THE FALLACY OF HOPE

THE FALLACY OF HOPE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 22, 2009

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“My principal design was to inform you, and not to amuse you.”

Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Anglo-Irish poet, satirist and clergyman


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THE AUDACITY OF HOPE EXPOSED


You that read me know my disdain for the concept of hope as compared to the idea of courage.

Courage is active and positive. Hope is passive and wishful thinking.

Courage requires doing something even if it is wrong. Hope looks to someone else to do the dirty work.

Courage operates from a position of taking control. Hope surrenders control expecting someone else to manage the outcome.

Courage entails risk, possible failure, and often setbacks. Hope places that responsibility and authority on someone else.

Courage doesn’t react to circumstances. It anticipates them and takes action. Hope shields itself from action by projecting blame when things go awry.

Courage embraces the challenge with gusto. Hope is prisoner to outcomes.

In baseball, a ground ball can be zooming at an infielder at 90 mph. He can charge the ball and embrace the challenge or sit back and play for a good hop. Should he choose the latter, chances are the runner will cross first base before his throw gets there, or he’ll be fooled by the hop and commit an error.

Major League infielders charge the ball. Amateurs often look for the good hop.

There is no audacity to hope when not structured around courage.

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In my long life, it would seem increasingly so that there is little difference whether the Democrats or Republicans are in power. Neither party seems able to escape an obsession with hope.

Both parties are controlled by corporate masters through an army of lobbyists who eclipse the political democratic process by dictating the corporate will.

Eisenhower called it the “military industrial complex, but now it permeates every quadrant of American society. It is evident in the current charade on healthcare, as it was and continues to be evident in the administration's ambivalence towards the War in Afghanistan.

The agents of the puppet masters are not elected to public office but they control the day.

Barak Obama got my vote, despite being disparaged by his campaign book, “Audacity of Hope” (2006). I forgave him for this, thinking it was simply a campaign strategy to get elected, confident, once elected, he would display the courage that change necessitates.

What I see thus far feels strangely like déjà vu, or Bush all over again. Columnist and former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan claims President Obama is not a natural decider. Obama is proving the pundit correct. I have worked for such men. They see themselves as prudent not realizing they are paralyzed with fear of making a decision.

We have a president-in-training with practical no corporate decision making experience. This was also true of Abraham Lincoln, but he was a successful practicing attorney in Springfield, Illinois, and was considered reasonably wealthy when he took office.

President George W. Bush had an executive background. He turned his back on his family’s fortune (something his brother, Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, didn’t), left the northeast and went wildcatting for oil in Texas, struck it rich after many failed attempts, and established his own successful company. He became a majority owner of the Texas Rangers of Major League Baseball, and continued in that capacity until he sold his interests at a handsome profit.

Bush's nemesis was the neoconservatives who owned him, including Vice President Chaney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. They talked him into a preemptive War in Iraq, when Afghanistan was where Al-Qaeda was entrenched. He is now saddled with that legacy thanks to the neocons, who have gone on their merry ways unscathed.

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More than 10,000 books have been written on Lincoln. I’ve managed to read a few. I think it unfair to compare President Obama to him or his presidency. Lincoln is remembered for his eloquence, for the Emancipation Proclamation, and for winning the Civil War, but the man he was is buried in subtext.

Lincoln may have been honest, but he was also tough, some thought vicious, as he never acted in half measures.

When he was a young man he was quite a wrestler, long, sinewy, and deceptively strong. He would allow his opponent to flex his muscles, make scary, and then quickly pin him to his opponent’s embarrassment. Lincoln didn’t believe in telegraphing his moves but exploited his rival’s weakness with animal like agility.

During the Civil War, Lincoln had a pusillanimous general-in-chief of the Union Army, George Brinton McClellan, nicknamed “The Young Napoleon.” He was a man with impeccable military credentials, good breeding and flawless sophistication, but otherwise a spineless wonder when it came to making decisions on the battlefield.

McClellan was also insubordinate. Lincoln removed him and for a time was general-in-chief of the army as well as commander-in-chief of the nation. Lincoln, by all accounts, was decisive, cold, calculating, and unyielding to the enemy in his battlefield strategies. After the war, there was an effort to try him as a war criminal citing these directives.

A talent for leadership is derived from a sense of character that is not always obvious or limited by pedigree. Lincoln went deep into the ranks of his generals before he found Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman to lead his army to a bloody but decisive conclusion, one in which Grant often had huge casualties for his victories, while Sherman’s “March to the Sea” left in his wake a scorched earth.

