EYES WIDE SHUT!

EYES WIDE SHUT!

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

© October 31, 2012

A READER WRITES:

I read your take on Edward Bernays’s “The Engineering of Consent and OD.”  It is apparent you like Bernays.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I suppose the reason Edward Bernays (Engineering of Concent and OD) interested me is the same reason Gustave Le Bon, and others of the same ilk do.  OD relates to the mindset of the organization, which includes "the crowd."

For example, I've read several histories of Nazi Germany including Joachim Fest's "Hiter," and his "Speer," Alan Bullock's "Hitler," and about twenty other volumes, mainly, because it fascinates me how the crowd is energized, manipulated and ultimately directed away from its best interests. 

Now I'm set to reading "Not Me: Memoirs of a German Childhood" (2012), a manuscript left by Fest, who died at nearly 80 in 2006.  I'm also rereading his other books.

I'm planning to read "The Occupy Handbook" by Janet Byrne to get a better sense of that crowd moment (I can't call it a movement).

What intrigues me about "Not Me" is what the Fest family endured because it refused to be sucked into the Nazi moment.  The book is largely about the father who was a staunch German Catholic with incredible courage and unfailing perception of the Nazi betrayal of the German people and its culture.

I come from a staunch Irish Catholic family, a family with nuns and priests in the family tree, but I wonder if my family could stand up to what the Fest family did, losing their upper middle class status, their friends and forced to live in veritable poverty and isolation while surrounded by a nation of Nazi sympathizers. 

Fest doesn't see his family as heroic, but as people who held deep beliefs that couldn't be easily changed.  A quote from the nineteenth century historian Leopold von Ranks puts this in perspective:

Neither blindness nor ignorance corrupts people and governments.  They soon realize where the path they have taken is leading them.  But there is an impulse within them, favored by their natures and reinforced by their habits, which they do not resist; it continues to propel them forward as long as they have a remnant of strength.  He who overcomes himself is divine.  Most see their ruin before their eyes, but they go on into it.

This is as true today when we embrace fads and panaceas at the expense of our core values and beliefs.  The sense of danger and even dread plays at the base of our reptilian brains, as we do so, but far too often it is not heeded for the mob rules, and we go into the abyss with our eyes wide shut. 

*     *     *

THE ENGINEERING OF CONSENT and OD!

THE ENGINEERING OF CONSENT and OD!

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

© October 30, 2012

Reference:

William L. Livingston III, author of “Design for Prevention” (2012), sent me an article written by Edward L. Bernays and Doris E. Fleischman © 1947, published sixty-five years ago. 

Livingston’s comment: “This essay is D4P in short form especially as it relates to the emphasis of front end design.”  He went on to say, “It is also the equivalent of "The Prince" by Machiavelli,” but for CEOs. 

Wow, I said to myself, that is some endorsement.  Edward Bernays, for those not familiar with the name, is the father of media “spin” and the creator of public relations or PR.  He also lived to be nearly 104 (1891-1995).

My interest, I must confess, is that I saw a remarkable connection between Bernays’s communications expose with organizational development (OD).

THE ENGINEERING OF CONSENT

Given that this piece was written sixty-five years ago, and is culture bound by that limitation, the reader might wonder what relevance it has.  As it turns out, the engineering of agreement that predisposes consensus is as relevant today as it was those many years ago.  Why?  Because with all our electronic tools being used essentially as toys we are the same hapless critters that we were then.

Bernays writes:

For only by mastering the techniques of communication can leadership be exercised fruitfully in the vast complex that is modern democracy in the United States.

He was writing of a much less formally educated society:

The average American adult has only six years of schooling behind him.

If that were not bad enough, he continues:

Today’s leaders have become more remote physically from the public; yet, at the same time, the public has much greater familiarity with these leaders through the system of modern communications.

Indeed, the President of the United States, if nothing else, is a media star, constantly on with his image appearing everywhere so that subliminally he is in the mind if not in one’s thoughts 24/7.

THE ENGINEERING APPROACH as PUBLIC RELATIONS

Bernays was not quite a contemporary of the French philosopher and psychologist Gustave Le Bon (see references to him in this blog), but he understood the mechanisms and motives, as did Le Bon of the group mind, and the impossibility of controlling and regimenting the masses according to an outside will without satisfying the crowd’s internal psychosocial needs. 

