THIS AND THAT -- REFLECTIONS OF A SUNDAY

THIS AND THAT – REFLECTIONS OF A SUNDAY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 7, 2010

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When I read President Barak Obama’s “Audacity of Hope” (2008), I was impressed with him as a writer. The man has skills for powerful metaphor and painting pictures with words. As famous as he is for his rhetoric, his writing is even more seductive. Yet, as many readers of my missives know, l have little affection for hope much less its audacity.

Goethe disparaged hope as a poor substitute for courage. Eric Hoffer, writing during the Cold War in his book, “The True Believer” (1951) wrote:

“If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent, or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.”

Hope seems to connect with our consciousness when we are buried in fear. Hope is a passive voice that demands nothing. Courage is an active voice that demands everything.

You cannot hope your way out of your financial straits. You must have the courage to reinvent yourself realizing this is the first day of the rest of my life.

You cannot hope to have a meaningful life but you can find it with courage.

You cannot hope to leave the ranks of the unemployed but you can open doors with courage.

The fear is the culprit that moves us towards hope; fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, fear of finding out that our cultivated biases are nothing but hot air.

There is no audacity inside hope but there is inside courage, which is actually the meaning of the word.

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The working class, of which I am a part of, which stretches across Middle America, went to the polls November 2, 2010 and kicked out a lot of Democrats in Congress and replaced them with a lot of Republicans.

Now, those same voters will wait for the newly elected to miraculously create jobs, reduced the deficit, and restore the United States to working class bliss, as it was in the 1950s and 1960s.
Meanwhile, this same working class would like the entitlements to remain, and possibly even increase, while taxes to remain the same, or even be lower, and for the National Debt to somehow be reduced to manageable levels with no sacrifice on its part.

Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman says kindly, “Americans have little knowledge or interest in macroeconomics.”

Politicians know this, with the blues (Democrats) being voted out on by promises of the reds (Republicans), with the two clashing at the interface to produce the purples of dysfunctional government in gridlock.

An interesting thought, this could all change if this working class that went to the polls and voted November 2 didn’t behave like Sunday worshipers. Instead, it stayed engaged. How? By making it clear to its representatives in Congress that it was ready for a reality check; prepared to leave its comfort zone and share the burden of necessary austerity to stem the tide of national decline and reverse the trend.

Will this happen? Yes, as soon as pigs can fly.

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The working middle class has been suspended in terminal helplessness or adolescence from 1950 through 1980. The past thirty years the working class has been coasting on its reputation while the rest of the world nibbled away at its lunch. First it was Japan, then South East Asia, then a rejuvenated Europe, and now it is Brazil, India and China.

Our factories became obsolescent over the past thirty years (1980 – 2010), and our working class obsolescent in its skill base with them. It was why I wrote “Work Without Managers” (1990), “The Worker, Alone” (1995), “Corporate Sin” (2000) and “A Look Back To See Ahead.”

The psychic billboards were like scarlet letters printed on our unconscious, but to no avail. I have put this failure to our reluctance to take control of our lives, to our failure to grow up and face reality. I have not been wrong about that. Every aspect of our institutional life has been like the ostrich with its head in the sand.

The working class has been programmed to be first counterdependent on the organization for its total well being with management acting as its surrogate parents. Corporate motivation for this was to realize total control. Abdication of control to corpocracy (and Congress is part of this corpocracy) is a luxury the working class can no longer afford. It needs to get off its duff, and embrace the chaos in creative endeavors.

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Where I was wrong is that I forgot our juvenility was the springboard to our prominence. We have been like a child on the planet too innocent and ignorant to resist plunging into the impossible to make it possible. As a result, we are the most copied nation since the ancient Greeks. Our juvenile mindset is redefining the twenty-first century.

Citizens of the world born after 1980 are changing the face of this small planet, redefining what it means to be a human being socially, culturally, politically and religiously through electronic connections. .

If you observe people of all ages in shopping malls, sporting events, walking down the street, they are reading, texting or talking on some handheld electronic contraption. Indeed, people in Haiti in tent cities constructed after the earthquake of 2010 could be seen on television using their iPhones, iPads and some other electronic device.

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An interesting phenomenon is taking place. School is no longer a place, but a space.

Learning is not a curriculum but a tool necessary to make connection. Juveniles are alert to the application of science and mathematics when before science and mathematics were just dull subjects they were forced to learn. They are learning the importance of science and mathematics in their electronic games. They see the connection.

