AN OPEN LETTER TO WRITERS AND THINKERS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 30, 2010
“Sincerity is to speak as we think, to do as we pretend and profess, to perform what we promise and really to be what we would seem and appear to be.”
John Tillotson (1620 – 1694), English Archbishop of Canterbury
* * *
In my peripatetic reading, it occurred to me how fallible and vulnerable writers and thinkers are to the narrow limits of perspective and ambience.
If you have never stared at a blank page or computer screen, stirred by the demons boiling in your subconscious to be expressed, it is perhaps difficult to understand the folly of writers and thinkers so inclined.
What they produce is a product limited to the learning and, yes, yearning hose demons generate.
What prompted this missive were two things: Hillary Spurling’s PEARL BUCK IN CHINA (2010), and the latest declaration on medicine out of Great Britain that ADHA is, genetically based, as many scientists have insisted, having little to do with diet and nutrition or the parenting skills of parents. This puts a cloud over psychiatrist Bruno Bettleheim Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago established in the 1930s.
* * *
Pearl Buck is best known for her novel, "The Good Earth” (1931). She is author of over one hundred works of literature. Biographer Spurling claims she is not read today. She doesn’t defend Buck’s 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature, which critics found ridiculous, but suggests criticism that her writing was parochial and her style pedestrian was pretty much on the mark. Buck was as popular in her day as Stephen King is in ours, and nearly as wealthy.
Critics have often chided King for not writing “a piece of literature.” He confesses, “I write as well as I can” on every book. Will King be read in seventy from now?
The answer perhaps is limited to where society and culture will be at that time. I read “The Good Earth” when I was a boy and it has stayed with me ever since. The book describes in a pastoral sense the cycle of birth, marriage, and death in a Chinese peasant family. It is written realistically without any attempt to awaken sympathy for any of the characters. It must have been the right medicine for me at the time because I have a similar orientation now when I write fiction.
* * *
Bruno Bettelheim has even fared more poorly. After reading several of his works (The Uses of Enchantment, The Empty Fortress, A Good Enough Parent, and Freud & Man’s Soul), I admit to being captivated by him as a writer. Then I learn in two biographies (The Creation of Dr. B, and Bettleheim, A Life and a Legacy) that he has had a somewhat checkered career from his alleged days in a concentration camp during WWII.
Bettleheim operated the Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago from the 1930s to the 1980s, where he treated children with autism and schizophrenia with psychotherapy and behavior modification.
Three quarters of a century later, although such treatment and therapy continue in some form, these diseases have become centered more on neurology and genetics. Diet, nutrition, a controlled environment, parenting skills and psychotherapy are no longer as popular as they once were.
Was Bettleheim a scoundrel or a fraud? I choose to think he did the best he could with the limited knowledge that he possessed and was then available. It is hard to imagine now, but in his day Bettleheim was a giant in his profession.
* * *
Earlier I mentioned the horror of the blank page. Anyone who has attempted to write and publish anything knows of what I speak. But there is a greater horror if that is the proper word, and that is not being able to release the demons in the mind that refuse to dance across the page.
The art of literature or the philosophy of thought can wake the mind with contours no more determinable than those of consciousness.
Take Kary Mullis. He is the inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). Thanks to him a drop of saliva can determine our DNA. His discovery has changed forensic science. Yet he writes that natural DNA was a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of his car in the dark, when it came to him on the open road, not in the laboratory.
Mullis is off beat to say the least and shows this in his book about the discovery, “Dancing Naked in the Mind Field” (1998).
Writers and thinkers know just because there is a sudden transformation that is committed to paper or the computer it doesn’t mean that it was easy or that it will endure. Such a life is a narrative of vitality and fear, but also hopefully, of a vision. Writers and thinkers know that what surfaces is more than life, but also tragically confined to it. In the end, they do the best that they can often in the caldron of despair.
* * *
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
WHEN THE SIXTH GRADER'S MINDSET IS OUR WINDOW INTO PRESIDENT OBAMA'S PSHCHE
WHEN THE SIXTH GRADER’S MINDSET IS OUR WINDOW INTO PRESIDENT OBAMA'S PSHCHE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 24, 2010
* * *
“What is the remedy? It is not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be a unit – not to be reckoned one character, not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand. Not so, brothers and friends. Please God, ours shall not be so.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
* * *
WOULD THAT WE ALL READ MORE!
I was forwarded an article, written anonymously by a Washington insider who has access to the "naked truth" about President Barak Obama (“White House Insider On Obama: The President Is Losing It”).
As a reader of books on presidents, after reading this article, I could not but have a bad taste in my mouth. The piece says nothing but insinuates much.
This writer, who chooses to be anonymous, has the audacity to speak to the reader from a position of privilege and to rant, as he will about the Presidency of the United States. We, the reader, are expected to accept his entreaties as the gospel incarnate. It is truly a media age.
* * *
Media provide our ignorance with infotainment to the beat of a celebrity culture, with junk thought, misguided objectivity, misuse of the singular, playing on our weakness for schadenfreude.
Given this inclination to project our angst on a person or thing outside ourselves, it is not surprising that we are quick to accept generalities as real rather than the fluff that they are.
We live in a digital age of electronic tools that generate junk thought and act as toys of distraction. Small wonder that a nasty piece like this gets our attention because we are told we have the voice of truth of the insider.
* * *
STROLLING DOWN MEMORY LANE OF PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY
Perhaps the best way to describe my sense of this piece is to comment on various statements made by the anonymous author.
Did the media give candidate Obama an assist?
(Sly smile) “Sure, we definitely had people in the media on our side.”
John F. Kennedy made Barak Obama look like a novice when it came to romancing and seducing the press. He had the media eating out of his hands, forgiving him his every transgression, which were legion.
* * *
“The opposition didn’t have near the energy, or the celebrity attraction that Obama brings.”
Why is it a positive when Kennedy created “Camelot” and all its nonsense becomes a negative when reference is made to Obama?
Teddy Roosevelt was no slouch when it came to creating celebrity. He manufactured the bravado that painted him the swashbuckling warrior among the mainly mythical “Rough Riders” of the Spanish American War.
Kennedy did it as well with his "PT 109" command in WWII. He was forced to abandon his vessel, and nearly fell into enemy hands through his ineptitude.
Kennedy compounded this by publishing "Profiles in Courage" while recovering from a back injury, failing to mention the book was largely written by an aid. His father, Joe Kennedy, made the book a national best seller by purchasing thousands of copies across the country. And yes, Kennedy accepted the Pulitzer Prize for a book largely ghost written. Where is the morality in this?
* * *
“The country was burned out after eight years of Bush.”
With the exception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who won four consecutive terms, it seems normal fare to tire of a president, especially in this media age, after two terms.
* * *
“He absolutely obsesses over Fox News. For being so successful, Barak Obama is incredibly thin-skinned. He takes everything very personally.”
Compare this to Richard M. Nixon, or for that matter compare it to JFK and his brother, Robert. These leaders saw monsters in the shadows. And who was more thin skinned then Lyndon Johnson? Sensitivity is the hallmark of a politician when it comes to arrows targeted for their backs.
* * *
“What does Joe Biden know about budgets and economics? Not much.”
This is probably true. FDR’s first vice president, John Nance Garner described the vice presidency “not worth a bucket of warm piss.”
It is only since the assassination of JFK that the vice presidency has taken on such gravitas.
With Joe Biden what you see is what you get, and with no apologies. The fact that he often has his foot in his mouth is par for the office.
Few presidents in the history of our nation have put someone on the ticket that might challenge their authority, possibly with the exception of Lyndon Johnson. The whole Kennedy clan loathed him, but felt he was necessary to win the election.
Vice presidents are generally chosen to win elections. Biden was a senior US Senator and expert on international affairs, a weakness assumed in Obama.
Vice president Chaney, on the other hand, was considered a co-president as "Saturday Night Live" loved to imply. History will have to weigh in on this.
* * *
“He (Obama) is scared to death of Hillary.”
On whose authority? If this anonymous author said “Bill Clinton,” then it would have some traction.
* * *
“He (Obama) respects her (Hillary) though, which might be why he fears her so much as well.”
God, how we love armchair psychologists!
* * *
“I have heard that Bill Clinton does not like Barak Obama.”
Now what is that suppose to mean?
Is "liking" someone either necessary or sufficient reason for respecting or valuing someone? I think not.
It would seem this comment is a holdover from the touchy-feely days of the 1980s? I have never found “liking” or “disliking” a suitable indicator of either competence or confidence. "Liking" in this sense is a toxic word implying that we must like each other to work together. My experience has been that those who possess value added skills to the mix drive self-interest.
* * *
“Obama played the race card?”
Kennedy played the religious card (Catholicism) to his advantage. Obama played the race card (African Americanism) to his. Nixon played the mislabeled card (Checker's speech). Show me where this is bad?
* * *
“He (Obama) takes his meetings just like any other president.”
Show me any executive worth his salt that takes them any other way.
* * *
“Though even then, he seems to lack a certain focus.”
Again, nothing is more boring or counterproductive than regularly scheduled meetings. They become meetings for meeting sake.
Most of what is hashed over in these routine meetings is given more relevance when the appropriate parties meet directly.
Alas, boredom often takes precedence. Small wonder the president occasionally lacks a “certain focus.”
* * *
“If you want to see President Obama get excited about a conversation turn it to sports.”
Good for him!
* * *
“Barak Obama doesn’t have a whole lot of intellectual curiosity.”
Now that is unmitigated nonsense! This says more about the anonymous author and absolutely nothing about the president.
If the author has read any of the president’s books he knows of the range, breath and depth of his mind, as well as his gift for subtle expression.
No one has ever accused the president of having "ghost" writers create his manuscripts. Writing is hard work. It takes discipline, time, attention, and talent, all of which appear in abundant supply
If the anonymous author has listened to Obama discussing (in depth) a wide range of subjects as he has done on such television shows with Jim Lehrer and Charlie Rose, he could not but think otherwise.
You cannot be intellectually gifted if you are not intellectually curious. You cannot have a rare intelligence by osmosis. If anything, the president is too curious. I would imagine he could easily drift off on a panoply of subjects if he did not check himself.
* * *
“When he (Obama) is off script, he is what I call a real “slow talker.”
This is but another example of junk thought. It implies meaning when it is meaningless. The implication is that “slow talk” is indigenous to slow thinking, which is ridiculous.
* * *
“He just doesn’t strike me as particularly smart. Bill Clinton is a smart guy. He would run intellectual circles around Barak Obama.”
Everyone is free to express his or her opinion. This anonymous author chooses to imply he has an inside track with the assessment tools of the psychometrician.
He implies he can gauge the character and capacity of the president’s mind and then label it with impunity.
