INVEIGHING AS I GO -- NUMBER ONE -- GUILT IS NOT SHAME, SHAME IS NOT GUILT!

INVEIGHING AS I GO – NUMBER ONE – GUILT IS NOT SHAME, SHAME IS NOT GUILT!

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

© May 27, 2011

We are familiar with the institutional idea of being innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.  The United States takes this to heart and is known as a litigious society.  We litigate for a hot cup of coffee spilled on us at a popular food franchise or a fence constructed inches on our property. 

In the corporate world, guilt dances between what are legal and ethical.  A corporation can walk away from a community and leave it economically in ruins, legally, but is that ethical?  Is there any sense of guilt associated with that common corporate practice?  You be the judge.

GUILT

When guilt was a legitimate deterrent, it kept us on the straight and narrow.  We felt painful self-reproach irrespective of whether anyone found out, if it was wrong to do.

In my late twenties successful in work, a veteran in my company asked to partner with me for a project I had in mind to buy a piece of commercial property in Indianapolis, Indiana, and build a medical professional building.  The realtor agreed to sell the land for $30,000 ($300,000 in 2011 dollars).  On a Friday, I put $3,000 down, all the money I had saved, with my partner to pay the balance of $27,000 on Monday. 

Monday came and he backed out.  I went to the realtor, and told him my plight.  He said I had just lost $3,000.  Rather than panic, I offered a proposition where I would pay him  $3,000 each quarter over the next year, giving him a total of $12,000.  If I hadn’t sold the land by then, he would have protected his investment and be $12,000 ahead for his trust.  Obviously, I was confident I could sell the land.

It was a busy period in my life in civic, political and church activities.  I was Secretary of the Zoning Board of Appeals of Lawrence Township in Marion County (Indiana), President of the Young Republicans, and a writer for the Catholic Messenger. 

A buyer wanted to build a factory on the land when the land was zoned for commercial not industrial use.  He had a foreign contract and was willing to pay $50,000 cash if I would expedite the zoning problem.  The 27 acres, which had a railroad spur, required a three-foot setback from a road that needed to go through the property.  Such a setback was not required for industrial zoning, which was crucial to the purchase.  It was the difference between a designation of suburban commercial (SC) and suburban industrial (SI).  The man in charge of zoning for the county could be induced to make this change posthaste for a “gratuity.”  

This is where guilt played its role with me.  I tried to rationalize that it was “for my family” and that gratuities were a common practice, sometimes higher than the five figures required here.  Besides, I could be out of $12,000 if I didn’t sell the land within the year.

While I was going through this moral dilemma, no one was aware of it not even my family.  I thought of how lucky I had been in work, in life, and how my da had struggled all his, which was stopped short as he turned fifty.  Then a thought came into my head, what if no one ever finds out?  My life would be a lie.  I called the prospective buyer and told him he would have to look elsewhere.  The land was not zoned for his purposes.

In the eleventh month, I sold the land for $30,000 paid directly to the realtor.  In turn, the realtor refunded my $9,000, as I had made two payments as well as the initial payment of $3,000.  Later, having forgotten that I sold the land for $30,000 when my contract was for only $27,000, the realtor’s CFO sent me a check for $3,000 after discovering the error. 

You might ask how could this happen?  I can’t explain it, I simply did forget.  I learned then that integrity was more important to me than money, that I couldn’t be bribed.  That was precisely what was attempted when I was working in South Africa.  No, I didn't take the bribe. 

*     *     *

Guilt is self-directed.  It is the very nerve of sorrow.  Guilt rides on the abandonment of self-trust.  It is a deviation from a sense of dignity, integrity and duty.  It is a shrinking from the person we are to the brute we can become.  The guilty mind debases truth to a lie.  It acts like rust on iron, defiles and consumes, gnawing and creeping into all our crevices until it eats away all that is vital to us until we are only waste.  Fraud and falsehood are guilt’s treacherous allies, lurking in the dark afraid of the light of discovery. 

*     *     *

SHAME

Shame is other-directed.  Shame is the painful feeling of letting others down, operating outside the code of what society condones to behavior it condemns.  It is the loss of communal respect in behavior that community most fears. 

When visiting my wife’s parents, we would go to church in Cambridge, Minnesota on Sundays and holidays.

The minister of that church was delightful in his sermons showing a familiarity with the existential philosophers of which I have a fondness.  He was also quite knowledgeable about Saint Paul, another interest of mine.  The minister didn’t back away from Paul’s complexity or contradictions.  In that sleepy little community, he pointed out how Paul was a fanatic, epileptic, visionary, and architect of the phenomenon of shame. 

Paul, he said, composed a lexicon of what was honorable and dishonorable, moral and disgraceful, desirable and regretful, celebratory and outrageous.  By doing so, Paul created precepts designed to cause those in violation to feel shame.

The minister pointed out that Saint Paul did this by the forceful drive of his rhetoric compelling believers to feel shame in violation of the "Word.”

On a subsequent visit, I was disappointed when the minister was not in the pulpit.  I asked my mother-in-law what had happened to him.  “Oh,” she said, “he resigned.  He was caught by a member of the church in a pornography bookstore.”

“He resigned for that?” I asked in disbelief, sensing that the person who found him there had some explaining to do as well, but that was apparently not at issue.

“Oh, yes, immediately," she said. 

It was from her tone that I surmised the action was considered proper.  Pornography is a multibillion business in this country, and I’m certain a good number of Cambridge citizens have an intimate knowledge of the little x-rated bookstore.  Shame is doubtlessly held to a higher standard for the minister when it is conspicuous. 

