good idea) to sign the bank's renewed charter or veto it and suffer defeat for reelection. Biddle thought he could box the president in on the Bank's terms, believing Jackson would do anything to get reelected. He was wrong on both terms.
Henry Clay, who was running against Jackson, was confident this strategy would put him in the White House. It was a terrible mistake. It led the bank into the political arena or out of its depth, where the president presided with skill. It also showed Senator Clay misread the times by playing by old rules where campaigners didn't directly engage the public, but acted presidential above the fray.
Jackson vetoed the charter, and soundly defeated Clay at the polls capturing the Electoral College votes by a convincing margin of 219 - 49 with over 55 percent of the popular vote to Clay's 37 percent.
* * *
The Nullification Act of Calhoun also failed putting Calhoun in the same livid state of Clay. They gained a measure of revenge by leading the Senate to censure the president for exceeding his authority in removing the deposits from the Bank of the United States. Friday, March 28, 1834, was, in retrospect, one of the most significant days of Andrew Jackson's life. He was censured for his removal of the deposits. The tally in the Senate was 26 to 20.
(Lost in this intrigue is that Jackson, by compromising on tariffs as they impacted cotton growers, caused nullification to be tabled and succession of South Carolina and other southern states from happening, thus postponing the Civil War by 28 years.)
Nearly two centuries later, presidents Bush and Obama concomitantly did essentially the same thing when the federal government took control of many investment banks that took TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) bailout funds during the 2007 - 2008 economic collapse. This included closing down several banks across the nation.
* * *
Currently, president Obama has a Jackson like initiative in his healthcare reform. Time will tell if the president has made a gross error in turning healthcare reform over to the House of Representatives, where Congress has made a mess of things, especially the confusing "public option" in competition with private healthcare insurance providers.
Jackson would never have done that. He would have gone to the people as Obama is now doing, measured its disposition, and then marshaled his reform in a way to garner the overwhelming endorsement of the people. At present, because of Obama's turning control of the initiative over to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, healthcare is mired in red tape and bound up in thousands of pages of confusion, which has led to conflict, anger and misunderstanding. This is not good OD.
Imagine if Jackson had deferred to Congress on dissolving the Bank of the United States. Obviously, it never would have happened. It happened because Jackson convinced the people it was the right thing to do. True, he was censured for the action, but that was only a symbolic move. Jackson took on the hubris and arrogance of Biddle and Congress and transferred the people's money to other banks with the strong possibility of being defeated for a second term, yet he did it. He succeeded because he did his homework and guided the effort through leading the charge.
One wonders if Obama's taking his case to the people in town hall meetings now after the cow is out of the barn will work. For his first deferring to Congress, we have a stalemate and the healthcare reform bill, should it pass, may be so watered down to make little impact on the uninsured.
* * *
A president must use his power, all of his will, and all of his attributes, Jackson would insist, to establish his leadership. Obama would profit from reading the "American Lion." Jackson was not inclined to please the establishment to do the people's business. Ironically, he is an iconic figure today, but then was a much-maligned man of action with an OD orientation.
Fortunately, we have had strong presidents in critical times. Imagine if President Truman had waited for Congressional approval before dropping the atomic bomb on Japan to end WWII in the Pacific. Imagine the stalemate that might have ensued. Chances are the war might have gone on for years, as it did in Vietnam and as it does now in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Time will tell if Obama will become a bold leader. Charlie Rose on PBS television routinely asks his guest experts and media observers how Obama is doing. Invariably, they give "thumbs up" on his leadership, yet from an OD perspective comparative to the Jackson presidency, I don't see it. That is why I hope the president reads "American Lion."
* * *
An Organizational Development (OD) Perspective
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Organization-Industrial Psychologist
© August 17, 2009
NOTE TO PRESIDENT BARAK OBAMA - "American Lion" is a learner's leadership manual on OD!
* * *
When I purchased this book, my wife looked at me and said, "Haven't you read enough books on Jackson? You must have read a dozen by now. How could there be anything new to say?"
True, I've read Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s celebrated "The Age of Jackson" (1971), Gloria Jahoda's "The Trail of Tears" (1975), the part Schlesinger left out, about Jackson's forced migration of American Indians to the North West, "Young Hickory" by Hendrik Booream (2001) about the making of Jackson, "Jackson's Way" by John Buchanan (2001) about his special appeal to the masses, "The Passions of Andrew Jackson" (2003) by Andrew Burstein written with an obvious bias, "Andrew Jackson" (2005) by H. W. Brands about Jackson's life and times, "From Sea to Shining Sea" (2005) by Robert Leckie about the War of 1812 where Jackson made his reputation and seeded the expansion westward, and now "American Lion" (2008) by Jon Meacham about Jackson's White House years and his presidential leadership, which was nothing like television's "West Wing."
