THINKING ABOUT THE WEIRDNESS OF THE TIMES! Conjugate the absurd with the ridiculous and you produce the boring!

THINKING ABOUT WEIRDNESS OF THE TIMES!

Conjugate the absurd with the ridiculous and you produce the boring!

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

© September 28, 2014

NOTE TO READERS:

I hastily posted this in a slightly different form.  Please accept my apologies as I've deleted the original.

It is truly a strange time when people are so hypersensitive to what is normal -- incessantly talking about nothing on a cell or smartphone -- that communication was bound to prove tedious.

At Christmas time if you slip and wish someone a “Merry Christmas,” you panic, and quickly correct yourself to say “Happy Holiday.”  

A National Basketball Association (NBA) owner makes racial remarks about African American basketball players in the privacy of his home in the company of his girlfriend, who records the conversation then makes it public, a girlfriend half his age upon whom he has showered gifts costing in the millions, and for this he loses his NBA franchise and is banned from the sport for life.

A general manager of another NBA franchise shares an e-mail with racial content with some other NBA owner over the phone, and he is likely to lose his job.

You can get into trouble referring to a woman as a girl, forgetting the differentiation between “Ms.” and “Mrs.”

National Football League (NFL) athletes have always trash talked to each other in the spirit of the game.  Now, they can be fined and their teams penalized for the use of the “n” word ending in a hard “er” or “a.”  

In my walks through the neighborhood, I often pass an elementary school when the students are leaving school for the day. 

I hear girls as well as boys, blacks as well as whites shouting at each other with the “f” word or its compound variety of “m-f,” and then laugh as if it is the most natural thing to say, and these are not yet teenagers.  Should we expect this language suddenly to stop when they get older?  I don’t think so.

Whatever happened to “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me?” 

Reared Irish Roman Catholic, I recall being called a “cod cruncher” and “papist” – didn’t know what that meant – a Mick or Paddy for being Irish, a carrot top for my reddish blond hair, a Hibe – I didn’t know it was the short for Hibernian or characteristic of the Irish and not as a compliment -- Cat-licker for being Catholic, and Mackerel Snapper for being forbidden to eat meat on Fridays under the pain of sin.

My da, who was a bit of a pugilist, told me to ignore all these references, “Don’t do anything until they touch you, Jimmy, and then hit them in the fricken mouth!”  Easy for him to say.

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My sense is that life has become absurd to the point of the ridiculous.  Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, spell it as “opportunity."  They conjugate our angst into products and programs to exploit this to their advantage and our delight.  Take television's "situation comedies," for example. 

We are so afraid of offending anyone that when we make a Freudian slip, we apologize profusely. Freud suggested that such slips were our unconscious coming to the surface, or an expression of the way we actually feel, and of course, we don't want anyone to know how we really feel about them or anything else, leastwise to ourselves.

The creative geniuses of social network developers have latched on to this absurdity to ridiculous success, making many of them billionaires and not long out of their nappies.   

More than a billion souls across the globe post their personal absurd anxieties and ridiculous inanities on these social networks with photographs and text to an equally anxious and inane audience. 

Cable television 24/7 news hits its audience with "breaking news" every five minutes, of course, between commercials.  You would think the world could not survive without this information, yet if you take stock, as I have done, the programs day-to-day are so similar repeating the same anxiousness, the same hypersensitivity, and in the same anxious and monotonous staccato.

We get comic relief with Bill O'Reilly on cable TV, and on cable radio the same with Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.  The content of their shows deal with the same cesspool of material of network and cable news, despite O'Reilly insistence that with him "the spin stops here," but as entertainment.  We love to be entertained.

Whatever happened to “there go I but for the grace of God” when we would display charity when someone fell from grace?  Or the biblical idea that “he who be without sin cast the first stone”?

Apparently, charity and forgiveness have been expunged from our conscience.  We are inundated with the message 24/7 that "the sky is falling" so when it is falling, we are too bored to pay attention, too insensitive to notice much less care to our regret.

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Most recently National Public Radio Television presented a several hour hagiography of the “Roosevelt’s”: Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt.  Film biographer Ken Burns was the creator of this entertaining assembly.

I'm sure it enjoyed a huge audience given we are bereft of leadership today.  But my wonder is if the Roosevelt's type of leadership is what is needed.

Having read books on these people, their sins seem strangely more provocative on film, further evidence of how powerful this media.

Scholars, biographers, journalists and pundits parade across the TV screen on what these people were like.  We hunger for evidence of their human frailties making our sins feel venial in comparison.

For example, Teddy Roosevelt comes across as a manic achiever with a perverse need to destroy in order to create.  His legacy of hegemony or empire is brought out to give the impression that the sleepy United States in late nineteenth and early twentieth century would still be inclined to isolationism were it not for the bravado of diminutive Teddy. 

The Theodore Roosevelt era, rich in achievement, also demonstrated the mindset of the overachiever and the implicit dangers that might engender. 

To wit, he graduated from Harvard, Phi Beta Kappa, Magnum Cum Laude, with a class ranking in the top third of his class, but was especially proud to point out that none of those who graduated ahead of him "were gentlemen.”  Not only was he born into elitism, but elitism was the fire in his belly.

Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand was a mommy’s boy to the end with the embedded solipsism that goes with such nurturing.

Just the opposite of his cousin, Franklin was tall, handsome, and a charmer but hardly a serious student.  Elected four times to the presidency, but living only three months into his fourth term, he left a mess for Harry S. Truman, his vice president, to handle that still haunts us to this day.