To my mother-in-law, the minister should not only feel shame but act precipitously when shame was uncovered, which is precisely what he did.   The congregation thus lost a brilliant spiritual leader found to be human, and the minister a promising career, a lose-lose proposition for all.

*     *     *

Shame is like a corrosive element that comes out of nowhere.  It finds us hauling a burden of shame about on our backs with self-loathing.  Shame can eat a person up from the inside.  It drives a lot of people to self-destructive behaviors such as promiscuity, doing drugs, drinking to excess, committing crimes, or exposing society’s double standards by being gay and failing to be ashamed.

Pulitzer prize journalist Murray Kempton wrote this after America’s 1984 Olympic diving gold medallist, Greg Louganis, suffered abuse for admitting to being gay:

The almighty is presumed to pass His judgments and dole out His penalties to individuals, which allows us to suppose that nations are spared painful sessions with the Recording Angel.  But if ours is ever so summoned, we may suppose that the inquiry into its cardinal sins might begin with the question: “And why, America, did you, in your arrogance, teach so many of your children to hate themselves?”  (New York Review, 1995)

A person may think he knows who he is at heart, and may decide he doesn’t want anything to do with that person, that the last thing he wants to know is the real person he is, because he is ashamed of that person.  Who is responsible for the cultivation of this self-rejection?  That is Kempton’s question. 

What complicates the matter is that we are unlikely to know why we are ashamed.  What’s more, we want to stay far away from that self-knowing.  So, we retreat into behaviors that throw us off stride into a bad light or bad company to shut the door on shame.     

*     *     *

Shame is a great restraint upon anti-social behavior, but that soon disappears, and when it does innocence falls off with it.  Modesty is no longer troublesome.  Impertinence follows, then disrespect, rudeness and calloused behavior finding sanctuary in vice. 

Am I saying shame is good?  The self comes to mind.  Neurobiologist Antonio Damasio claims consciousness is a subjective state of feeling, a sentience or awareness of qualitative experience.  Shame is nature’s hasty conscience.

When we have the heart to do very bad things, either to others, or ourselves we are dead to conscience.  Bob Larson in “Extreme Evil: Kids Killing Kids” (1999) gives example after example of children doing horrible things to other children without remorse. 

Violence is the timber of our culture with our ability in electronic games or television and other media to vicariously dispatch our aggressions on some entity for the mere sport.  This can quickly translate into real violence.  Recently, a man beat another man nearly to death in front of the man’s children after an argument in the parking lot of a San Francisco Giant and Los Angeles Dodger baseball game. 

*     *     *

Guilt and shame are the polar coordinates of civility.  They are increasingly missing in modern society.  Those who do not fear guilt start with shame. 

One can remember the Diaspora of a people forced to roam the world, turning that guilt into art, literature, science, philosophy, music and economics.  One can also remember the 2,000-year history of Catholicism that locked love out, and controlled its minions with the shame of departure from dogma.  Western civilization was built on its cultural architecture. 

The paradox is that a modicum of guilt and shame increase our humanity while too much can destroy us.  Those who do not appreciate the power of guilt can be waylaid with shame.  Irish author Jonathan Swift put it this way: I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

It is not my premise that there is more wickedness in the world, nor more promiscuity, lechery, or dehumanizing behavior than in my youth sixty years ago.  What appears different is a deadening of conscience as the controlling norm of society.

*     *     *

INVEIGHING AS I GO -- A NEW SERIES OF PROVOCATIVE THOUGHT

INVEIGHING AS I GO

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 25, 2011

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REFERENCE:

This is to alert you to the fact that I will be writing a series of short missives, from time to time, on subjects that cross my mind on my peripatetic daily four-mile walks. 

There will be an attempt to make them brief and to control my solecisms and malapropisms, as well as my quantitative calculations. 

I must confess that many of my readers read me differently than I read others.  My interest is always in the germ of the thought presented not whether the author crosses all the t's and dot all the i's, indeed, always manages to add the appropriate "ed," or avoids inevitable split infinitive.

It is no mystery that I love words.  I write the way I do because I think in such words.  As my sister can tell you when I was a boy not yet nine I had completely read the dictionary.  Add to this the fact that I was born into an Irish-Catholic culture in which Latin was the language (then) of the Church, and have studied Greek and Latin at university, and you have something of the basis of my propensity for language and provocative thought. 

Do I misuse words (malapropism)?  I'm sure I do, but I would wager far less than readers can call to mind.  Do I misuse grammar (solecism)?  I'm sure I do, but sometimes more the novelist than the essayist comes out, and novelists like to stretch the mechanics of the discipline, and they are able to do that because they know the rules.  I know the rules thanks to the good Sisters of St. Francis.

I have chosen INVEIGHING AS I GO, as the marquee of this series, inveighing being a Greek word to "rail against something in words," because there is not much that I see reassuring at the micro or macro level.    I mention these two levels because I often look at the same issue from both a personal and general perspective. 

My motivation is to generate thought in a thoughtless age.  I have the liberty of doing this because I represent no special group or have no special constituency to make look good.  Stay tuned.

*     *     *

NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET -- EUROPE & THE UNITED STATES

NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET  -- EUROPE & THE UNITED STATES

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

© May 22, 2011

Some fory three years ago, or 1968, when I was putting together a new company in South Africa, working with Nalco Chemical Company’s subsidiary, ICI’s British affiliate, and South African Explosives, Ltd.’s specialty chemical division, I found it remarkable how much those of British descent forged their identity and legitimacy on their European ancestors. 

