THIS GOT ME THINKING -- RE: "LUCTOR ET EMERGO"

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. 

© October 23, 2020 

Henry,

Bravo! This missive is entertaining and provocative, as are all your missives in your compendium (see below).

My approach is different, which of course you might expect as I have a different set of experiences and persuasions of mind.

Evidence of this was apparent in "We are not a polite society, never were, never will be."

What spurred my interest in writing this was rereading "The Lonely Crowd" (1950) by David Riesman who looks at violence quite differently than I do. He sees a lack of leadership consistent with Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy (re: essay after his death). Incredibly, he sees them as a cut above other presidents "because of their sophistication and intellectual acumen," failing to mention some of the messes they caused. No, I am not an admirer of either.

But Riesman got me thinking. That's all an author is obliged to do.

We Americans are a hard scrabble constituency with our most effective presidents, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson, hardly giant intellects.

Americans have always struggled to get beyond their midwife, Europe, where "Men of Words" have dominated and where "Men of Action" turn out to be either Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin, or Stalin with the occasional "Man of Words" such as Winston Churchill intervening to change the course of history, as he did persuading FDR to do the right thing.

Seemingly an unrelated subject, I am now working on a short piece, "Thinking About Violence of a Society on the Edge of Collapse," which starts out innocently enough, correcting Abraham Lincoln's error in the Gettysburg Address, then segueing into another book I read some time ago by Joseph Ellis, "The Quartet: The Second American Revolution" (2015).

Ellis correctly covers the period from 1787 to 1789, which was terribly traumatic as The Continental Congress had no teeth and The US Constitution as it then existed had no legs.

The thirteen colonies were perilously close to imploding, but then George Washington, always an adult and a "Man of Action" and John Madison a brilliant "Man of Words," keeping himself out of the limelight, and John Jay, another effective quiet "Man of Words," and pesky Alexander Hamilton, much younger than the other three, and never living long enough to assume true adulthood but another "Man of Words," combined to rewrite the US Constitution creating the three offsetting and balancing branches of the Federal Government: Executive, Judicial and Legislative, along with writing The Federalist Papers.

But like my typical long windedness, this is only preamble to discussing why we have such a violent society, not going back to the dawn of our nascent creation but looking at the mess we have been in since WWII.

You have a point about parenting in your piece. Parenting wasn't a problem for African American families or white families, poor as the majority of them were before WWII because they had something that their church gave them and the wider society, which no longer exists, and that was a sense of community. 

Alexis de Tocqueville saw this in 1831 (re: Democracy in America, 1831-1834) and the country saw it demonstrated in the mobilization miracle of 1942 where a sense of community saw the United States build more ship, planes, tanks, and create a logistical support system second to none in a single year (see David Halberstam's "The Next Century," 1991, p 59).

Enough. I'm going back to bed,

Jim

Re: “Luctor et Emergo”

http://fleabyte.org/My-2-cents/Myworld/blog-46.html

http://fleabyte.org/My-2-cents/Myworld/contents.html