If this were not enough, he engages the old ruse of "compare and compete" using Bill Clinton as the straw man. At this point, the article that was suspect becomes totally incredulous.
* * *
“The fighting (in the cabinet) is off the charts.”
Imagine that! Well, I'm sure it is quite true. I certainly hope so. Conflict is the glue that holds an organization together, not the absence of conflict.
Now, internal stress and strain can mount when external demands accelerate, as they did with President Bush and Katrina, and with President Obama with the oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Add to this the daily media blitz and you have something of nightmare proportions with which to grapple.
My wonder is why anyone except a masochist would submit him or herself to such duress. Fortunately, our elected President and Congress are willing to do such battle.
My experience in organization is that “in fighting” is par for the course. Ventilation is always better than violence.
* * *
“Come again, what about the First Lady?”
Michele Obama doesn’t escape the anonymous author’s junk thought. How could there not be stress in a marriage when you have no privacy?
JFK had girlfriends, one was alleged to be a Russian spy, another a gangster’s moll, putting the nation in jeopardy for the president's dalliances, of which the media remained essentially silent.
Jacqueline Kennedy was said to be less than angelic when it came to running her household. A subordinate in a “tell all” book captures this First Lady without makeup.
To be fair, it must be like hell in a basket to live in the president's zoo for four to eight years. Pat Nixon chain-smoked her way through it, and Bess Truman had enough sense to go back to Missouri.
* * *
“I saw first hand the President of the United States yelling at a member of his staff.”
Can you believe that statement? Extra, extra, the president is human!
What could be more obtuse than to insinuate that yelling is somehow abnormal?
Who hasn’t yelled at a subordinate?
Andrew Jackson used it as an expression of affection.
I wouldn’t want a president who couldn’t break glass with his decibels. Lyndon Johnson was legendary in his temper tantrums, and no one could be more conspiratorial than tricky Dick.
If we are looking for the presidency to be occupied by saints, by individuals without flaws, we had better look outside the body politic in some other dimension because such people don’t exist in humankind.
* * *
“Would another four years of an Obama presidency be the best thing for America?”
The anonymous author doesn’t think so because “Obama is not up to the job,” and “Obama is lazy.”
Compare Obama’s vacations to George W. Bush and one wonders when Bush had time to be president. Of course, he had Chaney and Rumsfeld to mess things up for him.
* * *
“What this country needs is a president who is focused on the job more than on himself.”
It would appear that President Barak Obama, as was true of every president before him, has a sense of history.
This can be a problem. I would have hoped that Obama had tackled jobs before he tackled healthcare. History will indicate long after I am gone whether he was right or not.
* * *
“He doesn’t really understand the idea of work, real work, get your heart and soul into it work.”
As you have seen, giving this anonymous author the benefit of the doubt, I have difficulty understanding where his head is.
Work is no longer manual, no longer busy work, no longer sitting at your desk to the wee hours of the morning contemplating your navel. It is no longer measured in chronological but psychological time.
My best thinking has always been in the shower when God talks to me, never at the workplace, never associated with coming in early and leaving late, but thinking.
The presidency is a symbolic role as well as an orchestration of initiatives. Furrowed brows and weighty demeanors do not a thinking president make.
Leadership is about taking risks and mobilizing resources to certain ins, and hoping for a little luck along the way, because there are no guarantees things will come out in the end as planned.
Leadership is all about timing. And yes, leadership is enduring ignoramuses like this anonymous author and staying with the program.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 24, 2010
* * *
“What is the remedy? It is not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be a unit – not to be reckoned one character, not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand. Not so, brothers and friends. Please God, ours shall not be so.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
* * *
WOULD THAT WE ALL READ MORE!
I was forwarded an article, written anonymously by a Washington insider who has access to the "naked truth" about President Barak Obama (“White House Insider On Obama: The President Is Losing It”).
As a reader of books on presidents, after reading this article, I could not but have a bad taste in my mouth. The piece says nothing but insinuates much.
This writer, who chooses to be anonymous, has the audacity to speak to the reader from a position of privilege and to rant, as he will about the Presidency of the United States. We, the reader, are expected to accept his entreaties as the gospel incarnate. It is truly a media age.
* * *
Media provide our ignorance with infotainment to the beat of a celebrity culture, with junk thought, misguided objectivity, misuse of the singular, playing on our weakness for schadenfreude.
Given this inclination to project our angst on a person or thing outside ourselves, it is not surprising that we are quick to accept generalities as real rather than the fluff that they are.
We live in a digital age of electronic tools that generate junk thought and act as toys of distraction. Small wonder that a nasty piece like this gets our attention because we are told we have the voice of truth of the insider.
* * *
STROLLING DOWN MEMORY LANE OF PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY
Perhaps the best way to describe my sense of this piece is to comment on various statements made by the anonymous author.
Did the media give candidate Obama an assist?
(Sly smile) “Sure, we definitely had people in the media on our side.”
John F. Kennedy made Barak Obama look like a novice when it came to romancing and seducing the press. He had the media eating out of his hands, forgiving him his every transgression, which were legion.
* * *
“The opposition didn’t have near the energy, or the celebrity attraction that Obama brings.”
Why is it a positive when Kennedy created “Camelot” and all its nonsense becomes a negative when reference is made to Obama?
Teddy Roosevelt was no slouch when it came to creating celebrity. He manufactured the bravado that painted him the swashbuckling warrior among the mainly mythical “Rough Riders” of the Spanish American War.
Kennedy did it as well with his "PT 109" command in WWII. He was forced to abandon his vessel, and nearly fell into enemy hands through his ineptitude.
Kennedy compounded this by publishing "Profiles in Courage" while recovering from a back injury, failing to mention the book was largely written by an aid. His father, Joe Kennedy, made the book a national best seller by purchasing thousands of copies across the country. And yes, Kennedy accepted the Pulitzer Prize for a book largely ghost written. Where is the morality in this?
* * *
“The country was burned out after eight years of Bush.”
With the exception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who won four consecutive terms, it seems normal fare to tire of a president, especially in this media age, after two terms.
* * *
“He absolutely obsesses over Fox News. For being so successful, Barak Obama is incredibly thin-skinned. He takes everything very personally.”
Compare this to Richard M. Nixon, or for that matter compare it to JFK and his brother, Robert. These leaders saw monsters in the shadows. And who was more thin skinned then Lyndon Johnson? Sensitivity is the hallmark of a politician when it comes to arrows targeted for their backs.
* * *
“What does Joe Biden know about budgets and economics? Not much.”
This is probably true. FDR’s first vice president, John Nance Garner described the vice presidency “not worth a bucket of warm piss.”
It is only since the assassination of JFK that the vice presidency has taken on such gravitas.
With Joe Biden what you see is what you get, and with no apologies. The fact that he often has his foot in his mouth is par for the office.
Few presidents in the history of our nation have put someone on the ticket that might challenge their authority, possibly with the exception of Lyndon Johnson. The whole Kennedy clan loathed him, but felt he was necessary to win the election.
Vice presidents are generally chosen to win elections. Biden was a senior US Senator and expert on international affairs, a weakness assumed in Obama.
Vice president Chaney, on the other hand, was considered a co-president as "Saturday Night Live" loved to imply. History will have to weigh in on this.
* * *
“He (Obama) is scared to death of Hillary.”
On whose authority? If this anonymous author said “Bill Clinton,” then it would have some traction.
* * *
“He (Obama) respects her (Hillary) though, which might be why he fears her so much as well.”
God, how we love armchair psychologists!
* * *
“I have heard that Bill Clinton does not like Barak Obama.”
Now what is that suppose to mean?
Is "liking" someone either necessary or sufficient reason for respecting or valuing someone? I think not.
It would seem this comment is a holdover from the touchy-feely days of the 1980s? I have never found “liking” or “disliking” a suitable indicator of either competence or confidence. "Liking" in this sense is a toxic word implying that we must like each other to work together. My experience has been that those who possess value added skills to the mix drive self-interest.
* * *
“Obama played the race card?”
Kennedy played the religious card (Catholicism) to his advantage. Obama played the race card (African Americanism) to his. Nixon played the mislabeled card (Checker's speech). Show me where this is bad?
* * *
“He (Obama) takes his meetings just like any other president.”
Show me any executive worth his salt that takes them any other way.
* * *
“Though even then, he seems to lack a certain focus.”
Again, nothing is more boring or counterproductive than regularly scheduled meetings. They become meetings for meeting sake.
Most of what is hashed over in these routine meetings is given more relevance when the appropriate parties meet directly.
Alas, boredom often takes precedence. Small wonder the president occasionally lacks a “certain focus.”
* * *
“If you want to see President Obama get excited about a conversation turn it to sports.”
Good for him!
* * *
“Barak Obama doesn’t have a whole lot of intellectual curiosity.”
Now that is unmitigated nonsense! This says more about the anonymous author and absolutely nothing about the president.
If the author has read any of the president’s books he knows of the range, breath and depth of his mind, as well as his gift for subtle expression.
No one has ever accused the president of having "ghost" writers create his manuscripts. Writing is hard work. It takes discipline, time, attention, and talent, all of which appear in abundant supply
If the anonymous author has listened to Obama discussing (in depth) a wide range of subjects as he has done on such television shows with Jim Lehrer and Charlie Rose, he could not but think otherwise.
You cannot be intellectually gifted if you are not intellectually curious. You cannot have a rare intelligence by osmosis. If anything, the president is too curious. I would imagine he could easily drift off on a panoply of subjects if he did not check himself.
* * *
“When he (Obama) is off script, he is what I call a real “slow talker.”
This is but another example of junk thought. It implies meaning when it is meaningless. The implication is that “slow talk” is indigenous to slow thinking, which is ridiculous.
* * *
“He just doesn’t strike me as particularly smart. Bill Clinton is a smart guy. He would run intellectual circles around Barak Obama.”
Everyone is free to express his or her opinion. This anonymous author chooses to imply he has an inside track with the assessment tools of the psychometrician.
He implies he can gauge the character and capacity of the president’s mind and then label it with impunity.
If this were not enough, he engages the old ruse of "compare and compete" using Bill Clinton as the straw man. At this point, the article that was suspect becomes totally incredulous.
* * *
“The fighting (in the cabinet) is off the charts.”
Imagine that! Well, I'm sure it is quite true. I certainly hope so. Conflict is the glue that holds an organization together, not the absence of conflict.
Now, internal stress and strain can mount when external demands accelerate, as they did with President Bush and Katrina, and with President Obama with the oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Add to this the daily media blitz and you have something of nightmare proportions with which to grapple.
My wonder is why anyone except a masochist would submit him or herself to such duress. Fortunately, our elected President and Congress are willing to do such battle.
My experience in organization is that “in fighting” is par for the course. Ventilation is always better than violence.
* * *
“Come again, what about the First Lady?”