It was as if this gave them a free pass to distinction.  They relied on the pomp and circumstances of that affiliation, and little on the hard bricks of scholarship, engineering and technical acumen, and the pursuit of new knowledge that go into a solid career.  They were unembarrassed to borrow that knowledge and know how from the Americans. 

It was only the pragmatic and unsophisticated Boers, the Afrikaners, who apparently saw it necessary to struggle through four, six or more years to acquire a solid education that could identify with the American spirit of substance and the pragmatics of doing instead of posing as if doing.

The Afrikaners, like Americans, did not look to Europe as their “homeland,” but the uncultivated wilds of Africa, which they had endeavored to tame. 

Not surprisingly, I felt a natural connection as an American from the heartland with the Afrikaners while having abhorrence for apartheid, or separation of the races.  With this policy, the majority Bantu (black) population (80 percent) was subjugated to the rule of the minority white European population (20 percent) of which two-thirds was Afrikaner and one-third British or Anglo. 

It was a strange feeling being an American executive with more hands on technical knowledge than most of those with whom he worked, which were primarily Anglos.  In 1968, business was still largely controlled by English descendents while the Afrikaners, descendents of the Dutch and French Huguenots, controlled the government. 

*     *     *

I preface my remarks here with this frame of reference because of the hype now surrounding the alleged raping of a maid by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, president of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in a hotel in New York City. 

Fox News and CNN, not to exclude Charlie Rose of PBS have been like lusting moth for the scandalous light in this affair.  True, IMF has played a major role in the world economic meltdown of 2008, especially with regards to Greece, Ireland and Portugal.  Were Samuel Beckett alive today my sense is he would make absurd comedy of the affair.

Charlie Rose, in his little interviewing show on PBS of movers and shakers of the world, rushed over to Paris to interview the New York Times Paris bureau chief, a reporter from for the French newspaper, Le Monde, and a senior adviser at France’s Institute for International Relations.

The French seemed appalled that Strauss-Kahn was shackled like a common criminal when led off after being arrested.  The French expected him to be treated with dignity consistent with his prominence and importance, and not like a guy from the Bronx caught with his pants down.  Viewers to Charlie Rose were informed that anti-American sentiments were rampant at this umbrage.

Incongruously, I sat there listening to the exchange smiling and shaking my head.  I happen to like some of the books written by authors Charlie Rose interviews, and find interesting some of the people he brings to his table, but what I’m sure he takes to be polite decorum and noblesse oblige I take as insulting to Americana. 

I could give two shoes what Europeans think of our criminal justice system, or our practice of the rule of law.  I took satisfaction in the way the New York City Police Department handled the affair, and if guilty, which I doubt will be the final verdict because money talks and people with it talk the loudest; I am pleased with how it went down.

*     *     *

Forty three years ago, when the Anglo managing director’s wife of Nalco’s affiliate criticized my children in a restaurant for holding their forks in their right hands, and shoveling in food with their left, I sensed where the criticism was coming from.  Her husband was totally out to lunch when it came to leading the merger.  To redress this fact, she found it necessary apparently to center her anxiety on my children.  I said nothing, but mimicked them to excess in duplicating their manner of eating.

Obviously, it can be seen here I can be petty.  That said I’ve never ceased to be amazed how those who manage a certain level of sophistication look to Europe for what is right and just and important in the scheme of things. 

Yesterday, I received my copy of Time (May 30, 2011), the weekly magazine with the cover headline, “Sex, Lies, Arrogance (all in red), What Makes Powerful Men Act Like Pigs (with an apology to pigs at the bottom of the page).”  The cover story inside is even more American with a bizarre picture of Strauss-Kahn.  The article includes a “rogues gallery” of flawed men from Thomas Jefferson to Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

It will be interesting to see what David Brooks, author of the current bestseller, SOCIAL ANIMAL: THE HIDDEN SOURCES OF LOVE (2011), has to say on the subject.  He quotes former University of Iowa professor Antonio Damsio widely in this work. 

Cognitive man, according to Damsio has not given sufficient attention to feelings, and therefore is often side blinded by them despite having otherwise celebrated gifts. 

*     *     *

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AN AUTHOR COMMENTS ON "WHEN MEN WON'T WORK AND THE WOMEN WHO CARRY THEM"

AN AUTHOR RESPONDS TO “WHEN MEN WON’T WORK AND THE WOMEN WHO CARRY THEM”

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

© May 21, 2011

*      *     *

REFERENCE: 

Howard Schwartz wrote THE REVOLT OF THE PRIMITIVE: An Inquiry into the Roots of Political Correctness (2001). 

The book was written when most of the gas had been let out of the Feminist Movement.  Schwartz, a Freudian psychologist, examined feminism in terms of the damage it has done to the human psyche (translated, male psyche) offering an interesting proposition that it represents a return to the primitive from the mature.

*     *     *

A READER WRITES:

Jim,

This may be a little off topic (IMHO I do not think so). I came to know Dr Schwartz while an adjunct professor at Oakland University in Michigan in 1985.  I would submit that his book, THE REVOLT OF THE PRIMITIVE is relevant.  In my opinion, he has hit the sweet spot in all his literary endeavors.
                                                                  

Respectfully

Dick Danjin
"Making Things Run Well"

*     *     *
 

DR. FISHER RESPONDS

I am familiar with Dr. Schwartz’s book.  Like Schwartz, I have used Freudian explanatory models to explain some of my views in the past, but I haven’t submitted these views as scientific or replicable.  Not being an academic, I am not limited to that protocol. 