There was nothing tentative here.


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A surprising role model for our inexperienced president might be President Andrew Jackson. Jackson and Obama, at first glance, might seem like an odd couple: Jackson was crude, intemperate, could be a bully, and yet mastered the eastern establishment and became the people’s president much as Obama did in his getting elected.

The “Age of Jackson” followed the Jackson presidency.

My sense is that under the cool detachment, fine manners, savoir-faire eloquence of Obama is a man of grit that hasn’t yet been allowed to surface. He has by most estimates a fine mind, perhaps finer than most men who have held that office, but a fine mind is not enough. Nor does the job require an intellectual, which he is also said to be. "Give intellectuals everything," advises author Eric Hoffer, "but never give them power."

Jackson was far from an intellectual. He preferred his own counsel to that provided in books, no doubt influenced by the fact he was self-educated with practically no former schooling. He had fought in the Revolutionary War as a fourteen-year-old boy, and every war thereafter up to his presidency.

Jackson was a self-made man as well acquiring considerable wealth by the time he was president, having practiced law, farmed, and served in Congress. He knew Wall Street and the banking lobby in real terms, not abstractedly and academically. He would take on the banking industry and beat it at its own game.

To say Jackson was decisive is to understate his impact. He sized up his enemies and the odds and took action. It didn’t matter whether it was political opponents, members of Congress, his cabinet, eastern bankers, or foreign powers.

Lobbyist and influence peddlers were as endemic to Jackson’s Washington as they are today, but he would have none of them. He dispatched them without a second thought. Nor would he let members of his own cabinet, mostly the Washington elite, dictate his agenda.

When members of his cabinet failed to include the wife of his Secretary of War, he dissolved the cabinet, and appointed his friends. For this, his administration was known as the “spoils system.” That said every president since has benefited from the "Office of the President" that he created, making it the most powerful branch of the federal government.


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President Obama, too, has surrounded himself with like-minded people, many from the financial industry that happen to be key players in the Wall Street meltdown and subsequent recession. He has also shown an inclination to media pundits, thinkers not doers, influence peddlers, not decision makers.

He would be well to note how Lincoln took office. Lincoln was wise in knowing what he did well (his strengths) and what he did not do so well (his weaknesses), appointing a cabinet of competent men who thought him a country bumpkin, and not worthy of the presidency. By doing so, he magnified his strengths and neutralized his weaknesses. In the process, he became stronger and more resilient than any member of his cabinet, and was on his way to greatness.

When we surround ourselves with others of similar weaknesses we reinforce and magnify our own. If the weakness is decision making, this can lead to the paralysis of analysis


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President Obama is making nice with Europe, and it would appear, Europe loves him for it (70 percent approval rating) far more than Americans do (50 percent approval rating) if you can believe the polls. He has made nice with Russia by withdrawing the Bush Missile Defense Shield from Eastern Europe, but in terms of quid pro quo has received nothing for the concession.

Any executive knows there is a world of difference between being nice and being effective. You can make nice when it is effective, but being effective is not always making nice. Being hated by some no matter how noble or appropriate the action is par for the course.

Jackson and Lincoln had similar challenges and acted similarly, preserving the nation at any cost. They recognized the dangers and did what was necessary, not necessarily popular. Controversy was white noise in the background. Courage was the order of the day, not hope.


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With all the major problems of the nation and the world, radio talking heads and the Fox News Network have gotten President Obama’s attention. This is unfortunate. Legitimizing these chatterboxes puts the president in a bad light. I would imagine someone has advised him of this strategy. That person should be fired immediately. He or she is no friend to the administration.

Incredibly, Time (September 28, 2009) had Glenn Beck’s picture on the cover of its magazine, a person I had never heard of before. I know who Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Howard Stern are, but have never listened to them, much less this man with his tongue stuck out on the cover of Time. Wonderful!

The measure of these talking heads’ appeal, and others like them suggests we have lost our pride and dignity, our good manners and sense of proportion, our reasoned thought, and intellectual balance.

Have we lost so much confidence that we can no longer do our own thinking? Do we need these interlopers to do it for us? Are we to rely on people who short circuit the issues to lay on us their biases? They have a right to their opinions, to promulgate them in any media they prefer, but we don't have to accept them as our own. That seems bizarre, but come to think of it, this is a bizarre age.


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