Michele Obama doesn’t escape the anonymous author’s junk thought. How could there not be stress in a marriage when you have no privacy?
JFK had girlfriends, one was alleged to be a Russian spy, another a gangster’s moll, putting the nation in jeopardy for the president's dalliances, of which the media remained essentially silent.
Jacqueline Kennedy was said to be less than angelic when it came to running her household. A subordinate in a “tell all” book captures this First Lady without makeup.
To be fair, it must be like hell in a basket to live in the president's zoo for four to eight years. Pat Nixon chain-smoked her way through it, and Bess Truman had enough sense to go back to Missouri.
* * *
“I saw first hand the President of the United States yelling at a member of his staff.”
Can you believe that statement? Extra, extra, the president is human!
What could be more obtuse than to insinuate that yelling is somehow abnormal?
Who hasn’t yelled at a subordinate?
Andrew Jackson used it as an expression of affection.
I wouldn’t want a president who couldn’t break glass with his decibels. Lyndon Johnson was legendary in his temper tantrums, and no one could be more conspiratorial than tricky Dick.
If we are looking for the presidency to be occupied by saints, by individuals without flaws, we had better look outside the body politic in some other dimension because such people don’t exist in humankind.
* * *
“Would another four years of an Obama presidency be the best thing for America?”
The anonymous author doesn’t think so because “Obama is not up to the job,” and “Obama is lazy.”
Compare Obama’s vacations to George W. Bush and one wonders when Bush had time to be president. Of course, he had Chaney and Rumsfeld to mess things up for him.
* * *
“What this country needs is a president who is focused on the job more than on himself.”
It would appear that President Barak Obama, as was true of every president before him, has a sense of history.
This can be a problem. I would have hoped that Obama had tackled jobs before he tackled healthcare. History will indicate long after I am gone whether he was right or not.
* * *
“He doesn’t really understand the idea of work, real work, get your heart and soul into it work.”
As you have seen, giving this anonymous author the benefit of the doubt, I have difficulty understanding where his head is.
Work is no longer manual, no longer busy work, no longer sitting at your desk to the wee hours of the morning contemplating your navel. It is no longer measured in chronological but psychological time.
My best thinking has always been in the shower when God talks to me, never at the workplace, never associated with coming in early and leaving late, but thinking.
The presidency is a symbolic role as well as an orchestration of initiatives. Furrowed brows and weighty demeanors do not a thinking president make.
Leadership is about taking risks and mobilizing resources to certain ins, and hoping for a little luck along the way, because there are no guarantees things will come out in the end as planned.
Leadership is all about timing. And yes, leadership is enduring ignoramuses like this anonymous author and staying with the program.
* * *
Thursday, September 23, 2010
A THOUGHTFUL MAN PONDERS AN ETERNAL PROBLEM
A THOUGHTFUL MAN PONDERS AN ETERNAL PROBLEM
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 23, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
On the editorial page (17) of today’s Tampa Tribune is a commentary by Mitch Alborn, “Hard Times: When Will They End?”
It depresses me for a couple of reasons. It suggests everyone is living in misery, which is wrong. It suggests folks do not see the pain of others because they are lost in their own awful situation, which is also not true.
Most of all, though, I feel that to simply speak of, or worse to encourage an, “Oh, woe is me, I just can’t get ahead,” or “Life is just so miserable and nobody cares” attitude contribute nothing positive, but instead help to perpetuate a sense of failure, misery and victim hood.
Mostly, it just offers nothing, no explanation of why, no suggestions for fixing, no ideas on how to overcome problems at either the micro or macro level. What purpose, other than low cost, might the Tampa Tribune have had in printing this piece?
What do you think of that sort of presentation?
* * *
Here is something else I would like your thoughts on.
In the past when panhandlers appeared, I would get irritated and refuse to give them anything. As they have started up again in this economic downturn, I have taken a different approach.
One of the first ones to hit me up was a rather timid elderly guy (my age?) standing outside the post office here in town.
I gave him a couple bucks, and he thanked me. I then found I had forgotten something and had to go back inside. He thanked me again coming and going.
On the way out I saw a friend and we stopped for a few minutes to chat during which this same guy decided to leave the area. As he walked by he thanked me yet again.
In thinking the incident over, I decided that this man would rather have been doing just about anything other than standing there and begging. So, I went out and got a bunch of $1 bills, and put them in the car so I would be ready when stopped at an intersection with panhandlers.
I have concluded:
(1) Panhandlers would rather be doing something else and if they saw an opportunity they would be doing it.
(2) Annoying though they might be panhandlers are at least making some effort for their income. They will probably go away as the economy improves.
(3) They may be scamming in the sense that some are just guys who never work, but even at that, they are better than many of the slugs sitting at home on the couch waiting for the government check to arrive. They will not go away when the economy improves.
I suppose the economic argument about the “one broken pane of glass” has application to their activities. But I have some sympathy for them, and am not sure I go along with the idea of just stopping them. I guess the government will help them out, and that will be better because . . . well, quite frankly, I don’t know. I do think those who would stop them should lay out a plan of what they would do for them.
Take care,
Ted
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
The beauty of your note is that you care. You can identify with the less fortunate. You can feel their pain, not in a rhetorical sense, but in a real sense. I don’t know if you are religious man or not, but you exemplify the Christian ideal, of the man, who sees the beggar and gives him aid, only to later learn that it was the Christ.
We have all heard that story. It was an Epistle in the Roman Catholic Church that I heard as a boy. It is in other churches as well, and is not confined only to the Christian faith but to men of good will of other faiths, and no faith everywhere.
I no longer subscribe to The Tampa Tribune, but to The St. Petersburg Times. Incidentally, there is an article by Margaret Carlson of the Bloomberg News on the op-ed page, “Mr. Hope and Change can feel no one’s pain.”
Ms. Carlson is on the president's case about his disastrous town meeting in which he, to his credit, didn’t try to make like slick Willie (Bill Clinton), when Velma Hart challenged him to feel her pain, and the pain of those she served. It was apparent he could only address the question analytically, "I understand your frustration," not your pain.
Imagine if the president had one-tenth of your empathy. How the country would rally to his side!
* * *
Journalists dumb down to our lowest common denominator in order to connect with us as readers. They are not in the business of challenging us. They are in the business of selling newspapers.
Mitch Alborn offended you because you are exasperated by the mere appearance of such gross negativity, as rightly you should be.
On the other hand, I failed to see the point of Ms. Carlson’s article, as the president is not apparently temperamentally suited to waxing much less feeling empathetic. So, there is little point in him stepping out of character and being what he is not.
Bob Woodward has out a new book, “Obama’s War,” and if the reviews are correct, and the text true, the president is more concerned with his historical legacy than the disposition of people. President Herbert Hoover of my State of Iowa could never managed such a challenge. He may not have been the cause of the Great Depression, but he didn't know how to act decisively once it came. Could the same case be made for our current president?
If so, I would suggest further that President Barak Obama is not an aberrancy, but a cultural phenomenon of what we have become, a society out of touch with reality, a society driven to get whatever we can while the getting is good, and to worry more about making an impression than a difference.
In the same op-ed page is an article by Maureen Dowd, “Truly madly purely Jimmy.”
It is an article about our ex-president Jimmy Carter. It is not a complimentary piece, but alludes to this president's many faux pas. Yet, while doing so, Ms. Dowd mentions in passing all that President Carter has done for people about the globe since leaving office.
Yes, he misspeaks on occasion, but who doesn’t? Yes, he has been fodder for exploitative television comedians. That said he has also connected with the downtrodden across the world, and with leaders within the so-called “evil empire” without apologies. He doesn’t have to confess to feeling the pain of others. His life and work is testimony to the fact.
You are a reader and thinker as well as doer. It is a manifestation of your discerning intellect that you process and rethink what you have read to see how it computes with your experience and life. Alas, were more only engaged in such a noble process.
* * *
The mind is a happy playground. Your candor in expressing your suspicions about panhandlers, and then passing through that filter to a course of action illustrates what I call “Sequential Chronology of Interpersonal Interaction” (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, 1996, page 250), which is the basis for getting beyond our apprehensions.
Obviously, the panhandler could be scamming, but his gratitude suggested otherwise, and you acted on that basis. That took courage and resolve, and yes, humanity. Whether you are God fearing or atheist, we all know, “there go I but for the grace of circumstances.”
There is ample justification for you to have turned away, and said, “Get a job!” Something in that man’s expression connected with your feelings, and those feelings connected with your thinking, and that thinking led you to a decision to give him “a couple of bucks.”
In my piece on “Two Remarkable Books,” I reference Antonio Damasio and his book, “Descartes’ Error.”
Damasio has shown in his work that emotions and their biological underpinnings are involved in decision-making (both positively and negatively, and often unconsciously). This provides the scaffolding for the construction of what he calls, “social cognition.”
You have it, and used it, and will not regret it. Your gut intelligence prevailed, and it has been my experience it never fails.
In our culture, rational determiners often discourage empathy. Empathy connects us to the least of our brothers and sisters, as it makes the world better one person at a time. In that sense, we are the government.
Thank you for sharing, and always be well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 23, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
On the editorial page (17) of today’s Tampa Tribune is a commentary by Mitch Alborn, “Hard Times: When Will They End?”
It depresses me for a couple of reasons. It suggests everyone is living in misery, which is wrong. It suggests folks do not see the pain of others because they are lost in their own awful situation, which is also not true.
Most of all, though, I feel that to simply speak of, or worse to encourage an, “Oh, woe is me, I just can’t get ahead,” or “Life is just so miserable and nobody cares” attitude contribute nothing positive, but instead help to perpetuate a sense of failure, misery and victim hood.
Mostly, it just offers nothing, no explanation of why, no suggestions for fixing, no ideas on how to overcome problems at either the micro or macro level. What purpose, other than low cost, might the Tampa Tribune have had in printing this piece?
What do you think of that sort of presentation?
* * *
Here is something else I would like your thoughts on.
In the past when panhandlers appeared, I would get irritated and refuse to give them anything. As they have started up again in this economic downturn, I have taken a different approach.
One of the first ones to hit me up was a rather timid elderly guy (my age?) standing outside the post office here in town.
I gave him a couple bucks, and he thanked me. I then found I had forgotten something and had to go back inside. He thanked me again coming and going.
On the way out I saw a friend and we stopped for a few minutes to chat during which this same guy decided to leave the area. As he walked by he thanked me yet again.
In thinking the incident over, I decided that this man would rather have been doing just about anything other than standing there and begging. So, I went out and got a bunch of $1 bills, and put them in the car so I would be ready when stopped at an intersection with panhandlers.
I have concluded:
(1) Panhandlers would rather be doing something else and if they saw an opportunity they would be doing it.