Each biography displayed another dimension of the man with the "American Lion" focusing on Jackson's eight years as president (1829 - 1837) from the perspective of his contentious loyalty to family and friends and consuming passion for the American people and the preservation of the Union.
"American Lion" can be viewed from the perspective of organizational development (OD), particularly in terms of leadership. OD looks at the whole and assesses behavior in terms of its parts - culture, climate, demographics, geography, personalities and histories -- something Jackson did surprisingly well, as he attempted to preserve the Union against such pesky enemies as Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Nicholas Biddle of the Bank of the United States. Clay saw him as a want-to-be monarch, Calhoun, as enemy to states' rights for the South, and Biddle as a manageable nuisance.
Author Jon Meacham paints a vivid portrait of Jackson and his tumultuous years in power. In doing so, he creates a manual on leadership. At the same time, he shows how talented people can horribly misread events and their times and apply the wrong leadership. "The Age of Jackson," as his influence became known, is testimony this didn't apply to Jackson.
Such leaders apply the wrong rules because that is all they know. Consequently, they oppose new rules of engagement, which lead to glaring errors of judgment. Jackson intuited his times and the rising power of the people. He seldom confused role demands (the job) with self-demands (ego needs) and defined testy situations with a clarity that often escaped his enemies. Moreover, he believed with great confidence he was the father of his country ordained to preserve and protect his family, the Union, at all costs.
He was a flawed, conflicted and contradictory man, beloved and hated, venerated and reviled, crude and sophisticated, rude and mannered, calloused and sensitive, confrontational and compromising, brutish and kind. He often got in his own way but read big events with clear-cut simplicity. A country bumpkin and poorly educated, he had the carriage of a monarch. He was a highly prejudiced man with a gift for giving power to ordinary men. He was, in short, a lot like his country that was moving from an agrarian to an industrial society, and ever westward.
He would change the presidency forever, and in so doing, change America itself. He was the first president to recognize the burgeoning power of the Office of President, while like Washington, a student of its symbolic influence.
* * *
Abraham Lincoln admired Henry Clay, Jackson's bitter enemy, and had the Kentucky senator's picture on the wall of his law office in Springfield, Illinois, yet he had far more in common with Jackson. Lincoln did agree with Jackson, however, that the will of the people was majestic, even magical. Perhaps Jackson being an unapologetic slave owner colored Lincoln's sentiment. That said Lincoln used Jackson's new rules of presidential leadership during his presidency including suspending habeas corpus.
John Quincy Adams, an abolitionist, has a meaningful role in "American Lion," which is revealed through his diaries and letters. He had visceral contempt for Jackson yet could appreciate his leadership. Unlike Clay and Calhoun, he understood why Jackson resonated with the people.
In contrast, Thomas Jefferson saw Jackson as nothing less than a scoundrel, uncouth and unlawful: "He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place (as president). He has very little respect for the law or constitution. He is a dangerous man."
Great men often misread other great men. John F. Kennedy was once hosting a state dinner, and toasted his guests: "Never has such a distinguished assembly dined here than when Jefferson dined alone." It is impossible to imagine him saying this of Jackson. Some presidents, such as Jefferson, get a free pass but never the likes of Jackson.
* * *
We have a classless society of distinct classes. It is defined by money, which is our civil religion according to Lewis Lapham in "Money and Class in America" (1988). Money and power have been pivotal in our nation's history. This was true of Jackson as he took on the establishment and the bank, an outsider without pedigree but with an iron will. Ever since he had read of a failed land scheme in England, Jackson confessed, "I have been afraid of banks." He had also learned to fear debt and lenders in the most personal way.
In 1795, Jackson became involved with a speculator in Philadelphia and ended up in "great difficulty" narrowly escaping. From that point forward, he remained skeptical of promissory notes, land speculation, financial maneuvers, and banks. This mindset, Meacham shows, changed American history forever.
He was a self-possessed man confident in the knowledge who he was without apologies. By a combination of intuition and rational determinism, he read the times from the perspective of the common people that escaped his more celebrated contemporaries.
* * *
Orphaned at fourteen, Jackson never knew his own father, who died the year he was born. From childhood on, he was in search of a structure in which he could fit, find reassurance and stability, and come to control. He took this into his adulthood treating the personal and political as a common core.
When the Union was threatened by John Calhoun's proclamation of nullification, insisting that states could choose what federal laws they would obey, he wrote, "I call upon you in the language of truth, and with the feelings of a Father to retrace your steps."
