CHARACTER MATTERS – A JOHN McCAIN PERSPECTIVE IN THE QUADRENNIAL MADNESS
James R. Fisher, Jr.
“It is impossible that an ill-natured man can have a public spirit; for how should he love ten thousand men, who never loved one?”
Francis de S. Fenelon (1651 – 1715), French archbishop
We are about to enter the quadrennial madness of presidential politics with people entering and bowing out of the race over the next two years. It is part of the American ritual of our best and worst moments, revisiting our national apathy and natural inclination to support a “winner.” That is why we have polls and are addicted to them.
Lost in the melee is the central issue that has kept our head above water in our worst moments. If you are not a reader of books, I hope that you are a watcher of the “American Experience” series on PBS television.
One of the surprising features of this series is that it puts flesh and blood on the skeletal remains of Our Founding Fathers and leaders throughout time, especially at our most critical moments.
For example when Benjamin Franklin was visiting France during the American Revolution to gain financial and military support, John Adams, who was to be our second president, was on a similar mission as well. Instead of combining their efforts, putting our fledgling nation’s best interests above their personal pride and ambition, both men were consumed with enmity and bitterness towards each other, nearly changing the course of American history.
You would see in this television series that George Washington had a Dwight Eisenhower kind of intellect, as did Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but all three men rose above their limitations because of their character.
They knew who they were and what they were about.
On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson, like John Adams, was the intellectual superior of his contemporaries, but of a flawed character that had a penchant for fortuity, which was not the case for Adams. The latter had a penchant for rubbing nearly everyone up the wrong side.
Likewise, his son, John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, was of superior intellect and character but not of a matching finesse. John Quincy’s greatest moments came when he was an ex-president and a member of the House of Representatives. There he displayed a powerful commitment to anti-slavery.
Neither Adams ever own slaves, but presidents before and after them did.
Currently, Time magazine features John Fitzgerald Kennedy (July 2, 2007) with the cover caption “What We Can Learn From JFK.”
The article is remarkable in its emphasis and omissions, making much of the man and little of his faux pas: e.g., little is made of his initiating the Vietnam War, the fiasco of the Cuban Invasion, where he lacked the will to give air support, his philandering, his precarious connection with mafia types and his hesitation to truly launch the Civil Rights Movement, while much is made of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was mainly self-generated.
It is understandable. JFK is the image Americans like to think of themselves: dashing, good looking, white, and above average. Profligacy has no place in this character image. It is as if JFK stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and (Theodore) Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore. It is Camelot of the Mind with a giant “what if” he had lived speculation.
Unfortunately, character is not something you wish for but something you are and demonstrate in what you do. The irony is that Time magazine doesn’t seem to realize it is illustrating our stuckness*** by exaggerating our sense of who and what we would like to think we are.
Some have wondered about my politics. Well, like my religion, they are not of a party or platform but of character and will that might lead us through our sick times and sick society. Who is that to be?
JOHN McCAIN, THE QUENTESSENTIAL AMERICAN
There is someone I find interesting. His name is John McCain.
John McCain may not get elected president, indeed; he may drop out of the race for lack of money, organization and support. But for me, he is the single character in the present firmament that seems real, flawed as this reality may appear.
McCain is not a good campaigner, not a good speaker, not robust or handsome, and certainly not dashing or debonair. Yet, I sense he has the will and the moral conviction to put American society back on its rightful axis.
In a strange way, John McCain, small, crumpled, white-haired, aging, disarmingly genuine and sincere in a humble way reminds me of John XXIII, the saintly pope that attempted to put a little reality and tolerance into his ancient Roman Catholic Church with the Ecumenical Council. McCain understands the United States, if it is to survive in tact, will have a more modest leadership role in the world. The Catholic church has not learned apparently from John XXIII's leadership, and so it continues to stumble forward. My hope is that America will be more fortunate.
John McCain credentials match his temperament. He has been a combat veteran in Vietnam, and a tortured prisoner-of-war, and yet he doesn’t believe in draconian measures against incarcerated “terrorists.” He has been a dedicated senator pleasing neither party in his stand on controversial issues such as immigration, where he is empathetic to the demands of ethnic minorities, and the war in Iraq, where he advocates more troops against criticism from all sides.
In a word, he is Jacksonian (re: president Andrew Jackson) in that he represents blunt reality as did Jackson, more than a century and a half ago. Like Jackson, he is his own man with the pain and struggle of his life as testimony to his philosophy and politics.
As this is written, he is low in the polls and declining while a television dandy and personality, Fred Thompson, threatens to enter the quadrennial madness. Thompson looks presidential; McCain is presidential.
Americans have not always chosen wisely, even in times of crisis, aggravating the madness of their dilemma. Is this to be any different? Time will tell.
__________
***Stuckness is the central issue discussed in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Monday, June 25, 2007
AUTHOR FISHER REFLECTS ON HIS RETURN TO HIS ROOTS!
AUTHOR FISHER REFLECTS ON HIS RETURN TO HIS ROOTS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2007
Author Thomas Wolfe wrote a compelling novel, You Can’t Go Home Again (1940). It was his last novel published posthumously as he died two years before at the age of 38. In the novel, after being out in the world – these were the riotous years in Europe prior to WWII – he returns to his mountain home seeking the peace and quiet of his boyhood, only to find it caught up in the same nervous frenzy of his time.
When I first returned to Clinton after an absence of many years in the 1990s, many of my friends who had stayed were as congenial as ever. I spent twelve weeks during that decade researching IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, a snapshot of growing up in Clinton in the war years of the 1940s.
I returned in 2003 for a speaking and book signing tour of this book in Clinton and the Quad Cities. I have not been back since.
Thomas Wolfe has a point that the home you leave is never the home you return to, partly because you have a perspective of a world apart, in my case working and living for many years abroad, and therefore lacking the continuity of the elapsing daily life in the community since I had left.
Take the magnificent courthouse prominently displayed on the front cover of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. It is still there, but totally gutted and modernized inside, while St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, Rectory and School on the back cover have been erased from the landscape, the sanctuary of my formative years.
Already in the 1990s, the playground that introduced me to baseball, football, basketball, and ice-skating in the winter -- the lawn bridging the county jail with the courthouse – was gone. It had been replaced by a public safety building for the county sheriff department.
By 2003, the scores of taverns that snaked their way along Clinton’s seven mile promenade had been largely replaced by fast-food restaurants from the city limits south and Camanche Avenue to Second Street north and Lyons.
Clinton was once famous for its collection of taverns. Also missing were the Chicago & North Western Railroad Shops along Camanche Avenue, once the primary employer of many members of my Irish-Norwegian clan.
If they didn’t work for the railroad, they worked for Clinton Foods, which has undergone many iterations of owners. My da once worked for both. Incidentally, if not for Clinton Foods, which employed me for five summers while attending the University of Iowa, I suspect my life would have turned out quite differently.
Like Thomas Wolfe, however, there are bittersweet memories as my roots rise out of South Clinton, which has been swallowed up by the current iteration of Clinton Foods (ADM) with the punctuation mark of a golden dome to mark its territory.
People of my generation identified with the neighborhood of their birth: south of the tracks (South Clinton), off Camanche Avenue (Chancy Park), above the big tree (Lyons), and so on. New neighborhoods have sprung up, but the old ones are still holding firm, except South Clinton, which is no more.
I mention this because my sense of place has never left my mind. This is where my values were first formed. Those values have given me an amazing freedom, and indeed security, to listen to my own drummer and to know I have real roots with real people.
Splitting grammar school between Lyons (St. Boniface) and the courthouse area (St. Patrick’s), then high school (Clinton High), I experienced cultural shock going from private to public school that apparently is now a thing of the past, for there is no St. Boniface or St. Patrick’s.
The catholic school system of the 1940s with the nuns of the Sisters of St. Francis and the priests of the Davenport Diocese represented a total cultural immersion in the ancient tradition of Catholic programming. I have never outgrown this as a thinker or writer.
The movement of the casino from offshore to Clinton’s beautiful riverfront offends me. I see gambling as part of the new plague and write about it in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. In this convoluted climate, people are looking for something for nothing; for luck as substitute for misplaced pluck. It is actually evidence of being stuck, which is the subject of my book and on how to become unstuck. A casino is not the answer. It is part of our societal sickness.
Today, the nuns are gone in Clinton as elsewhere, priests are few and far between, and the public school system, which in Clinton has always been excellent, is greatly challenged in these flippant times.
The strength of Clinton is its people. They nurtured and launched me into the world. People of Clinton to whom I owe a special debt include Gussie Witt, Jack Dunmore, Lyle Sawyer, sheriff Ky Petersen, deputies Chris Stamp and Jim Gaffey, Bobby Witt, Del Ploen, Billy McKinley, coach Ed Rashke, coach Dean Burridge, of course, my parents, as well as Sister Mary Flavian, Sister Mary Helen, Sister Mary Gertrude, Sister Mary Cecilia, and Father Anthony Geertz.
It is no accident that the first and last sentence of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE is of Bobby Witt. It was because Bobby was my ideal: open, fun, funny, intelligent, athletic, caring, modest, and there, always there. He also had a way to puncture my cockiness. Once I told him I had a photographic memory. He didn’t say anything until we attended a movie at the Rialto. After the film credits rolled, he said, “Did you see the credits?” I nodded. “Okay, hot shot, repeat them.” It is how I remember Clinton as I prepare to visit it once again.
____________
An edited version of this is to appear in The Clinton Herald in August 2007 prior to Dr. Fisher's book speaking and signing tour in the midwest.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2007
Author Thomas Wolfe wrote a compelling novel, You Can’t Go Home Again (1940). It was his last novel published posthumously as he died two years before at the age of 38. In the novel, after being out in the world – these were the riotous years in Europe prior to WWII – he returns to his mountain home seeking the peace and quiet of his boyhood, only to find it caught up in the same nervous frenzy of his time.
When I first returned to Clinton after an absence of many years in the 1990s, many of my friends who had stayed were as congenial as ever. I spent twelve weeks during that decade researching IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, a snapshot of growing up in Clinton in the war years of the 1940s.
I returned in 2003 for a speaking and book signing tour of this book in Clinton and the Quad Cities. I have not been back since.
Thomas Wolfe has a point that the home you leave is never the home you return to, partly because you have a perspective of a world apart, in my case working and living for many years abroad, and therefore lacking the continuity of the elapsing daily life in the community since I had left.
Take the magnificent courthouse prominently displayed on the front cover of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. It is still there, but totally gutted and modernized inside, while St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, Rectory and School on the back cover have been erased from the landscape, the sanctuary of my formative years.
Already in the 1990s, the playground that introduced me to baseball, football, basketball, and ice-skating in the winter -- the lawn bridging the county jail with the courthouse – was gone. It had been replaced by a public safety building for the county sheriff department.
By 2003, the scores of taverns that snaked their way along Clinton’s seven mile promenade had been largely replaced by fast-food restaurants from the city limits south and Camanche Avenue to Second Street north and Lyons.
Clinton was once famous for its collection of taverns. Also missing were the Chicago & North Western Railroad Shops along Camanche Avenue, once the primary employer of many members of my Irish-Norwegian clan.
If they didn’t work for the railroad, they worked for Clinton Foods, which has undergone many iterations of owners. My da once worked for both. Incidentally, if not for Clinton Foods, which employed me for five summers while attending the University of Iowa, I suspect my life would have turned out quite differently.
Like Thomas Wolfe, however, there are bittersweet memories as my roots rise out of South Clinton, which has been swallowed up by the current iteration of Clinton Foods (ADM) with the punctuation mark of a golden dome to mark its territory.
People of my generation identified with the neighborhood of their birth: south of the tracks (South Clinton), off Camanche Avenue (Chancy Park), above the big tree (Lyons), and so on. New neighborhoods have sprung up, but the old ones are still holding firm, except South Clinton, which is no more.
I mention this because my sense of place has never left my mind. This is where my values were first formed. Those values have given me an amazing freedom, and indeed security, to listen to my own drummer and to know I have real roots with real people.
Splitting grammar school between Lyons (St. Boniface) and the courthouse area (St. Patrick’s), then high school (Clinton High), I experienced cultural shock going from private to public school that apparently is now a thing of the past, for there is no St. Boniface or St. Patrick’s.
The catholic school system of the 1940s with the nuns of the Sisters of St. Francis and the priests of the Davenport Diocese represented a total cultural immersion in the ancient tradition of Catholic programming. I have never outgrown this as a thinker or writer.
The movement of the casino from offshore to Clinton’s beautiful riverfront offends me. I see gambling as part of the new plague and write about it in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. In this convoluted climate, people are looking for something for nothing; for luck as substitute for misplaced pluck. It is actually evidence of being stuck, which is the subject of my book and on how to become unstuck. A casino is not the answer. It is part of our societal sickness.
Today, the nuns are gone in Clinton as elsewhere, priests are few and far between, and the public school system, which in Clinton has always been excellent, is greatly challenged in these flippant times.
The strength of Clinton is its people. They nurtured and launched me into the world. People of Clinton to whom I owe a special debt include Gussie Witt, Jack Dunmore, Lyle Sawyer, sheriff Ky Petersen, deputies Chris Stamp and Jim Gaffey, Bobby Witt, Del Ploen, Billy McKinley, coach Ed Rashke, coach Dean Burridge, of course, my parents, as well as Sister Mary Flavian, Sister Mary Helen, Sister Mary Gertrude, Sister Mary Cecilia, and Father Anthony Geertz.
It is no accident that the first and last sentence of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE is of Bobby Witt. It was because Bobby was my ideal: open, fun, funny, intelligent, athletic, caring, modest, and there, always there. He also had a way to puncture my cockiness. Once I told him I had a photographic memory. He didn’t say anything until we attended a movie at the Rialto. After the film credits rolled, he said, “Did you see the credits?” I nodded. “Okay, hot shot, repeat them.” It is how I remember Clinton as I prepare to visit it once again.
____________
An edited version of this is to appear in The Clinton Herald in August 2007 prior to Dr. Fisher's book speaking and signing tour in the midwest.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
THINKING ABOUT RELIGION & GOD
THINKING ABOUT RELIGION & GOD
JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
© June 2007
“Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.”
Caleb C. Colton (1780 – 1832), English clergyman
My da once told me when I was a boy to never get embroiled in a discussion of politics, religion or race, and he was Irish, which makes this suggestion an oxymoron.
In a way, religion embraces everything including politics and race.
Religion has succeeded, for example, to generate selective forgetting by insisting on its territorial imperatives. How else can we explain the thousands of religions and the hundreds of dominations. Yet, the fact remains there is but one race, and that is the human race.
No other race exists except in the mind, which is the playground of religion.
