A PAINFUL STING, CRUEL AFFRONT, A MARGINALIZER, NOT AN INSPIRER
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 19, 2012
The first television debate in South Carolina of Republican hopefuls to win the party’s nomination for President personified moral fatigue. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich stepped into the void to offer odious overkill.
Fox Television News panel baited the Speaker with softball questions about food stamps and unemployment compensation for out-of-work Americans. Gingrich has a talent for going for the jugular expressing the pent up angst of his party, which for me represented a painful sting and cruel affront to the marginalized, the people powerless to protest, and I am a registered Republican.
Raucous applause greeted his reference to 99 weeks of unemployment compensation being the time required to earn an Associate of Arts college degree.
One of the panelists suggested that the Speaker’s criticism was directed at African Americans, a charge the Speaker dodged with agility pointing out that unemployment benefits should be tied to some kind of work or training program for everyone. Who could argue with that?
The Speaker waved his pudgy arms magnanimously and said he was sure his colleagues on the dais agreed. They were silent. He then said Republicans believed “work is good,” implying Democrats do not.
Words are incendiary, words such as “work” or “food stamps” or “unemployment compensation.” Incendiary words have been the arsenal of demagogues throughout history, words that suggest leadership but appeal to the rabble, not the reasonable.
Food stamps and unemployment compensation are indicators of the failure of governance, an embarrassment to takers as well as givers. The Speaker added ceremoniously, “I’ll help you if you’re willing to help yourself.” Pretty words empty of meaning. People drowning in debt and in psychological and economic depression have little to say in the matter but to accept their marginalized status.
THE PUNISHING WASTE OF CORPORATE SPEAK
The human mind is a fragile instrument, and puppet masters dance on that mind as if they own it, believing they have reached their own elevated status as if by osmosis. Heredity, environment, culture and programming are imperious masters of the individual’s fate. So it has been throughout history.
The soul of a race is docile or competitive, reactive or engaged, servile or challenging. Each race carries the heavy chains and the lasting links of its ancestors. Gustave le Bon, more than one hundred years ago, put it this way: “We are the children at once of our parents and our race. Our country is our second mother for physiological and heredity as well as sentimental reasons.” He went on to say, “A people are guided far more by its dead than by its living members. It is by its dead, and by its dead alone, that a race is founded.” Our ancestors fashion our ideas, our approach to our problems, and the motives of our conduct. We bear the burden of their mistakes and reap the rewards of their virtues.
A people of many races, as is our own constituency, develop common sentiments, common interests, and common beliefs. Within these sentiments a character develops with a mental constitution, which is not rigid. It may waver between a capacity for prudence or a tendency to rely on impulse, a demonstration of will power or an inclination to follow the crowd, the stoicism of perseverance or the passivity of giving up at crunch time, the energy to do what is necessary or the need to be carried, a respect for rules or an obsession with avoiding them. In the end, the level of morality determines if a race is to survive and prosper.
We have many examples in history to show us the truth of this. Rome fell after 500 years, overrun by barbarians, when its morality and character unraveled.
We also have bifurcated evidence of race bending but not breaking. The Anglo-Saxon of northern Europe had the character and constitution to challenge the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. This led to the Protestant Reformation.
This did not happen in southern Germany or the southern tier of Europe, or indeed, in any of the Latin countries of Europe. Five hundred years after Martin Luther, southern Germany remains essentially Roman Catholic, but not northern Germany, northern Europe or England. The birthplace of the present pope, Benedict XVI, incidentally, is from Bavaria in southern Germany.
African Americans have resided in southern Florida for more than three hundred years. In the wake of the Cuban Revolution in the late 1950s, Cubans fled to the United States, and became naturalized citizens of this country. They have produced a Florida governor and two United States Senators, Congressmen and Congresswomen. The southern peninsula of Florida has been turned into little Cuba, culturally, economically, intellectually and commercially. It has the character and soul of Cuba. Meanwhile, African Americans still struggle in the region for a toehold.
Cubans brought their individual culture with them, the visible expression of their invisible soul. Moreover, they assimilated the American culture and made it work for them. They possessed at once a personal life and a collective life, the latter being of their race. The mindset has not been modified, but merely the objects that have brought it into play have changed. So, it has been with many other cultures that make up America. Why not the African American?
This brings me to why I take umbrage at the Speaker’s comments.
Not only are his remarks to raucous applause patronizing and snide, they illustrate the problem. Modern society clashes with the prospects of the marginalized realizing the American dreams of social justice and equality of opportunity.
“I am willing to work with you” the speaker proclaims, implying those dependent on food stamps and unemployment compensation are the problem.
These recipients are casualties of the problem. The system is broke. The Speaker corroborates this by speaking one language while practicing another, a breach of trust. For instance, did his $1.6 million earned consulting for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac help or hurt these people?
The Speaker is not alone. Educators and politicians speak of a dumbing down of American society. Heads nod in agreement.
Yet, if you get inside this situation, you see that modern industrial society, and now the information age endeavor to program people to increasingly specialized labor at the expense of developing their intelligence and character to engage an ever changing world.
When people are honed like machines, they respond like machines, which is a dumbing down process.
When these machines are considered anachronistic and discarded, the people manning them are as well, putting them out in the cold, jobless, clueless, and powerless. A speaker standing behind a dais pontificating steps of amelioration cannot correct the problem because it is in the people's DNA.
Everything for at least the last century has been turned inside out and upside down by developments in the last twenty years, and now we are paying the price for that development. People have been programmed to feed the whimsical needs of society's machine rather than society being dedicated to feed the needs of the people.
This is palpably evident in education, which is boring and out of date for students from pre-K to graduate school, in job classifications, which favor the credentialed rather than the competent, where the emphasis is on nourishment of the brain as if it doesn’t have a body, and it explains why leaders who cannot lead and followers who can, never take the reins.
The compelling story of the Republican Presidential Debates has been the power of transparency. But transparency is not enough. Democracy demands more.
Democracy demands a rallying message that embraces us all. FDR often wrote his own speeches. He labored over what he would say to Congress the day after the Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He first wrote, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in history – the United States was deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan….” When he proofread his speech, he crossed out “history” and scribbled in “infamy.” The word was electrifying, and immediately rallied the nation behind his leadership. We are desperate for such a word and voice now.
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