Indeed, he saw the Union as his family, as he had no family of his own, with his wife, Rachel dying as he was about to be president. With no children from the marriage, he adopted the American people as his family and he as its father.
His White House years roiled with intrigue, war and sexual scandal, patronage, and corruption. It left a permanent mark on the nation. Author Meacham provides a portrait of these complex relationships within Jackson's intimate circle that reads like a soap opera. Yet, it never threw the president off his game. On the contrary, he seemed to thrive on the chaos and intrigue.
Jackson's vision was to take the pomp out of the presidency and to establish a political culture in which a majority of the voters chose a president, a president chose his administration, and his administration governed by its lights in full view of the people. He made no apologies for his federal appointments, which became known as the "spoils system," believing he better than anyone knew who could best serve and reform the Republic. This legacy has helped shape the way we live now.
WHY READ "AMERICAN LION"?
Jackson was not afraid to express his passions or display his loyalties. This troubles historian Andrew Burstein. He insists Jackson conceived of no political direction for the country, acquired wealth, and achieved prominence although virtually uneducated, while displaying the confidence that he alone could restore virtue to American politics as the people's president implying Jackson was a Machiavellian leader. This is far from the case.
In organizational development (OD) terms, Burstein inadvertently gives legitimacy to Jackson's leadership by detailing his development and interventions. Meacham, on the other hand, provides the basis for my declaring Jackson was the first OD practitioner in the White House.
Since the personal and political were regarded as the same, Jackson reacted vehemently to attacks to people close to him, the most celebrated being that of Margaret Eaton, the wife of one of his advisers, John Henry Eaton. The power of OD is when subject and predicate are one as feelings trigger the mind to action.
Eaton was an architect of Jackson's political career and a trusted secretary of war. The claim was the Eaton's had lived together in sin before marriage and Mrs. Eaton had had a series of affairs with other men before and during the marriage. It created social as well as political turmoil and resulted in Jackson dissolving his cabinet, and creating the "the kitchen cabinet," which reflected the will of the president. Jackson never wavered in his loyalty, or in his actions against those disloyal to him.
* * *
Such passion and loyalty calls to mind President Truman's letter to the Washington Post music critic Paul Hume (December 6, 1950) who had written of the president's daughter's operatic singing: "She cannot sing very well and cannot sing with anything approaching professional finish."
Truman wrote to the critic, "Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!"
* * *
In the 1988 presidential campaign, Bernard Shaw asked Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in a debate with George H. W. Bush, "If Kitty Dukakis was raped and murdered would you support the death penalty?"
The governor showed no passion only analytical detachment and composure as he gave a legalese answer, and lost the election. The Bush campaign capitalized on his bland affect with a series of devastating Willie Horton television ads.
Horton was serving a life sentence for murder without the possibility of parole, but was released from prison on a furlough program in Massachusetts supported by Governor Dukakis. While on parole, Horton committed assault, armed robbery and rape.
If Jackson had been asked that same question by Bernard Shaw, he wouldn't have hesitated to say, "You wouldn't have to worry about the death penalty. I'd have killed the bastard with my bare hands!"
This would not have been an idle boast. In 1806, he challenged Charles Dickinson to a duel over a horserace and a slur against his wife, Rachel. He allowed Dickinson to shoot first, carrying the bullet in his chest for the rest of his life, and then shot the man dead.
The media may have applauded the detached manner of the Massachusetts governor but the people didn't. They identify with passion. Dukakis was the darling of the media, but media couldn't rescue him after this display of dispassion.
* * *
In the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican vice president candidate, Sarah Palin, who comes out of the same passion gene pool as Jackson, was asked in a television interview with Katie Couric, what newspapers and magazines she had read over the years to be informed.
Palin answered, "All of them, everything." When Couric tried for a more specific answer, Palin became defensive. The interviewer neutralized Palin's strength, her passion, by killing her appeal as a serious candidate by appearing a nonreader. Yet, was the questioning fair or even meaningful?
Of some 320 million American citizens perhaps less than 10 percent are serious readers of such publications as The Washington Post, The New York Times and other periodicals such as Foreign Affairs and The Economist.
Are we to assume HYPE (Harvard Yale Princeton Elite) should guide us into the future and that those of us of ordinary lights should oblige them? Jackson certainly wouldn't have as he had a contentious relationship with them in his day. Jackson spoke the language of the people. Palin did as well until she stumbled in this interview.