To me, the Feminist Movement was necessary because society and Western Civilization were on life support attempting to run the world on half its collective energy and intellectual power. 

The advance of women in the twentieth century was not a return to the primitive but a natural progression to the complement of men and women as a collective intellectual force. 

It was as if the left-brain finally courted and invited the right brain to the party so that the problem solving could have many more dimensions and operational perspectives.

If you will notice, with all societal corrections, there is a tendency to blast forward to excess in order to arrive at some reasonable destination of equity and sensibility. 

The Feminist Movement was no different.  It went for the whole enchilada when it embraced political correctness, thus becoming a radical movement, justifying in Schwartz’s mind apparently that it personified the rise of the primitive.

I’m sure you would have determined by now that I am not a radical thinker but something of a literal and liberal plodder, trying to make sense of nonsense, which brings me to the idea of “maturity," a central argument in the Schwartz manifesto.

In nature when life reaches maturity, it starts its quick descent into entropy, that is, its return to nature in its original state.  Schwartz may see this as the primitive state, but I see it as the descent to total inertia or zero energy.  Total systemic collapse comes to mind. 

In the complex organization, survival is built on negative entropy, or reinventing and radically restructuring the organization in an effort to reenergize itself to survive. 

The Feminist Movement I see in terms of negative entropy.  It could be said that political correctness was an understandable but not necessarily effective tactic in that progressive strategy. 

I am no scholar but a plodder attempting in my limited way to see what is gained, and yes, what is lost as we move into a new millennium. 

It is apparent in the emerging world of Islam, a world that once was centuries ahead of the West in virtually every field of human endeavor, a world in which women were not invited to the intellectual and cultural banquet, that it now has some catching up to do in terms of women’s rights, and women as full partners in society. 

The so-called “Arab Spring” will continue to be identified as a move toward democracy when I see it more clearly as an inchoate Feminist Movement.  Look closely, who is leading the charge?

It is catchy to see this rise of women as primitive.  It certainly is a provocative concept.  You know from reading this missive that I see feminism more as a harbinger of greater equality and a more equitable world.  This is not a time for men to whine, but to grow up.

Thank you for writing, and always be well,

Jim

WHEN MEN WON'T WORK AND THE WOMEN WHO CARRY THEM!

WHEN MEN WON’T WORK AND THE WOMEN WHO CARRY THEM!

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

© May 19, 2011

A generation ago, when the Feminist Movement was in full stride, women came to view life through the feminist prism.  They campaigned for an Office of Gender Equity, insisting there was a gender bias favoring men, especially with regard to education.  What now seems like ancient history, in 1970, it was then observed:

• While boys get higher scores in mathematics, girls get higher scores in reading and writing;
• Boys in eighth grade are 50 percent more likely to repeat a grade, while boys in high school constitute 68 percent of the special education population;
• 67 percent of female high school graduates go on to college, compared to 58 percent of male high school graduates. 
• Women were only 41 percent of all college graduates. 

Regarding graduate education, in 1970:

• Women receive 40 percent of all master’s degrees;
• Two thirds of all master’s degree candidates and more than half of all master’s degree holders today are women;
• Women earned only 6 percent of all first professional degrees; by 1991 that figure had increased to 39 percent, and now hovers around 50 percent;
• Only 14 percent of all doctoral degrees went to women; by 1991 that figure was up to 39 percent, while today it is pressing 50 percent. 
• The medical degree earned by women between 1970 and 1991 jumped from 8 percent to 36 percent.  By 1993, 42 percent of first-year medical students were women; today more than half of all medical students are women.
• In 1970, 5 percent of women earned law degrees; by 1991, that figure was up to 40 percent, and today is around 50 percent;
• In 1970, women earned 1 percent of dental degrees compared with 32 percent in 1991, and today more than half first year dental students are women, and more than 40 percent have earned dental degrees;
• Women today earn the majority of doctoral degrees in pharmacy and veterinary medicine. 

The gender imbalance is even more pronounced for African American and Hispanic women.  In 1990, fully 62 percent of all bachelor’s degrees to African Americans went to women, while 55 percent of Hispanic students receiving bachelor’s degrees were women.  In 1990, the white student imbalance was 53 percent to 47 percent in favor of women.  It is even more pronounced today. 

*     *     *

BACKGROUND

On April 4, 2011, I wrote an article in longhand on my observations on men who refused to work and the women who support them.  I wrote it while waiting for my daughter at the eye clinic where she was operated on for a detached retina.   

On May 11, 2011, New York Times columnist wrote an article on the very same subject, not speaking from empirical data but economic statistics.  Brooks insisted in his piece that energy define us, and that we are becoming less energetic insofar as American males are concerned.

In 1954, 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 were actively engaged in some kind of regular work.  Today, that number has slipped to 80 percent, whereas women, once only allowed to enter the workforce in small numbers in menial tasks have steadily increased in the last half-century. 

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States now lags behind all other G-7 nations in prime age men in the workforce.  Brooks quips,

“More American men lack the emotional and professional skills they would need to contribute.” 

Most startlingly, however, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 35 percent of those males are without high school diplomas whereas only 10 percent of college degreed men are out of work. 