(2) Annoying though they might be panhandlers are at least making some effort for their income. They will probably go away as the economy improves.
(3) They may be scamming in the sense that some are just guys who never work, but even at that, they are better than many of the slugs sitting at home on the couch waiting for the government check to arrive. They will not go away when the economy improves.
I suppose the economic argument about the “one broken pane of glass” has application to their activities. But I have some sympathy for them, and am not sure I go along with the idea of just stopping them. I guess the government will help them out, and that will be better because . . . well, quite frankly, I don’t know. I do think those who would stop them should lay out a plan of what they would do for them.
Take care,
Ted
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
The beauty of your note is that you care. You can identify with the less fortunate. You can feel their pain, not in a rhetorical sense, but in a real sense. I don’t know if you are religious man or not, but you exemplify the Christian ideal, of the man, who sees the beggar and gives him aid, only to later learn that it was the Christ.
We have all heard that story. It was an Epistle in the Roman Catholic Church that I heard as a boy. It is in other churches as well, and is not confined only to the Christian faith but to men of good will of other faiths, and no faith everywhere.
I no longer subscribe to The Tampa Tribune, but to The St. Petersburg Times. Incidentally, there is an article by Margaret Carlson of the Bloomberg News on the op-ed page, “Mr. Hope and Change can feel no one’s pain.”
Ms. Carlson is on the president's case about his disastrous town meeting in which he, to his credit, didn’t try to make like slick Willie (Bill Clinton), when Velma Hart challenged him to feel her pain, and the pain of those she served. It was apparent he could only address the question analytically, "I understand your frustration," not your pain.
Imagine if the president had one-tenth of your empathy. How the country would rally to his side!
* * *
Journalists dumb down to our lowest common denominator in order to connect with us as readers. They are not in the business of challenging us. They are in the business of selling newspapers.
Mitch Alborn offended you because you are exasperated by the mere appearance of such gross negativity, as rightly you should be.
On the other hand, I failed to see the point of Ms. Carlson’s article, as the president is not apparently temperamentally suited to waxing much less feeling empathetic. So, there is little point in him stepping out of character and being what he is not.
Bob Woodward has out a new book, “Obama’s War,” and if the reviews are correct, and the text true, the president is more concerned with his historical legacy than the disposition of people. President Herbert Hoover of my State of Iowa could never managed such a challenge. He may not have been the cause of the Great Depression, but he didn't know how to act decisively once it came. Could the same case be made for our current president?
If so, I would suggest further that President Barak Obama is not an aberrancy, but a cultural phenomenon of what we have become, a society out of touch with reality, a society driven to get whatever we can while the getting is good, and to worry more about making an impression than a difference.
In the same op-ed page is an article by Maureen Dowd, “Truly madly purely Jimmy.”
It is an article about our ex-president Jimmy Carter. It is not a complimentary piece, but alludes to this president's many faux pas. Yet, while doing so, Ms. Dowd mentions in passing all that President Carter has done for people about the globe since leaving office.
Yes, he misspeaks on occasion, but who doesn’t? Yes, he has been fodder for exploitative television comedians. That said he has also connected with the downtrodden across the world, and with leaders within the so-called “evil empire” without apologies. He doesn’t have to confess to feeling the pain of others. His life and work is testimony to the fact.
You are a reader and thinker as well as doer. It is a manifestation of your discerning intellect that you process and rethink what you have read to see how it computes with your experience and life. Alas, were more only engaged in such a noble process.
* * *
The mind is a happy playground. Your candor in expressing your suspicions about panhandlers, and then passing through that filter to a course of action illustrates what I call “Sequential Chronology of Interpersonal Interaction” (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, 1996, page 250), which is the basis for getting beyond our apprehensions.
Obviously, the panhandler could be scamming, but his gratitude suggested otherwise, and you acted on that basis. That took courage and resolve, and yes, humanity. Whether you are God fearing or atheist, we all know, “there go I but for the grace of circumstances.”
There is ample justification for you to have turned away, and said, “Get a job!” Something in that man’s expression connected with your feelings, and those feelings connected with your thinking, and that thinking led you to a decision to give him “a couple of bucks.”
In my piece on “Two Remarkable Books,” I reference Antonio Damasio and his book, “Descartes’ Error.”
Damasio has shown in his work that emotions and their biological underpinnings are involved in decision-making (both positively and negatively, and often unconsciously). This provides the scaffolding for the construction of what he calls, “social cognition.”
You have it, and used it, and will not regret it. Your gut intelligence prevailed, and it has been my experience it never fails.
In our culture, rational determiners often discourage empathy. Empathy connects us to the least of our brothers and sisters, as it makes the world better one person at a time. In that sense, we are the government.
Thank you for sharing, and always be well,
Jim
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
TWO REMARKABLE BOOKS!
TWO REMARKABLE BOOKS!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 23, 2010
* * *
AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON by Susan Jacoby (2008)
Susan Jacoby surveys the anti-intellectual landscape of America today from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of what she calls “junk thought.” She follows this by a penetrating look at “junk science” exposing the underbelly of what Americans take seriously as meaningful when it is not.
She finds a disdain for logic and evidence that defines a pervasive malaise fostered by mass media, religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, and the death of fair-minded public intellectuals on the far right and far left. In this intense polarity, extremes pervade with those in the middle all too ready to accept half-truths in their lazy apathy.
To a country of underachievers and proud of it, this book delivers a kick in the pants. Snap out of it, she says, getting it right matters.
* * *
When an author makes a wide swath through contemporary life and culture, and writes honestly about her experience and perceptively about her subject, she is likely to connect with the reader. Ms. Jacoby connected with me.
In introducing you to this author and this book, you may sense a common bond with what you have read on these pages from me over time.
Perhaps it is only a coincidence that Ms. Jacoby graduated from a Big Ten university (Michigan State) and I from Iowa, another Big Ten school. She was reared in a small town in Michigan, as I was in a small town in Iowa.
Her town was located in northeastern Michigan whereas my town was in northeastern Iowa. She matriculated at parochial grammar schools, as did I, and attended public high school; again, as did I.
She pursued journalism in a highly successful career with the Washington Post, also writing for a number of periodicals. Traveling a good part of the world in her work, as I did I in my work in chemistry and corporate management.
It was astounding to see that she read many of the same books that I read at various stages of my life.
Again, perhaps it is not a coincidence. Antonio Damasio may supply the reason.
* * *
DESCARTES’S ERROR: Emotion, Reason and The Human Brain (2006) by Antonio Damasio
Damasio uses the premise of Descartes famously proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am,” to show the error. He claims there is a close connection between thought and feeling in the brain, and consequently in the mind as it reveals itself.
The author manages to maintain a conversational tone to explain the complexities of this marvelous instrument while bringing the reader into contact with modern neuroscience of the emotions as well as cognitive aspects of brain function.
Damasio first challenged conventional wisdom in his earlier version of this book in 1994. There he argued that the connection between emotions and rationality heretofore thought as separate entities were connected.
In this book, he takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, the most famous that of Phineas P. Gage. In 1848, Gage was a respected leader of a railroad gang blasting a railroad through the West. One day a premature blast caused a seven-inch spike to rip through his left eye socket out the top of his head and to land some hundred feet beyond.
Gage was conscious, articulate and mobile, and subsequently seem to recover, except for his personality – it totally changed so that “Gage was no longer Gage.” The accident resulted in a flat affect, that is, no emotional range, yet in every other aspect he could think and behave. It led the author unto the journey that is this book.
* * *
THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, connection to DESCARTES’ ERROR
As you know, my laboratory is my empirical experience. This is the source of my ideas and the basis of my speculations. Obviously, I am not alone in this pursuit of truth, but it is clear in reading these two books that my truth may not be your truth, or your truth my truth. That should not be the problem that it often is.
Behavior often finds the individual retreating from reality seeking solace in an imagined world that denies reality, and is isolated from it by fear. Both authors attack this problem but from opposite perspectives: one from the content of neurobiology (Damasio) and the other from the context of culture (Jacoby).
* * *
Jacoby hits hard at junk thought and junk science being very specific in her proclamations as I have been with non-thinking thinking. She is concerned with the dumbing down aspects of society, as have I with the corporation. Where she differs with me is her direct and crushing assault on anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. She doesn’t hesitate to identify those in such categories as lowbrow, middlebrow and highbrow thinkers, and the impact of these modalities on American society.
* * *
Thus, Damasio says, as we develop from infancy to adulthood, the design of brain circuitries that represent our evolving body and its interactions with the world seems to depend on the activities in which the organism engages, and on the action of innate bioregulatory circuitries, as the latter react to such activities.
He sees the inadequacy of conceiving the brain, behavior and mind in terms of nature versus nurture, or genes versus experience, or indeed, as the arbitrary standard of such instruments as IQ tests. Neither our brains nor our minds are tabulae rasae when we are born; nor is there any guaranteeing that early promise will be sustained if not exercised.
In other words, intelligence is not a dormant entity, and that if you don’t use it you lose it. Likewise, people with similar experience, not surprising, may come to similar conclusions about the world they observe in the context of those observations. Perhaps that is why Jacoby’s book resonates with me, and what I have been attempting to say these many years from an entirely different perspective, but in essence coming to similar conclusions.
The structure4 and function of the brain involves complex processes. Damasio shows how the simple reading of these words (here) forms a topographical map that is an organized representation of what is called a disposition that become images appearing in the mind as the brain processes them indirectly in convoluted misdirectional ways.
The point, then, is that images are the main content of our thoughts, regardless of the sensory modality in which they are generated. Hidden behind those images there are processes that guide those images in time and space. They are “faint,” as David Hume put it, in comparison to the lively images generated by stimuli from outside the brain. But they are images nonetheless.
Reading develops the musculature of the thinking athlete. It is an intimate, and yes, complex relationship of the mind with the word, an exercise of intimacy between the author and the reader expanding consciousness and growing awareness of another point of view, a point of view that may connect with yours in certain ways to cause you to rethink yours.
* * *
--
Posted By The Peripatetic Philosopher to The Peripatetic Philosopher at 9/22/2010 08:39:00 PM
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 23, 2010
* * *
AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON by Susan Jacoby (2008)
Susan Jacoby surveys the anti-intellectual landscape of America today from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of what she calls “junk thought.” She follows this by a penetrating look at “junk science” exposing the underbelly of what Americans take seriously as meaningful when it is not.
She finds a disdain for logic and evidence that defines a pervasive malaise fostered by mass media, religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, and the death of fair-minded public intellectuals on the far right and far left. In this intense polarity, extremes pervade with those in the middle all too ready to accept half-truths in their lazy apathy.
To a country of underachievers and proud of it, this book delivers a kick in the pants. Snap out of it, she says, getting it right matters.