He is very pragmatic in his dictum.  You manage this process as assiduously as a civil engineer goes about analyzing the elements of the situation before he builds a bridge which entails:

(1)   Calculating resources, human and physical;

(2)   Developing as thorough a knowledge of the subject as possible;

(3)   Determining the objective, subject to possible change;

(4)   Researching the public to learn why and how it acts individually and as a group.

Public relations differ little with this formula today.  It is consistent with organizational development (OD) as well.  I say that because Bernays’s favorite technique was the manipulation of public opinion by the indirection of a “third party.”  OD is that third party in assaying the lay of the land and the problems that seem endemic to the system.  Bernays’s writes:

If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group, which they sway.

As Livingston implies in his remarks, CEOs could benefit from “the engineering of consent” because they don’t always pay that much attention to the front end, whereas Bernays’s engineer would know precisely where he was going and what he desired to accomplish.  He writes:

He may intensify already existing attitudes; he may induce those holding favorable attitudes to take constructive action; he may convert disbelievers; he may disrupt certain antagonistic points of view.

WHERE ARE WE RIGHT NOW?  STUDYING THE PUBLIC

It is not enough to have the objective clear in your mind, but this must be balanced with a clear understanding of the crowd, the group, the public or the organization.  Bernays asks:

These are people, but what do they know? 

In other words, what is the organic construction of their will?  How do we go forward without first asking ourselves:

What are their present attitudes towards the situation with which we are concerned?  What are the impulses, which govern these attitudes?  What ideas are the people ready to absorb?  What are the people ready to do?  Where do they get their ideas?

Again back to Livingston’s CEOs and front end attention.  Attitude is all about people’s predisposition to act.  If we don’t precisely know people’s beliefs, values, interests, attitudes and cultural proclivities, then we don’t know them at all, or how they will act. 

Given this set of circumstances, whatever we do is more or less like trying to pin the tail on the donkey blindfolded.  As absurd as this sounds, this is too often the case. 

One must try to find out what they (people) are in any situation in which one is working. 

That is to say, know the group formations with which one is to deal from every vantage point, that is, material, spiritual, economic, psychological and political.

STUDY THE LEADER

To function well, Bernays advises, select leaders who usually remain in a controlling position for stated intervals of time.  These leaders reflect their followers’ wishes and work to promote their interests.  In turn, they can only lead them as far as, and in the direction in which they want to go.

Study the leader to see if he has the make-up to realize that leadership, in the end, is complete followership, that is, if the leader understands the mind of the group that establishes a common denominator between the leader and the group. 

Once established, Bernays says, it provides a blueprint of action and clarifies the question of who does what, when, and why.  It will indicate the over-all strategy to be employed.

Study the leader to see if he has the flexibility and the integrity to modify planned goals and to change actions and methods that circumstances necessitate. 

This furnishes, Bernays says, the equivalent of the mariner’s chart, the architect’s blueprint, the traveler’s roadmap.  It is also happens to be excellent OD.

THEMES, STRATEGIES AND ORGANIZATION

Bernays sees the thematic brief as the story line, the strategic intervention as the structured overarching principle to be carried out by the tactics that flow in an ever modifying process to the completion of the task.  The mechanism is holistic, intelligent and organic.  In that sense, it has much in common with OD.

Too often the story line is assumed when no one has checked beforehand to see if everyone is on the same page.  The strategy then is reduced to tactics.  The tactics then go off the grid of the intended target due to unanticipated or unintended consequences.  The tartet is then changed to accommodate the new contingencies. 

What is actually accomplished, if anything, is far removed from the objective.  This can lead to dire consequences.  I saw this when organizations aspired to creating a culture of contribution but, instead, created a culture of complacency with passive behaviors dominating (see Six Silent Killers, 1998).    

This has been the fate of MBOs (Management By Objectives) and PAS (Performance Appraisal System), exercises meant to energize operations to excellence only to see them wandering far off the grid of intended purpose.  They became ends in themselves instead of means to any useful ends. 

An organization when there is a disconnect between purpose and performance can lead to unusual internal stress and strain that finds it unable to recognize much less cope with external demands.  Markets disappear, manpower needs shift, and the economics of survival too often gravitate to panic mode.

Here is how Bernays looks at themes, strategies and communications:

Do not think of tactics in terms of segmental approaches.  The problem is not to get articles into a newspaper or obtain radio time or arrange a motion picture newsreel; it is rather to set in motion a broad activity (strategy), the success of which depends on interlocking (complementary) phases and elements of the proposed strategy, implemented by tactics that are timed to the moment of maximum effectiveness.