Brooks becomes something of an apologist for me relating to the structural changes in the economy, which although relevant, fail to get inside the fact that there are more idle men walking the streets of the United States anytime since the Great Depression.  Brooks sees the problem in terms of economics when it seems clear to me it has been a natural progression of the Feminist Movement as many American males feel emasculated by soaring prominence of women “to forget their place.” 

James Burke and Robert Ornstein presented a conceptual framework for such perturbations in The Axemaker’s Gift: A Double-Edged History of Human Culture (1995).  They argued that with each cultural change something is gained at the expense of something lost, never to be experienced again.  Half the world’s population is women.  Yet, prior to WWII, they had been given secondary and subjugated roles.  It was evident ten-years after WWII, that society wanted to put the genie back in the bottle as displayed in Good Housekeeping Monthly (May 13, 1955):

The Good Wife’s guide:

• Has dinner ready, plans ahead, even the night before to have a delicious meal on time for her husband’s return.  This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking of him and are concerned about his needs. 
• Prepare yourself.  Take 15 minutes to rest so you’ll be refreshed when he comes home.  Touch up your make up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh looking.
• Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him.
• Clear away the clutter.  Make one last trip around the house before he arrives.
• Gather up schoolbooks, toys and papers and run a dust cloth over the furnisher.
• Over the cooler months of the year light a fire for him to unwind by.
• Prepare the children.  See that they are clean, are not noisy, and eliminate all noise from vacuum cleaners to dryers.
• Be happy to see him.
• Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to please him.
• Listen to him.  You may have dozens of important things to tell him, but this is not the moment.  Remember, his topics of interest are more important than yours.
• Make the evening his.  Never complain if he comes home late, or goes out to dinner, or other places of entertainment without you.  Try to understand his stress.
• Your goal is to make your home a place of peace, order and tranquility.
• Don’t greet him with complaints and problems.
• Don’t complain if he’s late or stays out all night.
• Make him comfortable.  Have a cool or warm drink ready for him.
• Arrange his pillows and offer to take his shoes off.
• Don’t ask him about his actions or question his judgments or integrity.
• A good wife always knows her place

The retinue of this fading fantasy is evident in 20 percent of American men ages 25 to 54 who aren’t working, or if working, not doing what they were trained to do.  I know: 

• An attorney with several degrees including a doctor in jurisprudence that refuses to practice law, or when he does practice it, gives away his services to friends, while his family suffers mightily for the indulgence, forcing his wife to work as a freelance model driving fifty, sixty or more miles for auditions while still being mother, housekeeper, and taxi service for her husband and children.  
• A father of two who sits at home strumming his guitar when he is able bodied except for the carpal tunnel syndrome, a disorder from overworking the hands performing the repetitive task of strumming the guitar all day long.
• A number of college graduates who have given up the effort to find work while living with and off wives or girlfriends.
• Women who work at the expense of time with their children when there husband makes a good living, but feels the wife should be working as hard as he is bringing in money, when he forgets her full-time non-paying jobs is wife and mother, and primary nurturer of the children. 
• Of a couple that has four preteen children in which the husband is a high school graduate and the wife a college graduate.  She is a dedicated mother feeling she cannot afford to take on a full time teaching position, but substitute teaches and cleans houses to make ends meet, while her husband refuses to leave a job that, at best, is only part-time and never brings in much income.

Women described here are treated in the manner of this 1955 Good Housekeeping guide although none of theme was yet born.  They subscribe to the 1955 dictum, “a good wife knows her place.” 

*     *     *

THE WALTER MITTY SYNDROME

Humorous James Thurber wrote a short story in 1939, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” which touched the collective American psyche denoting the ineffectual male who spends his time in heroic daydreams paying little attention to the real world. 

Many of the men described above fit into the Walter Mitty Syndrome as they live in the “what if” world:

• Had I gotten the breaks I would have made something of myself.
• Had I been born into a better situated family I would be better off now.
• Had I gotten the breaks writing a song I might have had a career.
• Had I married the right woman I would not have been dragged down to this.
• Had I not had children I would not have had to struggle.
• Had I gone into the military or the government I’d be retired by now with a great pension.

Men who don’t work are great daydreamers, which is consistent with Thurber’s short story.  Walter Mitty would spend his day in a deep state of daydreaming imagining himself a fighter pilot during WWII, a world-class doctor, always someone far removed from what he was doing. 

It was why in that eye clinic waiting for my daughter that I wrote this missive, which follows.

*     *     *

WHEN MEN WON’T WORK AND THE WOMEN THAT SUPPORT THEM

People in the 1970’s watched their families disintegrate as women increasingly carried the economic and emotional load.

Since then, women not only do most of the work, but they are a taxi service for the demands of their mate.  They carry their children to and fro, go to the grocery store, and dry cleaners for their husbands, and suffer the aggravations as well as the joys of their children. 

They are the silent partners in the marital relationship, and never in the know, until their husbands need a signature on a second or third mortgage.  Husbands make deals and then tell their wives after the fact.  It would never occur to them to ask for counsel and in put from their wives.  They are always in the know, and often to the family’s ruin.   

Husbands scheme and daydream, and find no need to consult their wives for ideas on the matter thinking they have the superior minds and information.  

The nostalgia for the way it was hangs on.  Men are involved.  Their women are treated as maids, housekeepers, nannies, chefs, dishwashers, launderers and supervisors of their children, keeping order and avoiding chaos with little allocated down time.

