THIS AND THAT -- REFLECTION OF A SUNDAY -- A CONVERSATION WITH A READER

THIS AND THAT – REFLECTIONS OF A SUNDAY: A CONVERSATION WITH A READER

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 10, 2010

REFERENCE:

This has been modified from how it was received and answered in order to codify the ideas of the exchange. I should add that I have great respect and affection for this person, which might not be readily apparent from the exchange.


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A READER WRITES (Hereafter noted as Reader):

Acknowledgement working class roots sounds strange alongside your seeming conservatism.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS (Hereafter noted as Dr. Fisher):

I consider myself as “working class” because that is my economic roots. My da was an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad, and on the extra board at that, never enjoying the security of a permanent job.

Your seeing me as “conservative,” and find it difficult to believe a “working class” person can be so described is interesting. Labels, especially ideological labels, have never stuck to me too well.

Never drinking or smoking, watching what I eat, and exercising regularly, I suppose, could be considered conservative. I would imagine conserving my energy and being focused in my studies throughout my academic training, and the same on the job could be so construed as well. But I don’t think that is what you mean.

Being a freethinker and secularly oriented for the most part, I suppose, is closer to the liberal, but I don’t think you mean that either. I have strong opinions, which some might consider radical, but I hardly think they fall easily into either conservative or liberal classifications.

Yet, I am a registered Republican who often votes Democratic, as I did in the last election for President Barak Obama, and for Charlie Crist for the US Senate race in the mid-term election that just ended, who ran as an Independent.

My cultural conditioning is Irish Roman Catholic. I owe much to that in terms of discipline, moral outlook, and views on such topics as the right to life and the death penalty. I am for the first and against the second.

Moreover, I don’t have trouble with sexual orientations other than my own, but wonder why we are so preoccupied when we spend so little time in actual sexual congress.

Life has taught me that the sins of labor and management have often been self-defeating for both. As a chemical engineer in the field, I often saw union workers hiding in tunnels of major corporations failing to complete their work so they would get overtime. I have seen managers accept outlandish bonuses that weren’t deserved, but were received because they had the right organizational politics (See Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers, 2000).

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READER:

I, too, feel some umbrage for working hard to pay my way through college while most of my peers (not your HYPE designators) were inner-city girls on grants or the daughters of professionals (doctors and lawyers) living high on the family’s purse strings.

I’ve never grown bitter at “entitlements,” and believe that those rarely spring from the silver-spoon set’s magnanimity or guilt as you suggest. How then do we explain the phenomenon of wealth of this country that continues to trickle “up”?

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DR. FISHER:

Your suggestion of “rich kids” was the daughters of doctors and lawyers where as at Iowa more often than not they were the sons and daughters of farmers. In neither case would I designate the parents’ rich. HYPE schools are fed by prep schools, and this is an entirely different kettle of fish. As I indicated in this piece, education in this stratosphere is incredibly expensive, given children of HYPE the opportunity to rule the waves. These children are programmed to lead, to rule and control. They are apart from us.

My point is that HYPE graduates who have little in common with the rest of us believe we want to be like them, only a cheaper version of them. So, they get in industry and find they can control us with entitlements. They get in government and sponsor programs to make us cheaper versions of them with entitlements.

HYPE got a way with this from 1950 to 1980 because the US controlled the waves of the world economy. We Americans as workers would make a little stir and they’d (HYPE in government and industry) would throw us another bone. Unions were complicit in this, obsequious to HYPE in industry, education and the professions, including sports.

We are now – HYPE as well as the rest of us – lapdogs in a decline stretching from 1980 to 2010. HYPE plays musical chairs in industry, education, government and the professions (e.g. AMA, etc.), and nothing changes only the tans of those in charge.

We have been surviving, just barely, the last thirty years (1980 – 2020) without leadership treading on our momentum.

Why no leadership? Because those in charge don’t trust us or trust each other; those in charge lack sincerity, those in charge are not flexible, and those in charge are committed to rhetoric rather than the courage of taking a stand and voting with their feet. Leaders are concerned about their legacy, polls, and establishing the best face on their watch no matter how cosmetic it is in actuality.