Livingston is so right on when he insists this short document is a manifesto for CEOs alerting them as to how routine practices (e.g., MBOs and PAS) can cripple operations.  Bernays writes:

An action (or activity) held over but one day (that may no longer be relevant) may fall completely flat.  Skilled and imaginative timing has determined the success of many mass movements and campaigns.

Management is a dinosaur and it has been now for several generations, yet it operates with the hubris that it is irreplaceable (see Work Without Managers, 1991), which is not the case at all. 

We have had a revolution in what is considered “work,” and with the exception of a few high-tech companies, work is defined, scripted, implemented and performed as if most workers have those "six years of formal education" that Bernays speaks about. 

Moreover, we are in a machine age, but it is the second machine age, which finds that new machine too often the master and the worker too often the machine's willing slave. 

This need not be.  Bernays was a pioneer in media and a student of Freudian theory and the changing nature of the American culture.  He stepped outside his discipline to learn how social psychological and anthropological research was changing the conception of people as operatives. 

He recognized how cultures clashed and how events out of that collision change people; how these changes do not occur by accident but are driven by forces meant to accomplish some purpose, and that that purpose is influenced by the acceptance of certain ideas, which lead inevitably to certain actions.  In his words, he explains it thusly:

Events may set up a chain reaction.  By harnessing the energies of group leaders, the engineer of consent can stimulate them to set in motion activities of their own.  They will organize additional, specialized, subsidiary events, all of which will further dramatize the basic theme (the story line). 

This is Livingston’s “front end” attention, which he gives in his “Design for Prevention” (2012).  If the preparatory work is done comprehensively and completely, if everything that should go into the equation is properly understood and executed with precision, then the outcome is organic and flows naturally to its purpose. 

Bernays says:

Communication is the key to engineering consent for social action.

I couldn’t agree with him more.  He continues:

Words, sounds, and pictures accomplish little unless they are the tools of a soundly thought out plan and carefully organized method.  If the plans are well formulated and the proper use is made of them, the ideas conveyed by the words will become part and parcel of the people themselves.

An OD specialist can go into a workplace and can gain an understanding of that workplace without speaking to a single soul.  He does this by looking around, studying behavior, and absorbing the place.  He can tell in that obsevation whether or not the words are part and parcel of the people themselves, or if there is a great disconnect.  Bernays saw this in terms of public relations whereas I see it in terms of OD. 

With OD the language expressed is in behavior in which the word is, indeed, action:

The structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates organizational behavior; organizational behavior establishes whether the organization thrives or even survives.

*     *     *

A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS -- The Tyranny of Politics in the Age of Executive Collapse in the Office of the President

A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS – The Tyranny of Politics in the Age of Executive Collapse in the Office of the President

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

© October 27, 2012

The quadrennial madness of presidential politics seems to get less tolerable as one ages, at least that has been my experience.  When a political ad flares up on the television screen, I hit the mute button. 

Years ago I did this on a commercial ad, and my father-in-law said, “You can’t do that!  How are those people expected to sell their products?”

I answered, “By putting that money to better use by making quality products.” 

Two billion spent by a superfund blitzkrieg of Democratic and Republican ads on television, as I rest my case. 

I watched the score of Republican primary debates, the three presidential debates and the one vice presidential debate, have read scores of articles on the candidates in newspapers, magazines and books.  I’ve even watched Charlie Rose Monday through Friday with his cavalcade of experts giving their two cents on the candidates and the coming election, only to conclude that they are as clueless as everyone else. 

We live in a corporate society in which content and context have led to a confluence of pundits and personalities who believe proximity to the malarkey grants them an advantage, when I think they are part of the problem.

If I was a little green man from another planet, given the debates, alone, I’m sure I would conclude that Barak Obama was the challenger and that Mitt Romney the president. 

Looking and being presidential has taken a real hit, and media, the corporate horn of corporate society, is busy creating empty expressions such as the American president “is the most powerful leader in the world” when facts on the ground suggest otherwise.

Corporate society has spawned corpocracy, which I call the American disease.  It has now settled on the sick American presidency.[i]  We have moved in corporate society to an increasing reliance on the machine at the expense of the man, to drone on forward with robotic zeal not realizing how hapless we have become, and now we see it so clearly as presidential politics are center stage in this quadrennial madness.

