IN VEIGHING AS I GO -- NUMBER TWO -- WELCOME ABOARD THE SHIP OF FOOLS! (PART ONE)

IN VEIGHING AS I GO – NUMBER TWO – WELCOME ABOARD THE SHIP OF FOOLS! (PART ONE)

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

June 2, 2011

REFERENCE:

A reader writes, “Jim, have you read today's Perspective (St. Petersburg Times, Sunday, May 29, 2011)?  I think you would be interested in some of the articles.”

My practice, daily as well as on weekends, is to first read the Major League Baseball box scores, for my sanity, and then the editorial and op-ed pages. 

In the St. Pete Times, Frank Farley tells us why many politicians stray, Bill McKibbons educates us on climate control, while David Brooks celebrates the British political system.  I didn’t stop there.  I read “Views” in The Tampa Tribune (May 29, 2011) where George Will advises us that President Obama is something of a criminal acting above the law.

It got me thinking about these commentaries in a wider perspective.  They are our modern court jesters not unlike those of the past.  You could say in a minor way I belong to the same club.  I am a trained social, organizational, industrial psychologist, having plied my trade over the past fifty years across the United States, South America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East very much in the manner of a court jester.  And so, I thank the reader for inspiring this missive, which was created as I walked today.

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We live a tragic comedic time not unlike that described by Charles Dickens in THE TALE OF TWO CITIES about the French Revolution, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” 

 

It is surprising there are no equivalent masters of the absurd today in the tradition of Sartre and Beckett, yet the soil is ripe for them.  We have pundits on television, the Internet, the print media, in film, and all iterations of electronic expression, yet they pale in comparison. 

 

We have chat rooms, talk radio, and Wikileaks that delight the curious in the invasion of other people’s lives.  We have politicians who don’t know how to act as leaders, and leaders who only know how to act as politicians. 

We have bizarre characters such as Glenn Beck on the right and Michael Moore on the left of stirring up the dust with their social-political speak.  They are absurd in their pronouncements, and for that absurdity taken seriously.  They are full of white noise, and nothing changes, but a lot of oxygen is sucked out of the room. 

I’ve watched Glenn Beck several times now and tried to get a bead on him.  It would seem he believes himself the reincarnation of Nostradamus.  He constantly references earlier declarations.  Like the mystical idioms of Nostradamus, Beck’s pronouncements are like trying to fit a 15-size foot in a size ten shoe.   

As for Michael Moore, he has had the uncanny gift of making those in power his entrée and dessert. 

The powerful have willingly played their comedic role to his purposes starting with GM’s CEO Roger Smith.  Moore dogged the GM executive after GM summarily closed several GM plants in Flint, Michigan.  It cost 30,000 workers their jobs in this community of 80,000.  His film “Roger &  Me” (1989) was a commentary of his relentless stalking of Smith, and became a resounding hit.  Moore has been with us ever since.

Most recently I saw Moore speaking on C-Span (May 29, 2011) to an adoring audience of like-minded individuals.  The University of Michigan dropout was wearing a Rutgers University cap, a mountain climber’s uniform along with a neck bandana, knee high wool sox and mountain boots.  He looked like an overweight refugee who just slid down the mountain.  There he was an adulating audience taking in his every word as he pontificated on those miscreant Republicans that he so detests.   

Like Beck, with Moore there is a grain of truth to what he says and nine grains of folderol. 

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We have elevated lying to an art form.  Lying has been duplicated, replicated and reified into commentary and narrative in every media available including the most celebrated and sacrosanct of them all, The New York Times and The Washington Post.  Nothing published is what it seems because what it seems is not what it is, but a carefully cultivated version for mass distribution.  Stated another way, everything published is advertisement.  

A reporter today is likely to sit at his desk in front of his laptop checking all the appropriate aps to render his copy, whatever the media.

Then at another level we have George Will on the politically right, David Brooks near the center, and Mark Shields on the left, trying to make sense of the nonsense as rational ordering thinkers. 

If you look inside their copy, you would realize they are extensions of court jesters such as Beck and Moore, not a breed apart.  They, too, are in the manipulating business; they too, are trying to find the hooks to their song to send a message to our brains. 

The fact that they succeed less well than Beck and Moore is not so much the content or context of their missives but rather the robotic lifestyle of everyday life in the twenty-first century. 

Due to this lack of attention, exploiters – in all institutions including industry, government, academics and healthcare -- often act like quasi-criminals to get their message across, justified on the merits of the message.  No one in power escapes this designation.

Am I suggesting our leaders are kin to the likes of Bin Laden, Khaddafi, Mubarak, Hussein and al-Assad?  Of course they are. 

Our leaders are on the same grid but at different quadrants of that grid.  Likewise, Thomas Jefferson is on the same misconduct matrix of the likes of Berlusconic, Polanski and Strauss-Kahn, men who fancied they were above the law and its constraints, men who otherwise are renown for their brilliance. 

We choose to see our villains as subhuman and our heroes as superhuman when they are all cut from the same cloth.  Court jesters play on this sympathy and identity.  Good and evil men are members of the same club.  So where does that leave us?

It leaves us at a moment in history when nothing is clear.  Nothing is as it seems.  Creativity and destruction are the main players in the drama, moving us forward in time but not necessarily forward in mind. 

What is the remedy?  Should we no longer read newspapers, peruse books, surf the Internet, attend rallies, listen to talk radio, watch television news, or follow our leaders? 

That would be absurd and counterproductive.  No, we should be actively engaged in our communities with a sense of humor and perspective about our leaders and about all the information thrown at us, sifting through it to make the most sense of how it relates to our situation.

For you see, whether these practitioners know it or not, they are, like us, passengers on the SHIP OF FOOLS.

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NOTE: INVEIGHING AS I GO – NUMBER THREE – WELCOME ABOARD THE SHIP OF FOOLS (PART TWO) will explain all this.  Stay tuned.