SOFT HEADED SOCIETY ON DISPLAY!

SOFT HEADED SOCIETY ON DISPLAY!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 15, 2010

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A WRITER’S COMMENTS RECEIVING LIVINSTON’S BOOKS:

Thanks Jim.

I will put Bill Livingston’s HAVE FUN AT WORK and FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES to good use. Also, thanks to you, I contacted Ned Hamson and he kindly emailed the pdf version of THE NEW PLAGUE to me. Bill has been on this tack for a long time I see.

All the best,

George

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

George,

Yes he has, and I know you will make good use of Bill Livingston's books.

You're a professional engineer; you've paid your dues. And if I'm right, Livingston is a beacon to you, and others like you, in confirming that you are not only on the right track but are in control of the game.

The problem, and Livingston is well aware of this, and that is the game has been taken away from you. It has been made so by institutional infallibility, protecting the status quo, and no matter what the demands on the system pursuing business as usual.

Society has become controlled by politicians that know nothing about engineering except how to exploit it; by artists that know nothing about engineering, but how to denigrate it; and by ordinary citizens that know nothing about engineering, but how to consume it as toys of distraction.

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My Sundays are often dedicated to watching the various programs on books and authors on C-Span. One program -- taped May 27, 2010 -- hosted by John Stewart, whom I'm still trying to understand the legitimacy of his claim to being a satirist -- and featuring John Grisham, Condolezza Rice, and Mary Roach.

Authors today are combination politicians and advertising executives, who are as glib in front of a microphone as Bob Hope was at one time. They say the right words, make the right pauses, and connect with their adulating passive audience by saying precisely what that audience expects them to say. The whole affair is choreographed to perfection, leaving a good feeling in the audience’s mind like Valium.

Then I wandered on to a half hour interview with Christopher Hitchens regarding his new memoir "Hitch 22." Again, this was taped May 27, 2010. No one is glibber than Hitchens. He apparently is preoccupied with two things, being boring -- he can think of nothing worse; and death -- yet it is apparent in his appearance that hedonistic self-destruction has not taken a pause.

My wonder is why he is so popular. Then I gave myself pause and realized it all fits. Society is disintegrating around us -- which engineers are trying to shore up at every turn -- and we are confined to nice words, polite arguments, and total mediocrity.

This came to a head for me when I read the cover story of the current issue of Time magazine titled "Great American Novelist."

Words have become meaningless in our language such as "great" and "smart" and "brilliant." We are so impressed in what people are that we fail to look at what they do. Livingston says it is not the words but the actions that make the difference. In any case, it prompted me to write "A Letter to the Editor" at Time. To wit:


COVER STORY: “GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST” (8/23/10)

Come on, Time! Greatness isn’t an ad campaign. Greatness evolves as it has in certain respects with other midwestern writers such as Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, James T. Farrell, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Meredith Wilson. A few even won Nobel Laureate honors. Yet it is difficult to put American writers in the company of Joyce, Balzac, Camus, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Perhaps it is a matter of culture. Time magazine has done a disservice to Jonathan Franzen by placing the manacle of greatness on him. Then to confirm his popularity with book sales, I wonder how that registers with him.

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Finally, I watched publishing executives cry real tears on television regarding the dramatic shift in the publishing business. It is clear they don’t have a clue as to what to do. For more than one hundred years the publishing industry has been the hostage of authors, and now authors are every man and woman on the street. Clearly, this whole idea of electronic books has publishers flummoxed. Watching these executives try to paste words to their malaise was like watching Roman emperors fighting the wild beasts in the coliseum while the gladiators – the engineers – sat in the emperor’s box with “thumbs ups” or “thumbs down” to exploits in the arena.


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It would be nice if Livingston were twenty years younger, when he started this whole crusade. Then he would have the energy to make it right and in doing so make society well in the process. His books, as you know, cut to the marrow of the mischief of our times, and few in any walk of life and at any level have the constitution for facing that reality.

Be always well,

Jim