FROM THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY ….

Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States (1829-1837), was a man not a machine.  He won the popular vote in 1825, but lacked an electoral majority as did his opponent, John Quincy Adams.  The election was thrown into the House of Representatives and Adams was given the nod.  It helped that Adams was the son of one of the Founding Fathers and second president of the United States.  Likeability was even important then, and Adams won on that score but was not much of a president.  Wouldn’t it be something if this election finds its way into the House to determine the winner?

Adams attempted to expand the executive powers of the presidency, but didn’t have the temperament to be successful.  Jackson had the stones to not only expand the powers of the presidency but to establish “the imperial presidency,” intact to this day.

He took on the likes of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, and distracters such as Nicholas Biddle of the Second Bank of the United States.  His detractors looked to Europe for approval, he to the American people in the hinterland.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. writes in “The Age of Jackson” (1945) that the Tennessee country bumpkin established lopsided authority in the presidency not envisioned by the checks and balances in the Federalist Papers of Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.   

*     *     *

The imperial presidency has been waning since WWII.  Power in the 1950s shifted to the Supreme Court as it stepped into the vacuum of governmental indecision mainly on civil rights. 

Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954 abolished segregation in schools but not in public places such as restaurants.  The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s had Supreme Court support, while Congress was forced to act after the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. 

President Lyndon Johnson took advantage of the moment pushing through Civil Rights Legislation.  This success was quickly compromised by his escalation of the war in Vietnam with the bogus Tonka Bay resolution.

After Johnson, the imperial presidency continued to fad culminating in the Watergate “break-in” and the “Nixon tapes,” the embarrassing defeat in Vietnam, and the near impeachment of President Richard Milhous Nixon, who resigned in disgrace. 

President Gerald Ford completed Nixon’s term, attempted to heal the nation, but lost in his bid for his own term when former governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter was elected. 

Carter couldn’t seem to get on track.  As president, he was a quantitative thinker who couldn’t seem to make qualitative decisions.  With double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation, he addressed the nation on television as if “it” had a crisis in confidence, not he.  In an open collar shirt and cardigan sweater, apparently to suggest intimacy, which was foreign to his personality, it backfired.  The unfortunate thing is that quantitative thinkers are slaves to data, and never seem to have enough to make timely decisions.

With the Iran Hostage Crisis, the nation went into a tailspin matching its economic woes.  Carter surrendered power to his Republican opponent Ronald Wilson Reagan after one term.  Reagan, hardly an intellectual, was a man from the movies who had treated the governorship of California and now the presidency of the United States as if it was a motion picture in his head.  He pictured a global shield like “Star Wars” and then built the greatest war machine since WWII.  It threw the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and ultimate dissolution. 

Republican George Herbert Walker Bush followed promising “no new taxes,” but pursued the First Gulf War, which forced him to raise taxes, and gave way to his democratic opponent President William Jefferson Clinton after one term. 

Clinton was a dandy.  Quick on his feet, a party boy from a small rural state, Arkansas, where he had been governor, he treated the presidency as if it were a video game in which he always won.

The United States enjoyed an economic boom during the Clinton years, which everyone thought would continue forever.  He managed to balance the budget and create a surplus.  Flying high and mighty, his personal and surreal dandyism caught up with him in a sexual tryst with a White House page, was then impeached, but unsuccessfully.  He left the presidency in moral tatters, only to be succeeded by a reformed party boy as president.

President George Walker Bush expected to have an Eisenhower style presidency, only to be hit with September 11, 2001 when New York City’s Twin Towers were destroyed by al qaeda terrorist attack with the flying of two American commercial jets into the towers.

Nearly 3,000 died.  Shock was followed by the awe of a preemptive invasion into Iraq on the bogus charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.  The Iraq war led to the war in Afghanistan, which is now ten-years-long and still unresolved. 

At the end of the Bush administration, an economic crisis surfaced, which resembled the Great Depression of 1929.  President Barak Obama, the first African American to be president, stepped into this maelstrom, but after four years has been unable to end the crisis. 

An ambivalent Supreme Court and dysfunctional Congress haven’t helped as Bob Woodward shows in “The Price of Politics” (2012).

TO CORPORATE SOCIETY CORRUPTED TO CORPOCRACY

Over my long life, I have watched the United States go from a democratic republic to a corporate society.  Born during the Great Depression, growing up during WWII, coming of age going to college and doing my military service then joining the workforce, moving from the trenches to the boardroom, working on four continents, you could say I have been an active corporate participant.

