TOM & JERRY CARTOONS, MINDLESS RESPITE OR CAMEO TO ADVERSARIAL RELATIONS?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 11, 2011
BACKGROUND
When I was a boy, I would visit my uncle Leonard in Detroit of a summer from the age of nine through my freshman year in high school, or until organized baseball dominated by summer routine. My uncle, holder of Ph.D.’s in psychology and economics, was Chairman of the Department of Finance & Commerce at the University of Detroit.
During that impressionable period, I was intrigued with his interests, quality of his mind, and diversity of friends. They varied from the philosophical to the esoteric, from writers to industrialists, from the military to people on Wall Street.
A widower, he invited me to join him at the Fisher Building in downtown Detroit where he had a consulting business. I would listen to him dictating to his secretary, and study his quiet concentration. It made an impression on me.
His son, slightly older, shared common athletic interests with me and we became best friends.
The three of us of a Saturday would go to dinner and view a film at the Detroit Yacht Chub on Belle Isle near downtown Detroit. Films that seemed to give my uncle the most satisfaction were animated cartoons, especially Disney Productions. I watched him in the darkness of the theatre, his eyes sparkling with pleasure, wondering how such a man could find joy in such mindlessness.
Years later when I was heavy into my own career, I discovered similar satisfaction in the high jinx of comedic cartoons.
Only today after taking in the Charlie Rose Show on PBS with all its gravitas, I flipped channels to the Tom & Jerry cartoons, then went on my daily peripatetic walk.
NATURE OF ADVERSARIAL RELATIONS
Is it absurd to discover an important lesson learned in this foolishness? I asked myself that question, as the nature of the adversarial relationship was clearly demonstrated in this cartoon.
Tom and Jerry are adversaries, a tomcat and a tiny mouse, essential to each other in high jinx. In this episode another tomcat and pussycat were added to the mix.
This tomcat was competing with Tom for the affection of the pretty pussycat. This left Jerry effectively outside the intrigue.
No matter what Jerry did to get Tom’s attention – first a hotfoot with a match, then a full box of matches – he failed. Tom was in quest of the pussycat and to neutralize his new adversary, the tomcat. Ultimately, as the drama ends, Tom tired of the chase, his passion spent, he returned to his familiar adversary, Jerry, with élan.
This was a cartoon. As I walked, I asked myself what was so compelling about the introduction of a third and fourth party into the plot? Of course, it took the protagonists out of their game. It derailed the expected adversarial relationship, changed the dynamics, and left the partner out in the cold.
The vitality of the relationship depends on the collision of adversaries. Tom & Jerry are not Shakespeare but use the same mechanism to promote their drama.
They inflict havoc on each other to the point of annihilation only to rise again whole to engage again in the same nonsense. We have wars, earthquakes, forest fires, floods, tsunamis, and epidemics that test our mettle to survive, and yet we rise again and again from them to go on forward if not whole with full resolve.
Once faced with an adversary, be it a natural disaster or some human foible, we rise to meet the challenge with resolve we didn't know we had, but materializes in a crisis situation.
We complicate matters by this inclination. We are better at reacting to rather than anticipating the adversarial. Two million people die a year because of AIDS, as many as 7,000 a day, a disease that may originate in lower animals but spreads to humans through unprotected sexual contact or shared needles of illicit drugs. When we are the adversaries, adversarial relations are as likely to be denied as embraced.
We are not by nature confrontational, or adversarial. We may not like to think so but the relationship of:
(1) Children to each other is adversarial;
(2) Parents to each other is adversarial;
(3) Parents to children is adversarial;
(4) Families to each other and to the community is adversarial;
(5) Inclination to learn is adversarial;
(6) One part of the nation is adversarial to another;
(7) The president is adversarial to Congress;
(8) Congressmen and Congresswomen are adversarial to each other;
(9) One company is adversarial to another;
(10) One organized religion is adversarial to another faith;
(11) The laity is adversarial to the priest and the church.
