SPIRITED EXCHANGE OVER "THINKING ABOUT THE WEIRDNESS OF THE TIMES"

SPIRITED EXCHANGE OVER

“THINKING ABOUT THE WEIRDNESS OF THE TIMES”

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

© September 30, 2014

NOTE:

This is typical of the exchanges I receive.  It is refreshingly spirited and my reason for sharing.  The reader is responding to this particular missive.

A READER WRITES:

Your use of the word "Solipsistic" in referring to Franklin Roosevelt sent my mind searching for that man you describe.  Does that come close to "...you are what you think?"    

And as to Stalin, my husband, Mark, and I have had many a conservation on that subject. 

Had Stalin stayed out of WWII, what then?  The lives of millions of Russians were lost, granted many lost by Stalin's scorched the earth policy, keeping the Germans at bay as well as his own imagined enemies, but all the same lost. 

The Russians were still fighting their own civil awareness, who failed who? What was to be done? 

Sort of comes full circle each time the world feels the mouth of cruelty nipping at our heels.        

We, the human race, are ever evolving, those who promote the flattening of the world know not what they do...gives one a huge headache attempting to wrap one’s mind around the whole.    

You touched on a box full of turmoil, not one thought but many...a relief to look out the window behind the computer screen and view the shadows of evening tide sinking over the hill across the creek. 

I have the luxury to absorb nature when my being needs a rest from the eternal "race" we humankind dare immerse our thoughts, sinking our teeth into a subject and not liking the taste.         

Thank you for providing another thought provoking challenge...you have given us an insight, leading to an examination akin to "Who do you think you are?"  

All that you do, all that you see, you are.   

You do have the talent to turn us aside for new views, like the book of a decade ago, "Looking Away and Seeing Too Much."

It was another beautiful day in the Midwest...afraid I sat on the patio and planned iris gardens and was entertained by trumpeting goldfinches, the blue jays and squirrels fighting again in the front lawn over acorns, the blue heron spearing frogs near the creek, walnuts dropping with a splash into the creek, others rolling down the hillside adding new sounds to a country day as they crashed into dried leafs, the two cats at my feet soaking in the sunshine providing warmth as I pat their luxurious coats.  

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Thank you for your levity and insight.  Nature is a balm that you know so well and describe with much affection.

Someone else wrote me about this piece.

The reader commented that presidents are only human, which they are.  The reader also was correct in saying that whomever they are they are most likely to come in for a bucket of criticism. 

We are often quite divided in such criticism when it comes to our leaders.  That is with the exception of Adolf Hitler.  He is clearly evil with no redeeming value in most people's eyes.  

The humanity of Hitler is difficult for most people to digest, yet he was in fact a human being.

Were you to be perusing my study, with all the volumes I have on Hitler about all aspects of his life and personality, you might think I am a Hitler scholar, which clearly I am not.

Hitler has fascinated me since I was a boy.  Despite his dastardly deeds politicians ever since the world over have followed the boilerplate that he invented in his rise to power in Germany, one of the most sophisticated nations in the history of man. 

How was that possible, it is fair to ask?  Hitler was a poorly educated man, an aspiring but failed artist, a roustabout, unfocused, lazy, a dubious malcontent until he found a role for himself as soldier in WWI, after which he became an often ineffective political activist.

Yet, he would rise to power, and at one point, have the world quaking at his knees.  His rise says as much about Western culture and us as it does about him, and for reason.

Were I a younger man I would write a book on how sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and political scientists misread leadership in the 20th century, which is now being compounded in the 21st, a leadership that Hitler mainly invented.

Clearly, leadership in the post-modern world has a debt to pay to Hitler for he discovered what works in a technological society that operates mainly unconsciously and passively, as it is at once provoked and distracted by meteoric change. 

Hitler's madness, according to Nassir Ghaemi in "A First-Rate Madness" (2011), has been on display from Napoleon, Lincoln, Churchill, Gandhi, FDR, JFK, and such corporate types as Ted Turner. 

Ghaemi claims "thinking outside the box" is predicated on this madness. 

In contrast, he points out that Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain appeased Hitler at Munich in 1939, while General George McClellan, who was Lincoln's Civil War Military Commander, refused to fight. 

What Ghaemi sees these two men had in common is that they were actually quite normal.  We might add George W. Bush, if not also his father, and Barak Obama.  Normality is the antithesis of spirited leadership in times of crisis.

. 

I don't think Obama understands this, indeed, I don't think George Bush did despite his preemptive invasion of Iraq after 9/11 in 2003.  Alas, my wonder if any of those vying for the next presidency do.