The call now is for austerity as unemployment is at “9.6 percent,” which is a myth, as it is closer to 17.6 percent as many people have been forced to work part time to underpaying jobs.

Over the past sixty years (1950 – 2010), we have literally as well as figuratively become a flabby nation in mind, body and spirit. We have forgotten what it means to struggle, to get off our duff and take care of business, to look to ourselves rather than others to save us, and to control our appetites and destiny rather than to look to personal trainers to do it for us.

Our education has gotten flabby, our religious institutions have gotten flabby, our government has gotten flabby, the workplace has gotten flabby, and increasingly we look like the Romans for the catharsis of violence in television and sport to assuage our consciences. We have become spectators to our own lives, watching people in power positions play musical chairs, and wonder why we live in forward inertia.

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READER:

It’s ironic that those complaining about welfare cheats care not a whit about corporate entitlement cheats. Corporations bleed taxpayers dry, exhaust our scant resources, and rarely pay an equitable share of taxes (never mind the rates, what do they actually pay?). What do you have to say about that?

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DR. FISHER:

Do corporations cheat? Of course, some do. Do the wealthiest among us cheat on their taxes and entitlements? Most likely some do.

We hear about wealth creators and think of it as so much spin.

And yes, the richest 1 percent of Americans is getting richer, a lot richer. In 1976, near the end of the thirty-year period of economic bliss (1950 – 1980), the top 1 percent took home 9 percent of income. Today at the end of economic bleak (1980 – 2010) the top 1 percent takes home 24 percent of income.

In 1980, when self-restraint took a holiday, CEOs of the top American companies earned 42 times as much as the average worker. In 2001 that rate had increased to 531 times the average worker; today it is 1,000 times or better. More significantly, back to my model of run away excess since 1980, four-fifths or 80 percent of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent, while wages of average workers stagnated or declined.

So, you have a point. In earlier times, this might cause revolt or even revolution, but not today. A flabby complacent society is too busy watching “American Idol” or some talking head to take charge of their lives by saying with their feet that they have had enough. I don’t anticipate this happening. Instead, they go to the polls, vote, and watch a new dog and pony show transpire into collapsing gridlock in Congress.

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READER:

Do you deny that one of the best investments ever made in this country’s future was providing an education to vets returning from WWII? Or that Social Security and public education pay dividends? To privatize Social Security – as Republicans insist – would be ultimately prohibitive.

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DR. FISHER:

Social Security was a stopgap measure during the Great Depression, which has been a political time bomb to touch, whatever the strategy. Yes, it has allowed many senior citizens to live with dignity in their golden years.

It worked reasonably well up to 1980 when more money was coming in than going out. But that all changed when the rest of the world caught up with us. Another mixed blessing was the fact that we are living longer, which means longer on Social Security. To illustrate, in 1930 the average life expectancy for both sexes (white) was 61.4 years; in 1980, it was 74.4 years; and in 2005, it was 78.3 years, or the possibility of being on Social Security 17 more years than at the conception of the program.

Even if the retirement age is increased to 70, chances are Social Security will be bankrupt before the United States reaches mid-century.

As for the G.I. Bill, my service obligation was between 1956 and 1962 with two years on active duty in the Mediterranean. For fulfilling that obligation, I was able to spend six years in graduate education on the G.I. Bill to earn my Ph.D. It provided a stipend for me at the advanced age of 36 with a wife and four young children. Were it not for the G.I. Bill, it is unlikely I would have had the life I have enjoyed. So, I hear you.

On the other hand, for every veteran that took full advantage of this ten others didn’t. That is the sad thing. My source? When I laid out my plan to the officer at the Veterans Administration, he laughed. “If you do this, you will be the first for me, and I’ve been at this for going on twenty years.”

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READER:

We have no argument about the shame of education becoming “big business,” or maybe we do. You’re extolling the virtues of Ashford University, that California consortium, which has come into Clinton, Iowa with its hand out and in the aggressive stance of big business. It doesn’t expect to pay taxes, but to be given all kinds of property concessions as it has acquired church property. What do you say to that?