Religion throughout our Western history has displayed the full range of human emotion from the sublime to subterranean.
Dante showed great skill in this with his "Divine Comedy." He found himself lost in dark and frightening woods, and as he was trying to regain his path, he came to a mountain, which he decided to climb in order to get his bearings. Strange beasts blocked his way, and he was forced back to the plain. As he was bemoaning his fate, the poet Virgil appeared and offered to conduct Dante through Hell, Purgatory, and blissful Paradise.
This is all like a dream, and it might well have come to Dante as such, along with his Beatrice, the soul of his beloved.
Beatrice is more prominent in a less well known work of Dante's, "The Vita Nuova" (the new life). This work is a celebration in prose and poetry of the great poet's love for Beatrice Portinari.
When Dante first saw Beatrice he was nine and she was eight. He was so affected by the sight of her that his "vital spirit" trembled, his "animal spirit" was amazed, and his "natural spirit" wept. He was in love, and to know love as love was meant to be known.
Notice that love, even in the very young, embodies life, instinct and lust, all essential components in the heart of man that give expression to his humanity.
If you read the definitions of religion in the dictionary, you discover the seeds of the problem immediately.
Religion is defined as "the state of a religious; the service and worship of God or the supernatural, commitment and devotion to religious faith or observance, a personal or institutional system of religious attitudes, beliefs, practices, or scrupulous conformity to a system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith."
Dante (1265 - 1321) was fighting through this narrow view of religion in the dawn of the Renaissance, long before the Medici’s and Michelangelo and da Vinci would take on prominence.
The foundation of the early Christian Church was by such Church Fathers as Tertullian (160 - 220). He was a harsh theologian whose influence was demonstrated centuries later with "The Inquisition." He ranted against heathens and Jews, and heretics while championing asceticism. No one was a greater influence between Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, as his rigors proved endemic to Latinity followers for centuries.
Somewhat later, Saint Benedict (480 - 550) came along. Benedict had an outlook characterized by prudence and moderation in a framework of authority, obedience, austerity, stability and community. His product was the domestic life, which, obviously, was common to few but still influenced many.
This gentle saint had a rather harsh view of married love. If the "husband was transported by immoderate love, his intercourse with his wife so ardently in passion would be a sin."
James Cleugh studied the impact of this psychology in his book "Love Locked Out: A Survey of Love, License and Restriction in the Middle Ages" (1970).
The startling nature of this study is that the source of many problems of the twenty-first century life appears through the lens of this period of repression, suppression, suspicion, and guilt that were being programmed into the religion of Western man.
This psychosexual obsession with "locked out love" has had aberrant manifestation in scandal after scandal with the contemporary clergy. As Cleugh points out, it "gave birth to pornography in the middle ages."
Cleugh sites that unnatural fear of the natural has festered like a cultural plague throughout the ages.
Saint Benedict's aversion to sexual love was an invitation to make it an obsession. Love is the diet of the mind as food is diet to the body.
Obsession is fed by the perversion of the natural object be it of food or sex, or, indeed, of religion.
Society, for one, has become obsessed with obesity. It hasn't reduced obesity but increased it. At the same time, placing society on a diet has created a multibillion-dollar industry, which is constantly being replenished by the turnstile of recidivism. People today think constantly about food. It has become the narcotic of the pathology of normalcy and its bi-product is a bloated culture.
When you force people to stop smoking, all they think about are cigarettes. It is like an inverted chemical equation -- always getting the opposite reaction of what is desired or expected.
So, as Cleugh points out, if you tell people they can't have sex, or that they shouldn't enjoy sex, or thinking about sex is not healthy, then they are going to be obsessed with sex, when sex in the most active members of society in chronological time is fleeting at best.
It is psychological time that is the killer. Obsession is fueled by psychological time.
The irony is that if you choose to be master of psychological time, then you eat to live rather than live to eat, and you quit smoking "cold turkey." No drugs, no patches, no diets, no gurus. And sex emanates naturally from romantic to physical love and is expressed in other ways such as a look, a touch, or a caring remark.
Young males believe there is something wrong with them if they are not obsessed with sex, and girls think there is something wrong with them if someone is not hitting on them constantly. It is a double bind that has created a whole new industry of gurus that pander to these obsessions.
Men of the cloth have taken a back-seat to the shock jocks of radio and television, and the pop artist that weave sexual themes into their lyrics often of a barbaric nature. Then there are those "doctors of this and that" who probe willing psyches on the tube, persons who appear to have little clue they are being used and exploited if not abused, reminiscent of obsessed clerics of the past.
These new advisers, often rich and famous, have been given the power by a passive society to tell them how to run their sex, personal and dietary lives, only to exacerbate their problems and fuel their turmoil.
When the natural becomes unnatural, when the pathological becomes the norm, the other side of religion surfaces and dominates. The spirit is driven out of religion and it becomes a shell game.
Religion is not a church but a mindset and as such, it can be engaging or cruel, reassuring or defeating.
Madonna knows this and has used religion to exploit the popular mania, as have sex clubs, the phone sex and pornography industry, and now the Internet. Still, the answer is not to restrict these ventures under rights provided by the first amendment of the United States Constitution. The answer, it seems to me, is to allow young people to experience their religious education, entertaining their doubts in a safety zone of trust where they can discover for themselves what is relevant and what is not.
Children are not own by their parents but only pass through them. It is however an equal problem when children own their parents.
Unrealistic, you say? I don't think so. We are moving into a truly multicultural society in which fences and walls, psychological and physical barriers cannot hold back what Alvin Toffler called "the Third Wave." Toffler envisions a gyrating economy, a "blip culture," the post-nuclear family, the "electronic cottage," the stripping away of the nation-state, and the shift in politics from totalitarian to twenty-first century democracies.
Toffler is a mechanic. He thinks like a mechanic, and sees the future in mechanistic terms with more sophisticated "Machine Age" thinking.
But such thinking is still geared to a "machine age" focus and projection. We have left the Machine Age even if we don't know it. Were all these things Toffler envisions to take place, there would still remain the problem of cultural man and entropic spirit.
He is part of the organic landscape every bit as much as other plants and animals, and is not the master of nature but simply a factor in nature, subject to its laws and limitations. Thus far his intelligence has failed to make this connection.
At the heart of culture is language and religion, and at the heart of language and religion is man with a capacity to love and an inclination to hate, a lust for power and a fear of death. This will not change as man has not changed in tens of thousands of years.
Religion has always been a vehicle for man to run away from life and nature and into what is often called "God." God exists but in the heart of man, not outside of him. As soon as we separate God from man, we run into all these obsessions, all these religions that separate man-from-man and man from himself, which are founded in fear, not in trust, and are devoid of spiritual connection with all of life.
We have been stuck a long time in this "Sensate Culture" that Pitrim Sorokin wrote so eloquently about. Sorokin even predicted more than 70 years ago that we would become obsessed with sex in the dying Sensate, and that the church and religious would lose their way. I don't expect to be around for "the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow," which may take a hundred or two hundred years to become truly established. But it will come. Tensions now are but signs of the restless spirit for embracing it.
That said man is not patient and he forgets that a habit of a lifetime, say smoking or eating too much, or insisting on believing "this or that" cannot be precipitously changed with a patch, a diet, or a new messiah. Man is stuck with himself on this small planet, which is shrinking all the time, so he had better get used to sharing toothpaste with the neighbor next door who looks and speaks and thinks differently than he does. Religion, after all, is of the mind but affects the body. It has always been so and it will always be so.
_________________-
Note: Themes such as this are perused in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007).
JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
© June 2007
“Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.”
Caleb C. Colton (1780 – 1832), English clergyman
My da once told me when I was a boy to never get embroiled in a discussion of politics, religion or race, and he was Irish, which makes this suggestion an oxymoron.
In a way, religion embraces everything including politics and race.
Religion has succeeded, for example, to generate selective forgetting by insisting on its territorial imperatives. How else can we explain the thousands of religions and the hundreds of dominations. Yet, the fact remains there is but one race, and that is the human race.
No other race exists except in the mind, which is the playground of religion.
Religion throughout our Western history has displayed the full range of human emotion from the sublime to subterranean.
Dante showed great skill in this with his "Divine Comedy." He found himself lost in dark and frightening woods, and as he was trying to regain his path, he came to a mountain, which he decided to climb in order to get his bearings. Strange beasts blocked his way, and he was forced back to the plain. As he was bemoaning his fate, the poet Virgil appeared and offered to conduct Dante through Hell, Purgatory, and blissful Paradise.
This is all like a dream, and it might well have come to Dante as such, along with his Beatrice, the soul of his beloved.
Beatrice is more prominent in a less well known work of Dante's, "The Vita Nuova" (the new life). This work is a celebration in prose and poetry of the great poet's love for Beatrice Portinari.
When Dante first saw Beatrice he was nine and she was eight. He was so affected by the sight of her that his "vital spirit" trembled, his "animal spirit" was amazed, and his "natural spirit" wept. He was in love, and to know love as love was meant to be known.
Notice that love, even in the very young, embodies life, instinct and lust, all essential components in the heart of man that give expression to his humanity.
If you read the definitions of religion in the dictionary, you discover the seeds of the problem immediately.
Religion is defined as "the state of a religious; the service and worship of God or the supernatural, commitment and devotion to religious faith or observance, a personal or institutional system of religious attitudes, beliefs, practices, or scrupulous conformity to a system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith."
Dante (1265 - 1321) was fighting through this narrow view of religion in the dawn of the Renaissance, long before the Medici’s and Michelangelo and da Vinci would take on prominence.
The foundation of the early Christian Church was by such Church Fathers as Tertullian (160 - 220). He was a harsh theologian whose influence was demonstrated centuries later with "The Inquisition." He ranted against heathens and Jews, and heretics while championing asceticism. No one was a greater influence between Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, as his rigors proved endemic to Latinity followers for centuries.
Somewhat later, Saint Benedict (480 - 550) came along. Benedict had an outlook characterized by prudence and moderation in a framework of authority, obedience, austerity, stability and community. His product was the domestic life, which, obviously, was common to few but still influenced many.
This gentle saint had a rather harsh view of married love. If the "husband was transported by immoderate love, his intercourse with his wife so ardently in passion would be a sin."
James Cleugh studied the impact of this psychology in his book "Love Locked Out: A Survey of Love, License and Restriction in the Middle Ages" (1970).
The startling nature of this study is that the source of many problems of the twenty-first century life appears through the lens of this period of repression, suppression, suspicion, and guilt that were being programmed into the religion of Western man.
This psychosexual obsession with "locked out love" has had aberrant manifestation in scandal after scandal with the contemporary clergy. As Cleugh points out, it "gave birth to pornography in the middle ages."
Cleugh sites that unnatural fear of the natural has festered like a cultural plague throughout the ages.
Saint Benedict's aversion to sexual love was an invitation to make it an obsession. Love is the diet of the mind as food is diet to the body.
Obsession is fed by the perversion of the natural object be it of food or sex, or, indeed, of religion.
Society, for one, has become obsessed with obesity. It hasn't reduced obesity but increased it. At the same time, placing society on a diet has created a multibillion-dollar industry, which is constantly being replenished by the turnstile of recidivism. People today think constantly about food. It has become the narcotic of the pathology of normalcy and its bi-product is a bloated culture.
When you force people to stop smoking, all they think about are cigarettes. It is like an inverted chemical equation -- always getting the opposite reaction of what is desired or expected.
So, as Cleugh points out, if you tell people they can't have sex, or that they shouldn't enjoy sex, or thinking about sex is not healthy, then they are going to be obsessed with sex, when sex in the most active members of society in chronological time is fleeting at best.
It is psychological time that is the killer. Obsession is fueled by psychological time.
The irony is that if you choose to be master of psychological time, then you eat to live rather than live to eat, and you quit smoking "cold turkey." No drugs, no patches, no diets, no gurus. And sex emanates naturally from romantic to physical love and is expressed in other ways such as a look, a touch, or a caring remark.
Young males believe there is something wrong with them if they are not obsessed with sex, and girls think there is something wrong with them if someone is not hitting on them constantly. It is a double bind that has created a whole new industry of gurus that pander to these obsessions.
Men of the cloth have taken a back-seat to the shock jocks of radio and television, and the pop artist that weave sexual themes into their lyrics often of a barbaric nature. Then there are those "doctors of this and that" who probe willing psyches on the tube, persons who appear to have little clue they are being used and exploited if not abused, reminiscent of obsessed clerics of the past.
These new advisers, often rich and famous, have been given the power by a passive society to tell them how to run their sex, personal and dietary lives, only to exacerbate their problems and fuel their turmoil.
When the natural becomes unnatural, when the pathological becomes the norm, the other side of religion surfaces and dominates. The spirit is driven out of religion and it becomes a shell game.
Religion is not a church but a mindset and as such, it can be engaging or cruel, reassuring or defeating.
Madonna knows this and has used religion to exploit the popular mania, as have sex clubs, the phone sex and pornography industry, and now the Internet. Still, the answer is not to restrict these ventures under rights provided by the first amendment of the United States Constitution. The answer, it seems to me, is to allow young people to experience their religious education, entertaining their doubts in a safety zone of trust where they can discover for themselves what is relevant and what is not.
Children are not own by their parents but only pass through them. It is however an equal problem when children own their parents.
Unrealistic, you say? I don't think so. We are moving into a truly multicultural society in which fences and walls, psychological and physical barriers cannot hold back what Alvin Toffler called "the Third Wave." Toffler envisions a gyrating economy, a "blip culture," the post-nuclear family, the "electronic cottage," the stripping away of the nation-state, and the shift in politics from totalitarian to twenty-first century democracies.
Toffler is a mechanic. He thinks like a mechanic, and sees the future in mechanistic terms with more sophisticated "Machine Age" thinking.
But such thinking is still geared to a "machine age" focus and projection. We have left the Machine Age even if we don't know it. Were all these things Toffler envisions to take place, there would still remain the problem of cultural man and entropic spirit.
He is part of the organic landscape every bit as much as other plants and animals, and is not the master of nature but simply a factor in nature, subject to its laws and limitations. Thus far his intelligence has failed to make this connection.
At the heart of culture is language and religion, and at the heart of language and religion is man with a capacity to love and an inclination to hate, a lust for power and a fear of death. This will not change as man has not changed in tens of thousands of years.
Religion has always been a vehicle for man to run away from life and nature and into what is often called "God." God exists but in the heart of man, not outside of him. As soon as we separate God from man, we run into all these obsessions, all these religions that separate man-from-man and man from himself, which are founded in fear, not in trust, and are devoid of spiritual connection with all of life.