We will do anything to avoid conflict. Therefore, we are not very good at managing it. The adversarial is normal. We need to capture the energy of conflicting forces in order to build consensus. Conflict is actually the glue that holds us together as a single force, not harmony.
Consider this:
(1) Children do not become independent contractors and adults until they rebel against their cultural programming and purchase identity. We suffer today from a lack of adults running things because adversarial relations have been tabled.
(2) A husband and a wife cannot become partners or a team until they deal with and accept their natural differences as individuals.
(3) Parents cannot rely on the proper development of their children by demanding obedience without demonstrating trust. Trust is an outcome of listening to the conflicting voices that dominate the mind of the child.
(4) Families cannot have a sense of community until they get their own house in order. That demands first recognizing and dealing with adversarial relationships in the home.
(5) Education is bridging the gap between listening and telling, knowing and learning. A knower is not a learner. Education creates knowers, not learners, tellers, not listeners. Small wonder students hate school and teachers that measure performance on arbitrary tests and not the unique gifts of the student. School has become a war zone, not because of the adversarial, but because of its absence.
(6) We have several countries in one. The Midwest has little patience with the pomp of the East Coast and the West Coast. The South has nostalgia for antebellum days. The North has little empathy for the South, where jazz, cuisine and literature thrive, while the industrial North lives in the nostalgia of its halcyon past. Meanwhile, the Northwest is oblivious to all this as it lives in artificial dream of ubiquitous technology. Balderdash? Perhaps, but it needs to surface adversarially to be dispatched.
(7) The president and Congress fail to understand that the adversarial relationship is the ticket to their collaborative success, and so continue to avoid confrontation and conflict other than rhetorically, as the country sinks deeper into red ink.
(8) Congress cannot get to real issues until it first encounters the real in the adversary.
(9) It the adversarial relationship within and between companies that spurs them on to excellence, not the absence of the adversarial.
(10) Organized religion avoids the adversarial as if it were mortal sin, creating parallel universes of innocuous interventions that never crystallize into anything meaningful. Organized religion has forgotten it is all about love, and for love to thrive the adversarial of hate must be embraced not denied or denigrated.
(11) The laity continues to desert the church because church conformity fails to resonate with its life challenges. The laity is not looking for answers in the church, but for a sounding board to address its adversarial conflicts.
The common theme to this is that we are tired of lying to ourselves.
NO ESCAPE OF THE ADVERSARIAL RELATIOSHIP?
The twentieth century was remarkable in its drift towards adversarial avoidance. World War One was fought largely to deny Germany its hegemony. Rather than embracing its fault line of fear, the Western Allies punished Germany at Versailles with the unintended consequences of seeding the hegemony of Nazi Germany and WWII.
Afghanistan and Pakistan have become like poor relatives that we felt good about helping, but now we own their burden. The more we do for them the more they hate us. If you have ever lent money to a relative, and never gotten it back, but instead have that relative treat you deplorably, then you know something of what our military and diplomatic corps face every day. There are exceptions.
Not until 1948 did the Jewish people have a homeland, yet over the centuries they have made contributions far exceeding their numbers in literature, scholarship, philosophy, music, mathematics, medicine, painting, education, physics, chemistry, psychology and sociology, finance and commerce. How is that?
The Jewish people have always embraced the adversarial within, the conflict that forced them to find that ethical-moral center where creativity resides.
In contrast, we have ethnic cleansing, a practice throughout history by one people’s attempt out of fear and ignorance to remove another ethnic or religious group by violence, only to be enervated for the effort. Most recently, the Serbs tried it in Bosnia and Herzegovina with the same shameful results as the Spanish Inquisition of the fifteenth century.
In my walk today, I realize adversaries are not the problem, sane relationship with adversaries is.
The adversarial Civil War made the US a stronger nation and able to ultimately embrace the adversarial Civil Rights Movement. The Great Depression made Americans more resourceful and capable of hitting on all cylinders during World War Two.