We talk today about the exploitation of workers in Third World not realizing the United States has been so engaged since WWII across the globe.

As a consultant and educator, I’ve conducted seminars across the United States for the Professional Institute of the American Management Association with participants from state and federal government as well as lobbyists associated with these workers.

If congressmen and women covered their suits and dresses with the decals of their favorite lobbyists in the manner that NASCAR drivers cover their, we would have a better representation of who runs the country.

THE PRICE OF POLITICS

Bob Woodward, who with Carl Bernstein gave us “All the President’s Men,” which exposed the Watergate cover-up, tells a story through interviews and observations in “The Price of Politics” (2012) that reads like a horror tale.  It is the high-stakes personal and political struggle between the President and the Speaker of the House and their appendages. 

The House is now dominated by Republicans many of whom are of the “Tea Party” persuasion, while the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd influences many Democrats in the House cowered by the “One percent” who allegedly own everything and don’t pay their fair share in taxes.

The book covers the summer of 2011 when the two sides attempted to come to a grand bargain by cutting entitlements and increasing revenue.  It totally failed, as these players on stage are manipulated the corporate string pullers off stage of corporate CEOs and lobbyists.  Nothing is as it seems.

The President of the United States appears pathetically weak and indecisive matched only by the incompetence of the Speaker of the House.  There is no leadership on display only sound bytes and jargon.  It is cruelly funny and even entertaining if it were not for the fact this is hardly the way to run a country. 

THE TYRANNY OF POLITICS OVER GOVERNANCE

I share some of my highlighted passages from Bob Woodward's "The Price of Politics" (2012) to give the reader a sense of this:

It (budget) is just math.  Don’t get yourself crazy.  Economics is not politics.

Under Keynesian economic theory, cutting government spending hurt economic growth.

The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. (This was said later) I don’t want the president to fail.  I want him to change.

The joke among reporters on Capitol Hill was that the most dangerous place in Washington was between (Senator) Chuck Schumer and a television camera.

Allocating goodies in negotiations is a little easier than allocating pain.

Excessive pragmatism meant that Obama’s views and actions were not easily pigeonholed (leaving) the left and right perpetually unsatisfied.

President Obama doesn’t have the joy of the game.  Clinton the game and all the players (Congressmen and women, lobbyists).  Obama really didn’t like any of these guys.

Be a specialist, not a generalist.  Focus on one set of issues.  Get on a committee that you care about, and then learn more about the topic than anybody else (How to get ahead in Congress).

Obama in his gut is a fiscal conservative.  There is a Blue Dog streak in him.

This wasn’t an olive branch.  This was not Bill Clinton, not triangulation, not Simpson-Bowles.  This was game on demagoguery (Congressman Ryan’s take on Obama’s plan).

Why isn’t Obama doing what presidents are supposed to do? (Congressman Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee).

A growing feeling of incredulity came over Van Hollen (Republican).  The administration didn’t seem to have a strategy.  It was unbelievable.  There didn’t seem to be any core principle.

Republicans want Democrats to sell their sisters, to give up everything we (V.P. Biden) hold dear without making any sacrifices themselves.

Jargon on both sides prevailed at the expense of thinking and talking clearly.

Revenue would not need a trigger.

Polarization had increased among the Democrats.

The president and I whupped ‘em pretty good (Speaker Boehner on Obama and him teamed up against V.P. Biden and Ohio Governor Kasich)

Obama seemed energized.

He’s a golf playing, cigarette smoking, country club Republican, who’s there to make a deal (Obama or Boehner).

Tea Partiers were dangerously irresponsible (Obama on his opposition).

You see how crazy these people (Tea Partiers) are (Obama).  Boehner is not one of the crazies.

That’s theology.  That’s your theology.  Just tell us which of these items you hate the least?  Corporate jets? (Democrats on Republicans)

We’re not going to keep going down this road.  We’re not going to keep talking about them until you talk about revenue (Republicans on Democrats)

It’s a scam.  The states were gaming the system, taxing doctors and hospitals so they could get federal reimbursements and then returning the money to the providers.

We may as well call it quits.

Cantor (House Republican) was stunned.  He had no idea that the speaker and the president were planning to hold separate talks (behind their backs).

He (Boehner) did offer a path to comprehensive tax reform.  I (Boehner) want entitlement reform.