The Alaskan governor, born in 1964, educated at state universities, may not be a reader, but she belongs to the iconoclastic generation of doers of their own thing, who are now assuming leadership rolls. She has defied the programming of the establishment and embraced the untamed world of Alaska as Jackson embraced the untamed world west of the Allegany Mountains.
Imagine a Couric interview with Jackson who read hardly at all and didn't trust newspapers. Jackson would likely have said, "What a damn silly question to ask! I don't make my mind up by what you people print."
Palin is cut from the same cloth as the seventh president and needs to make no apologies for being so or for the passions that have brought her from the Wasilla shores into national prominence.
* * *.
Organization development (OD) is physician to the organization as the medical doctor is to the individual. OD accesses the relative health, stability and efficacy of the organization to accomplish its mission. It does this by taking readings of its culture and readiness to deal with internal stress and strain and accelerating external demands.
OD leadership is passionate but not necessarily polite, timely but not necessarily preemptive, empathetic but not necessarily accommodating. It is self-interested and makes no apologies for being so. It knows and uses its strengths and is not afraid to be a bit paranoid. OD knows what it does well (strengths) and what it does not (weaknesses) and makes corrections (acts). Jackson practiced this formula to perfection.
The "American Lion," while not intended, is an exercise in OD. Jackson was clearly a practitioner. While his critics chastised him for going over the head of Congress directly to the people, saying it was outside his constitutional authority, he recognized it was the only way to get things done.
John Calhoun believed the people should not be trusted with too much power. Jackson believed the opposite. Calhoun retreated into legalese, saying, "He (Jackson) claims to be the immediate representative of the people! What effrontery! Why, he never received a vote from the American people. He was elected by electors." Calhoun never grasped the power of symbolic interaction and symbolic leadership. Jackson did.
Jackson believed a congressional-financial-bureaucratic complex controlled the country. Imagine what he would think of the tens of thousands of lobbyists that feast on the pickings of Congress in Washington D.C. today. As president, he positioned the will of the people to crush the will of the few, never questioning his moral authority.
Was Jackson excessive? Meacham implies he was. He suggests government (Congress and the Supreme Court) failed to appreciate the new rules of engagement or the new role of the United States as an international power. Instead, they were consumed with regional disputes and provincial concerns.
Jackson wouldn't allow an inward-looking Congress to limit him. It threatened to impeach him for his bravado, especially going directly to the people to compromise congressional authority. Congress saw itself as representative of the people, and the president limited to working through it. Nearly two centuries (177 years) later, the problem is academic.
Remarkably, Jackson even looked at corruption in OD terms. He didn't look at it from its symptoms, but discerned it causes. Corruption wasn't limited to scandals and mismanagement, but in the broader sense was marshaled by how institutions used power and influence. With the few profiting at the expense of the many, Jackson saw the problem in system terms.
Jackson was not against competition in the marketplace of goods and ideas putting faith in the capacity of free individuals to work out their destinies. When institutional barriers prevented such possibilities, it was seen as his role as agent of the people to remove such barriers.
He worried in particular about the power of the Second Bank of the United States, an institution that held the public's money but was not subject to the public's control, or to the president's.
He was to meet his match in its president, Nicholas Biddle, who was brilliant, arrogant, and as willful in his way as he was in his. It became war. He saw the Bank of the United States a threat to the common good and believed nothing less than destroying it was on order. The battle consumed his administration, but he eventually won.
In January 1832, Biddle challenged Jackson (never a good idea) to sign the bank's renewed charter or veto it and suffer defeat for reelection. Biddle thought he could box the president in on the Bank's terms, believing Jackson would do anything to get reelected. He was wrong on both terms.
Henry Clay, who was running against Jackson, was confident this strategy would put him in the White House. It was a terrible mistake. It led the bank into the political arena or out of its depth, where the president presided with skill. It also showed Senator Clay misread the times by playing by old rules where campaigners didn't directly engage the public, but acted presidential above the fray.
Jackson vetoed the charter, and soundly defeated Clay at the polls capturing the Electoral College votes by a convincing margin of 219 - 49 with over 55 percent of the popular vote to Clay's 37 percent.
* * *
The Nullification Act of Calhoun also failed putting Calhoun in the same livid state of Clay. They gained a measure of revenge by leading the Senate to censure the president for exceeding his authority in removing the deposits from the Bank of the United States. Friday, March 28, 1834, was, in retrospect, one of the most significant days of Andrew Jackson's life. He was censured for his removal of the deposits. The tally in the Senate was 26 to 20.
(Lost in this intrigue is that Jackson, by compromising on tariffs as they impacted cotton growers, caused nullification to be tabled and succession of South Carolina and other southern states from happening, thus postponing the Civil War by 28 years.)