* * *
When an author makes a wide swath through contemporary life and culture, and writes honestly about her experience and perceptively about her subject, she is likely to connect with the reader. Ms. Jacoby connected with me.
In introducing you to this author and this book, you may sense a common bond with what you have read on these pages from me over time.
Perhaps it is only a coincidence that Ms. Jacoby graduated from a Big Ten university (Michigan State) and I from Iowa, another Big Ten school. She was reared in a small town in Michigan, as I was in a small town in Iowa.
Her town was located in northeastern Michigan whereas my town was in northeastern Iowa. She matriculated at parochial grammar schools, as did I, and attended public high school; again, as did I.
She pursued journalism in a highly successful career with the Washington Post, also writing for a number of periodicals. Traveling a good part of the world in her work, as I did I in my work in chemistry and corporate management.
It was astounding to see that she read many of the same books that I read at various stages of my life.
Again, perhaps it is not a coincidence. Antonio Damasio may supply the reason.
* * *
DESCARTES’S ERROR: Emotion, Reason and The Human Brain (2006) by Antonio Damasio
Damasio uses the premise of Descartes famously proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am,” to show the error. He claims there is a close connection between thought and feeling in the brain, and consequently in the mind as it reveals itself.
The author manages to maintain a conversational tone to explain the complexities of this marvelous instrument while bringing the reader into contact with modern neuroscience of the emotions as well as cognitive aspects of brain function.
Damasio first challenged conventional wisdom in his earlier version of this book in 1994. There he argued that the connection between emotions and rationality heretofore thought as separate entities were connected.
In this book, he takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, the most famous that of Phineas P. Gage. In 1848, Gage was a respected leader of a railroad gang blasting a railroad through the West. One day a premature blast caused a seven-inch spike to rip through his left eye socket out the top of his head and to land some hundred feet beyond.
Gage was conscious, articulate and mobile, and subsequently seem to recover, except for his personality – it totally changed so that “Gage was no longer Gage.” The accident resulted in a flat affect, that is, no emotional range, yet in every other aspect he could think and behave. It led the author unto the journey that is this book.
* * *
THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, connection to DESCARTES’ ERROR
As you know, my laboratory is my empirical experience. This is the source of my ideas and the basis of my speculations. Obviously, I am not alone in this pursuit of truth, but it is clear in reading these two books that my truth may not be your truth, or your truth my truth. That should not be the problem that it often is.
Behavior often finds the individual retreating from reality seeking solace in an imagined world that denies reality, and is isolated from it by fear. Both authors attack this problem but from opposite perspectives: one from the content of neurobiology (Damasio) and the other from the context of culture (Jacoby).
* * *
Jacoby hits hard at junk thought and junk science being very specific in her proclamations as I have been with non-thinking thinking. She is concerned with the dumbing down aspects of society, as have I with the corporation. Where she differs with me is her direct and crushing assault on anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. She doesn’t hesitate to identify those in such categories as lowbrow, middlebrow and highbrow thinkers, and the impact of these modalities on American society.
* * *
Thus, Damasio says, as we develop from infancy to adulthood, the design of brain circuitries that represent our evolving body and its interactions with the world seems to depend on the activities in which the organism engages, and on the action of innate bioregulatory circuitries, as the latter react to such activities.
He sees the inadequacy of conceiving the brain, behavior and mind in terms of nature versus nurture, or genes versus experience, or indeed, as the arbitrary standard of such instruments as IQ tests. Neither our brains nor our minds are tabulae rasae when we are born; nor is there any guaranteeing that early promise will be sustained if not exercised.
In other words, intelligence is not a dormant entity, and that if you don’t use it you lose it. Likewise, people with similar experience, not surprising, may come to similar conclusions about the world they observe in the context of those observations. Perhaps that is why Jacoby’s book resonates with me, and what I have been attempting to say these many years from an entirely different perspective, but in essence coming to similar conclusions.
The structure4 and function of the brain involves complex processes. Damasio shows how the simple reading of these words (here) forms a topographical map that is an organized representation of what is called a disposition that become images appearing in the mind as the brain processes them indirectly in convoluted misdirectional ways.
The point, then, is that images are the main content of our thoughts, regardless of the sensory modality in which they are generated. Hidden behind those images there are processes that guide those images in time and space. They are “faint,” as David Hume put it, in comparison to the lively images generated by stimuli from outside the brain. But they are images nonetheless.
Reading develops the musculature of the thinking athlete. It is an intimate, and yes, complex relationship of the mind with the word, an exercise of intimacy between the author and the reader expanding consciousness and growing awareness of another point of view, a point of view that may connect with yours in certain ways to cause you to rethink yours.
* * *
--
Posted By The Peripatetic Philosopher to The Peripatetic Philosopher at 9/22/2010 08:39:00 PM
Friday, September 03, 2010
"THE NEW DEAL" -- THREE QUARTERS OF A CENTURY LATER!
"THE NEW DEAL" – THREE QUARTERS OF A CENTURY LATER!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 3, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
We were only babies in the Great Depression. It seems to me that if FDR hadn’t stimulated the nation’s economy with a jobs program my dad and others like him would have been unemployed for a long, long time.
The Works Project Administration (WPA) in 1933 gave my dad a job and economic relief from the Great Depression. He didn’t have to wait until 1941 when America entered WWII.
No doubt World War II helped the economy. But people like my parents needed work in 1933. FDR provided it with the WPA.
Eight years would have been a long time to stand in bread lines without a job waiting for the economy to fix itself!
Have I missed something here in the analysis of past history? Does history repeat itself?
Nothing is ever exactly the same. I don’t think we can make judgments of where we were to where we are now.
It’s likely we won’t ever know how Obama’s stimulus package might have worked because the public is impatient. People don’t want to wait beyond 18 months to see results. They want immediate gratification.
Do people want us to return to the policies that got us into this economic fix?
I enjoy your writing a lot but sometimes you stimulate me to respond!
A Clintonian
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Dear Clintonian,
It is seventy-seven years since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) deserted his own aristocratic class and launched a radical approach to governance.
FDR called it "The New Deal,” and he ran into trouble almost immediately with the Supreme Court with his National Recovery Act (NRC).
The NRC was the broad umbrella under which the WPA and several others programs were initiated.
FDR boldly abandoned the policy of our own Iowa president, Herbert Hoover, our only president, who thought the economy would correct itself, and that government interference was the last thing that was necessary.
FDR had a 100-day moratorium on banks, and was not afraid to try anything his brain trusts came up with. The country was papered with slogans, brazen colored posters, archival photographs, and reproductions of art. This was all designed to celebrate a wide-ranging smorgasbord of programs that was to become, “The New Deal.”
If you read a biography of FDR, you will find he was not the cerebral type that President Obama is. Nor was he a president obsessed with his place in history.
He had one focus, get the economy going. A simple man, said to have a second rate mind but a first rate personality, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs was his attack strategy.
He not only established the WPA, but also the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Unemployment was greater than twenty-five (25) percent. So, he did everything he could to get millions of unemployed able bodied men and women to build roads, bridges, stadiums, parks, playgrounds, schools, and yes, the Hoover Dam, a monument to his drive and devotion.
FDR also created the Social Security System, which was meant to provide something of a safety net for those unable to save for their golden years.
My da worked on the WPA, too, and helped to build Riverview Stadium and Eagle Point Park, among other projects in our hometown. So, I feel something of the poignancy of your words. I come from the same class and circumstances.
* * *
Where I respectfully differ with you, and why I think Obama’s critics have been more than kind, is that as I have said in a recent missive, he missed his opportunity, and now it is gone.
Was it because of the people he surrounds himself, people who had him charging off on tangents when his primary focus should have been jobs? I don’t know.
Healthcare, finance reform, and the surge in the Afghanistan War replaced jobs as the focus with the economy taking a backseat.
Consider this: we are still very much in a recession while Europe is doing very well, thank you very much.
If it sounds as if I am angry, you get a sense of my disappointment. I voted for Obama and expected him to set realistic priorities putting the will of the people first instead of following his own agenda.
I suspect FDR’s eyes would glass over with incomprehension listening to Obama the way they did when he had a conversation with Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
FDR kept his ducks in a row, but historians tell us his economic impact was more psychic than real before the war. Be that as it may, you could never convince my da that was true, and I doubt seriously if you could your father as well.
Leadership is primarily symbolic and ordinary men and women felt FDR was doing something for them, that they counted for something! He didn't do it with words. He did it with actions, sometimes ineffectively but always with deep appreciation and affection of the intended. Small wonder he was elected president four times!
Had WWII not come along, which was his moment, history might have judged him quite differently.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 3, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
We were only babies in the Great Depression. It seems to me that if FDR hadn’t stimulated the nation’s economy with a jobs program my dad and others like him would have been unemployed for a long, long time.
The Works Project Administration (WPA) in 1933 gave my dad a job and economic relief from the Great Depression. He didn’t have to wait until 1941 when America entered WWII.
No doubt World War II helped the economy. But people like my parents needed work in 1933. FDR provided it with the WPA.
Eight years would have been a long time to stand in bread lines without a job waiting for the economy to fix itself!
Have I missed something here in the analysis of past history? Does history repeat itself?
Nothing is ever exactly the same. I don’t think we can make judgments of where we were to where we are now.
It’s likely we won’t ever know how Obama’s stimulus package might have worked because the public is impatient. People don’t want to wait beyond 18 months to see results. They want immediate gratification.
Do people want us to return to the policies that got us into this economic fix?
I enjoy your writing a lot but sometimes you stimulate me to respond!
A Clintonian
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Dear Clintonian,
It is seventy-seven years since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) deserted his own aristocratic class and launched a radical approach to governance.
FDR called it "The New Deal,” and he ran into trouble almost immediately with the Supreme Court with his National Recovery Act (NRC).
The NRC was the broad umbrella under which the WPA and several others programs were initiated.
FDR boldly abandoned the policy of our own Iowa president, Herbert Hoover, our only president, who thought the economy would correct itself, and that government interference was the last thing that was necessary.
FDR had a 100-day moratorium on banks, and was not afraid to try anything his brain trusts came up with. The country was papered with slogans, brazen colored posters, archival photographs, and reproductions of art. This was all designed to celebrate a wide-ranging smorgasbord of programs that was to become, “The New Deal.”
If you read a biography of FDR, you will find he was not the cerebral type that President Obama is. Nor was he a president obsessed with his place in history.
He had one focus, get the economy going. A simple man, said to have a second rate mind but a first rate personality, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs was his attack strategy.
He not only established the WPA, but also the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Unemployment was greater than twenty-five (25) percent. So, he did everything he could to get millions of unemployed able bodied men and women to build roads, bridges, stadiums, parks, playgrounds, schools, and yes, the Hoover Dam, a monument to his drive and devotion.