We have been stuck a long time in this "Sensate Culture" that Pitrim Sorokin wrote so eloquently about. Sorokin even predicted more than 70 years ago that we would become obsessed with sex in the dying Sensate, and that the church and religious would lose their way. I don't expect to be around for "the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow," which may take a hundred or two hundred years to become truly established. But it will come. Tensions now are but signs of the restless spirit for embracing it.
That said man is not patient and he forgets that a habit of a lifetime, say smoking or eating too much, or insisting on believing "this or that" cannot be precipitously changed with a patch, a diet, or a new messiah. Man is stuck with himself on this small planet, which is shrinking all the time, so he had better get used to sharing toothpaste with the neighbor next door who looks and speaks and thinks differently than he does. Religion, after all, is of the mind but affects the body. It has always been so and it will always be so.
_________________-
Note: Themes such as this are perused in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007).
Sunday, May 20, 2007
WHY LEADERSHIP MATTERS -- REV. JERRY FALWELL'S LEGACY!
WHY THE REVEREND JERRY FALWELL'S LEADERSHIP LEGACY IS IMPORTANT
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2006
"Early on, a leader learns that he is in essence the complete follower. He comes to understand that no leader can lead anyone where they haven't already decided to go; that leadership is not all about the leader, but all about the led."
James R. Fisher, Jr., A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007)
AN UNSTUCK MAN IN A PERIOD OF STUCKNESS: 1956 - 2006
We live in an era without leaders or demonstrable leadership, stumbling along in the palaver of rhetoric against the constant torment of violence. This is driving us deeper and deeper into an irrevocable abyss.
This pathology has become so ingrained that it is not recognized. It has come to be considered normalcy, contaminating not only American institutions but also that of our entire Western society. Everyone and everything appears to be accelerating while nothing is moving at all. We are stuck with our toys and tools but without the motivation to move forward.
We have lost our moral compass and thus our way, that is, with the possible exception of one man, whom some saw as a buffoon and others as a joke while he was on his way to creating a leadership legacy that cannot be denied, and which we would be well to study.
The critics and supporters of the late Reverend Jerry Falwell are lining up now to sing his fulsome praises or vent their passionate anger.
The critics suggest he was homophobic, xenophobic, and an intolerant religious extremist if not also a racist -- he claimed sympathy for South Africa's apartheid policy. They see him as having formed an unholy alliance with Reagan and then the Bush father and son presidencies, placing him at the door of this triumvirate responsible for most of our current problems. No question he has made it easy for his enemies to justify their enmity.
Supporters are of another mind. They don't dodge his damning evidence, as he often confused and confounded them, yet they have never wavered in their belief that we as a people are most like him, as he is most like us. In a word, he made connection.
Obviously, there is merit to both these views as he was not an icon but a man who understood what leadership was and wasn't and for that it would be well to pay attention to his leadership legacy.
Recently, on the PBS "News Hour with Jim Lehrer," there was a discussion of the reverend's legacy with a graduate of his university and an evangelical Christian critic. The latter agreed with much of Falwell's theology but not his politics, while the former student claimed Falwell had changed his life.
The most interesting comment made during this exchange, however, was that by his critic. "Falwell's success," he suggested, "could be attributed to the fact that many, who would not openly want to admit it, shared his sentiments on same sex marriages, miscegenation, abortion, gay rights, homosexuality and lesbianism and other moral concerns." This connection with the silent majority commenced fifty years ago.
A MODEST BEGINNING
In 1956, the Reverend Jerry Falwell opened the Thomas Road Baptist Church with only thirty-five members. He quickly saw the advantage of spreading The Word via radio and then moving into television with the "Old Time Gospel Hour." Ironically, he was preaching to white middle and lower class Americans a message that had already been created and resonated with African Americans, which he borrowed from observing their ministries.
Unlike many leaders in the exploding evangelical movement, he never suffered from the belief that "it was all about him." To the very end, friend and foe alike, found him a gentleman, courteous and humorous, never taking himself too seriously, or his leadership role for granted, or as a right unto himself.
He let nothing diminish from his focus or his mission. It remained crystal clear to him to the end as he combined vision with service.
In 1971, he didn't build a religious village as Jim Bakker did, but Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Today, the university serves a community of twenty-thousand students. Currently, a member of the US Congress is a graduate of this university.
In 1979, he founded the lobbyist group the "Moral Majority" with the goal of "exerting significant influence on the spiritual and moral direction of our nation."In 1983, US News & World Report, a newspaper not known to take shortcuts to the story, deemed him one of the 25 most influential Americans.
When Jim Bakker's PTL Ministry collapsed in 1986 consumed in scandal and debt, he didn't turn away from the problem but guided it through bankruptcy. He was much more charitable than was I:
"Only in America," I wrote, "could two otherwise ordinary people rise and fall so quickly as did Jim and Tammy Bakker. Their 'Praise the Lord' (PTL) television club was a resounding success, largely due to their commonplace familiarity. They were like the couple next door. But somewhere between their house and the homes of million of Americans, Tammy's mascara and war paint and Jim's cherubic grin became diabolical. Essentially nice people, they got caught in the war of ratings and the insatiable appetite of television for dollars. Long before Jim's sex scandal surfaced, the PTL Club had become 'show biz,' departing from its religious and spiritual intent. It became entertainment with a capital 'E.' When that happened; the Bakker's commenced to behave like superstars with other people's money. The mansions, the Mercedes, Tammy's shopping sprees -- all became part of the scam that led to Jim dalliance with Jessica Hahn. When that happened, they became a born again disaster."
(Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1990, p. 121)
The fall from grace of the Bakker's has happened again and again, not only to the religious, but also to virtually every other institution in these United States without exception. Scandal has become commonplace especially to those in leadership roles.
VARIATIONS OF FAUST AND MEPHISTOPHELES
People in leadership roles have repeatedly misread their role demands being often flummoxed by their self-demands. The desire is not so much for knowledge, as it was with Goethe's Faust, but for power. It would appear they have come to see leadership as all about affluence, influence and celebrity, or all about them when leadership is always all about the led.
Such leaders would lead on the sense of how people should be not as they are, and as an instrument to the leader's will and not necessarily that of the people's. This is a universal problem impossible to place in a locale or time, as it exists today as it has always existed with self-indulgent leadership.
The Reverend Jerry Falwell has seldom fallen into this trap.
He lost his appeal to the US Supreme Court in 1988 when he challenged the 1983 parody of him in the adult magazine, Hustler. This came at a time when his broad base "Moral Majority" had already been galvanized into a political movement. So successful was this movement that it was given credit for the rebirth of the Republican Party, and conservatism, as well as the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency for two terms.
Smarting from this Supreme Court defeat, what does he do in 1989, or ten years after the Moral Majority was founded, and now a force to be reckoned with? He dissolves it, saying, "Our mission is accomplished." He never confused role demands with self-demands. His personal angst was not allowed to contaminate his leadership mandate.
No doubt Falwell appreciated the wisdom in Lord Acton's remark, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." He would have no part of such corruption.
ALL TOO HUMAN
That said it seems equally apparent that his life was consistent with Nietzsche's suggestion that we are "all too human." This was displayed in his inability to save himself from being used, or, indeed, to save himself from himself.
Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas says it is not inconceivable to imagine Christian fundamentalists, evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholics ever mobilizing into a voting block without his leadership; nor can Thomas see Reagan being elected twice, father Bush once, and son Bush twice without his "Moral Majority."
But what so often happens to good intentions is that the means become the ends, in this case, as the focus was shifted from theology to politics, from moral renewal to getting Republicans elected to congressional office. The good reverend allowed himself unfortunately to be used.
On the other hand, he correctly identified the rage of the rank and file middle Americans in the 1980s with the liberal intrusion on their sacred traditions. Americans had had enough of the Hippies, Yuppies, X and Y generations and the "me" self-indulgence that accompanied narcissistic consumerism. In the midst of this mania, he, alone, cut black from white and attacked the gray, as America was stuck in crass materialism and Teflon spiritualism.
FALWELL'S FAUX PAS
Where he overstepped the mark was when he got obsessed with the Tinky Winky. This character of the Teletubbies on children's television, according to him, displayed a veiled homosexuality. Then he made matters worse with his outrageous statement that pagans, homosexuals, abortionists, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and other groups were partly responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001. He later would apologize but the damage was already done.
His failure on a personal basis was not recognizing when his views were laced with nonsense; his failure on a corporate basis was not recognizing when his movement and the church were being perceived and used as an appendage to the Republican Party. Thus, unwittingly, his influence was interpreted as yet another instrument to pamper and forgive a special group for its excesses. He proved in the process that leadership is human and not always heroic, that a leader's fragility is forgivable if not his dalliance with the truth.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM FALWELL LEGACY
Leading is a lonely profession, and the temptation to exceed the role and responsibility is always with the leader. Remember how the devil attempted Jesus on the mount. No leader is ever immune to possible corruption.
The second thing is that a leader can never get heady with his power, influence, impact or success. He is an instrument of the will of the people and never rises above that ground level.
The third thing is that the goodness that resonates with the people must make connection with the goodness in the leader's own heart. If goodness has been cauterized from his soul in his rise to leadership, once he gets there, he is doomed. There is no help for him for there is nothing left in him. He cannot see the motivation and requirements of the led because he is walking in a desert in which his own heat is already destroying him, and will in turn destroy the people.
The fourth thing is to recognize people think in terms of their own satisfaction, which is often at the expense of that of others. The leader must recognize and weigh through this to discover the crystal of commonality because he cannot be swayed by special interests.
The reason is clear; the majority is often wrong. It is wrong because it does not think but often acts like a mob. The mob never considers or thinks about the minority, except in terms of bias and stereotypes. The leader can ill afford for the majority to get too locked into self-interests. Human combustion is a function of this locked in-ness, fueled by a leader's weakness of will and vacillation in crisis.
A leader can be guided by, but not become summarily trusting of polls, pundits, personal advisers, or loved ones because they have a vested interest and limited vision of the now. The leader must consider his decisions in the more encompassing framework of the not yet now.
The fifth element of leadership is courage. Courage is not the absence of fear but the embrace of it in body of instinct. A legion of a hundred thousand voices of the past will visit the leader, not in his ear, but through his bones because he is an evolutionary phenomenon. Leaders have struggled before him with the same riddles and questions.
Every leader who is in touch with himself knows of what I am speaking.
These voices of the past are schooled in experience, culture, history, success, failure, salvation and damnation, death and resurrection, defeat and renewal.
Courage is the recognition when to advance, when to fall back, and when to do nothing. Courage is the quality of embracing apprehension when fear is the leader's only companion.
Courage is the recognition that no situation is ever impossible or as improbable as it may seem; nor is any situation exactly like any other before it, and therefore must be judged with naked eyes and an open mind.
The sixth thing is that the leader walks with destiny. In his every action, he is writing his and his people's history, and therefore can never have the luxury of worrying about what people think, say, or write about him in the immediate, or even threaten to do to him.
A leader is as likely to generate as many enemies as friends, as many who hate him as love him, as many who see him as their destroyer as their champion, making all such preoccupations meaningless and counterproductive.
And finally, the leader who leads establishes and leaves a legacy, something upon which to build into the future.
LEADERSHIP REDUX
The most fatal flaw in current leadership is that it is all about the leader, all about the charismatic pretense of his character. The leader has become a media performer.
Unfortunately, leadership is not a beauty contest, not about a glib or anecdotal mind with sound byte fluidity; nor is it necessarily in our prevailing image and likeness.
A leader has the presence, knowledge, will, courage, and decisiveness to make the strategic moves with the most telling long-term consequences that the well-defined problem demands. This is not likely to happen when role and self demands are confused, or when history is misread, misused, or ignored.
We are moving out of a half century of stuckness caused by this lack of leadership and we have called it everything but leaderless leadership.
Reverend Jerry Falwell, flawed as he was as a human being, never became confused about leadership, and his legacy of Liberty University is proof of that fact. He never forgot leadership is all about the led. His goodness drove him and it made connection with the common good.
_______________
Preorder information: A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: checks in the amount of $20 to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2006
"Early on, a leader learns that he is in essence the complete follower. He comes to understand that no leader can lead anyone where they haven't already decided to go; that leadership is not all about the leader, but all about the led."
James R. Fisher, Jr., A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007)
AN UNSTUCK MAN IN A PERIOD OF STUCKNESS: 1956 - 2006
We live in an era without leaders or demonstrable leadership, stumbling along in the palaver of rhetoric against the constant torment of violence. This is driving us deeper and deeper into an irrevocable abyss.
This pathology has become so ingrained that it is not recognized. It has come to be considered normalcy, contaminating not only American institutions but also that of our entire Western society. Everyone and everything appears to be accelerating while nothing is moving at all. We are stuck with our toys and tools but without the motivation to move forward.
We have lost our moral compass and thus our way, that is, with the possible exception of one man, whom some saw as a buffoon and others as a joke while he was on his way to creating a leadership legacy that cannot be denied, and which we would be well to study.
The critics and supporters of the late Reverend Jerry Falwell are lining up now to sing his fulsome praises or vent their passionate anger.
The critics suggest he was homophobic, xenophobic, and an intolerant religious extremist if not also a racist -- he claimed sympathy for South Africa's apartheid policy. They see him as having formed an unholy alliance with Reagan and then the Bush father and son presidencies, placing him at the door of this triumvirate responsible for most of our current problems. No question he has made it easy for his enemies to justify their enmity.
Supporters are of another mind. They don't dodge his damning evidence, as he often confused and confounded them, yet they have never wavered in their belief that we as a people are most like him, as he is most like us. In a word, he made connection.
Obviously, there is merit to both these views as he was not an icon but a man who understood what leadership was and wasn't and for that it would be well to pay attention to his leadership legacy.
Recently, on the PBS "News Hour with Jim Lehrer," there was a discussion of the reverend's legacy with a graduate of his university and an evangelical Christian critic. The latter agreed with much of Falwell's theology but not his politics, while the former student claimed Falwell had changed his life.
The most interesting comment made during this exchange, however, was that by his critic. "Falwell's success," he suggested, "could be attributed to the fact that many, who would not openly want to admit it, shared his sentiments on same sex marriages, miscegenation, abortion, gay rights, homosexuality and lesbianism and other moral concerns." This connection with the silent majority commenced fifty years ago.
A MODEST BEGINNING
In 1956, the Reverend Jerry Falwell opened the Thomas Road Baptist Church with only thirty-five members. He quickly saw the advantage of spreading The Word via radio and then moving into television with the "Old Time Gospel Hour." Ironically, he was preaching to white middle and lower class Americans a message that had already been created and resonated with African Americans, which he borrowed from observing their ministries.