I’m (president) for tax reform, but I’m not going to have a situation in which we have a vague promise of tax reform later – because tax reform would take a year, year and a half to actually get done, rewriting the tax code – but all the entitlement cuts are locked in on the front end.

The president asked if he felt they were on the road to a deal.  Let me preface (my remarks) by saying generally that I like John Boehner.  I genuinely think John wanted to get a deal done.  I don’t think he is in his bones an ideological person.  I think he’s a pretty practical old school country club Republican (in other words, out to lunch).  I like him, I mean, by that time I’d quit smoking, but I was making sure he had an ashtray.

Washington was dysfunctional.

Boehner’s probably a little over his skis here (Democrat on the speaker’s competence)

Republicans were demanding the tax code be made more regressive.

(Republican) Cantor thought, gee whiz it’s (White House plan to scuttle talks) going to blow up. The Democrats are going to blow up the Biden discussions and finger me.

The entitlement trajectory here is going to bankrupt the country.  Biden hung up the phone.  His search party had been a failure.

Ridiculing Republican sacred cows, he (president) said, the tax cuts I’m proposing we get rid of are tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires oil companies and hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners

With closely cropped hair, at 6-foot-2, Loper (Boehner’s policy director) was the ultimate Republican efficiency man.

I looked at myself (speaker), looked at the president, and I just started chuckling to myself. Because all you need to know about the differences between the president and myself is that I’m sitting there smoking a cigarette, drinking Merlot, and I look across the table and here is the president of the United States drinking iced tea and chomping on Nicorette. 

There’s discretionary (general and Defense), there’s mandatory (food stamps), and there’s entitlements (Medicare and Medicaid).

We’re not dealing just with talking points about corporate jets or other loopholes (Boehner speaking to the president).

Loper (Boehner’s man) found Lew (president’s man) obnoxious. Jackson (Boehner’s man) found Lew’s tone disrespectful and dismissive.

You realize that all the Democrats think we’ve got you by the balls and you think we’re going to give it up in one fell swoop?

I call that opportunity savings, as nobody knows what the tax rates are going to be.

Boehner’s staff worried that the president thought if he got Boehner in a room with the rest of the leaders and announced a deal, Boehner would fold in front of everybody.

Boehner wondered if Obama was using the meeting as a means of managing Reid (Senate Majority Leader) and Pelosi (House Minority Leader) who were increasingly upset about being cut out of the negotiations.

Boehner had no confidence the negotiations with the president would produce a deal and had to cover his own back by keeping McConnell (Senate Minority Leader), Cantor, McCarthy and Hensaling (Boehner’s team) busy doing something because they were really nervous about what the hell he was up to. And he realized that was an understatement. 

Don’t insult us, Pelosi retorted. You guys don’t know how to count (votes in the House).

There was often theater in these meetings.

The president and Boehner were each red-lining (drawing a mark in the sand) of each other’s proposals.

Golf, a game of recovery, was a good metaphor for what they were doing.  A bad or unlucky shot wasn’t fatal. Follow it up with a good second or third shot, and you could still find yourself on the green with a chance at par, or even better.  Negotiations were similar.

The predominate school of thought in the conservative movement held that you shouldn’t ever negotiate with Obama.

He (the president) calls me (Boehner) and says, you know what?  I’m going to have to walk away from this right now.  And to his credit, he said, I’m not closing the door to ever doing anything on this.

Boehner had realized that doing a deal with Obama would put his speakership in jeopardy.

The White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes (the core of why the road to nowhere became the only road either side could see).

Was it possible that The Wall Street Journal had such influence? …. What was clear was that Boehner had just got blown up.  If someone doesn’t come back to the table, they don’t want a yes in any form.

Hundreds of years of the history of negotiations suggested, strongly, that this is not the way you do it.

The speaker had to shift the debate to the more abstract issue of tax reform.

Obama was being subjected, dramatically, to the long, tortuous ways of budget negotiations and Washington deal making …. Obama was admitting that he was constrained.

Obama said he would get support for the deal from the business community, the media and the opinion pages.  But that was not enough.  Even at great political cost, he was going to have to be responsible, be the adult.

Prominent members of the House Republicans who are not only prepared to see default (stalemate), but in some cases are welcoming the prospects of default.

Biden (VP) jumped in.  We’re not going to become a banana republic.  So what is it going to be?  Or are we going to live or die on the election?