FDR also created the Social Security System, which was meant to provide something of a safety net for those unable to save for their golden years.
My da worked on the WPA, too, and helped to build Riverview Stadium and Eagle Point Park, among other projects in our hometown. So, I feel something of the poignancy of your words. I come from the same class and circumstances.
* * *
Where I respectfully differ with you, and why I think Obama’s critics have been more than kind, is that as I have said in a recent missive, he missed his opportunity, and now it is gone.
Was it because of the people he surrounds himself, people who had him charging off on tangents when his primary focus should have been jobs? I don’t know.
Healthcare, finance reform, and the surge in the Afghanistan War replaced jobs as the focus with the economy taking a backseat.
Consider this: we are still very much in a recession while Europe is doing very well, thank you very much.
If it sounds as if I am angry, you get a sense of my disappointment. I voted for Obama and expected him to set realistic priorities putting the will of the people first instead of following his own agenda.
I suspect FDR’s eyes would glass over with incomprehension listening to Obama the way they did when he had a conversation with Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
FDR kept his ducks in a row, but historians tell us his economic impact was more psychic than real before the war. Be that as it may, you could never convince my da that was true, and I doubt seriously if you could your father as well.
Leadership is primarily symbolic and ordinary men and women felt FDR was doing something for them, that they counted for something! He didn't do it with words. He did it with actions, sometimes ineffectively but always with deep appreciation and affection of the intended. Small wonder he was elected president four times!
Had WWII not come along, which was his moment, history might have judged him quite differently.
Be always well,
Jim
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
OUT OF ORDER! MORE THAN A MILITARY PROBLEM -- A RESPONSE
OUT OF ORDER! MORE THAN A MILITARY PROBLEM – A RESPONSE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 1, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
Hope you are well.
We have what exists today because we deserve it. We are moving more and more to a society, a culture that bases important electoral decisions on sound bites, platitudes and unfounded hyperbole.
As a result we will always chose the substance-less comedian. If Robin Williams was born twenty years later he could have been President. Slick, mean and frequent advertising trumps performance and track record. If Paul Simon were born forty years later he never would have been elected.
Michael,
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Michael,
Your response intrigues me. So, I get ready as I launch into a word journey.
Words transform history and are more powerful than bullets. It is interesting that you should mention two wordsmiths, Robin Williams and Paul Simon, relative to this missive (OUT OF ORDER: The Changing Climate of Authority and Its Consequences, August 26, 2010). I've spent some time ruminating over this.
* * *
“Good Morning, Vietnam” was a signature performance of Robin Williams. Although Mitch Markowitz wrote the film, most of the dialogue of Williams as a disc jockey was improvised. Words in that film pricked the absurdity of Vietnam with humor, not with pathos as in the case "Apocalypse Now" (1979) starring Marlon Brando.
A few years ago, I was in Denver watching John Stewart on cable with my nephew. I had never heard of Stewart but was familiar with his guests, Robin Williams and Joe Bidden. The ad-libs of Williams were like eclectic firecrackers. He demonstrated knowledge on a wide range of subjects. It was an astonishing performance. With that quirky smile of his, words rolled off his lips without effort. As I recall, Bidden mainly smiled.
Paul Simon, ten years senior to Williams, is more of my generation. I remember in 1968 British South Africans returning from New York to South Africa humming “Mrs. Robinson” after seeing "The Graduate."
Simon’s “Graceland,” nearly a score of years later, was about South Africa apartheid (not Elvis Presley’s home).
"Graceland" is said to have turned the tide on that policy. Be that as it may, in 1990, four years after the song was published, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Then in 1994, he led a multi-racial democracy to a new South Africa government. Apartheid was gone! Imagine that! Could words in a song be that explosive? I wonder.
Two artists, connoisseurs of words, have managed to punch holes in the fabric of unpopular societal movements without guns or armies.
* * *
Obviously, Colonel Mathhew Moten had other intentions in his “Out of Order” article in FOREIGN AFFAIRS (September/October 2010). His focus was on strengthening political-military relationships. You have managed to widen my sense of this. It is all about words.
* * *
"OUTSIDER" AND "INSIDER" AND OTHER MEANINGLESS WORDS
Outsider Rick Scott gained the Republican nomination for governor of Florida by beating the heir apparent Bill McCollum, the “insider” politician. He did it by spending $50 million.
Scott the “outsider” relied almost totally on a campaign of television ads with few boots-on-the-ground, unconventional to say the least. He linked McCollum to former state GOP leader, Jim Greer, who was “indicted" for "fraud,” and to McCollum’s unpopular stand on “immigration.”
Words in quotation marks are charged words that actually are relatively meaningless in the context in which they are used. Not to worry, an emotional electorate thrives on meaningless words.
McCollum had the massive Republican political machine working for him against Scott, and it, too, lost in the fray. Republicans were stuck in convention, in business as usual, and failed to realize the ground rules had changed.
Was it money that won for Scott? Was it his capacity to see where Floridians were and wanted to go? I think it was a combination of both. There is another factor.
Elections have become beauty contests with smiling baldheaded Scott being seen as more attractive than whining, wimpy McCollum. Scott rolled with the punches on television while McCollum seemed punch drunk from them. Viewers don't miss this.
* * *
Were Robin Williams and Paul Simon politicians I think we would be surprised by how they would fare. There is something manic in the humor of Williams, while Simon seems to shuffle along on a Valium carpet. Both performers hit the conscious centers of the brain but with different medicine. Different medicines are required at different times in society.
Aaron David Miller touches on this in the Sunday edition of the St. Petersburg Times (August 22, 2010). He writes:
“Woody Allen got it wrong. Ninety percent of success in life isn’t showing up; it’s showing up at the right time and knowing what to do once you get there.”
Miller sees President Barak Obama missing his moment, and America’s by attempting to become a “great” president by passing important legislation, such as healthcare reform, finance regulation, and then playing tough with the military.
* * *
The columnist sees it is hard for President Obama to step out of his character. It is hard for us all to step out of our own skin and be what we are not.
Obama is a cerebral president in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson with some of the cutting charm of John F. Kennedy. If you believe historians, these men were great but not necessarily great presidents.
Great presidents, Miller writes, were the courageous (and lucky) George Washington, the cerebral (and courageous) Abraham Lincoln, and the pragmatic (and sociable) Franklin D. Roosevelt. Circumstances had much to do with their greatness as well.
According to Miller, three presidents he sees as “near great” capitalized on succeeding weak presidents: Andrew Jackson (my favorite) succeeded John Quincy Adams; Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy; and Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter.
These “near great” presidents seized the moment and understood where America was and where it wanted to go and took the country there. This is a pretty good definition of LEADERSHIP.
* * *
LEADERSHIP REVOLVES AROUND WORDS
“Professionalism,” which is a word Colonel Moten is fond of using, is a word that bothers me. Few of us are multitasked oriented. We find safety in being “professional.” Indeed, we have scores of disciplines in psychology to explain behavior, yet common behavior remains a mystery.
We have found refuge in “words,” words without meaning that bounce off our psyches like raindrops. Great presidents have known the right words were secret weapons, as have leaders throughout time.
* * *
Leadership involves action but revolves around words, words with meaning in the high octane numbers, words with the purity of explosives. Ordinary leaders shy away from such words because they fear the chaos. Chaos leads to inevitable, irrefutable, incontrovertible change. You can never put the words back into the tube.
* * *
Our citadels of learning know this. They shy away from such words because they have a vested interest in things, as they are: enrollments, endowments, tenure and all the rest.
My sense is when thinking is too pure too unvarnished it may in fact blow up in our collective faces. Purity has its dangers.
Many years ago when I worked for Nalco Chemical Company, we had a new chemical plant in Freeport Texas. It blew up shortly after it went on line. The plant was built to the specifications of a radical new chemical process to make tetraethyl and tetra methyl lead then used as catalysts to produce high-octane gasoline. Nalco, a small but successful specialty chemical company, was betting its future on this new technology. Overnight, those aspirations were reduced to melting steel and pungent toxic fumes.
A comprehensive study was made of the failure. It turned out that the process was too pure. I have never forgotten that word “pure” in association with “spontaneous combustion.”
As Rick Scott demonstrated in his campaign a little dirt can go a long way. Our great and near great presidents were good at throwing dirt, and no one better than Thomas Jefferson. It takes luck to succeed with the public but it helps, or at least it is believed that it helps, if you hedge your bet by sullying the reputation of your opponent. That said I have a wider view.
* * *
THE PRICE OF HAVING TOO MUCH, TOO MANY, TOO SOON
Sometimes I wonder if technology changes society or if society changes technology because change seems predicated on boredom. We want relief from the doldrums. We talk of a “clash of cultures,” or some other sophisticated nonsense because we have time on our hands in busyness, which is boring, and don’t have enough to do that is consequential.
* * *
Man is a curious being, but forever lives in a veritable conundrum. He likes the comfort and security of things as they are, but must constantly fiddle with them because of his nervous temperament to change them, and thus by changing them changes himself to some degree, and everything around him. He never thinks of the consequences of his fiddling. That would be boring. Fiddling is an end in itself.
* * *
For the past hundred years or so, machines have taken over what man had done for himself the previous more than a thousand years. This has left him with time on his hands. But like the nervous chicken that he is, cackling away at shadows as T. S. Eliot’s “hollow man," he hasn't risen to his numerator but sunk instead to his common denominator.
Author William Livingston calls this shadow “cognitive bias.”
Talk radio with the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh know the power of this bias. It increases entropy as it reduces transparency to a shadow.
Grass root movements depend on this bias as they exploit prejudice, fixed misconceptions, favoritism, and partialities. Livingston writes in DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010) “Not only does cognitive bias operate to displace information from its axis of truth, it is the basis of delusions about goals and consequences.”
We are currently in the throes of false beliefs, hallucinations, and misperceptions about our own President of the United States. But this is not new. It is the necessary charge on minds of those that are attracted to the herd, as Eric Hoffer so carefully illustrates in his book, THE TRUE BELIEVER (1954).
* * *
WE ARE SHAPED BY “THE WORD” and THE RECENT PAST
It has been said that our character is made by the decades that immediately preceded our birth. Think of that a moment. Think of when you were born and what you believe to be true.
To give you a respite from this personal angst consider the ordeal of Shakespeare in the same context. He has fascinated me mainly because of the impact he has had not only on us more than four hundred years later, but on his own time.
Shakespeare was born in 1564 and was influenced by the Manichean clash of The Renaissance and The Reformation. His art became a distillation of this chemistry.
The world he describes is one of political confusion, religious bewilderment and personal danger. It was a time not unlike our own. There is something of Erasmus and Luther in Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies.
More importantly, like Robin Williams and Paul Simon, his work revolves around the "rise of the Word." It may seem blasphemy to put these men in the company of Shakespeare, but remember Shakespeare wrote in the vernacular of the common man and was the common man’s principle entertainer.
