CONFESSIONS OF AN EXISTENTIAL AMATEUR AUTHOR

 

CONFESSIONS OF AN EXISTENTIAL AMATEUR AUTHOR 

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., PH.D. 

© JANUARY 5, 2021 

When I have had the energy, I’ve been working on a piece seeing myself as an existential amateur author materializing my views from the perspective of published reflections over the past fifty years, works empirical and biographical in the sense of how I perceive what I have experienced, valued, believed and understood to be so.

If they don’t make any sense to the reader, fine, I have no problem with that.

I am not out as an existential amateur author to embark on a crusade. I am simply interested in sharing my point-of-view and my own history in my lifetime. Now, what if this were the norm? What if we accepted our myths and passions with a grain of humor?

For 1600 years, Christianity was Catholicism, my religion, a religion in reflection that has been largely made up since the death of the historic Jesus some 2,000 years ago.

Given my nature, I have read scores of books by historians as well as commentaries on the Four Gospels, and yes, Papal Encyclicals over the centuries, not to mention the role of Emperor Constantine in promoting Roman Catholicism as a political act – including the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea to define the faith– a religion he clearly never understood himself.

As a boy, I accepted “Original Sin” that St. Augustine of Hippo defined for us, the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary that Pope Pius IX declared in an encyclical after he issued one in which it became a mortal sin if you didn’t believe in the Infallible Authority of the Pope in Matters of Faith and Morals.

Our lives from the beginning have been made up by men to whom we have largely acceded to follow without question, forgetting they are caught up in the same mythology as we are.

We had the Roman Empire, the Islam Golden Age, the Spanish Empire, and the British Empire, the Conquests of Alexander the Great and Napoleon, and now the American Empire, each eventually receding into history for similar human insufficiencies.

Now, we have another common insanity that periodically shadows us like a shroud. Imagine if we just gave this a rest, too.

We have most recently had a President of the United States from the generation born immediately following WWII in Donald Trump, a generation I have identified as “the spoiled brat generation,” and now we have President Joe Biden, born during WWII, or before Trump’s generation but seemingly retrogressing to an earlier more nostalgic time.

Biden is the benefactor of this age of Artificial Intelligence, Zukerberg’s Facebook, Brin and Page’s Google, Apple’s entertainment, Gates’ Microsoft, Bezos’ Amazon and now with professional journalism having been reduced to advertising puppets for special interests. 

It happened before; indeed, it has all happened with essentially the same script. Permit a pause.

My venerated Uncle Leonard Martin Ekland, born in 1898, had to quit high school in his freshman year to support his five brothers and two sisters, becoming a telegraph operator, the technology of early 20th century.

He would leave that work at 15 and attend high school and university in Iowa City, simultaneously, graduating from high school and college at the age of 19, and going on to earn Ph.D.’s in economics & psychology from The University of Iowa.

Now, to the more things change the more they remain the same.

Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes (1822 – 1893) who was President of the United States from 1877-1881 and a fierce abolitionists. But that is not what is most interesting about him.

In the election of 1877, he supposedly trailed Democrat Samuel Tilden by 250,000 votes, and was ready to concede but didn’t.

Hayes hadn’t looked closely at the electoral results in three southern states. 

The Western Union, the monopolist of telegraph technology and prominent at the time, had given Tilden’s people unfettered access to telegrams sent by Democrat strategists, and had done everything it could to insure that Tilden defeated Hayes.

For four months the results of the election remained in limbo threatening a Second Civil War. Hayes prevailed only when his party agreed to withdraw Federal Troops from the South.

I started these reflections as I am wont to do, thinking they may turn into something else, perhaps a book, which is the manner in which my writing progresses.  Then, somewhat impulsively, I decided to share these reflections with you, the reader.

Given this compunction, I wonder how much of our lives and times are mainly made up by people who are driven by some new god, ghost, ghoul, or hubris, usually in the form of the current prominent technology of the day. These technologist often seem to forget they are not omnipotent or infallible but temporary actors on stage, as was Western Union and its monopoly of telegraph technology.

My safe haven has been that of the quintessential existential amateur who people are free to read, reflect, ignore or find some amusement.