This situation is independent of socio-economic status, education, or social standing.  Families with the advantage of affluence, education, cultural enhancement, travel and social engagement are just as likely to have this male attribution.  .

The only time attention is brought to this matter is when women are coming apart, in failing health, and are forced to slow down or stop this demanding schedule.  Women persevere, for the most part, in the most trying circumstances.  . 

PRIDE ON THE LINE

Cultural bias would imply that I am addressing the dregs of society.  Not true.  Men who won’t work can be physicians in their forties who won’t practice medicine, attorneys who won’t practice law, carpenters who won’t apply their craft, and yes, poorly educated men who have lost their safe jobs in automobile manufacturer, chemical processing, oil refineries, or other previously safe jobs for the unskilled and undereducated.  These workers refuse to suffer the embarrassment of going back to night school or junior college to learn twenty-first century skills.

These men could be teachers who are no longer up to engaging students who challenge their methods and authority, engineers unwilling to adjust to the digital demands of new engineering, managers who refuse to adapt to the shift in power from authority to knowledge now possessed by the professional workforce.

These men are caught in a time warp in which their authority was infallible, and whether they were a doctor, teacher, or manager no one had the gumption to challenge their views.  They bask in nostalgic pride and excuses for why they have given up and given out.

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Men across society at every socio-economic level have been dropping off and dropping out of the workforce because it has changed and they cannot or will not change.

They read self-help books, attend self-help workshops or seminars, daydream, write music, strum guitars, or do anything to avoid looking for work.  They are Walter Mittys looking for the quick score, the perfect franchise, standing on acres of diamonds – their own inherent ability – looking for answers in all the wrong places.

Others eat and drink themselves to a state of permanent inertia depleting their energy to the point that they couldn’t look for work if their lives depended on I, retreating into some kind of real or psychosomatic illness. 

Still others spend the little money they have gambling, following their favorite professional sport teams, or supporting a girlfriend.

Men born after the Good Housekeeping 1955 guide for the “good wife” are the spoiled brats of our culture and their inculcators are their mothers.  In a paradoxical way, mothers continue to enslave their daughters and liberate their sons from responsibility. 

Yet, these same women that are nursemaids to their husbands and children, taxi service and maid service to the family, housekeeper and sergeant at arms in maintaining order, are often ridiculed rather than appreciated.  Men often resent when these women use their limited free time to go back to school to better themselves when they not so inclined.

THE DOUBLE EDGED SWORD, OR WHAT HAS BEEN LOST

The generation of the Great Depression entered maturity in the 1950s and survived because they were small in number with unlimited opportunity in a post-World War II climate.  They had been schooled in scarcity, and learned to live with little.  When they came to maturity, they failed to teach these same lessons to their children.  Not only were parents guilty of this, but also teachers, the religious, managers, and leaders.  Insouciant society developed without guidance or direction, and therefore without wisdom 

The irony is that children had more freedom then, more creative license, more natural selection and survival of the fittest, more a climate conducive to developing leaders, more palpable identity and integrity as nothing was written in concrete but assumed the natural flow of things. 

The generation of the 1950’s, essentially pre-television era, lived within their means, didn’t buy expensive houses, or drive fancy cars, nor did they dress or attempt to mimic the rich and famous, but lived within themselves, and prospered.

The societal train went off the track in the 1960’s when it attempted as parents to deny children the pain of struggle that had made them, and instead pampered them to the extent that they made school a war zone.  Sons of WWII veterans burned their draft cards, refused to serve their country, created chaos on college campuses, or retreated to Haight Asbury in California, and into psychedelic drugs and hedonistic lifestyles in defiance of established mores.  The generation that felt sexually repressed looked for liberation in free love, but instead gave birth to the United States of Anxiety, and the burgeoning psychotherapy industry that is still with us.

THE POWER OF DENIAL

People who came to maturity in the 1950’s, now parents, were not prepared for a world that had caught up with the United States economically and technologically. 

1950 style parents were drunk with success, and had little time for child rearing. Their offspring were allowed to be their own parents as birth parents were seldom home.  Children invented their own play, but the world of 1960 was a very different world than the 1930’s, something parents refused to acknowledge.  It was a much more dangerous place. 

At the same time, the inchoate power shift to women was underway.  Men were being pushed aside in leadership, scholarship and professional acumen, as women climbed up to eventually become the majority in college, whatever the ethnicity or profession.  Women have not allowed the fact that they make only 75 percent as much as men for the same work to slow them down.

Women, once biased for being baby factories, are working their way up the corporate pyramid to the boardrooms and into the highest offices of government

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RIGHT BRAIN, LEFT BRAIN

In this digital age, we are finding the right brain, the so-called “feminine brain” is a powerful and necessary complement to the left-brain, the so-called “masculine brain.” 

The key to the problem solving is not only aggression action, but also appropriate response to the chronic problems.  Likewise, the key to economic health is not only the competitive verve, but also the spirit of cooperation. 

Although rational cognitive thinking is still important, intuition and the use of the affect have come into new prominence (see David Brook’s “The Social Animal,” 2011), as the personal are an important match to the cerebral in the successful discharge of business.  In that same vein, analysis need not lead to paralysis if balanced with suitable attention to synthesis. 

No one has been more energetic in exposing the limits to pure Socratic thinking, or linear logic than Edward de Bono in such books as “Lateral Thinking” (1977) and “Parallel Thinking” (1994).

Women are inclined to problem solve conditionally when dealing with contradictory situations, which are common to experience today.