* * *
Shakespeare with his conceptual depth, iconoclasm and reservoir of ancient beliefs, showed the "Word” was to his mind “God." Thus he unwittingly invented psychology, as I challenge anyone to show me a better psychologist than he reveals in his plays. He brought to the surface a new ethos of conscience and consciousness, a self-scrutiny and introspection that has survived to our day.
Imagine the times and then think of them in terms of our own. In Shakespeare’s time, Roman Catholicism was in a state of collapse in a climate of corruption with dogmatic beliefs shattered in the wake of the passionate intensity of Luther.
It was a time of tragedy and self-disgust. Shakespeare took hold of history and rumor and turned it into art and a new psychology, as Freud would do centuries later with the collapse of Victorian sensibilities.
Morality is in the mind of the times.
Morality was then provoked by the rush of the uncertainties of the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of capitalism, the hysteria of a new age, and the introduction of World War.
Peter Gay covers this period in THE CULTIVATION OF HATRED: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud (Volume III, 1993). It is mention here because many of us, now old, had parents born during this climatic change, which was the second decade of the twentieth century. .
* * *
To not put not to fine a point on this, decades before I was born society was coming out of the tumultuous First World War and the Roaring (irresponsible) Twenties to give birth to The Great Depression. The Great Depression has had considerable impact on my generation, and consequently and subsequently on how we have reared our children.
As was the case with Shakespeare, we are products of our times. The ways we look at things are manifested in our attitudes and behavior, our writing, wondering, and creative verve.
Shakespeare is more like us than we might think. For example, he was not considered to possess the “genius” of say, Christopher Marlowe.
Marlowe was constantly reminded of his “potential,” of his specialness. He was said to have been hedonistic, self-indulgent, atheistic, adventuresome, cynical, alas, a self-destructive personality. He displayed the reckless abandon of a type “A” personality that has become familiar to us today.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, was a family man, something of plodder with a consuming drive to give life to his demons through art. There is no doubt he had demons. He was a practicing Protestant and closet Catholic. He stayed essentially below the political radar in his art. It reminds me of Rod Serling who did it in the 1960s with his televised “The Twilight Zone.”
There were few great painters or inventors in Shakespeare’s time. There were, however, great philosophers and theologians as “the Word” reign supreme.
* * *
FAST FORWARD TO TODAY
Robin Williams and Paul Simon have used language to elevate thought while it has since been essentially bastardized and made toxic driving the human spirit down to its common denominator where it can be exploited at whim. .
Ironically, the Bible, the Torah and the Koran manage to thrive in this toxic climate.
Human reflection, however, is now forced through the prism of science, and science is on safe ground as long as it deals honestly with Mother Nature. Yet some treat science like it was a dogmatic religion. There is a world that science cannot touch and that is the world of the spirit where “the Word” resides. Science moves beyond its boundaries when it denies the human spirit that science cannot see and cannot measure, but which nonetheless exists beyond ontic space, or in the imagination. It is why Genesis has always had a special appeal to me.
NIHLISM OR THE AGE OF SELF-HATE
Take comfort, Michael, in what you know, believe and value because they make you, you.
Too many people today are defined by what they have, or what electronic device they hold in their hands.
As I’ve said at the beginning of this missive, we are products of the decades that preceded our birth. Young people today were born before terrible World War Two, before the insanity of the Holocaust, before the dropping of the atomic bomb, and before the collapse and redefining of civilizations across the globe arbitrarily by the victors. Everything that has transpired since 1945 is a product of this disposition.
Much of life is a reaction rather than an action to circumstances. Before I was born, there was the First World War with the collapse of three empires almost instantaneously as if they had never existed. Europe spun on a dime.
Science and technology entered the vacuum and created the weapons of the next war, and the wars thereafter. Everyone alive today has lived in this climate of uncertainty since birth. Traditional anchors have been fragmented if not shattered such as family, church, school, company and country. Everything is in flux. Seemingly, the only thing incontrovertible is the discoveries of science.
Yet, science cannot explain beliefs, feelings, and common practices, but it can claim the immortal soul is false, if it cannot prove it.
Co-discoverer of “the double helix”, the structure of DNA, Francis Crick, has tried with his book, THE ASTONISHING HYPOTHESIS: THE SCIENFIC SEARCH FOR THE SOUL (1994). He was pursuing the idea that the soul exists in some fold of our brain. He didn’t find it.
Let us say for argument's sake that the soul exists only in our mind. If so, does that make the soul any less real in our behavior?
* * *
I must confess “Word” keep a hold on my sanity. They are not offered to win approval or a following. I am not on a crusade other then to persuade people to think, to process what they have to what they are, and to determine, on balance, if it is what they desire.
Each of us must forage our way through the muck of our times, alone, with all kinds of competing distractions meant to disengage us from self-awareness, self-acceptance and self-direction.
“Individualism” has been preached, yet now we are entering the “Age of the Individual,” not the contrived sense of the individual of existentialism, but the individual with the identity and authenticity capable of resisting the pressures to be a tool of technology or any other distracting phenomenon.
Man will establish the verticality of reality through human perception without the multi-filters of media and culture.
* * *
We are leaving the “Age of Nihilism” and despair where all passion is spent. The signs, as Pitrim Sorokin reminded us in THE CRISIS OF OUR AGE (1941), are evidence of the passing of the Sensate culture into an Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow.
Sorokin could see the waning of passion and the rising of the artificial and cosmetic to dominate human preoccupation.
We see this in vigara, pornography, noise as music, blasphemy as art, misery as literature, history as revisionism, cultural evolution as psychology, sociology and anthropology, and analytic philosophy as the answer to “Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land,” which, incidentally, was the title of one of my books I could never find a publisher.
Read a biography of Shakespeare and you will see how he soared above his times while being an essential part of them. He worked hard, harder than any of his artistic contemporaries, and we have his art today to show for it.
* * *
New York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote of our mental flabbiness as imperiling our national fabric. My readers outside the United States tell me this is endemic to their societies as well. Brooks concludes: “To use a fancy word, there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate . . . Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.”
Brooks could make a similar charge to people in general, but he is too polite to infer such a possibility. I am not.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 1, 2010
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
Hope you are well.
We have what exists today because we deserve it. We are moving more and more to a society, a culture that bases important electoral decisions on sound bites, platitudes and unfounded hyperbole.
As a result we will always chose the substance-less comedian. If Robin Williams was born twenty years later he could have been President. Slick, mean and frequent advertising trumps performance and track record. If Paul Simon were born forty years later he never would have been elected.
Michael,
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Michael,
Your response intrigues me. So, I get ready as I launch into a word journey.
Words transform history and are more powerful than bullets. It is interesting that you should mention two wordsmiths, Robin Williams and Paul Simon, relative to this missive (OUT OF ORDER: The Changing Climate of Authority and Its Consequences, August 26, 2010). I've spent some time ruminating over this.
* * *
“Good Morning, Vietnam” was a signature performance of Robin Williams. Although Mitch Markowitz wrote the film, most of the dialogue of Williams as a disc jockey was improvised. Words in that film pricked the absurdity of Vietnam with humor, not with pathos as in the case "Apocalypse Now" (1979) starring Marlon Brando.
A few years ago, I was in Denver watching John Stewart on cable with my nephew. I had never heard of Stewart but was familiar with his guests, Robin Williams and Joe Bidden. The ad-libs of Williams were like eclectic firecrackers. He demonstrated knowledge on a wide range of subjects. It was an astonishing performance. With that quirky smile of his, words rolled off his lips without effort. As I recall, Bidden mainly smiled.
Paul Simon, ten years senior to Williams, is more of my generation. I remember in 1968 British South Africans returning from New York to South Africa humming “Mrs. Robinson” after seeing "The Graduate."
Simon’s “Graceland,” nearly a score of years later, was about South Africa apartheid (not Elvis Presley’s home).
"Graceland" is said to have turned the tide on that policy. Be that as it may, in 1990, four years after the song was published, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Then in 1994, he led a multi-racial democracy to a new South Africa government. Apartheid was gone! Imagine that! Could words in a song be that explosive? I wonder.
Two artists, connoisseurs of words, have managed to punch holes in the fabric of unpopular societal movements without guns or armies.
* * *
Obviously, Colonel Mathhew Moten had other intentions in his “Out of Order” article in FOREIGN AFFAIRS (September/October 2010). His focus was on strengthening political-military relationships. You have managed to widen my sense of this. It is all about words.
* * *
"OUTSIDER" AND "INSIDER" AND OTHER MEANINGLESS WORDS
Outsider Rick Scott gained the Republican nomination for governor of Florida by beating the heir apparent Bill McCollum, the “insider” politician. He did it by spending $50 million.
Scott the “outsider” relied almost totally on a campaign of television ads with few boots-on-the-ground, unconventional to say the least. He linked McCollum to former state GOP leader, Jim Greer, who was “indicted" for "fraud,” and to McCollum’s unpopular stand on “immigration.”
Words in quotation marks are charged words that actually are relatively meaningless in the context in which they are used. Not to worry, an emotional electorate thrives on meaningless words.
McCollum had the massive Republican political machine working for him against Scott, and it, too, lost in the fray. Republicans were stuck in convention, in business as usual, and failed to realize the ground rules had changed.
Was it money that won for Scott? Was it his capacity to see where Floridians were and wanted to go? I think it was a combination of both. There is another factor.
Elections have become beauty contests with smiling baldheaded Scott being seen as more attractive than whining, wimpy McCollum. Scott rolled with the punches on television while McCollum seemed punch drunk from them. Viewers don't miss this.
* * *
Were Robin Williams and Paul Simon politicians I think we would be surprised by how they would fare. There is something manic in the humor of Williams, while Simon seems to shuffle along on a Valium carpet. Both performers hit the conscious centers of the brain but with different medicine. Different medicines are required at different times in society.
Aaron David Miller touches on this in the Sunday edition of the St. Petersburg Times (August 22, 2010). He writes:
“Woody Allen got it wrong. Ninety percent of success in life isn’t showing up; it’s showing up at the right time and knowing what to do once you get there.”
Miller sees President Barak Obama missing his moment, and America’s by attempting to become a “great” president by passing important legislation, such as healthcare reform, finance regulation, and then playing tough with the military.
* * *
The columnist sees it is hard for President Obama to step out of his character. It is hard for us all to step out of our own skin and be what we are not.
Obama is a cerebral president in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson with some of the cutting charm of John F. Kennedy. If you believe historians, these men were great but not necessarily great presidents.
Great presidents, Miller writes, were the courageous (and lucky) George Washington, the cerebral (and courageous) Abraham Lincoln, and the pragmatic (and sociable) Franklin D. Roosevelt. Circumstances had much to do with their greatness as well.