Philosopher Eric Hoffer had practically no formal education, and spent much of his life as a longshoreman on the West coast of the United States, where he poured out his heart in a few short books near the end of his life. He died in 1983 at the age of 80, and missed the past thirty years of our decline. I doubt if many people read his books today. That is unfortunate because he knew why America’s juvenility made it great. Here is what he had to say about juveniles in “The Temper of Our Time” (1964):

“The juvenile, then, is the archetypal man in transition. When people of whatever age group and condition are subjected to drastic change they recapitulate to some degree the adolescent’s passage from childhood to manhood. Even the old when they undergo the abrupt change of retirement may display juvenile impulses, inclination, and attitudes.”

Most would agree we are in transition as a world society with little agreement, however, on transformational principles. I suspect if Hoffer were alive today he would remind us that the juvenile mind is an open not a closed mind, a mind that unshackles itself from precedence if precedence is a barrier to tactile functioning, that a juvenile mind engaged could be the mind of a seventy-year-old or a seven-year-old.

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I have often referred to Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elitism as HYPE, first writing about this in “The Worker, Alone” (1995). My quarrel is not with these institutions, per se, as it is with William L. Livingston IV in “Design for Prevention” (2010), although I agree with him that they are dedicated to hindsight thinking, but with the precedence and mindset of those so programmed.
Typical graduates of these institutions have lived entitlement lives in which preschool cost their parents upwards of $10,000 for preschool, $20,000 for prep grammar school, $30,000 for prep high school, and $50,000 for HYPE matriculation, and that is per year.

They know little or nothing about working two jobs to make college tuition after completing public grammar and high school, much less cleaning their own rooms, taking out their own trash, or counting on a best friend as a tutor when in academic difficulty than to have a professional tutor as HYPE is likely to have.

Now, if HYPE graduated and lived out their productive life in a cave of their own kind impervious to the rest of us, I would have no quarrel. My problem is that they typically want to save us from ourselves, to bless us with the same entitlements that they experienced, to see that we live in the image and likeness of them so that they might feel good about their generosity and magnanimity.

It is not only Europe or Third World countries that are led by HYPE type of souls, but the United States of America as well, and they have led us to where we are today, into the soup.

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That said the HYPE paradigm seems to be eroding at its foundation the same way established religions are eroding at theirs. You can see it in less ostentatious places of worship and in the changing nature of what purports to be higher education.

HYPE centers of academia are becoming less relevant and too expensive to maintain. Silicon Valleys are emerging not only across the United States but also across the globe. Moreover, the HYPE paradigm is now receiving serious competition from the “on-line” phenomenon.

In September 2010, I was in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa and I saw concrete evidence of this. Ashford University is an on line institution spreading its tentacles throughout the community. It purchased Mount St. Clare College’s grounds and complex that had been renamed “The Franciscan University.” The campus stands high on a bluff in picturesque splendor, looking east to the Mississippi River.

A friend gave me a tour of Ashford University throughout the town. Its growth in the community in only a decade is surprising. Along with the college, Ashford University has purchased the Clinton Country Club and golf course, and is now busy building classrooms, sports and recreational facilities on the country club grounds including a track and soccer field.

The university has also purchased a Clinton motel, which is to be turned into a dormitory for students. Several facilities have also been constructed to house on line services. Everywhere I looked I saw the imprimatur of the university. Clinton, Iowa has been a booming college town. It is doing so to augment the demand for a place as well as an electronic space for alternative education.

Ashford University has top accreditation and education at a fraction of the cost to attend HYPE or even state universities. It has touched the consciousness of the working class. Time will tell if it is of transitional and/or transformational significance. Little blips on the radar screen such as Ashford University are encouraging.

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I have often said I wouldn’t have anything to read if it weren’t for Jewish writers. Recently, I read a book titled,“ Literary Genius” (2007). It was edited by Joseph Epstein, whom I suspect is Jewish, but who discusses “25 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature” with nary a Jew in the bunch.

The fact I have read all twenty-five authors listed gave me pause. My wonder is why Muriel Spark, Philip Roth, Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Chaim Potok, to name a few Jewish writers, didn’t make the cut. Hemingway and Faulkner did. I say, “so much for lists.”

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BB has influenced me in enjoying television as she does. This enjoyment is gravitating to disgust with network and cable television entertainment and infotainment. Gratuitous violence is the name of the game of network television, which I don’t find entertaining. Nor do find all these talking heads anything but boring. My wonder is why police reporting dominates local metropolitan nightly news. I know crime, larceny and murder are out there, but do we have to make celebrities of these criminals? Newsprint is no better. The quickest way to a headline is to do violence on others. Sad.

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