THINKING ON THESE THINGS

THINKING ON THESE THINGS

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

© August 11, 2011

Syndicated columnist Maureen Dowd sees President Barak Obama as “withholder in chief.”  It is a catchy phrase.  Dowd is nothing if not entertaining and provocative. 

She like other pundits beats the phrase to death.  I can only imagine it is because she has to fill an empty column with something.  Given this reality, given the assortment of characters vying to unseat the president, I’m sure she knows, as I’m confident President Obama knows, given no fortuitous event, he will be reelected.  Let us hope he lacks the paranoia of Richard Nixon, who had no real competition for reelection but victimized himself with Watergate, tarnishing his presidential legacy.

Pundits notwithstanding, we elect people like ourselves, people who have the same character flaws that we possess, as well as the concomitant strengths. 

We are a tired nation, fatigued by war, by the burden of holding up the rest of the world to some kind of accountability, by retreating into ideology at the expense of the problems we face, by substituting explaining for execution. 

Dowd writes today, “Hasn’t he (Obama) learned how dangerous it is to delegate to Congress?  His withholding and reactive nature has made him seem strangely irrelevant in Washington, trapped by his own temperament.  He doesn’t lead, and he doesn’t understand why we don’t feel led.”

I smiled when I read this.  It described 99 percent of the people I know in all walks of life, and in all kinds of roles.  We are a reactive society, not an anticipatory society.  We are a crisis management society, a society that congratulates itself for solving problems in its ineptitude it has created.   

Corporate society still attempts to solve problems when it can, at best, manage and control them.  Corporate society dodges true chronic problems, problems it feels too complex or too expensive to tackle, and “solves” peripheral or cosmetic problems instead.  This allows real problems to fester until they implode, throwing into the fray crisis management techniques.  Why should we expect Congress and the President to act otherwise?  It is part of our cultural DNA.

Crisis is a motion picture in our heads that provides entertainment but not resolution.  Listen to the talking heads that keep us glued to the Internet or cable TV.  This pathology is akin to watching a neighbor’s house go up in flames with a gaggle of firemen fighting the fire to no avail with us enchanted by the spectacle.   . 

We have become spectators to life, and spend what little capital we have to keep MLB, NBA, NHL, and other sport franchises in business with players making in a year more than we will make in twenty or thirty years.  We do this willingly because it is a socially acceptable way to dodge our problems.  That said we shake our finger at the President and Congress when they go into recess, play a little golf, or take a vacation.  Author Alan Watts once said that we think that the furrowing of our brow fastened to our workstation is the recipe for problem solving, when it is the cause.  The conscious mind is duplicitous and therefore misleading.

Yet, tired as we are as a nation, as fatigued as we are with war and disappointment, as much as we would like the world to behave better so we could get some sleep, it is the greatest time to be alive in the history of man. 

While everyone is yelling that things are coming apart, the fact of the matter is that they are coming together.  We are in the messy kitchen of our times with the anxiety we’re not going to have enough food to feed all our relatives, relatives that we now realize are all our ethnic brothers and sisters who have been shocked awake and clamber at the door of our twenty-first century home.  

What am I saying?  Am I saying the President and Congress are not accountable, that it is all right to be passively aggressive?  No, I am saying the momentum change is bigger than any leader.  I think Obama realizes this.  It is not 1914, not 1941, not 1963, and not 2003. 

I have written widely about leadership, but the leadership I’ve written about is retreating into history.  We have moved from monarchs to dictators to democratically elected presidents to corporate CEO’s.  They are receding in relative importance although titular heads will always exist.  Great Britain would be lost without its queen.  She is a cultural icon.

With regard to corporations, they have been experiencing this momentum change for the past sixty years, and have chosen to mainly ignore it, but at their peril, as events continue to demonstrate. 

Leadership is no longer trickle down benevolence but rising discontent of those at the bottom.  They have the energy and passion to challenge the problems that shackle them.    

Dowd points out in her column that presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has adopted the mantra of hope of Obama.  “The power of our campaign,” she tells the Iowa voters, “is hope, and a future.” 

Hope is the operational word, which we have seen has no teeth.  Goethe said that hope is ephemeral.  Only courage can change the dynamic.  Courage is personified across the globe in the Arab Spring and now in Syria as those at the bottom is courageously taking on impossible odds.  They will ultimately triumph, as it is human nature to have a passion for freedom and control of one’s existence.  Obama understands this, stepping out of the way, and for this, he is criticized.

Millions, possibly billions will be spent on the 2012 Presidential Campaign now unfolding.  Yet my sense is that President Obama will be reelected, given no major faux pas in the next fifteen months.  This will disappoint libertarians while being music to the ears of progressives, but they will both be misguided.  Obama benefits from momentum and little else.

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