According to Miller, three presidents he sees as “near great” capitalized on succeeding weak presidents: Andrew Jackson (my favorite) succeeded John Quincy Adams; Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy; and Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter.
These “near great” presidents seized the moment and understood where America was and where it wanted to go and took the country there. This is a pretty good definition of LEADERSHIP.
* * *
LEADERSHIP REVOLVES AROUND WORDS
“Professionalism,” which is a word Colonel Moten is fond of using, is a word that bothers me. Few of us are multitasked oriented. We find safety in being “professional.” Indeed, we have scores of disciplines in psychology to explain behavior, yet common behavior remains a mystery.
We have found refuge in “words,” words without meaning that bounce off our psyches like raindrops. Great presidents have known the right words were secret weapons, as have leaders throughout time.
* * *
Leadership involves action but revolves around words, words with meaning in the high octane numbers, words with the purity of explosives. Ordinary leaders shy away from such words because they fear the chaos. Chaos leads to inevitable, irrefutable, incontrovertible change. You can never put the words back into the tube.
* * *
Our citadels of learning know this. They shy away from such words because they have a vested interest in things, as they are: enrollments, endowments, tenure and all the rest.
My sense is when thinking is too pure too unvarnished it may in fact blow up in our collective faces. Purity has its dangers.
Many years ago when I worked for Nalco Chemical Company, we had a new chemical plant in Freeport Texas. It blew up shortly after it went on line. The plant was built to the specifications of a radical new chemical process to make tetraethyl and tetra methyl lead then used as catalysts to produce high-octane gasoline. Nalco, a small but successful specialty chemical company, was betting its future on this new technology. Overnight, those aspirations were reduced to melting steel and pungent toxic fumes.
A comprehensive study was made of the failure. It turned out that the process was too pure. I have never forgotten that word “pure” in association with “spontaneous combustion.”
As Rick Scott demonstrated in his campaign a little dirt can go a long way. Our great and near great presidents were good at throwing dirt, and no one better than Thomas Jefferson. It takes luck to succeed with the public but it helps, or at least it is believed that it helps, if you hedge your bet by sullying the reputation of your opponent. That said I have a wider view.
* * *
THE PRICE OF HAVING TOO MUCH, TOO MANY, TOO SOON
Sometimes I wonder if technology changes society or if society changes technology because change seems predicated on boredom. We want relief from the doldrums. We talk of a “clash of cultures,” or some other sophisticated nonsense because we have time on our hands in busyness, which is boring, and don’t have enough to do that is consequential.
* * *
Man is a curious being, but forever lives in a veritable conundrum. He likes the comfort and security of things as they are, but must constantly fiddle with them because of his nervous temperament to change them, and thus by changing them changes himself to some degree, and everything around him. He never thinks of the consequences of his fiddling. That would be boring. Fiddling is an end in itself.
* * *
For the past hundred years or so, machines have taken over what man had done for himself the previous more than a thousand years. This has left him with time on his hands. But like the nervous chicken that he is, cackling away at shadows as T. S. Eliot’s “hollow man," he hasn't risen to his numerator but sunk instead to his common denominator.
Author William Livingston calls this shadow “cognitive bias.”
Talk radio with the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh know the power of this bias. It increases entropy as it reduces transparency to a shadow.
Grass root movements depend on this bias as they exploit prejudice, fixed misconceptions, favoritism, and partialities. Livingston writes in DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010) “Not only does cognitive bias operate to displace information from its axis of truth, it is the basis of delusions about goals and consequences.”
We are currently in the throes of false beliefs, hallucinations, and misperceptions about our own President of the United States. But this is not new. It is the necessary charge on minds of those that are attracted to the herd, as Eric Hoffer so carefully illustrates in his book, THE TRUE BELIEVER (1954).
* * *
WE ARE SHAPED BY “THE WORD” and THE RECENT PAST
It has been said that our character is made by the decades that immediately preceded our birth. Think of that a moment. Think of when you were born and what you believe to be true.
To give you a respite from this personal angst consider the ordeal of Shakespeare in the same context. He has fascinated me mainly because of the impact he has had not only on us more than four hundred years later, but on his own time.
Shakespeare was born in 1564 and was influenced by the Manichean clash of The Renaissance and The Reformation. His art became a distillation of this chemistry.
The world he describes is one of political confusion, religious bewilderment and personal danger. It was a time not unlike our own. There is something of Erasmus and Luther in Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies.
More importantly, like Robin Williams and Paul Simon, his work revolves around the "rise of the Word." It may seem blasphemy to put these men in the company of Shakespeare, but remember Shakespeare wrote in the vernacular of the common man and was the common man’s principle entertainer.
* * *
Shakespeare with his conceptual depth, iconoclasm and reservoir of ancient beliefs, showed the "Word” was to his mind “God." Thus he unwittingly invented psychology, as I challenge anyone to show me a better psychologist than he reveals in his plays. He brought to the surface a new ethos of conscience and consciousness, a self-scrutiny and introspection that has survived to our day.
Imagine the times and then think of them in terms of our own. In Shakespeare’s time, Roman Catholicism was in a state of collapse in a climate of corruption with dogmatic beliefs shattered in the wake of the passionate intensity of Luther.
It was a time of tragedy and self-disgust. Shakespeare took hold of history and rumor and turned it into art and a new psychology, as Freud would do centuries later with the collapse of Victorian sensibilities.
Morality is in the mind of the times.
Morality was then provoked by the rush of the uncertainties of the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of capitalism, the hysteria of a new age, and the introduction of World War.
Peter Gay covers this period in THE CULTIVATION OF HATRED: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud (Volume III, 1993). It is mention here because many of us, now old, had parents born during this climatic change, which was the second decade of the twentieth century. .
* * *
To not put not to fine a point on this, decades before I was born society was coming out of the tumultuous First World War and the Roaring (irresponsible) Twenties to give birth to The Great Depression. The Great Depression has had considerable impact on my generation, and consequently and subsequently on how we have reared our children.
As was the case with Shakespeare, we are products of our times. The ways we look at things are manifested in our attitudes and behavior, our writing, wondering, and creative verve.
Shakespeare is more like us than we might think. For example, he was not considered to possess the “genius” of say, Christopher Marlowe.
Marlowe was constantly reminded of his “potential,” of his specialness. He was said to have been hedonistic, self-indulgent, atheistic, adventuresome, cynical, alas, a self-destructive personality. He displayed the reckless abandon of a type “A” personality that has become familiar to us today.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, was a family man, something of plodder with a consuming drive to give life to his demons through art. There is no doubt he had demons. He was a practicing Protestant and closet Catholic. He stayed essentially below the political radar in his art. It reminds me of Rod Serling who did it in the 1960s with his televised “The Twilight Zone.”
There were few great painters or inventors in Shakespeare’s time. There were, however, great philosophers and theologians as “the Word” reign supreme.
* * *
FAST FORWARD TO TODAY
Robin Williams and Paul Simon have used language to elevate thought while it has since been essentially bastardized and made toxic driving the human spirit down to its common denominator where it can be exploited at whim. .
Ironically, the Bible, the Torah and the Koran manage to thrive in this toxic climate.
Human reflection, however, is now forced through the prism of science, and science is on safe ground as long as it deals honestly with Mother Nature. Yet some treat science like it was a dogmatic religion. There is a world that science cannot touch and that is the world of the spirit where “the Word” resides. Science moves beyond its boundaries when it denies the human spirit that science cannot see and cannot measure, but which nonetheless exists beyond ontic space, or in the imagination. It is why Genesis has always had a special appeal to me.
NIHLISM OR THE AGE OF SELF-HATE
Take comfort, Michael, in what you know, believe and value because they make you, you.
Too many people today are defined by what they have, or what electronic device they hold in their hands.
As I’ve said at the beginning of this missive, we are products of the decades that preceded our birth. Young people today were born before terrible World War Two, before the insanity of the Holocaust, before the dropping of the atomic bomb, and before the collapse and redefining of civilizations across the globe arbitrarily by the victors. Everything that has transpired since 1945 is a product of this disposition.
Much of life is a reaction rather than an action to circumstances. Before I was born, there was the First World War with the collapse of three empires almost instantaneously as if they had never existed. Europe spun on a dime.
Science and technology entered the vacuum and created the weapons of the next war, and the wars thereafter. Everyone alive today has lived in this climate of uncertainty since birth. Traditional anchors have been fragmented if not shattered such as family, church, school, company and country. Everything is in flux. Seemingly, the only thing incontrovertible is the discoveries of science.
Yet, science cannot explain beliefs, feelings, and common practices, but it can claim the immortal soul is false, if it cannot prove it.
Co-discoverer of “the double helix”, the structure of DNA, Francis Crick, has tried with his book, THE ASTONISHING HYPOTHESIS: THE SCIENFIC SEARCH FOR THE SOUL (1994). He was pursuing the idea that the soul exists in some fold of our brain. He didn’t find it.
Let us say for argument's sake that the soul exists only in our mind. If so, does that make the soul any less real in our behavior?
* * *
I must confess “Word” keep a hold on my sanity. They are not offered to win approval or a following. I am not on a crusade other then to persuade people to think, to process what they have to what they are, and to determine, on balance, if it is what they desire.
Each of us must forage our way through the muck of our times, alone, with all kinds of competing distractions meant to disengage us from self-awareness, self-acceptance and self-direction.
“Individualism” has been preached, yet now we are entering the “Age of the Individual,” not the contrived sense of the individual of existentialism, but the individual with the identity and authenticity capable of resisting the pressures to be a tool of technology or any other distracting phenomenon.
Man will establish the verticality of reality through human perception without the multi-filters of media and culture.
* * *
We are leaving the “Age of Nihilism” and despair where all passion is spent. The signs, as Pitrim Sorokin reminded us in THE CRISIS OF OUR AGE (1941), are evidence of the passing of the Sensate culture into an Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow.
Sorokin could see the waning of passion and the rising of the artificial and cosmetic to dominate human preoccupation.
We see this in vigara, pornography, noise as music, blasphemy as art, misery as literature, history as revisionism, cultural evolution as psychology, sociology and anthropology, and analytic philosophy as the answer to “Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land,” which, incidentally, was the title of one of my books I could never find a publisher.
Read a biography of Shakespeare and you will see how he soared above his times while being an essential part of them. He worked hard, harder than any of his artistic contemporaries, and we have his art today to show for it.
* * *
New York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote of our mental flabbiness as imperiling our national fabric. My readers outside the United States tell me this is endemic to their societies as well. Brooks concludes: “To use a fancy word, there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate . . . Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.”
Brooks could make a similar charge to people in general, but he is too polite to infer such a possibility. I am not.
Be always well,
Jim
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)