Aware of their biological clock, delayed gratification is programmed into their psyches as well as genes.  The necessary investment of time, patience and care are familiar territory.  Stated another way, women have their feet solidly on the ground while men prefer to soar to avoid the detritus and normal obstacles of everyday life, while women preserve the race by pruning the good earth. 

The decline and fall of men has been accelerated by women as mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives and teachers, who make excuses in perpetuity when they won’t work, won’t study, won’t get off their behinds and do something useful.  These women instead attempt to support and carry them as if they were still dependent children suspended in terminal adolescence at the age of twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or older.

Women have complicated the picture of carrying men who refuse to work by taking physical, mental, and emotional abuse from these same men as if they deserved it.  If the situation were reversed, chances are the men would walk out on their women, something that seldom happens with instinctual women. 

WHAT CAN BE DONE WITH MEN WHO WON’T WORK?

The short answer is for women to tell their men to get off their behinds and look for work or get out.

Better would be to understand the spinelessness of such men, and from this understanding find a way to tap their diminished capacity by directing their attention and interest to some activity which might land to employment. 

Everyone has interests.  Few men follow their bliss but instead chase the buck doing what pays the most or something that has very little appeal to them.  Women have been locked in this prison for centuries, and continue to thrive despite repressed bitterness.  Men are not made of such firm substance.  Interest may be kindled in volunteering at school, church or in a community project, or around some favorite activity such as music, sports, or some other social arena.  In this age, men could find a way of making a living at home surfing by surfing the Internet. 

Another possibility would be cut off giving them money for beer and cigarettes, tickets to sporting events or other incidentals without them doing something specifically for the money.  They could be cleaning the house, painting, doing the grocery shopping, going to the cleaners, doing the laundry, taking the kids to and from school, and to youth events.  The shoe is on the other foot, and the person who has the coin has the power. 

These men often keep their women out of the loop as to how they spend their money.  Now, they can experience a little of their own medicine. 

Here is the rub.  I’ve talked to countless women who never had a clue as to how their husbands spent the family income, never understood why they had to sign papers without prior conversations on the investment, or second or third mortgage on their house, never were asked if they would like to go to this or that event, but assumed they would go because they were obliged to go to satisfy their husband without question or protest. 

Now, these men who won’t work and are not bringing in the bacon have wives who feel obliged to get permission from them to do this or that with their hard earned money, something they never experienced when their men were making the majority of the coin.

Moreover, women are reluctant to take legal action against deadbeat husbands and fathers, blaming themselves for the anxiety in the family.  Deadbeat dads are good at assuming the offense against their wives and mothers of their children.

Eventually, given the stress and strain of carrying these men, given it is unlikely the situation will change, these women have to decide if it would be better for the family without these men, or worse? 

I have known families who have gone through more than one generation of deadbeat men, men who would work only for premium wages or not at all, men who were alcoholics and abused their wives and children psychologically, and women who were willing to accept such treatment because they knew no other. 

In the last quarter century, the plush jobs in the automotive and steel industry have evaporated.  Generation after generation of workers with high school diplomas or less were conditioned to make $50,000 to $75,000 a year in unskilled jobs, and to retire with pensions of $40,000 with full medical benefits.  The boilerplate for this workforce still exists but the jobs are essentially gone. 

Then there are men who soared during the booming 1990s, and have suffered major setbacks, finding themselves in deep financial trouble, unable to cope much less work.  They need help but they are unwilling to seek it.  Many are well educated in law, medicine, engineering and education.  They are the walking wounded that are part of this problem and need help not criticism. 

The world of the Big Easy, be it Detroit or Gary or Seattle, or somewhere else is gone.  We are a declining nation in a world that has not only caught up with us but is passing us.  We cannot complain our way back to prominence, or deny the reality.  I’ve known engineers making near six-figure incomes who were surplused when high tech companies downsized dramatically.  Some started new businesses using their skills, many waited for the downturn to end, and of course they are still waiting.  I know of one engineer who was given a quarter million separation package from IBM, and went through it in two years, and has never had a stable income since.  I would like to think this an isolated case, but I don’t think so.

Men who won’t work are not a mirage.  I am confident everyone reading this has someone they know who fits the profile.  We are aghast that unemployment hovers around 9 percent, when I think it is close to 18 percent, when you take in part-time workers, and workers working far below their skill levels, if working at all.

One day soon there will be an eruption of attention to this issue, and the focus will be on economic dimensions of the problem, when I see the problem more basically a behavioral and psychological one. 

These are not bad men that won’t work.  These are men that need help.  I’m not sure we have the societal tools to do the job.  The psychological and psychiatric professions are mainly explanatory models that develop and interesting vocabulary to explain the problem, but have little impact on changing behavior or ameliorating the malady.

For wont of being misunderstood, I would suggest it is mainly a spiritual issue that our culture far from enhancing our spirituality and dampened it by retreating into biological and mathematical paradigms to explain our lethargy when it is our soul that is sick.

We have lost our moral compass, and the ideals of our forefathers, and thus our way.  We need help to crawl out of the ditch of despair, that the answers to this dilemma are not “out there” but inside waiting to be explored. 

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REFLECTIONS OF A ROMANTIC -- A TIME TO TELL YOUR STORY!