At the Yalta Conference, near the end of WWII, FDR, Great Britain’s Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin divided the world, especially the Middle East, into the quagmire that it has become three quarters of a century later.

Patrician Roosevelt and Churchill acted as if the world revolved around their axis, failing to correctly gauge or understand their pedestrian adversary, Stalin.  He had them for lunch at Yalta, got everything he wanted and gave up little in the bargain.  For that blunder, the world has been paying a heavy price ever since.

Now we come to Eleanor Roosevelt.  Much as Ken Burns had wonderful things to say about her, not dodging her husband's great betrayal, she was clearly the brightest star in this firmament, more able, centered, mature, intelligent, and effective than this lot of men, including Stalin.

Eleanor was also patrician by birth, but never wore her elitism on her sleeve for her instinct was to treat all people with dignity.  My wonder is where FDR's "New Deal” would have been without her influence.  She was not absurd or ridiculous but close to divine.

*     *     *

The Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) era is mine as well.  My da worked on Roosevelt’s WPA.  I now benefit from FDR’s Social Security System and graduated from land grant public universities, or otherwise would have been unable to attain a university education, so I am grateful for that.  

Education has led to the career I have had.  But it was what FDR didn’t do that counts.  He didn’t get in my way, but let me find my own way on my own terms.

Now, it seems people are looking for safe guards in an uncertain world.  They are consumed with security and willing to sacrifice many freedoms for it, when the socio-economic climate and geopolitical status of the world is constantly in flux. 

Fear has the face of people who look different, speak and dress different than we do.  This is a bias that is deep in the American psyche.  African Americans have been here for hundreds of years, and yet it was reported today (September 28, 2014) in The Tampa Bay Times  that “Black people in the Tampa Bay Area are at least six times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession as white people.”  Clearly, fear lurches in the shadows of our collective minds.   

People tend to compound the situation by turning away from reality, ceasing to work for a living, but living to work for things, using acquisitiveness as therapy to quell their anxieties, craving a more exciting life often retreating into self-negating habits, needing a bigger home, nicer car, more influential friends, and the required accoutrements to push boredom to the back of their minds.    

My wonder is when appearing to be interesting or being obsessed with the lives of interesting people became more important than being interested in something of and for itself.  

It didn’t originate with Facebook and other facsimiles of socio-electronic networking.  Don’t blame these creators for simply exploiting our preoccupations to their advantage.  My wonder is when thinking became akin to punishment? 

 

*     *     *

A “ho hum” column by New York Times columnist David Brooks caught my attention: “Things aren’t that bad, but many leaders are.”  Now that is a loaded declarative comment.  It stunned me, and when I read the article I was incredulous that Brooks had written it.

I know this journalist with a fine conscience has to write these columns to get paid.  I sense that like the rest of us he has his bad days, when he doesn’t have anything important to say, but yet must knock out a column. 

True, I don’t have to read his column.  And if I read it, I don’t have to get exercised about it, but unfortunately, I was and am because I can’t believe, given the tectonic shift in the nature of leadership that he believes what he has written.

In the column, he’s saying our cities are doing great: “Widening the lens,” he says, “we’re living in an era with the greatest reduction in global poverty ever -- across Asia and Africa.”  

Well, now, he knows that is not quite true.  Even South Africa, which once found Bantus living better than most Africans, share the problem of poverty with the rest of the world today.  With the exception of pockets of wealth, more than 50 percent across the globe are still living in poverty.

We in the West like to blame it on the lack of initiative, but I have seen it first hand, and initiative has little to do with such status.

If this is an endorsement of capitalism, it leaves out pollution and political instability fostered by aggressive industrialization at the expense of the rural life known to nearly three billion souls (China, India, and Africa), not to mention the civil wars and jihad terrorism plots that feed on disparity, inequality, chaos and ignorance.

Given David Brooks’ upbeat picture, what he claims the world suffers from is not enough elite leaders, leaders I suspect like Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Elitism, he claims, is the key to the world’s troubles.  This must be music to the ears of graduates pouring out of our elite universities.

I’m not sure we’re ready for a manic Teddy or a solipsistic mommy’s boy Franklin. 

To make his point he reminds us of the elitism of our Founding Fathers, and where would we be without them, right? 

Absurd and ridiculous as this premise is, he suggests the antithesis of elitism is characterized in Senator Ted Crux and Karl Marx who champion the individual in the masses for having the capability of leading and ruling and bringing about social justice and change.  

I confess I am acquainted with Marx and his writing, but not Crux and his.  Much of what Marx said makes sense to me.  Lenin and Stalin didn’t establish the communism that Marx pontificated, but another form of elitism.  

Isn't it ironic that communist China is becoming increasingly capitalistic while democratic Europe and the United States are becoming increasingly socialistic?

It is counterintuitive to claim people can lead without managers and leaders because that is what we know.  

If American is an idea that is constantly maturating, and I think it is, it suggests an increasingly well educated population may find a better way than the elite have saddled us with. 

From my point of view, we are at the brink of a watershed moment.  The world is literally turning upside down on how it should be run, and who should be running it.

Stated another way, the current concept of leadership is as stale as day old bread albeit still in place, but crumbling.

Those with answers programmed to wait and react to elite authority, and then obediently clean up the mess that leadership leaves behind is unraveling.

Clean up has been the role of workers since the beginning of time.  It is changing because a select one percent of the populations no longer has the answers, or even understands the problems.  They have been living too long like the “Flying Dutchman” floating about the globe isolated from reality, failing with impunity, and now that day is drawing to a close.

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