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DR. FISHER:

Clinton, Iowa, my hometown, was on the cutting edge of the lumber boom at the beginning of the last century, largely because logs from Wisconsin and Minnesota could not economically negotiate the narrow channels of the Clinton on the Mississippi River.

The lumber boom faltered and then collapsed in the 1920s, and many wealth creators left town, sending the community into a tailspin.

Gradually through the 1920s while embracing the challenges of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Clinton, Iowa arrived at the dawn of WWII in 1942 the hub of an important small but competent manufacturing center.

Clinton performed amazingly well during WWII, including building a huge U.S. Military Hospital, and arrived at 1945 a booming town of some 33,000 citizens. It rode the good years up to 1980, as did the rest of the country, only to once again fall on hard times with many industrial operations downsizing or going out of business.

Clinton is smaller now, perhaps 29,000 or so, with few industries, other than the large ADM complex, and the possibility of a new railroad center.

Clintonians are hard workers, but modest in their demands. As a consequence, Clinton was not hit as hard hit as other places with the economic-industrial meltdown and real estate collapse of 2008.

You know all this because you are a Clintonian but most of my readers do not.

* * *

My life has been a constant reinventing of myself, and I come by that naturally as I, too, am a Clintonian. I see Ashford University as a reinvention of Clinton, Iowa as an education center in light of the twenty-first century, and not the twentieth century model.

In the fifteenth century, Gutenberg invented movable type in printing. This led to the flourishing of the classical university system of Europe in the sixteenth century, along with the rise of Protestantism and the “Protestant Work Ethic” of Max Weber.

We are now in the Information Age, the electronic age, in which everything is likely to change form the way we once saw things, including education.

Ashford University has come to this quiet community on the banks of the Mississippi River, which is known for its integrity, industry, resilience, and openness to new ideas, and decided to invest “big time” in the possibilities of that climate and culture.

If I sound as if I am naïve about Ashford University, and its corporate motivation, I am being misconstrued. The university has to prove itself worthy of the support of Clinton, Iowa, but I sense that is already taking place.

Nor am I naïve about the disclaimers of the value of an online degree versus a traditional degree. Some are no doubt saying an online degree is a waste of time for workers striving to advance their careers. Consider this: according to a recent Society for Human Resource Management seventy-nine (79) percent of human resource officials said their organizations had hired job applications with online degrees in the past twelve months from accredited online universities. Ashford University is fully accredited.

My sense this is an exciting time in Clinton, Iowa, and I’m glad I was given a chance to see it unfolding.

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READER:

My final question: do you not see yourself as a conservative?

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DR. FISHER:

You see me as a conservative. Okay. Can a person who grew up in a working class family not be a conservative?

Some people might see me as conservative in my dress, manner, appetites, and disposition, but others might see me as liberal in my freethinking, secular views, and radical ideas.

I’ve never been inclined to drink or smoke not because of religious convictions, but as a matter of choice.

I would imagine I have the Protestant work ethic in my bones although I am an Irish Roman Catholic who doesn’t go to church.

I am a registered Republican who voted for President Obama in the last election, and for Governor Charlie Crist, who ran as an Independent in the U.S. Senatorial race for Florida.

I don’t support abortion or the death penalty.

Nor do I support the idea of English being the official American language although I speak and write in no other language.

I am a heterosexual but I have no problem with homosexuals.

I don’t believe one race or nationality is superior to another, but the content of our character the true determiner.

I played football, basketball, track and baseball in grammar and high school, but only follow baseball with passion today.

I have great respect and affection for a precious few people but it is not important that they have equal respect and affection for me. I don’t like them because they like me, or dislike them because they dislike me. I like them because I choose to like them.

I am a Christian but do not think Christianity is superior to any other religion including agnosticism and atheism.

My life has not been built around ideology but unraveling the mystery of my consciousness.

From this you can decide what I am. I am too busy being.

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