Votes were a touchy subject for the speaker and everyone knew it.

The president was still pushing for decoupling (entitlement reduction from increased taxes).  Republicans couldn’t believe it.  Even the White House staffers realized that the president still saw it as his sword.

The vice president did say consistently that nothing was agreed to till everything was agreed to.

Boehner had already concluded that the whole thing was a pointless dog and pony shows.  Was the president really naïve enough to think that he could get all these members in a room and come to an agreement on a deal?  That never happened.

You do not be disrespectful of the office of the president, he (Republican Barry Jackson) told the staff in Boehner’s office.  You just don’t.  It’s the worst job in the world.  They don’t need people kicking them in the shins for the heck of it.  But in the speaker’s office, respect for the office didn’t extend to the man who occupied it.  Jackson believed that Obama lacked courage, was a poor negotiator, and was completely out of his element in dealing with Congress.

Boehner said.  The president talks a good game, but when it comes time to actually putting these issues on the table, making decisions, he can’t quite pull the trigger.

WHAT DOES THIS ALL SEEM TO MEAN?

Journalist Woodward puts it succinctly when he says that historians won’t write about the Boehner (Speaker of the House) administration, nor will they write about the Reid (Majority Leader in the Senate) administration, but they will write about the Obama administration. 

He goes on to say that Obama cannot blame the Bush administration or the collapse of the Euro Zone, or the turmoil in the Middle East, or the rapacious nature of China’s economic policy or currency manipulation for his woes.  He has to lead!

According to the journalist, Obama is not comfortable in that role, or psychologically motivated to fulfill its demands.  He would prefer the comfort of bosom of his family.

The principals highlighted here talk largely in code and metaphor.  They also swear a lot (except for the president) and hardly ever display a touch of eloquence (again with the exception of the president).  

Woodward shows in the president to be a man still on a steep learning curve, a man out of his depth, and a man that would undoubtedly be happier doing something else, possibly writing the great American novel. 

I have purposely left out many passages where people of both parties in Congress show disrespect for the office of the president as well as its current occupant.

In the age of corporate society, civility has retreated to bluster.  President Obama is, on the other hand, inclined to civility but is not comfortable with the pull of corpocracy. 

What comes through is that the president is a very decent man, indeed, a very good man, but a man who lacks the anger or angst that motivated an Andrew Jackson to rain on the parade of his enemies, which were many, and not make a backward glance.  Jackson knew fear keeps people in check and nice guys don’t make good presidents, especially of the imperial kind. 

That said presidential historians are likely to compare President Obama to the “great liberator,” Abraham Lincoln.  Obama has the same fine mind and the same sorrowful gravitas, a man more comfortable with his own counsel than any other, a man who feels the best way to keep his adversaries at bay is to keep them close at hand. 

Lincoln was president just as corporate society was taken hold.  The Civil War hastened the Industrial Revolution.  Now, CEOs and their army of lobbyists run an invisible government that most of us don’t see but all of us experience.  I wonder how Andrew Jackson would have dealt with this.

Gridlock in Congress is a product of corpocracy.  It is the reason why whomever wins the election is bound to disappoint because the office of the president is never an independent contractor, not even for the interests of the American people.  Corpocracy rules and it never rules well.

*     *     *

---

[i] Corpocracy is a virus common to the corporate society.  It has metastasized through the American system first in business after WWII, and now in all quadrants of the private and public sector impairing the ability to function and/or govern.

It has spread also to Europe and Asia (India, China, Japan and South Korea), and now Latin American, notably Brazil.  Paradoxically, through the draconian practices of the Putin administration, it would appear to have stalled in Russia.

Common to this virus is:

(1)     Management is insensitive to employees other than rhetorically,

(2)     Internal politics dominate and negatively impact productivity,

(3)     Secrecy and paranoia are a measure of what is communicated,

(4)     The principal activity is nonproductive electronic dalliance,

(5)     Endless meetings, boards, committees and task groups are a blind to avoid tackling problems,

(6)     Trapped in business as usual practices as potential markets disappear,

(7)     Short term planning creates an inability to think beyond the next quarter,

(8)     Individual initiative is the mantra, but those who get promoted follow the party line,

(9)     Bottom up partnerships is the talk but the top down power is the walk, and

(10)  Transparency is advocated but covert hostility rules the game.

