ARE WE ALREADY BEING PUNISHED IN ABSTENTIA?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 1, 2014
REFERENCE:
This is with
reference to: “End of Sincerity? Is the
Constitution of the NBA to trump the Constitution of the United States?”
Many have written
saddened by the despicable and racial comments of the L A Clippers’
owner, Donald Sterling, of that NBA franchise, but they wonder at its
constitutional implications. Undoubtedly,
African Americans, NBA fans or not, feel for once that they have attained a
modicum of social justice, but the question remains, at what price?
A READER WRITES:
Hi Jim,
Haven't responded to
one of your missives in a while. I do read them and occasionally disagree with
what you say, but I've been busy rehabbing and flipping houses as, due to age,
I am no longer welcome in my chosen profession. I surmise 55 is the new 75 in
manufacturing.
When I was earning an
MBA (a degree you have panned many times) one of the required courses was
business ethics.
Father McMahon stood
at the front of the class with his pointer reviewing a list of business
practices important to a budding manager. Some were well understood.
We don't vote on who
leads us nor on their decisions.
One person assembles
input from subordinates and data from Finance, mulls it over, then issues a
decision.
We cannot remark on
another's appearance lest it be considered sexually discomforting.
During a union
campaign, or contract vote we cannot threaten or promise to sway the vote.
We can't even listen
in on employee conversations.
Typically, we are not
allowed to express our religious views or openly pray because another might
find it offensive.
We can be hired or
fired at will, just because they didn't like something, not work-related, that
you did.
Maybe you drank too
much at the Christmas party. Oops, Holiday party.
There were more
things on the list. As he finished, Fr. McMahon turned to the class and said,
"So, what does this mean?" I raised my hand. He pointed to me. I
said, "When you pass through the company's front door, the Constitution is
suspended."
Fr. McMahon threw
down his pointer and said, "I just spent fifteen minutes to say what you
just said in a few words. Class dismissed."
The Constitution is a
wonderful document. The framers were wise men who could not have anticipated
manufacturers would be able to make enough guns so every man, woman and child
in America could carry one and have another at home; that an Internet would develop
to spew hate messages from any bigot with a modicum of keyboard skill and, to a
lesser extent, various types of pornography; that, through interpretations of a
Supreme Court, our democracy would evolve into an oligarchy where rich
corporations, through lobbyists and campaign contributions, control most of the
laws issued by Congress.
We are already being
punished in abstentia because fifty percent or more of us are absent on Election
Day. We get the Constitutional interpretation we deserve.
Michael
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Michael,
First of all, I don't
write to persuade readers to my point of view, but to get them in touch with
their own. I see myself as an enabler
and facilitator not as a promulgator of “universal truth.” It is my point of view.
A boyhood friend of
mine, Robert McMahon, became a priest. I
could imagine him teaching a course in ethics, but I have no knowledge where
his priesthood took him.
Father McMahon's
comment that you got there in one sentence that took him a whole lecture made
me smile. A good friend reminded me
recently that I use "100 times as many words" as he does to say
something to which he agrees. My BB has
accused me of the same.
Yes, I am hard on
MBA's, perhaps in part because I taught as an adjunct professor for ten years
for several colleges and universities in their graduate MBA programs, and often
found many of them -- some with Ph.D.'s in chemistry and engineering -- who
didn't know a gerund from a participle and couldn't write a simple declarative
sentence, much less craft a comprehensive conceptual idea.
Many of these
students not only couldn’t express themselves convincingly and therefore
persuasively, but they had contempt for the whole business of self-expression,
seeing it as not necessarily a primary skill, when none could be more
important.
One of the reasons we
are in the trouble we find ourselves today is because good minds cannot connect
with a wider audience that might benefit from their wisdom. And so the self-conscious mechanics rule the
day.
Language isn't a sun
tan; not a stunning physique or figure, not what you see but what you are.
Writers struggle, sometimes valiantly, to match what is inside with what people
see on the outside. That is a personal perspective.
In a macro sense,
writing is an attempt to match what the eyes see, the heart feels, and what
resonates with the soul as an expression of thought. It is a quiet mind speaking to itself.
Once this was a thing
of beauty as it was of a single cloth -- body, mind, soul -- as if touched by
God in the expression of some universal truth.
But no more.
Writing, like nearly
everything else, is now self-conscious, written for affect and effect, written
to an audience, written as cache to a job, career, or simply to get a B.A.,
B.S., M.A., M.S., Ph.D. or MBA after your surname.
If you read
biographies, and I suspect you do, great writers claim they were writing only
to themselves in an effort to discover the language of their heart.
I am speaking of
authors before the twentieth century.
Authors such as Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald
were self-conscious writers who perfected peculiar styles indigenous to their
natures, creating a whole army of copiers such as Norman Mailer, John Updike,
et. al.
Writing became
mechanistic, as cold and calculating and as brittle as the times.
Read Freud, perhaps
one of the best writers of the twentieth century, who invented a discipline
that described only his own neuroses if not psychoses, and the world accepted
his self-consciousness as its own. He
couldn't have done it if he hadn't had the genius of expression for what he
thought.
Freud understood that
despite what we might think we are all pretty much the same, as we operate with
the same limited equipment. He reminded
people of this and captured their anxieties; other self-conscious authors
helped us forget these limitations, and we rewarded them with celebrity.
The world of ideas,
and the expression of them today is not a pretty place.
My effort, which is
sometimes alluded to as that of a provocateur, is to get people to get in touch
with themselves, to get beyond that cold steel of the “Tin Man” to the rhythm
of their warm hearts. Not an easy chore
for I -- by measure of my success as a writer -- have been a miserable failure,
yet I keep trying, as that is all I know.
Thank you for getting
beyond your MBA as you express yourself very well, and always have.
Be always well,
Jim
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