REFLECTIONS OF A ROMANTIC – A TIME TO TELL YOUR STORY!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 8, 2011

REFERENCE:

Real names are used in this exchange that might not resonate with the reader, but the essence of the exchange is common to us all.  A subtle nuance in this writer’s note is that he didn’t feel comfortable at one local hangout compared to another because of implied caste, class distinction.  Like the writer, I was born on the wrong side of the tracks and can empathize with him.  Now, both of us are in our advanced years, but the sting of that distinction is still present in our prose.  Often lower class survivors become writers of some distinction because they live in their souls, or to put it another way, there souls are very much alive in them. 

JRF

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A WRITER WRITES:

Dear Dr. Jim –

I just read the comments written in one of your letters regarding the book "In The Shadow of the Court House." I never throw your notes or letters away until I do read them, it just takes a while to get to them.

Now that the Clinton Herald has cut (sliced) my hours I do have a little more time on my hands.

Coming from the other side of the tracks, below the 4th Street subway, I wasn't “in the shadow of the courthouse” very often except for a baseball game or football game (remember the no pads, no flags, just straight tackle stuff.


But I do remember the fun you all had near the courthouse as the fun we all had between South Clinton Park, Chancy Park, and the courthouse and even up to Lyons and Eagle Point Park.


During daylight hours there were games, at night perhaps a little rumble with no punches thrown (usually) just a lot of loud talk. I forgot, once in a while we Southenders even made it to Camanche.

Needless to say I recognize names and locations. You had your young Billy Collins and we had Robert "Ripper" Collins, his older brother, and names like Bill Calnan Jim Delaney, Bill Hullinger, etc. I felt I didn't belong to the Marcucci Soda Fountain set and so hung out at the Revere (Rastrelli's) Soda Fountain and Petersen's Roller Skating Rink.

I was a baseball fan, especially since dad had played semi-pro ball in Hannibal, Mo., my birthplace. Dad worked for the recreation department here in Clinton. I did not know for several years that the Recreation Department was also a WPA project.

Dad worked at Clinton and Southside parks and in summer handled the lights and bases at the softball field next to Riverview Stadium. In fact it was dad who named the Clinton Owls, and I was official scorer for almost 20 years for Clinton Baseball Club, Inc. That is not Riverview Stadium, nor Alliant Energy Field, but my ball yard.

Isn't it amazing how when you read something about someone else's hangouts you start thinking of your own and how great and peaceful life was "In the Good Old Days"?


Hope life is treating you and BB in a wonderful manner. Take care, drive carefully, love and prayers, and as my favorite funny-man used to say,
 God bless.......


Gk

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear GK,

What a lovely piece of nostalgia and remembrance.  Yes, it was a delightful time to be alive.  Our youth, its climate and culture, its veritable ambience was a time when we had not yet taken ourselves so seriously. 

I wrote IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) in memory of Bobby Witt and the generation that he headed, not only to illustrate that but also to provide a snapshot of an era. 

Neighborhoods mattered in those days, and those names you mentioned are remembered, as are Ray Gilbert, Hans Andreson, Lefty Ward and Skinz (sp) Haddadd from Chancy Park, then there was Bill Eversole and his gang from Lyons. 

As a fellow romantic, I think they were truly halcyon days.  It saddens me that young people today don't experience such casual joy, alas, how could they as small town America is long gone.

We have lost our place and space in our quest to have more be more and dominate more.  Like you, I am a reader and find it incredible and yes, regrettable that most writers have ignored those years during and immediately following WWII. 

Baby boomer generation celebrities such as Des Moines, Iowa's own Bill Bryson have written interesting memoirs of their youth but there are not many -- of which I am aware -- of Depression generation writers. 

Tom Brokaw, also a Midwesterner (South Dakota), was born in 1940 or of our generation, while Bryson was born in 1951, or a member of the spoil brat generation.  His memoir I sense was quickly knocked out. 

These two high achievers have written surprisingly bland memoirs, by that I mean they don't reveal their souls, which a Depression era kid could not avoid.

My purpose in saying this is that you should write your book just as if you were writing a letter to someone like me with real names and real places and real events as you recall them.  You are a good writer, and have a sense of the nuances of the people you write about as your profiles illustrate -- you did one on a classmate of mine, Carole Gilbert

To write my book I had to take twelve trips back to Clinton with hundreds of interviews, constant hours with the microfiche at the Clinton library, perusing documents in the Clinton Historical Museum, and wandering around town to find landmarks that were quickly vanishing.  I spent thirteen years collecting data committed to scores of notebooks, then wrote my book and reducing it to half its nearly 700 pages (single space). 

I look back now, thinking how much better I could have written it today.  But here is the irony, all five Catholic churches are gone, many of the other landmarks have been torn down, replaced by fast food franchises, so I was lucky to have written what I wrote when I did.

I'm telling you this for another reason.  Time is of the essence, and none of us knows when we will run out of time. 

From another perspective, I have been writing A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA for more than forty years.  It wasn't until now that I could write an honest book about that period and that experience.  It will offend many who think of me as that good Catholic boy IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE.  I know it will be published, but I'm not sure in my lifetime.  I say this because I am in my third rewrite of it, a volume of 653 pages and some 260,000 words, and that is after cutting scores of stories from it.

You are a writer.  Who is a writer?  A writer is a storyteller, pure and simple.  But for a story to have traction it must first have traction with an audience of one, you.  It must resonate with your soul irrespective of how the reader might see you writing it. 

So, George, think about it, give it a go, and enjoy the ride not worrying about whether it will be published or not.  It doesn't have to be perfect as perfect is the enemy of the good.  And you are good.

Be always well,

Jim

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