A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS -- THIS BUSINESS ABOUT A WRITER'S AUDIENCE

A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS -- THIS BUSINESS ABOUT A WRITER'S AUDIENCE 

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

© October 25, 2012

My good friend William L. Livingston III (I love to write his full name out.  It has a history) asked me who my audience is for a possible OD book. 

I had to smile to myself when I read that.  Of course, that is the first question asked by a publisher considering publishing your work. 

I wonder what it was like when James Fennimore Cooper, Herman Melville, or indeed Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters thought of writing their books.  Did they think in terms of an audience or simply write because something inside them, call it a soul, forced itself to the surface and commanded (could I say demanded) that they write.

As you have heard from me many times before, I believe we are all writers.  But my sense is that the soul seldom reaches from deep inside us and makes this demand. 

My mother, who was a great reader all of her life, I suspect in part because she was terribly hard of hearing, wrote me and said that she thought she would like to write a book.  She asked if I had any thoughts on the subject.

I sent her a writer's guide to organize her thoughts, structure the narrative, develop her dominant themes and determine the denouement. 

She wrote me back, "That is an awful lot of work.  I think I'll stick to reading."

She had soul but not enough punishing soul to command/demand she write. 

Another person asked me one day, "Do you think writers are born or made?"

I answered without hesitation they are born!  

Now, years later, I still think that is true.  I think writing is as much a vocation as is the religious.  Nuns and priests have a calling, and I think writers do as well.

Now, you're going to think I'm hedging my bet when I say I am not necessarily talking about published writers, and if so, you would probably have a point. 

My sister Janice wrote simply beautiful poetry as a girl, but had absolutely no desire to publish.  I've known others gifted people at poetry of the same inclination.

Poetry is different than prose.  It demands intense discipline and economy of expression.  It also can be done in bits and pieces.  This is impossible with prose.

I have several volumes -- more volumes than I've had published -- of prose, both fiction and nonfiction that took years to complete.  For example, "A Green Island in a Black Sea," which is not published, and looks as if it will not be published in my lifetime, has been a forty-year project.  It has commanded several versions (all discarded), except this one.  Were I younger, the South Africa book might have led to several additional versions, absurdly so.

Looking back, it has been a blessing that these many manuscripts have not been published.  On the other hand, do I regret any books or articles that have been published?  No.  What would be the point?

Are some of them naive?  Yes.  Are some of them stupid?  Yes, again.  Do some of them look as if my head was sewed on backwards?  I suspect so.  But given what is out there, I'm glad they exist.  Thank God for cyberspace!

If it is hard to get your mind around the concept that I am stating here, I've never been enamored of golf because it takes too much time and money, whereas tennis can be played quite economically and expediently on a public course. 

My tennis, then, is metaphor for poetry and golf for prose.  Much as I have played tennis I could never say I was a good tennis player, but I have a son who is outstanding in the sport and has made a career and good living as a tennis director. 

Carrying the metaphor further, you may ask if I think I am a good writer.  That is a fair enough question.  My answer is immodest but I think accurate. 

I am a better writer than I was forty years ago, but the mechanics of writing are still a challenge and I think I will expire still not mastering the discipline. 

When I said my answer would be immodest, I have always thought that I am a very good thinker, and have had to get better as a writer to express that ability in words.

Now, what has this to do with the business of an audience?  This may tell you more about me than you care to know. 

My audience has always been myself, nobody else.  It is my attempt to make sense of life, and my life and existence in this current moment of madness, and how to deal with it.  If it resonates with others, all the better.

My daughter and granddaughter visited me yesterday, but had a hard time waking me up at 2:30 in the afternoon to answer the door.  I had been again writing most of the night.

My daughter said, I can't believe how much you write, in e-mails alone it is staggering.  How do you do it?

The better question, I told her, is why do I do it, and the answer brings us back to that soul that is restive and commands or demands attention. 

The sadness I see is that writers worry more about getting publish than what they think and write about.  They skew their words to a receptive audience at the expense of their personal integrity, and what is burning within to be expressed.  I've never suffered that limitation, which I can tell you is quite liberating.

By a peculiar set of circumstances, most of the novels I now read are written by novelists in Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, people who write from a buried soul without conceit like a farmer's wife I know in Iowa with the initials Rita Waage.  She pours out little gems that are priceless.  The subjects?  Everyday life written small, and therefore very large.

Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about such people as this lady in "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" (1959).  Philosopher George Santayana must have been thinking about her when he wrote:

"Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation."

Be always well,

Jim