The United States came out of the Cold War with the Soviet Union as the lone super power, but, alas, no longer with a recognizable adversary
Long before the Osama bin Laden led al-Qaeda destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, even before the Soviet Union beat the US in space with Sputnik in 1957, the US commenced to chasing ghosts.
When an adversary vanishes, as did Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan after WWII in 1945, the inclination is to fill the vacuum with an invented one. Many senior citizens my age can remember the high jinx of that period.
We had the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) from 1938 to 1975, looking under every rock for communist sympathizers in writers, directors, filmmakers, novelists, poets, educators and the religious. Senator Joseph McCarthy was on a witch-hunt for Communists in the army and government. This came to a head with the histrionic psychodrama of the Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954.
We need an adversary, an adversary that generates an authentic response, not a fear mongering concoction of special interests. This is because we are a combative society. When the combat is missing or not real, when it doesn’t generate passion, we become stuck.
The danger of being stuck is that we retrogress, live in nostalgia, and fail to see the real challenges ahead. How can you tell? We become critical of anyone who isn't optimistic for America's future.
QUICK WALK DOWN MEMORY LANE
When I entered the workforce after college in the late 1950’s, I was confident that I was on the same page as my contemporaries, that we were guided by the same ethical-moral compass, that hard work and effectiveness got rewarded, that worth was qualitative and not quantitative, that a college education was not designed to punish others with your knowledge but to use it to enhance their development, that no one was better than anyone else, and that all honest work was noble.
Given this philosophy, I wasn’t much into bosses, not especially good at taking orders, or asking permission before I did something. Rather than being career oriented and ambitious, I was interested in the effective utilization of my inherent ability. I was not a competitor, a joiner, a sycophant, a flatterer, or a stooge for the boss’s ideas if I didn’t believe in them.
I was naturally disciplined and loved to work. There wasn’t a job that I had from being a student in school to a laborer in a chemical plant to a white hat in the navy to a chemist and chemical sales engineer in industry to an executive to a professor and writer that I didn’t derive immense pleasure.
This is mention because I came into the system just as everything was being escalated.
There were essentially six levels of management when I entered to twelve when I left. Executive compensation was marginally ten times that of workers with hands on experience to five hundred or more times that same workers daily take home pay when I retired.
Management was hard and lean when I entered the system and tough on you if you didn’t do your job. You didn’t get a reprimand in those days. You got fired. Same in school. You fouled up and you were expelled, not suspended for four days.
Chances of getting an “A” were not impossible but difficult. Having a “B+” average in college was enough to get you into Phi Beta Kappa; today you have to have an “A+,” which should not be construed as the “A” student being a better student. It was all about escalation.
If you flunked a course, it went on your permanent record. You couldn’t take the course over to erase the embarrassment. If you cheated on an exam, even if you were about to graduate, you were expelled with no redress.
It was a black and white world where good and evil were clear to everyone, and doers and slackers were as well. Then the human relations movement came in, followed by the human resources department, and we went from a society of contributors to a society of complainers, where everyone’s delicate psyche needed massaging no matter how much we were rotting on the inside.
We have been on this seventy-year drift preoccupied with the bumps that inevitably surface from time to time such as the 2008 real estate meltdown, the scandal of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the Wall Street corruption, the automotive industry failures, the stimulus package and the corporate bailouts of GM and Chrysler.
The common theme here is retreat from conflict and confrontation, from the natural adversarial relationship that enables a people to move in the direction of its strengths by facing its weaknesses, not apologizing for its failures but learning from them.
We are a bankrupt nation in spirit as well as coin because we have bought into the bleeding hearts that confuse equal opportunity with meritocracy. We are not all equal in ability nor can we all rise to the same heights. Excellence has many faces, and we can all put our best face on it.
Failure has been given a bad name, and failure is something I know much about because for every time I have succeeded I have failed four times. I am not a successful writer, but yet I write because like all those other jobs I have had, I derive immense pleasure from the practice.
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