Read Henry Kissinger who clearly understands (re: "World Order," 2014).  Kissinger blames George W. Bush and his administration for pursuing idealistic crusades that ignored earthly reality.  The earthly reality that Lincoln understood.  Kissinger states that America’s idealism is necessary to be true to itself, but “to be effective, these aspirational aspects of policy must be paired with unsentimental analysis of underlying factors.”  To put it bluntly, leadership in crisis must do what it must do to protect its sovereignty.   

Lincoln did negating constitutional liberties and assuming the authority of the War Powers Act to save the nation, as other "madmen" designates of author Ghaemi did in their time of crisis. 

Sometimes such solipsism goes awry -- a word you seem fond to note from my piece – finding them ignorant of the facts while imposing their will as if the world revolved around them, and that is when they misstep. 

Relating this to common experience, it can kill the efficacy of a player or a team in sport and it certainly can cause a nation to go reeling when it is displayed by the national leadership.

Whether the West would have won World War Two, or not without Russia seems a moot point. 

Hitler wanted Poland without having to invade the country, or fight Russia for it, so Germany signed a "German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact" on August 23, 1939 with each country promising not to fight the other for ten years.

A week later on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and WWII was underway.

The German Nonaggression Pact with the Soviet Union lasted until June 22, 1941 when Germany's "Operation Barbarossa" was launched against Russia.  It proved Hitler's albatross.

The Soviet Union had no choice but to fight.  Remember, the United States didn't enter the war until after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands on December 7, 1941.

What I'm trying to say in all my writing is that we cannot cast stones at a few people whom we choose to lead us and then think our hands our clean.  They reflect us and we reflect them.  Leaders and followers are not discrete groups but part of the same homogeneity.  Therefore, we must be as committed to each other as any two people are in marriage.

Good to hear from you allowing your body and mind to breathe the aroma of nature with a light heart.

THE READER RESPONDS:

You can't be serious!  You endorse the W (President George Bush) years as his own???

You don’t see it as a power play by his gang of idiots with Dick Cheney (Vice President) the heavy? 

Yes, they did shadow Hitler’s maneuvers...threatening the people (used collectively) with the levels of terror on a color coded scale, leading us to the edge of martial law.

The Oz speaks the fiction, "Weapons of Mass Destruction," exposing the CIA agent Valerie Plame and God only knows at what cost to national security.

True, each leader has his foibles.  There was President Clinton and his crotch fantasies along with a few others.  The sad truth is that an insufficient quorum of statesmen are left.  Seemingly, many are out for the triple score, be it a Congressman or Senator, President or Vice President, looking for the money pot or power or both.

I have always been and remain an Independent as a voter, never voted for Obama, believe deeply that we need more political parties and a total rewrite of history but that would be something only Douglas Brinkley could handle. 

Yes, I do agree, to remain mired in the murky side of things becomes one boring vortex.  Life is far more interesting than the government’s acerbic side.  Eventually it reeks, like another Clinton Presidency would!  Am I showing my hand?

When will our youngsters come to the fore and start shining through? 

A Paul Ryan is on the wrong track, far too reactionary, like the governor of Wisconsin...a walk on the money side.  He had the whole of the Republican Party's Labor departments across the nation helping break municipal unions, not that some shouldn't be broken, when it comes to the cronyism. 

Where did that thought go?  Where should it?   

Just to get at the idea that for some reason a union has become an unsavory device.  Can you imagine that?

The hour is late, Mark has surgery in the am and bed bids us sleep to enable a worried wife to be comforting and supportive on the morrow. 

Good night...

DR. FISHER RESPONDS TO COMMENTS OF READER:

This is beautiful!  Doesn't it feel great when you get all this out?  I love it.  Good luck to your Mark.  A mind with its own opinions intact is a beautiful mind!  Ironically, our opinions are much more valuable than our arguments.  They put us in touch with our soul.  Thank you for sharing.

THE READER RESPONDS TO THIS:

Dear Dr. Fisher,

I love reading your writings.  And yes, it does feel good to rant and relieve the innards of the nasty tastes of this world...had I a mountain top I would be there hooting and hollering to the heavens.     

I have my grandparents' picture of FDR, most likely very similar to your folks', stored safely on the bottom of a linen drawer, the drawer below holds a fanciful General Pershing, hero of WWI.    

It hurts to think where will our treasure trove of books go when we are gone...those good friends we value as jewels.  Do you have Sandburg's Lincoln volumes?  I’m sure you do. 

The nasty politics then make today's pale in content and context.

I suggested once to a friend that she only needed to digest the political volumes written trashing our political heroes through time to ease her mind of today's pundits' mud.  Goes back to Andrew Jackson and beyond.    

Headed for bed and a couple chapters of reading.  Be well, good friend, and again love your writings, never stop...

FINAL NOTE:

People about the globe may not be able to relate to the particulars here, but they as part of our common humanity and know such sentiments first hand in their own right, and can translate them I’m sure to their own with ease.

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