THE WINTER OF MY SEASONS

THE WINTER OF MY SEASONS

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

© December 23, 2014

In this Christmas Season, thoughts turn to mistletoe and merriment, blessings and promises, thankfulness and thanksgiving, and right that they should, but for an aging peripatetic philosopher who is in the winter of his seasons, who is trained to see beyond seeing, it is less a utopian and more a dystopian landscape for much of the world.

Christmas 2014 sees a world in which nearly 150 Afghan children are slaughtered in school for pursuing a Western education, killed by the Taliban; a world in which four children are beheaded by ISSI terrorists for failure to accept conversion to Islam; a world in which two police officers of the New York City Police Department are assassinated sitting in their patrol car by a disturbed African American, who no doubt is also a media junkie listening to all the talking heads fueling the flames of discord and dissent for ratings over the shooting deaths of a black youth in Ferguson, Missouri by a white police officer and the choking death of a black man in New York City by another white police officer, both deaths tragic but little gained by sensationalizing these incidents. 

In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s cutting edge 1924 dystopian novel, “We,” which was the inspiration for George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four” (1949) prophetic novel of the same genre, Zamyatin has the protagonist Billy Pilgrim of the story exclaim,

“I’m like a machine being run over its RPM limit: The bearings are overheating – minute longer, and the metal is going to melt and start dripping and that’ll be the end of everything.  I need a quick splash of cold water, logic.  I pour it on in buckets, but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist.”

This metaphorical description appears to describe our world this Christmas, 2014, a world in the midst of a global nervous breakdown, a world I thought of as I flew to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and then drove to Waterloo, Iowa with my wife, Beautiful Betty, to attend the graduation of our grandson, Taylor Michael Fisher at the University of Northern Iowa In Cedar Falls, outside Waterloo.

It had been more than a half century since I was in the frigid cold of the north – 22 degrees Fahrenheit – or that I had seen the barren and naked fields of Iowa farms of a winter season that flanked the highway like frigid deserts.  

It was so surreal that I wondered if I, like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s novel, “Slaughterhouse Five” (1969), had been transported to another planet, as I felt aphoristic, even ad hoc, not unlike an out-of-body experience. 

The Vonnegut novel is based on the author's experience as a WWII German prisoner-of-war when the American and British firebombed Dresden, Germany into oblivion, a place that was not a war target, a bombing that was totally gratuitous.

This Dresden bombing was one of the darkest acts of the Allied Forces, executed in the waning days of WWII.  Vonnegut was saved from the carnage holed up in a Dresden slaughterhouse then being used as a prison.  The event traumatized the author for life, but released his creative verve that led to his productive literary career.

  

Taylor Michael Fisher was in a graduating class at the University of Northern Iowa of 1,200 classmates with approximately 10,000 friends and families of the graduates in attendance.  

The ceremony was handled with an efficiency that mimicked Frederick Winslow Taylor's “Principles of Scientific Management” (1911), which, incidentally, was most famous for its advocacy of “time and motion studies.”  

Zamyatin, who was familiar with the book, parodied its obsession with chronological time as well as its fixation on efficiency, while failing to understand the sterility of this mania.  That is so because it is the antithesis of effectiveness.

Consistent with that efficiency, the University of Northern Iowa’s graduation ceremony was as timely as a well-oiled machine.

Unfortunately, there were no inspiring speeches, no monumental moments to carry forward other than nostalgia for the event.  

Movement was precise, synchronous to the extreme, with students of the colleges of Information Technology, Business and Marketing, Social and Behavioral Sciences moving down the aisle on cue, to pass by the president, to hand him a symbolic confirmation slip of the student's status, to receive a mock diploma (the real one will be mailed later), then to swiftly move to stand in front of a mock backdrop of the university to have their photograph taken, then to quickly return to their seats.  

It was done with such speed that I failed to see my grandson as he swiftly passed by. 

The university president, along with the State of Iowa Provost, college presidents, student spokeswoman, and an assortment of dignitaries gave brief appropriate addresses with the entire program lasting about one and one half hours, efficiency, indeed. 

The university president concluded his address by saying he didn’t expect students to remember his words in thirty years.  I sense it will be closer to thirty minutes. 

To punctuate the sobriety of the ceremony, I waited for the graduates to toss their caps into the air, but only saw a couple, as my grandson said later, students didn't want to lose their caps. Collective restrain must be the millennial manner of Iowans today.

It gave me pause.  

I still remember my University of Iowa President Virgil Hancher’s commencement address to my class some sixty years ago.  Hancher, a handsome, quiet and modest man, a Rhodes Scholar and Phi Beta Kappa graduate, had a taste for the good sentence.  He also displayed no inclination to wax provincial, as current academics seem to prefer, or to register colloquial.  On the contrary, he moved the mind as well as the spirit and proved prophetic as he saw us entering a dangerous post World War Two future.  

It would seem the soul has been taken out of such ceremonies in this mechanistic age of impersonal electronics. 

That said it is clear that this Iowa assembly – as I suspect the majority in attendance were native Iowans – are healthy, wealthy and, yes, I would say wise, as they are friendly, hospitable, down-to-earth, gracious, mannerly, with no display of false modesty or the assumption of superiority.  

Iowans just are!  In that sense, I love the lot of them, although having been so long away from Iowa acculturation, I also felt somewhat foreign to them in manner of speech, disposition, perspective and orientation, but yet consistent with them in terms of values. 

What I remember from my days as a youth growing up in Iowa is how pretty the girls were, so different than I would see them on my travels about the United States and globe. They had a freshness like a virgin spring that made my heart sing.  They still have that fresh appeal, as I see them working at McDonald’s, at our hotel, in the shops, as well as on this college campus.  But now they look much like young people everywhere, young people in New York City, St. Petersburg, Russia, or Paris, France. 

That of course is thanks to television and now the electronic age.  Fortunately, I didn’t see prominent tattoos that readers know I hate, so if they had them they were hidden, but on the plane back to Tampa on an aisle seat across from me, an Iowa lady in her late sixties on holiday, who read during the whole 2 hours and 28 minutes of the flight, had ankle tattoos.  So, what do I know!

Readers are also familiar with my candor in these missives, and so I will close with reference to how difficult this trip was for my aging body.  As much trouble as I had with the cold weather, I had more trouble keeping up with my younger associates including Beautiful Betty.  It may surprise you, but I’ve never had that feeling before, and I know that it is an inevitable condition of an aging person.  That is why I titled this,“The Winter of My Seasons.”

Merry Christmas to you in the United States and Canada, and all about the globe, who keep in touch with me through my blog, and Happy New Year to us all, and may we have the blessings to prevail in a world that is more than a little mad at the moment. 

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