Nearly two centuries later, presidents Bush and Obama concomitantly did essentially the same thing when the federal government took control of many investment banks that took TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) bailout funds during the 2007 - 2008 economic collapse. This included closing down several banks across the nation.
* * *
Currently, president Obama has a Jackson like initiative in his healthcare reform. Time will tell if the president has made a gross error in turning healthcare reform over to the House of Representatives, where Congress has made a mess of things, especially the confusing "public option" in competition with private healthcare insurance providers.
Jackson would never have done that. He would have gone to the people as Obama is now doing, measured its disposition, and then marshaled his reform in a way to garner the overwhelming endorsement of the people. At present, because of Obama's turning control of the initiative over to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, healthcare is mired in red tape and bound up in thousands of pages of confusion, which has led to conflict, anger and misunderstanding. This is not good OD.
Imagine if Jackson had deferred to Congress on dissolving the Bank of the United States. Obviously, it never would have happened. It happened because Jackson convinced the people it was the right thing to do. True, he was censured for the action, but that was only a symbolic move. Jackson took on the hubris and arrogance of Biddle and Congress and transferred the people's money to other banks with the strong possibility of being defeated for a second term, yet he did it. He succeeded because he did his homework and guided the effort through leading the charge.
One wonders if Obama's taking his case to the people in town hall meetings now after the cow is out of the barn will work. For his first deferring to Congress, we have a stalemate and the healthcare reform bill, should it pass, may be so watered down to make little impact on the uninsured.
* * *
A president must use his power, all of his will, and all of his attributes, Jackson would insist, to establish his leadership. Obama would profit from reading the "American Lion." Jackson was not inclined to please the establishment to do the people's business. Ironically, he is an iconic figure today, but then was a much-maligned man of action with an OD orientation.
Fortunately, we have had strong presidents in critical times. Imagine if President Truman had waited for Congressional approval before dropping the atomic bomb on Japan to end WWII in the Pacific. Imagine the stalemate that might have ensued. Chances are the war might have gone on for years, as it did in Vietnam and as it does now in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Time will tell if Obama will become a bold leader. Charlie Rose on PBS television routinely asks his guest experts and media observers how Obama is doing. Invariably, they give "thumbs up" on his leadership, yet from an OD perspective comparative to the Jackson presidency, I don't see it. That is why I hope the president reads "American Lion."
* * *
Friday, August 14, 2009
DID YOU EVER NOTICE? TRIVIA BUFF RESPONDS
DID YOU EVER NOTICE – TRIVIA BUFF RESPONDS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 14, 2009
* * *
I am glad this little respite from serious palaver was found interesting. Many more occurred during my 90-minute walk, but I thought this should suffice. In any case, a trivia buff responded, and expanded on one of my observations. It follows:
It's funny that you mention fist bumps in the context of baseball. I suffer the unfortunate curse of having way too much trivia stored in my head. Recall is easy. The fist bump was born of necessity out of health concerns. Moises Alou related to a reporter that to toughen his hands he would urinate on them. As with many of these odd treatments originating from folk medicine, it is easy to assume he was not the only one. Other players on the Cubs changed from recognizing his accomplishments with high five's to fist bumps. I would assume other Latino ball players might have made similar admissions. The fist bump took the place of a high five's and fore arm bumps.
More humorous is the awkward manner in which the unpracticed share fist bumps. They require much more precision than a high five. Misplaced or delivered with too much force it can be painful. Often there is this moment of tentative address that makes the exchange seem more contrived than spontaneous.
Probably more than anyone needs to share.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 14, 2009
* * *
I am glad this little respite from serious palaver was found interesting. Many more occurred during my 90-minute walk, but I thought this should suffice. In any case, a trivia buff responded, and expanded on one of my observations. It follows:
It's funny that you mention fist bumps in the context of baseball. I suffer the unfortunate curse of having way too much trivia stored in my head. Recall is easy. The fist bump was born of necessity out of health concerns. Moises Alou related to a reporter that to toughen his hands he would urinate on them. As with many of these odd treatments originating from folk medicine, it is easy to assume he was not the only one. Other players on the Cubs changed from recognizing his accomplishments with high five's to fist bumps. I would assume other Latino ball players might have made similar admissions. The fist bump took the place of a high five's and fore arm bumps.
More humorous is the awkward manner in which the unpracticed share fist bumps. They require much more precision than a high five. Misplaced or delivered with too much force it can be painful. Often there is this moment of tentative address that makes the exchange seem more contrived than spontaneous.
Probably more than anyone needs to share.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *