The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

A TEACHER RESPONDS!

 Plagued by an Excess of Intellectual Emptiness

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© January 31, 2017

AUTHOR’S COMMENT:

Of late, I’ve been reading a lot about the so-called “Age of the Enlightenment” to better understand my own times.  The roots to everything that are good or bad about today seem to emanate from that age.  It was during the late 18^th century that we had the “American Revolution” (1776) and the “French Revolution” (1789), largely based on the writings of John Locke, Thomas Paine, Voltaire and Rousseau, among others. 

It was a difficult period in America history, but somehow reason prevailed with the young nation going forward without a counter-revolution. 

This was not the case in France with the “Reign of Terror” with hundreds losing their lives at the guillotine only to be followed by the rise of the Corsican, Napoleon Bonaparte as Emperor creating massive plunder and carnage before being subdued in Belgium at Waterloo.  Yet, to this day Napoleon is a hero in the eyes of many Frenchmen and beyond.

Madness is always just under the surface of every society at the ready to break through to wreak havoc tantamount to an emotional earthquake.  We are now in such a period.

The sad part of the equation is that real issues of social, political and economic as well as ethnic and religious issues are always legitimate contributing factors to the affair.   The problem is that jackals in the other part of the equation are always equally at the ready to exploit the situation to their advantage with the hapless majority caught in the middle. 

The American longshoreman turned philosopher, Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), wrote a series of books including “The True Believer” on the subject, as earlier French polymath Gustave Le Bon (1841 – 1931) did the same on the psychology of the popular mind with such books as “The Crowd” and “The Psychology of Revolution.”

They were explaining philosophers.  They were not planting seeds.  Philosophers in the “Age of the Enlightenment” were planting seeds and using ideas as weapons.  German legal philosopher Hermann Kantorowicz (1877-1940) captures this differentiation succinctly: “There is an important distinction between thoughts and ideas.  Men possess thoughts but ideas possess men.” 

We have possessed unevenly the philosophies of the Enlightenment as we are now in an age bereft of ideas putting all creative energies into the making of things, while congratulating ourselves for our brilliance in this electronic “Age of Information” and ever more appealing contraptions. 

Meanwhile, schools are failing and therefore our students are failing.  The total title to Professor Tom Nichols’ article in The Chronicle of Higher Education was “Our Graduates are Rubes”: We are churning out entitled students with paltry knowledge and inflated egos, easy prey for propagandists.”  Indeed, we are seeing evidence of the crowds across the United States protesting the immigrant ban without fully understanding what it entails or even what it is all about.  We let the media do our thinking for us and where does that usually takes us?  To the streets!

It doesn’t matter if you have a Ph.D. or M.D. or occupy the chair of a prominent university during these times of mass hysteria.  Emotions rule! 

The comments that follow are from a recently retired teacher, a person I know and respect, a person without animus towards anyone but who has the courage to reflect openly and honestly on his career in teaching after reading my referenced missive. 

While on the subject of education and good sense, we here in Florida have found our educators constantly flummoxed with how to lift our students up out of their angst and apathy to realizing education is their ticket out of fear and ignorance and yes, poverty and humiliation.  What has Florida done to address this issue?

Florida has created a school award system on the basis of funding with such designations as “A” and “B” and “C” and “Failing” schools.  The award index is based on school testing, grading, student promotion, and the like. 

As incredible as it may seem, I learn only today in reading columnist Daniel Ruth op ed piece in the The Tampa Bay Times that the Pinellas County School District (across Tampa Bay from Tampa and Hillsborough Country) recently implemented a new grading system no doubt to improve its award ratings.  Students receiving 66 to 100 percent on US History examinations now earn an “A”; tougher courses in the sciences such as biology have to at least score 70 percent on a test to get an “A.” 

For my Great Depression generation 96 to 100 percent was an “A” in any course and a 66 percent score would have been an “F.” 

How can you develop tolerance for others when ignorance rather than knowledge and understanding are not part of the equation? 

We Americans are in a messed up age in terms of priorities.  It was the reason I wrote “Time Out for Sanity!” (2015), and I’m sure the reason why Professor Tom Nichols wrote his article.

A TEACHER SPEAKS

I agree with you 100% (re: my article on “Intellectual Emptiness”).  When I started teaching in 1967, after about a year into the business of education, I felt we were like the Soviet Union in that the state was responsible for rearing the children.  It has never changed. 

When I was teaching at King (high school) doing hall duty during lunch for our section of the campus, a student was standing outside the door among other students waiting to come in when the bell rang.  

As he was waiting he said out loud “We should rush him (meaning me) and kick the shit out of him.”  I went out the door and took him to the office.  On the way to the office I told him he was lucky he was at school because he was the one who needed his ass kicked.  

He was suspended and the next day his parents came in and complained about what I had said to him.  When I was in high school and had I said to a teacher what he said, my parents would have punished me and certainly not gone to the school to complain about anything.     

All this ruckus over Trump’s decision to keep a closer eye on Muslims also bothers me.  Muslims and Non-Muslims are demonstrating in the streets about the Trump decision.  

However, when ISIS broadcasts cutting a non-believers head off or burning them to death and other atrocities such as 9/11, you don’t hear a peep from these same people, and on top of that you don’t hear anything in the media except this one sided reporting.  The only thing Muslims have gone out to protest is cartoons and anything that they see as an insult to Mohammed. This behavior is essentially like the behavior of the student and his parents in the above incident.

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares a chronic condition:

PLAGUED BY AN EXCESS OF INTELLECTUAL EMPTINESS!

James Raymond Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 30, 2017

My Beautiful Betty (BB) is wont to say reading something in the newspaper or seeing something on television -- they're saying what you've written about!  

And they are!  Now for some 25 years (at least), I have been writing about how empty higher education is (Work Without Managers, 1991), how inflated the grading system especially in high school prep schools and our pristine universities (The Worker, Alone, 1995), how self-indulgent are our students and workers (Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, 1996), and how all of this has created a "spoiled brat” society of students and workers (Corporate Sin, 2000 and A Look Back to See Ahead, 2007), not to mention tons of missives.  If you have not read any of these books or missives, you’re not alone.

Then I was recently talking to a university student, who blames "poor professors" for her angst, and my sense is that she is not alone either.

I mention this because George Will, the celebrated pundit from Washington, DC has a column today on precisely what I have been saying for decades, not from my Ivory Tower, but from my experience, having been an adjunct professor for ten years and with innumerable encounters in corporate society over the years with what Will's says in this morning's op ed page of The Tampa Bay Times is "an outrage of egos." The Washington Post columnist is essentially quoting Tom Nichols, a professor at the US Naval War College.  

Students today treat education as an entertainment with hitting the books hard only a diversion from the more pressing enterprise of finding university life as a fun experience.  

Students of elevated grading and going to the "best" colleges and universities are more interested in "developing connections," Will's points out, “than having a learning experience.”  Now, we have a President of the United States in the Donald who is cut from that same mode with an equally anxious temperament.                 

In the Naval professor's article, which appeared in the Chronicle Review, referenced is a study where most students not only expect but get "A's" at pristine universities with the academics having no trouble giving them as the “A’s” are ballast to keep the academic ship floating with huge tuition student fees. 

At the same time, according to the study, in 2011 at the University of Chicago, 45 percent of the students admitted that none of their courses required more than 20 pages of writing and 32 percent had no class that required more than 40 pages of reading in a week. 

The University of Chicago, incidentally, has tuition in the neighborhood of $60,000 a year or a quarter million dollars for a four year degree, which the article claims is usually stretched out to five or six years.

"College in an earlier time," Nichols writes, "was supposed to be an uncomfortable experience because growth is always a challenge."

My operative word in my works is "struggle," something that has been apparently taken out of the brew.  Those who have read me will find this line of Nichols echoing mine: "Rather than disabuse students of their intellectual solipsism, the modern university reinforces it."

We have created a world of "spoiled brats" and then wonder why the Donald has risen to the presidency.  

We are yet to find out if the Donald is what the doctor ordered because when he says something -- like Andrew Jackson before him -- he doesn't erase the "red line" as President Obama did, but re-enforces it with executive order, creating the havoc that we are now seeing across America on his visa policy for immigrants from terrorist countries.  

Typically, good standing immigrants blame the president instead of taking their wrath out on the cause of the policy: terrorists from their countries who have been able to gestate in situ with little interference or control.  This is part of the same syndrome expressed by Professor Nichols about college students: the focus is on the wrong offender! 

I write about this in somewhat of an oblique fashion in my yet to be published book titled THE VELVET GLOVE & IRON FIST:

A worker in trouble feels he needs another degree, another seminar, another shot of inspiration from the master, the person with all the answers, who, like his religious predecessor, is unlikely to have spent much time doing in the real world.

   

Americans have created the mystique that suggest that they are incapable of taking care of themselves.  Thus is born the syndrome of terminal dependency:

In the workplace: dependency is on the manager for guidance, direction and control, or counter dependency on the company for security, identity and recognition.

At home: dependency on elaborate social outreach programs of the government meant to compensate for the disappearance of a family centered culture. The majority of families seldom share a daily meal together, the round table of a family centered culture. The government now owns the problem; a prob­lem that it can never solve.

In school: dependency is on teachers and school administrators to assume a responsibility that is a privilege granted to the student for greater mobility and opportunity in an increasingly more challenging economic environment. Schools are expected to create purpose, order, motivation and a desire to learn when that is the student's responsibility.

On television: dependency on the talking heads to enter­tain, enlighten, shock, embarrass and excite in order to fill the menacing silence with distracting noise; to divert the mind from its function and unique singularity.

In the community: dependency is on Law Enforcement and the Criminal Justice System to orchestrate morality, to be the community's conscience when the community has abdicated that responsibility. A community gets the police and justice system that it deserves. If the community is hypocritical, violent or corrupt, the police will mirror that aspect.

Americans sense the disorder in their lives, so they read, they listen to pundits on television, they surf the Internet, they explore apps on their iPads, they text and tweet, they look everywhere but to themselves for order. They argue among themselves. In the end they do what "the experts" say.

A vast majority of students and workers find themselves in a “catch 22.”  They feel helpless and isolated on the one hand from each other, and slaves to the system that they didn’t create on the other.  They feel little obligation to respect the authority of the system or obligation to abide by its protocols.  They argue among themselves but fail to challenge the system, claiming, “It’s not my problem!”

Nothing changes, because they look always for change elsewhere, not in themselves. It has been my experience that most workers expect:

Management to be more responsive to workers' needs than workers are to the needs of the company that employs them.

Social services to be more accessible to workers' needs than workers are to the social needs of others.

Teachers and administrators to be more motivated to teach than students are motivated to learn.

Police to be more patient, tolerant and understanding of citi­zens and their needs, than citizens are willing to be respectful of police and understanding of the limits placed on police in the discharge of their duties.

Notice where the emphasis is always placed? Always on others! It is always "somebody else's problem," not the student’s/worker’s. 

You would think these service providers would challenge this absurdity. But rather than challenge these impossible demands, these providers attempt instead to do the impossible.

Meanwhile, citizens tend to identity their frustrations with causes outside themselves.  These causes are packaged and promoted by self-interested experts – educators, university professors, media outlets, other authors, companies and governmental bodies – who have a stake in exploiting self-indulgence and angst.  

As long as students/workers remain immature, on the edge in self-ignorance, these promoters not only have a customer, but a field day. 

But alas!  It is still all for naught. Outward order begins with inward order. There is no other way. A community, a company, a fam­ily gets better one person at a time. This is true in the case of economic parity, or matters of recognition, identity and social consciousness.

It is equally true of government, science and reli­gion. Government cannot do for the citizen what the citizen best do for himself. Nor can science forgive the A.I.D.'s epidemic by promising a miraculous cure for a social tic. Nor can religion celebrate the nobility of man by denying man's nature.

It is not the lack of leadership, alone, that is at fault. It is also the failure of people to pay attention. Their lack of vigilance finds madness has gravitated to the collective norm. It is sanity that has become suspect. How do I prove this? I ask, "What has been your experience?"

Life is without cause. There is no direction, no safe harbor in sight. It puts me in mind of "The Flying Dutchman," the man on the legendary ship who can never make port, and is doomed to sail the oceans forever. Likewise, humanity never seems to find purchase of common ground on this planet.

In the microcosm, this is exercised in the 21st century by students and workers alike.  Students failing to realize education is a job on the way to another job; failing to see self-interests and the collective self-interests of society are indistinguishable from each other. 

Everything starts and ends with the solitary student in the classroom and the solitary worker on the job, for each person comes in alone and leaves alone and there is no profit in blaming everything and everyone if it doesn’t turn out as expected.   

Man is still unfinished. He is only a recent inhabitant of earth, here no more than a few hundred thousand years. The purpose of his life is to live it, period. What he does is an expression of that purpose.

The problem with many students and workers is that they seem unable to see what is true from what is false. They want to be told. They don’t want to struggle to find it out on their own; so they wait. The wait freezes them in suspended adolescence, grown children who first fail to act as young adults as students and later as workers on the job, falling back on parents to bail them out of whatever difficulty they get into at whatever juncture of their existence.  How long will this go on?  It is difficult to say.  The prospects are not encouraging.

The Peripatetic Philosopher reminisces:

 An Upside Down World!

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

© January 23, 2017

In my 1995 book, “The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain,” never considering myself either political or prescient, and obviously not anticipating Donald John Trump as the 45^th President of the United States, I wrote what follows.  It was a little book written at my sister’s and her husband’s house while on a short visit to Clinton, Iowa in the Fall of 1994. 

The world seemed every bit as “upside down” then as it does today only nobody seemed to notice or to make much of the occasional unsettling headline stories in the news media:

There was President Clinton’s decision to intervene in Bosnia with mainly military reserves and support from NATO keeping the whole affair low profile.

There was the stumbling at the Dayton Peace Accords with the late Richard Holbroke taking the heat.  In reflection, it seems incredible but it was a case of out of sight out of mind for most Americans.

NATO was feeling its oats and bruising for a war with Yugoslavia over power, oil and gold, which went mainly unnoticed.   

Bosnia then became our Syria today.

There was the memory of “Desert Storm” (1990 – 1991) and the strategic air strikes of the United States Military that fueled execrable contempt for America and Americans in the Middle East.

There was the disruption of airline deregulations that is still felt today.

And there was the anticipation of space warfare by the Pentagon and CIA with Hollywood jumping the gun by making films of that genre.

“The Worker, Alone!” was written then with only oblique references to things found disturbing keeping the themes of the book troubling but not too much so.  Here is an excerpt of the chapter “An Upside Down World”:

The English poet John Donne (1572 – 1631) was wrong when he said “no man is an island,” as every man today is an island unto himself, and his only redemption is in the full knowledge and acceptance of that fact.

The answers are not in government, nor industry and commerce; no longer in religion and certainly not in science.  So you ask, “Where does that leave you, the worker?”  I reply, “Very much alone!”

Expedient naiveté does not improve the worker’s long term identity and recognition; nor does naiveté ensure the continuance of freedom which is virtually taken for granted. 

The worker is on his own nickel and there is no savior, no God, no protector to shield him from the crush of history; from the inevitable force of reality, other than him or herself.

What is missing in these times is a lack of attention to fear.  Workers are afraid to lead fuller lives, not because they embrace their fears, but because they deny them while being preoccupied with distractions. 

I understand fear.  Fear runs through my body the way sap runs through a tree.  I am attentive to fear each day of my life, for that day may be my last.  Were it not for this attention I might be distracted and go to my grave without expressing these sentiments.  Fear is a powerful elixir to life.  It keep you attentive.  It finds you taking life seriously, but not yourself.

The working world is upside down.  This world today demands workers go against the prevailing grain to put the world back on its foundation.  What is killing this country in particular and the working world in general is too much HYPE, too much Harvard, Yale and Princeton elitism in politics, government, commerce, religion and industry. 

These institutions of inflated grading and solipsistic egos, would in government restore order from chaos by cosmetic surgery (CRIME BILL), revitalize trust by the appearance of propriety (NEW DECLARATION OF ETHICS), establish economic stability by treaty (NAFTA and GATT), and rejuvenate accountability by modification of the rites of passage (TERM LIMITS IN CONGRESS).  None of this touches the society’s sick soul. 

The “upside down world” continues and what appears here in a book written more than two decades ago may sound like a stump speech of the Donald's drive to the presidency.  If so, what could be a better indicator of the world standing on its head than this?         

The Peripatetic Philosopher answers:

A Reader Asks:

Has economic nation building ever worked?

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© January 22, 2017

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

"Economic nation building" is not primarily about money, as I have said before, but represents a total invasion of the underbelly of a society where the rot and decay, the gang wars and the drugs, the poverty and the hopelessness have dug in and claimed domain as ruthlessly as despots do in laying to waste societies with war and mayhem, leaving millions homeless and helpless necessitating "nation building." 

The key is re-energizing the population giving them food and sustenance, medicine and medical support so that they can rebuild by taking charge themselves.  

We have seen it done countless times in our history in the promotion of democracy. Why not economic stability? 

My sense is that economic wheelers and dealers are too isolated or disinterested in this complex problem preferring to concentrate on simply "throwing money at the problem" with no real strategic plan or well thought out tactical approach to the problem; stated another way, without noticeable involvement while being committed from a distance.

Solid guidance and direction are required at the front end and not draconian rules and regulations that stifle the energy and commitment of the people in the rebuilding.

You point out Haiti.  This small country has been exploited by the French colonizers, then by puppet governments set up by the French while transitioning to independence, only to be led by incompetent Haitians such as the legendary "Poppa Doc" Duvalier (1907 - 1971) and Jean-Bertrand Aristide (born 1953).


This could have happened to the United States, but it didn't.  Why?


If you read our history, an aristocracy mirroring that of Great Britain materialized in the American colonies.  Moreover, it was an asset that Americans spoke English, were conditioned to its culture; and mirrored its values and institutions from the beginning.


Great Britain took a different approach to colonization than what France had taken in Haiti, the Portuguese in Brazil and Spain took in Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Florida, and other South and Central American colonies.


These European countries established juntas of military elites while failing to create viable cultural and economic infrastructures of the indigenous people at hand.  The British did in America, Canada and Australia!


First, the American colonies had a succession of governors and officials that presided over a social, political and economic hierarchy to establish America as a stable and profitable colony. 

Furthermore, Great Britain developed a merchant’s class of ship owners, importers and exporters in support of the economy. At the same time, mimicking the aristocracy of England, it created a class of inherited wealth and landed gentry as well an educated body of physicians, attorneys, politicians and merchants.


At the next level, there were the lesser merchants and shopkeepers, master craftsmen and sea captains who were essentially independent businessmen who were vigorously involved in support of the economy.


The next level down included a diversity of apprentices (Ben Franklin was one such printing apprentice), bound laborers and hired servants for the growing number of estates of the plutocrats of the colonies. 

These apprenticeships were tightly secure in families (Franklin had a nine year apprenticeship with his brother), providing a large pool of semiskilled labor that enabled them to rise in the class system (Franklin became an independent businessman with a score of printing shops working for him, and was independently wealthy before the age of forty).


Further down existed a huge staple and pyramid of black slaves in which all the colonies took advantage of this labor option without a pause of conscience, although in reality it was absurd given the professed commitment of society to see itself as egalitarian.


At the same time, young professionals from all the white classes were on the rise -- teachers, ministers, writers, but especially those who were entering the law.   Ben Franklin, however, pursued science as an amateur and became acclaimed by the French for his kite experiment. He attached a key to the kite in a storm to prove that lightning was an electrical phenomenon.


Whereas Thomas Jefferson and George Washington came from the established upper aristocratic classes, John Adams was one of the young lawyers who had a precocious understanding of politics and the possibility of self-government. He showed a knack for such leadership from the beginning of his career.


This was the structure of the American colonies proving that the British by their own design created the monster that would realize its ultimate independence in the American Revolutionary War and one day exceed its hegemony.


This is the great legacy of Great Britain, an accomplishment that has not been matched, and that is so because Western societies have failed to learn from this great achievement.

-----Original Message-----

The Peripatetic Philosopher expresses his view:

 Why the USA train left the tracks:

One View!

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© January 17, 2017

REFERENCE:

Previously, I had suggested why not “economic nation building” with similar resources to “nation building.”  This is one of many replies.  It was written and replied to on January 17, 2017, or before President Trump’s “Inaugural Address,” but not posted.  I feared my recent barrage of missives might be overkill.  It has not been changed.

A READER WRITES:

Yes, economic nation building worked in America beginning in 1945 with an enormous investment in hard and soft infrastructure, an Interstate Highway System, rural electrification, financing for track homes, the GI Bill, and scores of other programs which created our middle class. In the 70s paying our way stopped and growing inequality has skyrocketed.    

DR. FISHER REPLIES:

Exactly.  It happened just as you describe.  It was also the American "boom" period from 1945-1970, a time of spendthrift optimism with American parents having babies at an alarming rate ushering in the “baby boomer generation.” 

It was also a time when young men born during “The Great Depression” were coming of age, but also draft age illegible for the US Military with the possibility of temporary deferment by first going to college. 

The years bridged the period when a United States’ “police action” turned into the “Korean War” (1950 – 1953) only to end a stalemate with American military still in South Korea more than six decades later.  This was also the time of the most unpopular “Vietnam War” (1955 – 1975) that ended in an ignominious defeat. 

Having personally straddled that quarter century, first as a university student (1951 – 1956), then as an enlisted man in the US Navy (1957 – 1963) with two years of active duty on a US Cruiser in the Mediterranean, I can attest to the seemingly ambivalence and uncertainty of the times (i.e., 1945 – 1970) from the perspective of a young man. 

Those who took hold of the contradiction and first acquired professional credentials then satisfied their military obligation had access to the “GI Bill.”  By taking this serendipitous route to the future they were likely to discover, to their surprise, that post-WWII was their oyster.  For those who didn’t, the road was still inviting as jobs were plentiful.  Why was this so? 

The world was exploding in population and opportunity, and for Americans, especially those with professional training, there was more opportunity than people to fill the openings.  America clearly was not ready for the world stage; nor were its people.  A lot of mistakes were made which are now coming home to roost.  I attempt to personify this incongruity in the person of “DEVLIN” (to be released later in 2017), a young naive American executive who encounters the brave new world only to find it is not according to the world of his school books.

EXCERPT FROM “DEVLIN, A NOVEL”

Devlin dreamed of becoming the next James Watson chemical model building his way to fame and fortune, as Watson had done with the discovery of the double helix of DNA.  Besides, he saw himself as a washout as a bench chemist, able to manipulate complex chemical variables on paper, but not able to create the instrumentation for the necessary chemical experiments.  He believed he would be a great chemist beyond the lab.  It was not to happen.     

H. B. Myers, executive vice president, Polychem International Operations, found a niche as the company’s Everyman, which meant he was never able to say “no” to any request.  His curse was amplified in his tentative decision-making – he never had enough data!  On the other hand, he was a born mediator projecting a charming manner and a cooperative spirit that put others at ease. 

He was wise but not political.  This enabled him to see all sides of an argument but seldom able to resolve the issue at hand to anyone’s satisfaction.  He could calm warring factions, but was ill equipped when it came to the critical decision, and he knew it.  He needed someone to front for him, take the heat and compensate for his analytical paranoia. 

It was the nature of the HB/Devlin connection that they were alike but so different.  Both had graduated from university having earned B.S., M.S. degrees; HB’s both in Chemistry, Devlin’s in chemical engineering and chemistry, but there the similarity between the two men ended.

HB was a talented bench chemist. Devlin was an equivocal dreamer.  HB was a true blue company man who valued himself only in terms of how his superiors and peers valued him.  He was the composite of everything they thought or said about him.  It never occurred to him to question the company’s will or the prudence of its actions, much less the ethics of its pursuits.  Devlin questioned everything and the motives of everyone.

As fate often plays tricks on us, HB found his brains came in handy as a company strategist, but he had no stomach for playing the bad ass games that the corporate situation demanded.  Devlin had a flair for reading people, taking risks and playing the heavy with no second thoughts. He wouldn’t hesitate to get in the face of anyone, senior management included, when he felt it necessary. 

No surprise, he was reluctantly promoted into management in the Industrial Division on the strength of his sales, as he was both largely disliked and feared by those with whom he dealt, but not by HB.  Devlin he saw as possibly his salvation.  He plucked him out of field management and promoted him to vice president, leap frogging him over four intermediate executive positions, having him report directly to him. 

This was an unprecedented company move, but an indicator of HB’s clout and authority to satisfy his perceived need.  Devlin was the iron fist to his velvet glove, and despite what others thought of the match it enjoyed unprecedented success across Europe and South America with South Africa the latest challenge. 

On the strength of his legendary if unconventional approach to sales, Devlin continued to excel in acquiring major accounts and as a developer of people.  His enemies saw him as a maverick and ticking “time bomb,” but not HB. 

Devlin was loyal to himself, his family and his Irish Catholicism in that order.  He knew he had strong opinions, which were double-edged.  He believed it gave him perspective to define situations clearly.  While he could be abrasive when he thought it necessary, it was also true that when it came to customers and subordinates, he was generally admired.  HB hadn’t missed that either.

He was however somewhat juvenile when it came to his outlandish cultural assessments: West coast people were hedonists and dreamers; East coast people behaved as if the United States never grew beyond the thirteen colonies; the South was still fighting the American Civil War finding new ways to keep the Negro in his place; only people in the Midwest were real.  There nobody was better than anyone else.  He was a card carrying Midwesterner, as was HB.

Devlin had little regard for praise, but thrived in chaos.  It was where he found his calm.  In chaos, he could quit chasing shadows.  His drive was a puzzle to others perhaps because it was so simple.  He wanted to avoid waste at any cost which meant effectively harnessing his natural talents.  Failing that, he felt life was meaningless.  

He hated any kind of waste and detested anyone who flaunted his or her gifts.  He was not into revenge when deceived, but never forgot or forgave a transgression.  His punishment was narcissistic: he would have nothing to do with that person again. 

The subtle difference between HB and Devlin was a gulf that left the two men bound together by fate but separated from understanding.  The WASP shadow of expectations hounded HB; the Catholic deceptive shroud of theology harassed Devlin. 

Devlin could never be confused with a hardy fellow well met.  He had a reputation for shooting from the lip, a brooder but dedicated problem solver.  His actions weren’t always predictable.  He believed it easier to ask forgiveness than permission.  Nor did logic limit his problem solving as he had confidence in his intuition.  He liked to say he was a thinking feeler rather than a cognitive thinker.  This alarmed others, and confused HB who couldn’t argue with his results.  Many preferred to see him “as lucky”; HB considered him simply necessary.  

Devlin was happiest when engaged in problem solving, and thought nothing of the hours involved.  In one sense, he was level headed, and in another, not.  This meant he rarely changed his mind, while knowing ideas could be traps of which he was the author.  How could two less likely individuals discover synergy?  The answer was in the times.

During World War II, the American military needed specialty water treatment chemicals for railroad locomotives, military tanks, ships and airplanes across the globe.  Polychem had the technical “know how” and products to satisfy these requirements.  The Department of Defense (DOD) provided fledgling Polychem with access to these far-flung markets.  Once WWII was over, these outposts became manufacturing and distribution centers in such places as Venezuela, Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Australia and South Africa.  

A quarter century after the war (1968), Polychem International, Inc. was on the brink of $100 million in sales but suffering a critical shortage of high talent while handcuffed with the policy of promoting only from within.  HB and Devlin rose from otherwise modest careers as trained bench chemists into first the management and then executive ranks of Polychem to fill that void. 

In another life, they’d have been lost in the breach – despite both being Phi Beta Kappa graduates, HB from DePauw University with a master’s degree from Purdue University with Devlin’s degrees from the University of Iowa – and relegated to the laboratory for the duration of their careers. 

But Polychem in post-WWII, like many other emerging American companies, had to improvise as the nation made its mad dash into global economics.  HB and Devlin were not trained for leadership but found themselves fulfilling that role by default.    

WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED

Taking the reins from President Truman in 1952, President Eisenhower invested in the national highway system, while AT&T was a boom to rural areas, delivering electrical power no matter how remote the location.  Iowans remember AT&T fondly during that period.  

And yes, the GI Bill was another boom to many, some using it judiciously, others not.  It gave me the opportunity to earn my doctorate after “retiring” (the first time) after leaving South Africa with a wife and four young children to support.  

For the first time in American history, the working middle class soared to new heights as the "Big Three" automakers were getting rich providing the world with vehicles as WWII had decimated the infrastructure of most advanced societies. 

[I saw this up close and personal first as a US Navy hospital corpsman traveling through Europe after WWII, and as a chemical company executive for Nalco Chemical Company visiting facilities in France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.  Europe was in the process of rebuilding – brick by brick – out of the rubble.]   

Small companies such as Nalco Chemical Company became billion dollar establishments, and people in otherwise stalled careers rose to the executive ranks on that momentum.  It was the nature of the times. 

[To give you a sense of this dramatic change in the American Midwest rust belt, in the late 1940s, I would visit my uncle in Detroit every summer.  He was the Chair of the Department of Commerce & Economics at the University of Detroit, a Jesuit university, and he lived in an upscale neighborhood.  He had an extensive consulting business with an office in the Fisher Building across from GM’s headquarters in downtown Detroit.  I, however, played organized baseball with factory workers’ kids during those summers, families that lived in more plush neighborhoods than my uncle’s.

The kids I played baseball with planned on working in the automotive industry after high school; none planned on going to college.  Dearborn was a few miles away and I saw that side of Detroit as well since my cousin had friends who lived in that area.  Homes I visited had large indoor swimming pools where we played water polo, and swam laps.  The surprising thing was the mindset of these kids was the same as the factory workers, that is, secure in the belief that the future belonged to them.  Their fathers were automotive executives or with companies that had commercial alliances with the automotive industry.  I was told that many of the homes were also those of UAW executives.  The homes I visited were vainly ostentatious with the necessary accoutrements to suggest wealth.]

A typical GM, Ford or Chrysler family had a mother and father, son and/or daughter, and often son-in-law and daughter-in-law working at one of these automotive plants with only a high school education or less during this period (1945 – 1970).  Nepotism was not rare but universal.  Assembly line workers in these families, collectively, were more affluent than my uncle or many other professionals including some in medicine and law.  Yet, there the resemblance ended.

These homes didn’t have libraries, didn't have nice paintings on the wall, didn’t have fine furniture or thematically appointed décor as did my uncle’s home and that of his neighbors.  They had lots of vehicles and seemingly unlimited disposable income with the homes displaying room-to-room garish trappings that spoke to financial security but little discernment.      

This gravy train lasted until the rest of the world caught up with the United States, and that started in the 1970s and crested in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  

Corporate management has taken heat for this slippage, but for the working middle class it represented the great betrayal of the UAW and other such unions.  From the late 1940s, these unions continued to sue for worker wage and benefit concessions, but at the expense of giving management complete control of the actual work. 

As a consequence, workers came to increasingly work for wages and benefits no longer finding satisfaction in the work, itself.  They behaved like renters no longer as owners.  To no one’s surprise, workers came to be suspended on automatic pilot as if part of a never ending assembly line.

Union management leadership came to be just as corrupt and ineffective as corporate management, which it mirrored.  While corporate management denied the changes that were happening across Europe and Asia, maintaining the same infallible authority and business-as-usual practices, the game of industrial commerce was being taken from the United States bit-by-bit as Europe and Asia caught up with and then surpassed its dominance,  To make matters worse, Americans rushed to buy these foreign automobiles, televisions, electronics, machine tools, and glass products. 

While union management continued to deny the changes, continued to sue for more and more wage and entitlement concessions, the boom that was thought to last forever, saw the fading of a stable US economy and a vibrant working middle class, as the manufacturing industry was quietly moving abroad, leaving behind empty factories and tens of thousands of unemployed workers. 

[The United States economy was gutted with double digit unemployment and double digit inflation in the 1970s as a result of this after shock.]

Even when it was obvious that consumers’ tastes had changed and that the American market was imploding, corporate management of the “Big Three” automakers continued to manufacturer gas guzzling vehicles when Europe and Asia were meeting the new demand with smaller more fuel efficient vehicles.  Other major American manufacturing fell into the same dysfunctional trap.

When trouble was conceded, what did these operations do?  As previously mentioned, they sent the jobs overseas where labor costs were more reasonable and built new state-of-the-arts manufacturing facilities abroad because they could be built more cheaply, leaving behind the hollow decaying out-of-date factories in the United States. 

The result was the collapse of the Midwest rust belt into a sea of empty facilities with the shrinking of the working middle class to a shadow of its original grandeur.  

Workers paid the penalty as they always do when corporate and union management in all its arrogance refuses to show leadership. 

So, you see, I have no trouble with your analysis.  It is time we quit patting ourselves on the back and realize we all own this problem as no one’s hands are clean and go about taking charge again, and this time, less grandly and overtly, but more sensibly and realistically.