Unlike many leaders in the exploding evangelical movement, he never suffered from the belief that "it was all about him." To the very end, friend and foe alike, found him a gentleman, courteous and humorous, never taking himself too seriously, or his leadership role for granted, or as a right unto himself.
He let nothing diminish from his focus or his mission. It remained crystal clear to him to the end as he combined vision with service.
In 1971, he didn't build a religious village as Jim Bakker did, but Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Today, the university serves a community of twenty-thousand students. Currently, a member of the US Congress is a graduate of this university.
In 1979, he founded the lobbyist group the "Moral Majority" with the goal of "exerting significant influence on the spiritual and moral direction of our nation."In 1983, US News & World Report, a newspaper not known to take shortcuts to the story, deemed him one of the 25 most influential Americans.
When Jim Bakker's PTL Ministry collapsed in 1986 consumed in scandal and debt, he didn't turn away from the problem but guided it through bankruptcy. He was much more charitable than was I:
"Only in America," I wrote, "could two otherwise ordinary people rise and fall so quickly as did Jim and Tammy Bakker. Their 'Praise the Lord' (PTL) television club was a resounding success, largely due to their commonplace familiarity. They were like the couple next door. But somewhere between their house and the homes of million of Americans, Tammy's mascara and war paint and Jim's cherubic grin became diabolical. Essentially nice people, they got caught in the war of ratings and the insatiable appetite of television for dollars. Long before Jim's sex scandal surfaced, the PTL Club had become 'show biz,' departing from its religious and spiritual intent. It became entertainment with a capital 'E.' When that happened; the Bakker's commenced to behave like superstars with other people's money. The mansions, the Mercedes, Tammy's shopping sprees -- all became part of the scam that led to Jim dalliance with Jessica Hahn. When that happened, they became a born again disaster."
(Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1990, p. 121)
The fall from grace of the Bakker's has happened again and again, not only to the religious, but also to virtually every other institution in these United States without exception. Scandal has become commonplace especially to those in leadership roles.
VARIATIONS OF FAUST AND MEPHISTOPHELES
People in leadership roles have repeatedly misread their role demands being often flummoxed by their self-demands. The desire is not so much for knowledge, as it was with Goethe's Faust, but for power. It would appear they have come to see leadership as all about affluence, influence and celebrity, or all about them when leadership is always all about the led.
Such leaders would lead on the sense of how people should be not as they are, and as an instrument to the leader's will and not necessarily that of the people's. This is a universal problem impossible to place in a locale or time, as it exists today as it has always existed with self-indulgent leadership.
The Reverend Jerry Falwell has seldom fallen into this trap.
He lost his appeal to the US Supreme Court in 1988 when he challenged the 1983 parody of him in the adult magazine, Hustler. This came at a time when his broad base "Moral Majority" had already been galvanized into a political movement. So successful was this movement that it was given credit for the rebirth of the Republican Party, and conservatism, as well as the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency for two terms.
Smarting from this Supreme Court defeat, what does he do in 1989, or ten years after the Moral Majority was founded, and now a force to be reckoned with? He dissolves it, saying, "Our mission is accomplished." He never confused role demands with self-demands. His personal angst was not allowed to contaminate his leadership mandate.
No doubt Falwell appreciated the wisdom in Lord Acton's remark, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." He would have no part of such corruption.
ALL TOO HUMAN
That said it seems equally apparent that his life was consistent with Nietzsche's suggestion that we are "all too human." This was displayed in his inability to save himself from being used, or, indeed, to save himself from himself.
Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas says it is not inconceivable to imagine Christian fundamentalists, evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholics ever mobilizing into a voting block without his leadership; nor can Thomas see Reagan being elected twice, father Bush once, and son Bush twice without his "Moral Majority."
But what so often happens to good intentions is that the means become the ends, in this case, as the focus was shifted from theology to politics, from moral renewal to getting Republicans elected to congressional office. The good reverend allowed himself unfortunately to be used.
On the other hand, he correctly identified the rage of the rank and file middle Americans in the 1980s with the liberal intrusion on their sacred traditions. Americans had had enough of the Hippies, Yuppies, X and Y generations and the "me" self-indulgence that accompanied narcissistic consumerism. In the midst of this mania, he, alone, cut black from white and attacked the gray, as America was stuck in crass materialism and Teflon spiritualism.
FALWELL'S FAUX PAS
Where he overstepped the mark was when he got obsessed with the Tinky Winky. This character of the Teletubbies on children's television, according to him, displayed a veiled homosexuality. Then he made matters worse with his outrageous statement that pagans, homosexuals, abortionists, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and other groups were partly responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001. He later would apologize but the damage was already done.
His failure on a personal basis was not recognizing when his views were laced with nonsense; his failure on a corporate basis was not recognizing when his movement and the church were being perceived and used as an appendage to the Republican Party. Thus, unwittingly, his influence was interpreted as yet another instrument to pamper and forgive a special group for its excesses. He proved in the process that leadership is human and not always heroic, that a leader's fragility is forgivable if not his dalliance with the truth.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM FALWELL LEGACY
Leading is a lonely profession, and the temptation to exceed the role and responsibility is always with the leader. Remember how the devil attempted Jesus on the mount. No leader is ever immune to possible corruption.
The second thing is that a leader can never get heady with his power, influence, impact or success. He is an instrument of the will of the people and never rises above that ground level.
The third thing is that the goodness that resonates with the people must make connection with the goodness in the leader's own heart. If goodness has been cauterized from his soul in his rise to leadership, once he gets there, he is doomed. There is no help for him for there is nothing left in him. He cannot see the motivation and requirements of the led because he is walking in a desert in which his own heat is already destroying him, and will in turn destroy the people.
The fourth thing is to recognize people think in terms of their own satisfaction, which is often at the expense of that of others. The leader must recognize and weigh through this to discover the crystal of commonality because he cannot be swayed by special interests.
The reason is clear; the majority is often wrong. It is wrong because it does not think but often acts like a mob. The mob never considers or thinks about the minority, except in terms of bias and stereotypes. The leader can ill afford for the majority to get too locked into self-interests. Human combustion is a function of this locked in-ness, fueled by a leader's weakness of will and vacillation in crisis.
A leader can be guided by, but not become summarily trusting of polls, pundits, personal advisers, or loved ones because they have a vested interest and limited vision of the now. The leader must consider his decisions in the more encompassing framework of the not yet now.
The fifth element of leadership is courage. Courage is not the absence of fear but the embrace of it in body of instinct. A legion of a hundred thousand voices of the past will visit the leader, not in his ear, but through his bones because he is an evolutionary phenomenon. Leaders have struggled before him with the same riddles and questions.
Every leader who is in touch with himself knows of what I am speaking.
These voices of the past are schooled in experience, culture, history, success, failure, salvation and damnation, death and resurrection, defeat and renewal.
Courage is the recognition when to advance, when to fall back, and when to do nothing. Courage is the quality of embracing apprehension when fear is the leader's only companion.
Courage is the recognition that no situation is ever impossible or as improbable as it may seem; nor is any situation exactly like any other before it, and therefore must be judged with naked eyes and an open mind.
The sixth thing is that the leader walks with destiny. In his every action, he is writing his and his people's history, and therefore can never have the luxury of worrying about what people think, say, or write about him in the immediate, or even threaten to do to him.
A leader is as likely to generate as many enemies as friends, as many who hate him as love him, as many who see him as their destroyer as their champion, making all such preoccupations meaningless and counterproductive.
And finally, the leader who leads establishes and leaves a legacy, something upon which to build into the future.
LEADERSHIP REDUX
The most fatal flaw in current leadership is that it is all about the leader, all about the charismatic pretense of his character. The leader has become a media performer.
Unfortunately, leadership is not a beauty contest, not about a glib or anecdotal mind with sound byte fluidity; nor is it necessarily in our prevailing image and likeness.
A leader has the presence, knowledge, will, courage, and decisiveness to make the strategic moves with the most telling long-term consequences that the well-defined problem demands. This is not likely to happen when role and self demands are confused, or when history is misread, misused, or ignored.
We are moving out of a half century of stuckness caused by this lack of leadership and we have called it everything but leaderless leadership.
Reverend Jerry Falwell, flawed as he was as a human being, never became confused about leadership, and his legacy of Liberty University is proof of that fact. He never forgot leadership is all about the led. His goodness drove him and it made connection with the common good.
_______________
Preorder information: A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: checks in the amount of $20 to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
OUR CLICHE CULTURE COMES HOME TO ROOST
OUR CLICHÉ CULTURE COMES HOME TO ROOST
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2007
“Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy when great ones are not in the way. For want of a block he will stumble at a straw.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist
THE MISCHIEF OF METAPHOR
We see people “looking at the glass half full or half empty” as a convenient way to identify their disposition, but what does the expression mean? What does it tell us, if anything?
It is an expression outside of us provoking no action but suggestion an inside preference.
Likewise, our inclination is meaningless if we judge the situation outside its context. There are times when optimism is healthy and times when it is sick, as there are times when pessimism is healthy and times when it is sick.
A situation is never an either/or proposition. Take self-esteem. Books, videos, and a constant barrage of television gurus promote formulas for self-esteem. But you cannot wish yourself esteemed. You must earn it. You earn it by fighting through low esteem. And you do this by getting unstuck.
In point of fact, it is dangerous to view every situation as optimistic when clearly there are good reasons to see some situations in pessimistic terms. We need the dark clouds that promise rain as much as we need the cloudless skies that guarantee sunshine. It is as unnatural to be always “up” as it is to be always “down.” Life has a rhythm to it and we are designed to be resilient, not rigid. When we claim to always be on top of everything, it suggests we are stuck. There is an old popular song about “laughing on the outside and crying on the inside” that is closer to the mark.
What determines whether we are stuck or not is a matter of how we look at and define the situations we experience. Stuckness is the rigidity of a mind that will resist seeing the situation and circumstances for what they are.
This is not a matter of talent or genius or the generosity of circumstances. It is simply a preference for seeing conditions, as they should be not as they are. When we are rigidly judgmental, we are either stuck in optimism or pessimism, which are equally damaging.
Stated another way, when we stop growing, we don’t vegetate. We start to die. There are people in their teens embracing the dying process, which they call “boredom,” whereas there are people in their seventies and eighties that are still growing.
Sometimes, the metamorphic glass is indeed half full and other times it is half empty. So, to suggest it is half full when it is half empty is to stumble over it as if it were a metaphoric straw.
It was in reflecting on this as I had a coffee at McDonald’s today waiting for my Beautiful Betty to join me to select luggage for our European trip. My mind turned to wondering why we always seem to look at problems from the outside or the same perspective. We do it so repeatedly that two puzzlers came to mind while trying to think over the cell phone chatter that surrounded me.
THE CLICHÉ OF LEADERSHIP
Having just left Barnes & Noble, after inspecting new books on leadership, including a new one by Lee Iacocca and several by John Maxwell, the leadership guru, as well as others of note, I could not help but notice these books were all about the leader and not one of them about the led. They were no less leadership prescriptions than books that came out of post-World War II from such authors as Douglas McGregor, or Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, in other words, indicators of our stuckness in leadership style.
Maxwell has a fetish about the “leader within” while Iaccoca addresses the problem of leadership as if he is the Supreme Pontiff of ecclesiastical leadership. Iacocca does not appear a bit self-conscious in issuing dogmatic encyclicals from his exalted throne, whereas Maxwell sounds like a retread of a priest of the 1970s who was then harping about the “child within.” The good priest never thought it an incongruity to bypass that elusive “adult within” in his quest for personal validation.
Should the reader be able to clone himself into Iacocca or to discover the leader within of Maxwell, the problem of leadership would still remain unresolved because it is the wrong focus.
When only ten percent of the workforce was well educated, and workers obediently marched to the beat of their masters, workers could be duped into such cadence. Not anymore.
Ninety percent of the workforce now is as privy to everything as is its management, plus better educated than most managers who would claim to be their leaders. Therefore, it behooves leaders today to recognize that leadership is all about the led, and not about the leader. This is true of students, parishioners, the military, buyers and the voting constituency.
The focus of leadership should be on the led, and what the leader can glean from that focus to make the led all that they could be.
This is not epiphany stuff.
Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century could already see that there was a disconnect between the ruling class and his people. He wandered among them incognito to get a sense of this, and to assess the trust level of his leadership. He needed this to gauge a momentous disruption of stuckness in feudalism. He could see the handwriting on the wall. Russia was a crumbling feudal empire and the West was leaving Russia in its dust. He knew leadership was not all about him but all about the people. His pressing problem was how to use this understanding to pitchfork his people into the changing modern world. Once he got a sense of his people, he embarked on a series of sweeping military, fiscal, administrative, educational, cultural and ecclesiastical reforms, many of them based on Western European models. All classes of Russian society suffered from the impact of these reforms, including his own son who died leading a conspiracy against his father. Becoming unstuck exacts a price. No platitudes are going to engineer a necessary process to completion. This can only be accomplished by embracing our natural resistance to change.
THE CLICHÉ OF POVERTY
There was a great economic depression in the late nineteenth century, but even a greater one in the early second quarter of the twentieth century. The Great Depression of the twentieth century put the focus of capitalistic democracies on the elimination of material poverty.
The United States came to stir the world’s drink as Europe was decimated by the destruction of World War II, while the United States was left intact with its industrial and management might operating at full steam unimpeded by such devastation.
A new mentality rose out of this conflagration. Economic Man with the mindset of progress was now committed to obliterate material poverty. To a considerable degree it was successful in the United States as many who had been poor for generations came to capture something of the “American Dream” in wealth and relative luxury. A vibrant middle class seemed to have been created, but was it so vibrant?
Americans, it would seem, have never associated luxury with rest but instead with the pursuit of more. This has translated into new activities; new acquisitions and symbols of new status with “bigger and better” becoming the new mantra.
For more than a half century, this has been going on with many new problems, problems that never existed when material poverty was a lifelong status. Ironically, we were a happier and more integrated society when we were poor. Wealth has made us poorer in spirit as a function of our material prosperity.
Similarly, the functional family has been replaced by the dysfunctional family; the active individual has been replaced by the obese couch potato; the comfortable stability of regional heritage has been replaced by everyone and every place looking the same; while the center of life which once rotated around the axis of family, church and school has been replaced by a potpourri of distracting activities that are centrifugal rather than centripetal.
The most egregious sin in America is for an activity to be an end in itself, such as reading a book, pruning roses, or going to school. Everything must have instrumental and terminal coordinates or the activity is judged a waste of time. We are an action-oriented society even if we delude ourselves with passive participation.
Consequently, one size does seem to fit all as the richest and poorest in quest of eradicating material poverty are as likely as not to be involved in crime, violence, illegitimacy, drug addiction, divorce, obesity, AIDs, homicide, suicide, corruption, and every other expression of spiritual poverty.
Spiritual poverty has been ignored as if the magnitude of material abundance and prosperity would be sufficient to eliminate it from the face of the earth. We make a big deal about philanthropy when it would not be necessary if our values were a little more in balance.
For instance, the welfare system treats those that use it as second-class citizens. Some gravitate towards it because of need, others because it is easy. The irony is that it is a sin to be materially poor, but being spiritually wanting doesn’t seem to get much attention; yet the evidence suggests that as a society we are.
When all the energy and focus has been put on progress, there is little energy left for spiritual poverty. The charge could be made that the welfare system has kept more people in place (and down), or spiritually impoverished and dependent than any other factor.
No one feels good about getting something for nothing. We feel good about ourselves when we are respected for our contributions.
When we either have too little or too much, society suffers a spiritual breakdown.
We see this as good paying jobs are sent abroad. We see this as young people drop out of school. We see this in the failure of young people to be trained in skills to qualify them for well paying jobs. We see this in young girls reaching puberty too early, and having children while still being children. We see this in adults in trusted positions in the home, school, church, workplace, government and military abusing their positions and compromising or corrupting those around them by their actions. Scandal has become so normal as to suggest the normalcy of pathology.
The evidence is overwhelming: the rich and poor of this nation are equally spiritually impoverished.
Spiritual poverty has been beyond the pale of society-at-large to do anything about it. We have created a society where no one is in charge, where boundaries are meaningless or nonexistent, where continence is considered repressive, and self-control oppressive; where freedom is considered doing whatever one pleases when that is the greatest enslavement.
Leaders are looking for a formula on how to be successful instead of learning how to lead the led, while people chase the buck thinking that wealth is the palliative to all their spiritual and material poverty.
Such stuckness is another reason why I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
PREORDER INFORMATION: checks in the amount of $30 (plus $5 S&H) for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2007
“Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy when great ones are not in the way. For want of a block he will stumble at a straw.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist
THE MISCHIEF OF METAPHOR
We see people “looking at the glass half full or half empty” as a convenient way to identify their disposition, but what does the expression mean? What does it tell us, if anything?
It is an expression outside of us provoking no action but suggestion an inside preference.
Likewise, our inclination is meaningless if we judge the situation outside its context. There are times when optimism is healthy and times when it is sick, as there are times when pessimism is healthy and times when it is sick.
A situation is never an either/or proposition. Take self-esteem. Books, videos, and a constant barrage of television gurus promote formulas for self-esteem. But you cannot wish yourself esteemed. You must earn it. You earn it by fighting through low esteem. And you do this by getting unstuck.
In point of fact, it is dangerous to view every situation as optimistic when clearly there are good reasons to see some situations in pessimistic terms. We need the dark clouds that promise rain as much as we need the cloudless skies that guarantee sunshine. It is as unnatural to be always “up” as it is to be always “down.” Life has a rhythm to it and we are designed to be resilient, not rigid. When we claim to always be on top of everything, it suggests we are stuck. There is an old popular song about “laughing on the outside and crying on the inside” that is closer to the mark.
What determines whether we are stuck or not is a matter of how we look at and define the situations we experience. Stuckness is the rigidity of a mind that will resist seeing the situation and circumstances for what they are.
This is not a matter of talent or genius or the generosity of circumstances. It is simply a preference for seeing conditions, as they should be not as they are. When we are rigidly judgmental, we are either stuck in optimism or pessimism, which are equally damaging.
Stated another way, when we stop growing, we don’t vegetate. We start to die. There are people in their teens embracing the dying process, which they call “boredom,” whereas there are people in their seventies and eighties that are still growing.
Sometimes, the metamorphic glass is indeed half full and other times it is half empty. So, to suggest it is half full when it is half empty is to stumble over it as if it were a metaphoric straw.
It was in reflecting on this as I had a coffee at McDonald’s today waiting for my Beautiful Betty to join me to select luggage for our European trip. My mind turned to wondering why we always seem to look at problems from the outside or the same perspective. We do it so repeatedly that two puzzlers came to mind while trying to think over the cell phone chatter that surrounded me.
THE CLICHÉ OF LEADERSHIP
Having just left Barnes & Noble, after inspecting new books on leadership, including a new one by Lee Iacocca and several by John Maxwell, the leadership guru, as well as others of note, I could not help but notice these books were all about the leader and not one of them about the led. They were no less leadership prescriptions than books that came out of post-World War II from such authors as Douglas McGregor, or Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, in other words, indicators of our stuckness in leadership style.
Maxwell has a fetish about the “leader within” while Iaccoca addresses the problem of leadership as if he is the Supreme Pontiff of ecclesiastical leadership. Iacocca does not appear a bit self-conscious in issuing dogmatic encyclicals from his exalted throne, whereas Maxwell sounds like a retread of a priest of the 1970s who was then harping about the “child within.” The good priest never thought it an incongruity to bypass that elusive “adult within” in his quest for personal validation.
Should the reader be able to clone himself into Iacocca or to discover the leader within of Maxwell, the problem of leadership would still remain unresolved because it is the wrong focus.
When only ten percent of the workforce was well educated, and workers obediently marched to the beat of their masters, workers could be duped into such cadence. Not anymore.
Ninety percent of the workforce now is as privy to everything as is its management, plus better educated than most managers who would claim to be their leaders. Therefore, it behooves leaders today to recognize that leadership is all about the led, and not about the leader. This is true of students, parishioners, the military, buyers and the voting constituency.
The focus of leadership should be on the led, and what the leader can glean from that focus to make the led all that they could be.
This is not epiphany stuff.
Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century could already see that there was a disconnect between the ruling class and his people. He wandered among them incognito to get a sense of this, and to assess the trust level of his leadership. He needed this to gauge a momentous disruption of stuckness in feudalism. He could see the handwriting on the wall. Russia was a crumbling feudal empire and the West was leaving Russia in its dust. He knew leadership was not all about him but all about the people. His pressing problem was how to use this understanding to pitchfork his people into the changing modern world. Once he got a sense of his people, he embarked on a series of sweeping military, fiscal, administrative, educational, cultural and ecclesiastical reforms, many of them based on Western European models. All classes of Russian society suffered from the impact of these reforms, including his own son who died leading a conspiracy against his father. Becoming unstuck exacts a price. No platitudes are going to engineer a necessary process to completion. This can only be accomplished by embracing our natural resistance to change.
THE CLICHÉ OF POVERTY
There was a great economic depression in the late nineteenth century, but even a greater one in the early second quarter of the twentieth century. The Great Depression of the twentieth century put the focus of capitalistic democracies on the elimination of material poverty.
The United States came to stir the world’s drink as Europe was decimated by the destruction of World War II, while the United States was left intact with its industrial and management might operating at full steam unimpeded by such devastation.
A new mentality rose out of this conflagration. Economic Man with the mindset of progress was now committed to obliterate material poverty. To a considerable degree it was successful in the United States as many who had been poor for generations came to capture something of the “American Dream” in wealth and relative luxury. A vibrant middle class seemed to have been created, but was it so vibrant?
Americans, it would seem, have never associated luxury with rest but instead with the pursuit of more. This has translated into new activities; new acquisitions and symbols of new status with “bigger and better” becoming the new mantra.
For more than a half century, this has been going on with many new problems, problems that never existed when material poverty was a lifelong status. Ironically, we were a happier and more integrated society when we were poor. Wealth has made us poorer in spirit as a function of our material prosperity.
Similarly, the functional family has been replaced by the dysfunctional family; the active individual has been replaced by the obese couch potato; the comfortable stability of regional heritage has been replaced by everyone and every place looking the same; while the center of life which once rotated around the axis of family, church and school has been replaced by a potpourri of distracting activities that are centrifugal rather than centripetal.
The most egregious sin in America is for an activity to be an end in itself, such as reading a book, pruning roses, or going to school. Everything must have instrumental and terminal coordinates or the activity is judged a waste of time. We are an action-oriented society even if we delude ourselves with passive participation.
Consequently, one size does seem to fit all as the richest and poorest in quest of eradicating material poverty are as likely as not to be involved in crime, violence, illegitimacy, drug addiction, divorce, obesity, AIDs, homicide, suicide, corruption, and every other expression of spiritual poverty.
Spiritual poverty has been ignored as if the magnitude of material abundance and prosperity would be sufficient to eliminate it from the face of the earth. We make a big deal about philanthropy when it would not be necessary if our values were a little more in balance.
For instance, the welfare system treats those that use it as second-class citizens. Some gravitate towards it because of need, others because it is easy. The irony is that it is a sin to be materially poor, but being spiritually wanting doesn’t seem to get much attention; yet the evidence suggests that as a society we are.
When all the energy and focus has been put on progress, there is little energy left for spiritual poverty. The charge could be made that the welfare system has kept more people in place (and down), or spiritually impoverished and dependent than any other factor.
No one feels good about getting something for nothing. We feel good about ourselves when we are respected for our contributions.
When we either have too little or too much, society suffers a spiritual breakdown.
We see this as good paying jobs are sent abroad. We see this as young people drop out of school. We see this in the failure of young people to be trained in skills to qualify them for well paying jobs. We see this in young girls reaching puberty too early, and having children while still being children. We see this in adults in trusted positions in the home, school, church, workplace, government and military abusing their positions and compromising or corrupting those around them by their actions. Scandal has become so normal as to suggest the normalcy of pathology.
The evidence is overwhelming: the rich and poor of this nation are equally spiritually impoverished.
Spiritual poverty has been beyond the pale of society-at-large to do anything about it. We have created a society where no one is in charge, where boundaries are meaningless or nonexistent, where continence is considered repressive, and self-control oppressive; where freedom is considered doing whatever one pleases when that is the greatest enslavement.
Leaders are looking for a formula on how to be successful instead of learning how to lead the led, while people chase the buck thinking that wealth is the palliative to all their spiritual and material poverty.
Such stuckness is another reason why I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
PREORDER INFORMATION: checks in the amount of $30 (plus $5 S&H) for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
WHO AMONG PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES WOULD MAKE A GOOD PRESIDENT – A READER’S QUESTION CONSIDERED
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2007
"It is not enough to have great qualities, we must also have the management of them."
Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French Seventeenth Century Moralist
A reader of my piece, "THINKING ABOUT LEADERSHIP," asked the question whom among the presidential candidates do you think would make a good president?
In my book WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), I claimed we were a one-dimensional society with an aversion to greatness, which was best demonstrated in our leadership. I see no reason to change that assessment now.
This aversion is first demonstrated in our educational system. I have a grandson who is going to an exclusive prep school in which it sets his parents back about $17,000 a year, and he is just finishing the seventh grade.
From what I've seen during "Grandparents Day" it isn't the equivalent of what I got at St. Patrick's Grammar School in Clinton, Iowa decades ago for nothing. I examined the workbooks, the lesson plans, the posted materials on the board, and witnessed the exercises presented to us, and I was under whelmed in all instances.
Education today is geared to impress. It is geared to tests, not to learning, to high SAT scores and not to conceptual understanding, to high GPAs whether than insight into the material covered and the world beyond where everyday experience complements the classroom.
Curiosity in school isn't pricked, but appetites and status are. Children go to school “because they have to” not “because they want to.” They take education as a right, which they can accept or reject, and not the privilege that it is, and therefore not appreciated, as it should be. Politicians demonstrate every day precisely this characteristic of our society. They not only fail to speak with clarity but with little sense of learning.
The best and the brightest are not the equivalent of decades ago even though they have wondrous electronic facilities and consummate skills at manipulating these electronic wonders. Thinking is not a text message.
Technology is not education. It is a tool too often used as a toy. Consequently, the equivalent of comprehension is not necessarily a subset of problem solving skills. That is why we keep repeating the same problems as if discovering them for the first time.
Education should not be boring but stimulating, yet it is both boring and iterative, which would appear to commence with a hard wiring process that results in cheating.
A one-dimensional society is a cheating society, and the greatest sufferers for the cheating are the cheaters. Kids will do anything to have high SAT scores and impressive GPAs. Cheating has become a cultural dimension of our society in its one-dimensional inclination. When artificial indexes, such as IQ and SAT scores, are taken to be the measure of intelligence then man is truly mismeasured to the extreme.
The other night on a TV program a father saw the SAT envelop of his daughter empty, and assumed her scores were low, immediately going to her head of school to see if she could take a review course to bump up her scores. Actually, the daughter had impressive scores but had taken it out of the envelope to show her mother. The idea that a parent would do anything to bump up an artificial index of his child speaks to one-dimensionalism.
NUMBER ONE
SO THE FIRST QUALITY OF A GOOD PRESIDENT WOULD BE HONESTY AND INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY AS A LEARNER AND NOT A KNOWER, AS A LISTENER AND NOT A TELLER, AS A THINKER AND NOT AN IMPRESSOR.
Leadership is not an egalitarian pursuit, but a quest to develop one's house of intellect to become a mansion of many rooms, rooms that are amply furnished with diverse and varied cultural artifacts.
To be able to converse with and understand everyman a leader must first converse with and understand him or herself. This takes the combination of a quest for “knowledge building” leavened by incrementally sound supportive and corroborating experience. School is never out for a leader and often he or she doesn't get passing grades, but accepts the occasional shortfall as the price for leadership.
NUMBER TWO
SO THE SECOND THING IS THAT A PRESIDENT HAS TO GET BEYOND OUR VOCATIONALLY ORIENTED MATRICULATION. THIS IS AS EVIDENT IN THE IVY LEAGUE AS IT IS IN THE MOST MODEST OF CITADELS OF LEARNING. THE CONSEQUENCE OF VOCATIONAL TRAINING IS VOCATIONAL THINKING AND LEADERSHIP. THIS TRANSLATES INTO SHORT TERM UTILITY THINKING INSTEAD OF LONG TERM TERMINAL ASSESSMENT.
Leadership is impossible if the culture is organized against leadership and our society is so organized.
We are systemically committed to and depended on wealth creation. Progress is our most important product and no one seems to questions the insanity of this quest, especially with the reality of diminishing resources, disappearing specimens of wildlife, and all the consequences of an increasingly overcrowded planet.
We think of value in terms of wealth rather than the wealth of values. There is little room for trust, sacrifice, love, compassion, virtue, and kindness when they are all subsumed under competitive advantage.
In a one-dimensional society, the people most likely to rise to leadership positions may have little talent or aptitude for leadership other than wealth creation. They can be glib but glibness requires no depth, and leadership does. They can be physically attractive but leadership is not identified with surface beauty but inner quality. They may have great physical courage but leadership is more a function of moral courage, which is not the same as physical courage.
In this one-dimensional orientation, the person or persons who are most successful at raising money are the most likely to win elected office, which includes the presidency.
This is because in a wealth creation society the king and queen of worth are media in all its forms bombarding the senses until one is senseless, and finally capitulates to the poll posters and votes what is believed to be his or her conscience when all it is is their respective fatigue.
NUMBER THREE
SO THE THIRD THING IS FOR A PRESIDENT TO EMERGE ABOVE AND BEYOND THE POPULAR SPHERE OF INFLUENCE AND TO DEMONSTRATE THE VISION TO SEE AND CAPACITY TO SERVE THE INTERESTS OF ALL, NOT SIMPLY IN THE NARROW CONTEXT OF NATIONAL INTERESTS BUT IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT OF INTERNATIONAL REALITY.
Preparation for this role of leadership is not likely to be found in one of the more prestigious business schools, nor is it likely to be found in law, engineering or science, but in a person that has the foundation of a liberal and therefore liberating education.
This person would be fluent in the culture and language of his or her own culture and language as well as that of at least two other prominent cultures and languages of the international world with an affinity to grow in that comprehension and beyond. If this suggests a “liberal scholar,” it would be in the lower case.
Business schools are consumed with wealth creation; law with order; engineering with conformity; and science with value free analysis.
To a considerable degree, these are all one dimensional disciplines and orientations. Liberal arts leadership has enough acquaintance with these disciplines to see that they are integrated into multidimensional service.
NUMBER FOUR
THE FOURTH QUALITY A PRESIDENT SHOULD DEMONSTRATE IS THAT OF THE READER, A STUDENT OF HISTORY AND SCIENCE, MYTH AND RELIGION, AND GREAT MOMENTS OF GREAT MEN.
I provided a shortlist in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS that would aid in the development of a multidimensional international perspective:
(1) Homer's THE ILIAD, THE ODYSSESY
(2) THE BIBLE
(3) THE TROJAN WARS
(4) THE TORAH
(5) THE KORAN
(6) Aristophanes THE BIRDS
(7) Euripides CYCLOPS
(8) THE BHAGAVAD GITA
(9) Sophocles OEDIPUS REX
(10) THE HOLY CRUSADES
(11) ALEXANDER THE GREAT
(12) Julius Caesar THE GALLIC WARS
(13) St. Paul THE EPISTLES
(14) Marcus Aurelius MEDITATIONS
(15) Edward Gibbons THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
But perhaps the most evasive characteristic of leadership whose absence has plagued American society throughout its history is the lack of a secure moral center and moral compass of that leader to guide and direct the leader through the inevitable chaos that accompanies a leader’s time.
Sycophants and sybarites can sense this lack and provide the leadership with flattery and debauchery. They are essentially invisible for when history writes of the debacles of leaders it seldom finds cause to mention them. Yet it was their presence and manipulation of that leadership that forced the fiascos or disasters that became manifested.
NUMBER FIVE
SO, IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS THE PRESIDENT MUST HAVE A STRONG INTUITIVE SENSE THAT CUTS THROUGH THE NONSENSE OF ADVISERS AND SELF INTERESTS TO STEER THE PROPER COURSE FOR THE GREATER GOOD. HE OR SHE MUST HAVE A DECISIVE MIND AND LITTLE PATIENCE WITH PROCRASTINATORS OR PROCRASTINATION.
PREORDER INFORMATION:
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: $20 with checks made to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2007
"It is not enough to have great qualities, we must also have the management of them."
Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French Seventeenth Century Moralist
A reader of my piece, "THINKING ABOUT LEADERSHIP," asked the question whom among the presidential candidates do you think would make a good president?
In my book WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), I claimed we were a one-dimensional society with an aversion to greatness, which was best demonstrated in our leadership. I see no reason to change that assessment now.
This aversion is first demonstrated in our educational system. I have a grandson who is going to an exclusive prep school in which it sets his parents back about $17,000 a year, and he is just finishing the seventh grade.
From what I've seen during "Grandparents Day" it isn't the equivalent of what I got at St. Patrick's Grammar School in Clinton, Iowa decades ago for nothing. I examined the workbooks, the lesson plans, the posted materials on the board, and witnessed the exercises presented to us, and I was under whelmed in all instances.
Education today is geared to impress. It is geared to tests, not to learning, to high SAT scores and not to conceptual understanding, to high GPAs whether than insight into the material covered and the world beyond where everyday experience complements the classroom.
Curiosity in school isn't pricked, but appetites and status are. Children go to school “because they have to” not “because they want to.” They take education as a right, which they can accept or reject, and not the privilege that it is, and therefore not appreciated, as it should be. Politicians demonstrate every day precisely this characteristic of our society. They not only fail to speak with clarity but with little sense of learning.
The best and the brightest are not the equivalent of decades ago even though they have wondrous electronic facilities and consummate skills at manipulating these electronic wonders. Thinking is not a text message.
Technology is not education. It is a tool too often used as a toy. Consequently, the equivalent of comprehension is not necessarily a subset of problem solving skills. That is why we keep repeating the same problems as if discovering them for the first time.
Education should not be boring but stimulating, yet it is both boring and iterative, which would appear to commence with a hard wiring process that results in cheating.
A one-dimensional society is a cheating society, and the greatest sufferers for the cheating are the cheaters. Kids will do anything to have high SAT scores and impressive GPAs. Cheating has become a cultural dimension of our society in its one-dimensional inclination. When artificial indexes, such as IQ and SAT scores, are taken to be the measure of intelligence then man is truly mismeasured to the extreme.
The other night on a TV program a father saw the SAT envelop of his daughter empty, and assumed her scores were low, immediately going to her head of school to see if she could take a review course to bump up her scores. Actually, the daughter had impressive scores but had taken it out of the envelope to show her mother. The idea that a parent would do anything to bump up an artificial index of his child speaks to one-dimensionalism.
NUMBER ONE
SO THE FIRST QUALITY OF A GOOD PRESIDENT WOULD BE HONESTY AND INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY AS A LEARNER AND NOT A KNOWER, AS A LISTENER AND NOT A TELLER, AS A THINKER AND NOT AN IMPRESSOR.
Leadership is not an egalitarian pursuit, but a quest to develop one's house of intellect to become a mansion of many rooms, rooms that are amply furnished with diverse and varied cultural artifacts.
To be able to converse with and understand everyman a leader must first converse with and understand him or herself. This takes the combination of a quest for “knowledge building” leavened by incrementally sound supportive and corroborating experience. School is never out for a leader and often he or she doesn't get passing grades, but accepts the occasional shortfall as the price for leadership.
NUMBER TWO
SO THE SECOND THING IS THAT A PRESIDENT HAS TO GET BEYOND OUR VOCATIONALLY ORIENTED MATRICULATION. THIS IS AS EVIDENT IN THE IVY LEAGUE AS IT IS IN THE MOST MODEST OF CITADELS OF LEARNING. THE CONSEQUENCE OF VOCATIONAL TRAINING IS VOCATIONAL THINKING AND LEADERSHIP. THIS TRANSLATES INTO SHORT TERM UTILITY THINKING INSTEAD OF LONG TERM TERMINAL ASSESSMENT.
Leadership is impossible if the culture is organized against leadership and our society is so organized.
We are systemically committed to and depended on wealth creation. Progress is our most important product and no one seems to questions the insanity of this quest, especially with the reality of diminishing resources, disappearing specimens of wildlife, and all the consequences of an increasingly overcrowded planet.
We think of value in terms of wealth rather than the wealth of values. There is little room for trust, sacrifice, love, compassion, virtue, and kindness when they are all subsumed under competitive advantage.
In a one-dimensional society, the people most likely to rise to leadership positions may have little talent or aptitude for leadership other than wealth creation. They can be glib but glibness requires no depth, and leadership does. They can be physically attractive but leadership is not identified with surface beauty but inner quality. They may have great physical courage but leadership is more a function of moral courage, which is not the same as physical courage.
In this one-dimensional orientation, the person or persons who are most successful at raising money are the most likely to win elected office, which includes the presidency.
This is because in a wealth creation society the king and queen of worth are media in all its forms bombarding the senses until one is senseless, and finally capitulates to the poll posters and votes what is believed to be his or her conscience when all it is is their respective fatigue.
NUMBER THREE
SO THE THIRD THING IS FOR A PRESIDENT TO EMERGE ABOVE AND BEYOND THE POPULAR SPHERE OF INFLUENCE AND TO DEMONSTRATE THE VISION TO SEE AND CAPACITY TO SERVE THE INTERESTS OF ALL, NOT SIMPLY IN THE NARROW CONTEXT OF NATIONAL INTERESTS BUT IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT OF INTERNATIONAL REALITY.
Preparation for this role of leadership is not likely to be found in one of the more prestigious business schools, nor is it likely to be found in law, engineering or science, but in a person that has the foundation of a liberal and therefore liberating education.
This person would be fluent in the culture and language of his or her own culture and language as well as that of at least two other prominent cultures and languages of the international world with an affinity to grow in that comprehension and beyond. If this suggests a “liberal scholar,” it would be in the lower case.
Business schools are consumed with wealth creation; law with order; engineering with conformity; and science with value free analysis.
To a considerable degree, these are all one dimensional disciplines and orientations. Liberal arts leadership has enough acquaintance with these disciplines to see that they are integrated into multidimensional service.
NUMBER FOUR
THE FOURTH QUALITY A PRESIDENT SHOULD DEMONSTRATE IS THAT OF THE READER, A STUDENT OF HISTORY AND SCIENCE, MYTH AND RELIGION, AND GREAT MOMENTS OF GREAT MEN.
I provided a shortlist in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS that would aid in the development of a multidimensional international perspective:
(1) Homer's THE ILIAD, THE ODYSSESY
(2) THE BIBLE
(3) THE TROJAN WARS
(4) THE TORAH
(5) THE KORAN
(6) Aristophanes THE BIRDS
(7) Euripides CYCLOPS
(8) THE BHAGAVAD GITA
(9) Sophocles OEDIPUS REX
(10) THE HOLY CRUSADES
(11) ALEXANDER THE GREAT
(12) Julius Caesar THE GALLIC WARS
(13) St. Paul THE EPISTLES
(14) Marcus Aurelius MEDITATIONS
(15) Edward Gibbons THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
But perhaps the most evasive characteristic of leadership whose absence has plagued American society throughout its history is the lack of a secure moral center and moral compass of that leader to guide and direct the leader through the inevitable chaos that accompanies a leader’s time.
Sycophants and sybarites can sense this lack and provide the leadership with flattery and debauchery. They are essentially invisible for when history writes of the debacles of leaders it seldom finds cause to mention them. Yet it was their presence and manipulation of that leadership that forced the fiascos or disasters that became manifested.
NUMBER FIVE
SO, IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS THE PRESIDENT MUST HAVE A STRONG INTUITIVE SENSE THAT CUTS THROUGH THE NONSENSE OF ADVISERS AND SELF INTERESTS TO STEER THE PROPER COURSE FOR THE GREATER GOOD. HE OR SHE MUST HAVE A DECISIVE MIND AND LITTLE PATIENCE WITH PROCRASTINATORS OR PROCRASTINATION.
PREORDER INFORMATION:
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: $20 with checks made to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504
Saturday, April 28, 2007
THINKING ABOUT LEADERSHIP
THINKING ABOUT LEADERSHIP
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.© April 2007
"The true grandeur of humanity is in moral elevation, sustained, enlightened and decorated by the intellect of man."
Charles Sumner, American statesman (1811 - 1874)
I have written elsewhere "we are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way."
This phase entered my consciousness as I walked today. Then without notice three men popped into my mind: former president Andrew Jackson of the early nineteenth century, emperor Marcus Aurelius of the second century and Dick Cheney of the twenty-first century. All display variations of leadership and all were students of failure as much as success.
MARCUS AURELIUS
No one can read his "Meditations" without a firm sense of morality and the conviction of a man of moral authority.
Marcus Aurelius was a loyal subject and devoted student to law and philosophy, especially stoicism. When he rose to authority, he voluntarily divided the government between himself and his brother by adoption, Lucius Aurelius Verus.
Verus was a bad apple: self-indulgent and dilatorious in the conduct of his duty.
It was not an easy time in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. He suffered from constant wars, though in Asia, Britain and on the Rhine barbarians were checked, but permanent peace was never secured.
Rome was spiraling into chaos. It suffered from pestilence, earthquakes and floods as the Roman armies fought against northern barbarians on the Danube. The Roman army was humbled and almost annihilated while retreating across the Danube in 168 and 173.
Verus died after the first retreat in 169, solidifying Marcus Aurelius as emperor. Once victory was won over Germanic tribes, Marcus Aurelius was summoned to the East to deal with the rebellion of its governor. On his way home, he visited Lower Egypt and Greece.
At Athens, he founded chairs in philosophy for each the chief schools: Platonic, Stoic, Peripatetic, and Epicurean.
From there, he went to Germany and then Italy. In 176, he quelled uprisings along the way as he returned home.
Never of robust health, he died in Vienna in 180 at the age of 59.
Retrospectively, Marcus Aurelius is remembered, as perhaps Rome most "perfect emperor." This is largely due to the survival of his writings, principally "Meditations."
"Meditations" is the record of a man's innermost thoughts who happened to be the supreme leader of his time. It documents his loneliness. But it also indicates that he did not allow himself to become embittered by his betrayals and defeats in life. The poetic thoughts resonate with learning and sophistication, and should be read and contemplated by anyone today that finds him or herself in a position of leadership.
In a profound sense, it is introspective and honest, passionate and compelling, putting the reader, without knowing it, in contact with his or her own most intimate longings.
His death was a national calamity mainly because his rule contrasted so demonstratively with the past and disastrously with the period that began with the accession of his unworthy son, Commodus who established an imperial anarchy.
As all Christians know, Constantine I called "the Great," made Christianity the national religion in the early fourth century (312), which marked the beginning of the Christian era and Western civilization, as we know it.
NOTE:
SEED PLANTERS: Leaders plant seeds sometimes in parched earth, seeds that do not die, but wait for the soil to be blessed by sunlight and rain, and care and cultivation as was the case of the seeds planted by Marcus Aurelius that blossomed in the reign of Constantine.
PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON
I have written extensively on president Jackson elsewhere emphasizing that he was an "outsider" from birth forward.
Jackson's parents died when he was not yet a teenager. Soon after, he and his brother were captured by the British as prisoners of war in the Revolutionary War.
Without the benefit of any formal education, he picked himself up by the bootstraps to put his stamp on his time.
Jackson was tall (six foot) but terribly thin (135 pound) but with a sinewy physique and psychological courage that could move mountains. He had the will of a lion, the appetite for justice of an elephant, and the tenacity to stalk his way to the truth, which was his truth as he saw it and no one else's. He was Destiny's child and knew he would prevail because he never questioned his survival.
All his predecessors in power from George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams before him were part of the eastern establishment; all well educated and programmed in Eurocentric leanings and learning.
None of these leaders reflected the pioneer spirit or manner in dress, deportment or philosophy. He did.
Jackson was actually an embarrassment to the elite, no one more so than the urbane Jefferson who made scathing remarks about him in the United States Congress.
True, he didn't speak or write well, didn't have the social grace or decorum expected of a gentleman or a man in high office. What is worse, his marriage to a pipe smoking woman had the taint of scandal and suspect legitimacy.
Jackson, however, was totally his own man; totally self-made, and totally believing in the wisdom of his convictions.
Although having the appearance of being fragile, his steel blue eyes suggested a surprising physical as well as moral courage, which was displayed in a resilience many times when he appeared at death's door.
Characteristic of his personality was evident when he conquered Florida (1818) without the approval of president Monroe. He was of that self-made school that believed it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission for an action. Therefore, he apologized for his impudence after the fact. It should be noted the United States, however, never gave Florida back to the Indians or satisfied the British or Spanish for their claims to the territory.
Earlier (1814), he saved the American nation as much as Lincoln did in the Civil War with his decisive defeat of the British at New Orleans. The irony is that a treaty of peace was being signed at Ghent in Belgium at the same time.
Still, Jackson's victory at New Orleans was an exclamation point, and the British (or the French or Spanish) never gave the United States any trouble after that.
With Jackson, there was no gray area; everything was either black or white.
There was little compromise in his spirit, and he had an appetite for taking on such politicians as Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster.
Clay, whose picture was on Lincoln's law office wall in Springfield, Illinois when he was a lawyer, was always a "president-wantabe" much in the fashion of Robert Taft in the mid twentieth century.
Webster was a man of grand rhetoric but little action.
Jackson played these two like a fiddler and in the process expanded the power and prestige of the executive branch of government to its present status.
President Martin Van Buren, who was hand picked by Jackson to succeed him, continued what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has called "The Age of Jackson."
There was a cruel and insensitivel side to Jackson that is often overlooked. Schlesinger overlooked it in his Pulitzer Prize winning book. It has come to be known as "the trail of tears" (1813 - 1835) and involved the breaking of treaties with American Indians and displacing them from their sacred lands to an exodus of thousands of miles to the Northeast. Scores of men, women and children died along the way.
Presidents before Jackson pussyfooted around the American Indian issue, but not him. He was determined to make the American continent a country for American pioneers and he did.
While showing a disdain for the elite and the Eastern Establishment, Jackson was popular with the common people in the hinterland. It is interesting that politicians have been as well ever since.
NOTE:
Were it not for the personality, mindset, courage and focus of Andrew Jackson, the United States today would be a very different country.
Author George Wills calls the actor John Wayne "America's Adam." He may be for the Teflon generation but not for the American common man. That "American Adam" is Andrew Jackson.
He made Congress and the Supreme Court cower to the Executive Branch of Government and the presidency, and that condition has continued to this day.
He also gave inspiration to people born poor but of a singular mind to pursue the American Dream and make their mark.
And finally, he made Americans proud to be a separate culture and community independent of their European forebears.
DICK CHENEY
There is a ruthlessness to this man that does not appear to be leavened with respect for anyone except those members of his social and political circle.
There appears an arrogance that is not guided by study and knowledge, philosophy and science that was so apparent in the Founding Fathers and the elite of our land.
It would seem this is a blatant arrogance without the sagacity or intution of Jackson or the humility and perception of Marcus Aurelius.
Perhaps it is unkind to identify these characteristics as the exclusive property of one man when it is, in fact, the generic quality of leadership in general in the geopolitical as well as domestic arena today. We witness such hubris across all levels of enterprise from academic to religious, from commercial to industrial, from social to governance.
Conditional to this closed loop orientation is looking for confirmation of previously held views rather than insight into reality.
Such men and women surround themselves with people of like minded orientations and views seeing all others as misinformed, misguided, ignorant, or the "enemy."
They equate wisdom with wealth, and importance with power, having a cynical view of intelligence in general and people in particular. Their "best friends" are members of the Fortune 400 list of the richest people in the world.
They are guided by what is legal, not what is ethical, by the use of power irrespective of its hint of corruption or hit on moral authority.
Consequently, plans are evaluated in terms of risk factors rather than ethical considerations, or on what will fly instead of what should fly.
They focus on the 3 to 5 percent that are devious or criminal instead of the 95 percent or more that are law abiding and good because fear is their game, and dividing and conquering their aim.
NOTE:
The human heart could not love it did not have a capacity to hate. Both are always present and it is up to leadership to determine where the fulcrum lies.
The American culture is now on a slippery slope cascading to chaos and calumny. It has been on this slope since the end of World War Two. We have never gotten beyond the nostalgia for that surreal time.
The evidence is striking. Leadership has collapsed to leaderless leadership. We see it every day in every aspect of American life. This inclination now impacts and contaminates the world.
Peter Drucker and others as well as yours truly (e. g., in such books as Work Without Managers, The Worker Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, and soon-to-be-published A Look Back To See Ahead) have written on this subject.
Corpocracy has lined its pockets with the hard earned money of American workers that man the jobs across American society. As a result, the few get richer and the majority poorer (only last month it was announced that 250,000 American had a net worth of $5 million, today one million Americans have such a net worth).
American executives are sending American jobs overseas rather than train and upgrade the skills of workers. This is a failure of education; a failure of the church; a failure of industry and commerce; and a failure of governance.
It has seen these same leaders lobby Congress for concessions, tax breaks, and forgiveness for failing to upgrade physical plants and technologies to remain competitive with emerging industrial nations.
It has seen war being used as fear tactics to sell "the war on terror" in its many forms: from the Iraq and Afhganistan War to the War on Drugs, to the creeping terror of immigrantion of this immigrant nation. They want to build a wall across the south to keep out immigrants. Erasmus would deem this "praise of folly" as it is folly beyond belief.
Tim Russert said recently that the answers are in the people but you won't hear from them because they could lose their jobs.
Something is wrong with this picture when people in the know are committed to silence, like lambs going to the slaughter.
Even the former CIA director, George Tenet, who has a new book out, admitted weakly that when Dick Cheney misspoke about so many things to justify the preemptive invasion of Iraq, "I should not have let silence imply agreement."
For more than forty years, I listened to people with answers as an internal and external organizational psychologist/ Like Cheney, my clients picked and chose what fit with what they already thought.
We are not only paying for this now, but creating a legacy.
TO MAKE YOU THINK, READ
"A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD!"PREORDER INFORMATION: CHECKS IN THE AMOUNT OF $20 TO DR. JAMES R. FISHER, JR., 6714 JENNIFER DRIVE, TAMPA, FL 33618-2504
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.© April 2007
"The true grandeur of humanity is in moral elevation, sustained, enlightened and decorated by the intellect of man."
Charles Sumner, American statesman (1811 - 1874)
I have written elsewhere "we are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way."
This phase entered my consciousness as I walked today. Then without notice three men popped into my mind: former president Andrew Jackson of the early nineteenth century, emperor Marcus Aurelius of the second century and Dick Cheney of the twenty-first century. All display variations of leadership and all were students of failure as much as success.
MARCUS AURELIUS
No one can read his "Meditations" without a firm sense of morality and the conviction of a man of moral authority.
Marcus Aurelius was a loyal subject and devoted student to law and philosophy, especially stoicism. When he rose to authority, he voluntarily divided the government between himself and his brother by adoption, Lucius Aurelius Verus.
Verus was a bad apple: self-indulgent and dilatorious in the conduct of his duty.
It was not an easy time in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. He suffered from constant wars, though in Asia, Britain and on the Rhine barbarians were checked, but permanent peace was never secured.
Rome was spiraling into chaos. It suffered from pestilence, earthquakes and floods as the Roman armies fought against northern barbarians on the Danube. The Roman army was humbled and almost annihilated while retreating across the Danube in 168 and 173.
Verus died after the first retreat in 169, solidifying Marcus Aurelius as emperor. Once victory was won over Germanic tribes, Marcus Aurelius was summoned to the East to deal with the rebellion of its governor. On his way home, he visited Lower Egypt and Greece.
At Athens, he founded chairs in philosophy for each the chief schools: Platonic, Stoic, Peripatetic, and Epicurean.
From there, he went to Germany and then Italy. In 176, he quelled uprisings along the way as he returned home.
Never of robust health, he died in Vienna in 180 at the age of 59.
Retrospectively, Marcus Aurelius is remembered, as perhaps Rome most "perfect emperor." This is largely due to the survival of his writings, principally "Meditations."
"Meditations" is the record of a man's innermost thoughts who happened to be the supreme leader of his time. It documents his loneliness. But it also indicates that he did not allow himself to become embittered by his betrayals and defeats in life. The poetic thoughts resonate with learning and sophistication, and should be read and contemplated by anyone today that finds him or herself in a position of leadership.
In a profound sense, it is introspective and honest, passionate and compelling, putting the reader, without knowing it, in contact with his or her own most intimate longings.
His death was a national calamity mainly because his rule contrasted so demonstratively with the past and disastrously with the period that began with the accession of his unworthy son, Commodus who established an imperial anarchy.
As all Christians know, Constantine I called "the Great," made Christianity the national religion in the early fourth century (312), which marked the beginning of the Christian era and Western civilization, as we know it.
NOTE:
SEED PLANTERS: Leaders plant seeds sometimes in parched earth, seeds that do not die, but wait for the soil to be blessed by sunlight and rain, and care and cultivation as was the case of the seeds planted by Marcus Aurelius that blossomed in the reign of Constantine.
PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON
I have written extensively on president Jackson elsewhere emphasizing that he was an "outsider" from birth forward.
Jackson's parents died when he was not yet a teenager. Soon after, he and his brother were captured by the British as prisoners of war in the Revolutionary War.
Without the benefit of any formal education, he picked himself up by the bootstraps to put his stamp on his time.
Jackson was tall (six foot) but terribly thin (135 pound) but with a sinewy physique and psychological courage that could move mountains. He had the will of a lion, the appetite for justice of an elephant, and the tenacity to stalk his way to the truth, which was his truth as he saw it and no one else's. He was Destiny's child and knew he would prevail because he never questioned his survival.
All his predecessors in power from George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams before him were part of the eastern establishment; all well educated and programmed in Eurocentric leanings and learning.
None of these leaders reflected the pioneer spirit or manner in dress, deportment or philosophy. He did.
Jackson was actually an embarrassment to the elite, no one more so than the urbane Jefferson who made scathing remarks about him in the United States Congress.
True, he didn't speak or write well, didn't have the social grace or decorum expected of a gentleman or a man in high office. What is worse, his marriage to a pipe smoking woman had the taint of scandal and suspect legitimacy.
Jackson, however, was totally his own man; totally self-made, and totally believing in the wisdom of his convictions.
Although having the appearance of being fragile, his steel blue eyes suggested a surprising physical as well as moral courage, which was displayed in a resilience many times when he appeared at death's door.
Characteristic of his personality was evident when he conquered Florida (1818) without the approval of president Monroe. He was of that self-made school that believed it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission for an action. Therefore, he apologized for his impudence after the fact. It should be noted the United States, however, never gave Florida back to the Indians or satisfied the British or Spanish for their claims to the territory.
Earlier (1814), he saved the American nation as much as Lincoln did in the Civil War with his decisive defeat of the British at New Orleans. The irony is that a treaty of peace was being signed at Ghent in Belgium at the same time.
Still, Jackson's victory at New Orleans was an exclamation point, and the British (or the French or Spanish) never gave the United States any trouble after that.
With Jackson, there was no gray area; everything was either black or white.
There was little compromise in his spirit, and he had an appetite for taking on such politicians as Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster.
Clay, whose picture was on Lincoln's law office wall in Springfield, Illinois when he was a lawyer, was always a "president-wantabe" much in the fashion of Robert Taft in the mid twentieth century.
Webster was a man of grand rhetoric but little action.
Jackson played these two like a fiddler and in the process expanded the power and prestige of the executive branch of government to its present status.
President Martin Van Buren, who was hand picked by Jackson to succeed him, continued what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has called "The Age of Jackson."
There was a cruel and insensitivel side to Jackson that is often overlooked. Schlesinger overlooked it in his Pulitzer Prize winning book. It has come to be known as "the trail of tears" (1813 - 1835) and involved the breaking of treaties with American Indians and displacing them from their sacred lands to an exodus of thousands of miles to the Northeast. Scores of men, women and children died along the way.
Presidents before Jackson pussyfooted around the American Indian issue, but not him. He was determined to make the American continent a country for American pioneers and he did.
While showing a disdain for the elite and the Eastern Establishment, Jackson was popular with the common people in the hinterland. It is interesting that politicians have been as well ever since.
NOTE:
Were it not for the personality, mindset, courage and focus of Andrew Jackson, the United States today would be a very different country.
Author George Wills calls the actor John Wayne "America's Adam." He may be for the Teflon generation but not for the American common man. That "American Adam" is Andrew Jackson.
He made Congress and the Supreme Court cower to the Executive Branch of Government and the presidency, and that condition has continued to this day.
He also gave inspiration to people born poor but of a singular mind to pursue the American Dream and make their mark.
And finally, he made Americans proud to be a separate culture and community independent of their European forebears.
DICK CHENEY
There is a ruthlessness to this man that does not appear to be leavened with respect for anyone except those members of his social and political circle.
There appears an arrogance that is not guided by study and knowledge, philosophy and science that was so apparent in the Founding Fathers and the elite of our land.
It would seem this is a blatant arrogance without the sagacity or intution of Jackson or the humility and perception of Marcus Aurelius.
Perhaps it is unkind to identify these characteristics as the exclusive property of one man when it is, in fact, the generic quality of leadership in general in the geopolitical as well as domestic arena today. We witness such hubris across all levels of enterprise from academic to religious, from commercial to industrial, from social to governance.
Conditional to this closed loop orientation is looking for confirmation of previously held views rather than insight into reality.
Such men and women surround themselves with people of like minded orientations and views seeing all others as misinformed, misguided, ignorant, or the "enemy."
They equate wisdom with wealth, and importance with power, having a cynical view of intelligence in general and people in particular. Their "best friends" are members of the Fortune 400 list of the richest people in the world.
They are guided by what is legal, not what is ethical, by the use of power irrespective of its hint of corruption or hit on moral authority.
Consequently, plans are evaluated in terms of risk factors rather than ethical considerations, or on what will fly instead of what should fly.
They focus on the 3 to 5 percent that are devious or criminal instead of the 95 percent or more that are law abiding and good because fear is their game, and dividing and conquering their aim.
NOTE:
The human heart could not love it did not have a capacity to hate. Both are always present and it is up to leadership to determine where the fulcrum lies.
The American culture is now on a slippery slope cascading to chaos and calumny. It has been on this slope since the end of World War Two. We have never gotten beyond the nostalgia for that surreal time.
The evidence is striking. Leadership has collapsed to leaderless leadership. We see it every day in every aspect of American life. This inclination now impacts and contaminates the world.
Peter Drucker and others as well as yours truly (e. g., in such books as Work Without Managers, The Worker Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, and soon-to-be-published A Look Back To See Ahead) have written on this subject.
Corpocracy has lined its pockets with the hard earned money of American workers that man the jobs across American society. As a result, the few get richer and the majority poorer (only last month it was announced that 250,000 American had a net worth of $5 million, today one million Americans have such a net worth).
American executives are sending American jobs overseas rather than train and upgrade the skills of workers. This is a failure of education; a failure of the church; a failure of industry and commerce; and a failure of governance.
It has seen these same leaders lobby Congress for concessions, tax breaks, and forgiveness for failing to upgrade physical plants and technologies to remain competitive with emerging industrial nations.
It has seen war being used as fear tactics to sell "the war on terror" in its many forms: from the Iraq and Afhganistan War to the War on Drugs, to the creeping terror of immigrantion of this immigrant nation. They want to build a wall across the south to keep out immigrants. Erasmus would deem this "praise of folly" as it is folly beyond belief.
Tim Russert said recently that the answers are in the people but you won't hear from them because they could lose their jobs.
Something is wrong with this picture when people in the know are committed to silence, like lambs going to the slaughter.
Even the former CIA director, George Tenet, who has a new book out, admitted weakly that when Dick Cheney misspoke about so many things to justify the preemptive invasion of Iraq, "I should not have let silence imply agreement."
For more than forty years, I listened to people with answers as an internal and external organizational psychologist/ Like Cheney, my clients picked and chose what fit with what they already thought.
We are not only paying for this now, but creating a legacy.
TO MAKE YOU THINK, READ
"A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD!"PREORDER INFORMATION: CHECKS IN THE AMOUNT OF $20 TO DR. JAMES R. FISHER, JR., 6714 JENNIFER DRIVE, TAMPA, FL 33618-2504
Thursday, April 26, 2007
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD -- "this & that"
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD - this & that
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.© April 2007
"Very few men are wise by their own counsel, or learned by their own teaching; for he that was only taught by himself had a fool to his master."
Ben Jonson
One time an executive that I had mentor when he was a budding student confessed to me when he was elevated to CEO to a Fortune 500 company, "I always wanted to own a red corvette. So, when I finally reached this pentacle of success, I indulged myself and went out and bought one. Imagine my surprise when it seemed that at every stoplight I saw another red corvette when previously I can't recall seeing any."
It is like that when you write a book, especially a book such as A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. Stories and television programs bombard your senses reinforcing what you have said, giving you the distinct feeling that you are not alone in saying these things, and what's more, can take little comfort in the fact, as saying them doesn't change anything. People do.
Last night (April 25, 2007) I watched the stimulating PBS program of "Bill Moyers' Journal." It addressed the subject of "buying the war." The war in question was the Iraq War and "weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)."
The program demonstrated how fear tactics worked as well on journalists as they did on the public with the iterative mantra: "the smoking gun and the mushroom cloud."
Sadam Hussein was supposed to have chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction as well as being in the process of developing a nuclear bomb, none of which proved to be true. But the mantra was effective because fear does not have to be supported by facts, and most people alive know the "smoking gun and mushroom cloud" is reminiscent of WWII and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War.
Several prominent writers and journalists were interviewed among them Walter Isaacson, current author of the superb "Einstein" and former CEO of CNN as well as Dan Rather . Isaacson said that "thumb suckers and pundits" had replaced journalists because journalists pounding leather on the beat across the world cost money.
Rather, who had been known as a liberal skeptic, admitted that he caved into the times when Colin Powell, the most respected man in the military and in the Bush administration pleaded the US case before the United Nations.
"He (General Powell) had been in Viet Nam, Desert Storm, he knew war up close and personal," Rather said, "and I trusted the man." Rather was also caught up in the dilemma that if you were patriotic you had to support the war even if you questioned the rhetoric.
The most damning revelation of the program was that the two most respected newspapers in the United States, The Washington Post and The New York Times would give front-page coverage to Bush administrative "leaks." Then, on Sunday television news programs, these same Bush officials would quote these stories as confirmation of the facts they were then presenting to a national Sunday television audience. These "facts" often proved bogus to the extreme - a variation of "catch 22."
The exception was the "Ritter Syndicated News Service," a service outside the Washington, DC beltway, and one that was also outside the surreal world of Washington "make believe." As I show in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, it is "outsiders" that get us off the dime and unstuck, and it has always been so.
One of the most moving clips of the program was that of senator Ted Kennedy . His speech before the senate in opposition to the preemptive war proved prophetic. Virtually everything he said, in retrospect, has come true, including the quagmire that the US is now in.
As one analyst put it, "over the period of 9/11 to the war in 2003, more than a million words were printed by The New York Times. Of senator Kennedy's speech, it printed only 36 words."
Another interesting development was that of Phil Donohue. He had a show on MSNBC, which was canceled when he put a critic of the war on his show along with an advocate. He was told that that was an unsatisfactory case of two liberals against one conservative, him being the other liberal. The sentiment after 9/11 was such that no negative opinion was apparently acceptable. Moyer reflected, "It was a case of patriotism." Donohue added "and also a case of business."
Perhaps the most embarrassing moment was a clip of an Oprah Show in which she had some two Kurdish expatriates giving their opinions on why the war was necessary and, again, indicating that they knew with certainty that Hussein had WMDs. A young lady in the audience suggested that she thought they were expressing opinions but were providing no hard evidence to confirm their suspicions. Oprah immediately shut her down going to a commercial. It was not pretty.
One of the more humorous moments, if there can be such a thing in something as consequential as this review, was the British government's publication of pictures that suggested that uranium enrichment facilities did, in fact, exist in Iraq. It turned out that the pictures were lifted from an American student's work at Oxford on his Ph.D. Where did the student get these pictures? From the Internet? He threatened to sue the British government for plagiarism.
Back to my thesis of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, or the more things go around they come around, illustrating our stuckness, it was indeed Bill Moyer, himself, who was press secretary to president Lyndon Baines Johnson who provided that president with his spin to the press. This reached a crescendo when the sham of the Gulf of Tonkin Bay Resolution was first manufactured, and then presented to Congress, with congress voting to escalate the war in Viet Nam.
Historians now dispute the legitimacy of the grounds for this resolution. North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in North Vietnam.
President Johnson immediately ordered retaliatory air strikes on Hanoi-Haiphong. Congress then quickly approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 7, 1964), authorizing the president to take "all necessary measures" to win in Vietnam. This allowed for the war expansion ultimately to 525,000 men on the ground, and the fiasco that followed. Another demonstration of stuckness.
THAT WAS THEN THIS IS TODAY (APRIL 26, 2007)
Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell today (April 26, 2007 in The Tampa Tribune) sees Virginia Tech and Columbine shootings as carry over guilt from the 1960s.
Sowell does make a valid point that since then the intelligentsia has depicted American society in collective rather than individual terms.
This resonates with Moyers' "buying the war," as he shows how politicians repeat the same lie until it has the ring of truth and then is accepted as such. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD , it is shown that we have been programmed to look for authority for our individual destiny outside ourselves rather than trusting ourselves to have discriminating minds and therefore relevant views to accurately access the reality of our experience.
As Sowell correctly points out, with this rationale if we find ourselves lacking, it is society's fault.
To put this in some context, I have often had people come up to me when I have spoken, and say, "I'd have done what you have done if I had had better teachers."
In my whole lifetime, I think I have had about five prominent teachers and two were my parents and one was a coach, leaving only two others.
The best teacher I ever had was myself as student. I had the benefit of coming from a poor family and if I didn't do it on my own it wouldn't get done. I had no safety net, no financial support system to fall back on, and consequently, I am as frugal today as if I didn't have two dimes to rub together.
Therefore, I agree with Sowell that banning or restricting guns is not necessarily going to solve the problem of Virginia Tech or Columbine. His answer is that we have to find our way to individual responsibility from collective responsibility, and I concur.
George F. Will, the pedantic journalistic pundit that loves to use remote language to illustrate the quality of his thought (such as using "ineluctable" instead of inevitable) has a column in the same newspaper. He, who was incidentally duped by the Bush administration's WMDs argument for war, takes the complementary position to Sowell's. He sees collective responsibility or commercial culture dictating the future. China is used as an example.
Will does have a point. People do tend to think the collective of capitalism in China as the eventual corrective if not the cure to communism. I remember when I worked in South Africa a businessman suggested that commercial culture was the answer to the problems of the world. The late great senator Patrick Moynihan wouldn't have agreed. He once said Westerners are likely to be more impressed in China with the absence of flies than the absence of freedom.
We should read Sowell and Will, Moyer and me, or anyone else, and see how the information fits with our own experience and the shape of our mind.
Someone noted that it took millions of years to reach 3 billion souls in the world, and only 50 years to double that amount. We are moving faster and faster as we inevitably move closer and closer together. It is so easy to forget that half that world of six billion souls doesn't have a cell phone nor do they make as much in a month's time as its upkeep of that electronic wonder. It should give pause.
Eric Hoffer once said the most revolutionary thing is to feed a starving man a crumb of bread. That starving man is close by if not at our door, and we have to start thinking in terms of inviting him to dinner and at our table as an equal.
Finally, an aside, Tim Russert of "Meet the Press" is an engaging fellow and kind of an inside-outsider. I say that because he mentions with pride that he is a "blue collar guy," having come from that kind of family in New England.
He said something on the Moyer program that resonated with me in my organizational development (OD) work.
"If you want to know what is going on, really going on in an organization, you have to talk to the people doing the work, the workers and managers where the action is."
Moyer said, "Why don't you have those people on your show?"Russert smiled, "First of all they wouldn't want to be on my show to save their life. And secondly, it would put their jobs in jeopardy."
I have written several books directed to top management on this very subject, attempting to explained to them that the spin they get from their direct reports, human resources, and consultants is all self-serving, as Moyer explained is the case in Washington, DC.
It was my job to go talk to these people and then to formulate what they said into a narrative or remedial recommendation. This was then presented to top management. The ideas I expressed were never my own, but always those of the people in the trenches (see WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A View From The Trenches 1990). Most of the time, these data were ignored, and so on a smaller scale, chaos reign supreme. This was not unlike the case presented in "buying the war" in Bill Moyer's Journal alluded to here. Go figure!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxPREORDER INFORMATION: Checks of $30 (plus $5 S&H) or $35 for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617 - 2504
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.© April 2007
"Very few men are wise by their own counsel, or learned by their own teaching; for he that was only taught by himself had a fool to his master."
Ben Jonson
One time an executive that I had mentor when he was a budding student confessed to me when he was elevated to CEO to a Fortune 500 company, "I always wanted to own a red corvette. So, when I finally reached this pentacle of success, I indulged myself and went out and bought one. Imagine my surprise when it seemed that at every stoplight I saw another red corvette when previously I can't recall seeing any."
It is like that when you write a book, especially a book such as A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. Stories and television programs bombard your senses reinforcing what you have said, giving you the distinct feeling that you are not alone in saying these things, and what's more, can take little comfort in the fact, as saying them doesn't change anything. People do.
Last night (April 25, 2007) I watched the stimulating PBS program of "Bill Moyers' Journal." It addressed the subject of "buying the war." The war in question was the Iraq War and "weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)."
The program demonstrated how fear tactics worked as well on journalists as they did on the public with the iterative mantra: "the smoking gun and the mushroom cloud."
Sadam Hussein was supposed to have chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction as well as being in the process of developing a nuclear bomb, none of which proved to be true. But the mantra was effective because fear does not have to be supported by facts, and most people alive know the "smoking gun and mushroom cloud" is reminiscent of WWII and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War.
Several prominent writers and journalists were interviewed among them Walter Isaacson, current author of the superb "Einstein" and former CEO of CNN as well as Dan Rather . Isaacson said that "thumb suckers and pundits" had replaced journalists because journalists pounding leather on the beat across the world cost money.
Rather, who had been known as a liberal skeptic, admitted that he caved into the times when Colin Powell, the most respected man in the military and in the Bush administration pleaded the US case before the United Nations.
"He (General Powell) had been in Viet Nam, Desert Storm, he knew war up close and personal," Rather said, "and I trusted the man." Rather was also caught up in the dilemma that if you were patriotic you had to support the war even if you questioned the rhetoric.
The most damning revelation of the program was that the two most respected newspapers in the United States, The Washington Post and The New York Times would give front-page coverage to Bush administrative "leaks." Then, on Sunday television news programs, these same Bush officials would quote these stories as confirmation of the facts they were then presenting to a national Sunday television audience. These "facts" often proved bogus to the extreme - a variation of "catch 22."
The exception was the "Ritter Syndicated News Service," a service outside the Washington, DC beltway, and one that was also outside the surreal world of Washington "make believe." As I show in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, it is "outsiders" that get us off the dime and unstuck, and it has always been so.
One of the most moving clips of the program was that of senator Ted Kennedy . His speech before the senate in opposition to the preemptive war proved prophetic. Virtually everything he said, in retrospect, has come true, including the quagmire that the US is now in.
As one analyst put it, "over the period of 9/11 to the war in 2003, more than a million words were printed by The New York Times. Of senator Kennedy's speech, it printed only 36 words."
Another interesting development was that of Phil Donohue. He had a show on MSNBC, which was canceled when he put a critic of the war on his show along with an advocate. He was told that that was an unsatisfactory case of two liberals against one conservative, him being the other liberal. The sentiment after 9/11 was such that no negative opinion was apparently acceptable. Moyer reflected, "It was a case of patriotism." Donohue added "and also a case of business."
Perhaps the most embarrassing moment was a clip of an Oprah Show in which she had some two Kurdish expatriates giving their opinions on why the war was necessary and, again, indicating that they knew with certainty that Hussein had WMDs. A young lady in the audience suggested that she thought they were expressing opinions but were providing no hard evidence to confirm their suspicions. Oprah immediately shut her down going to a commercial. It was not pretty.
One of the more humorous moments, if there can be such a thing in something as consequential as this review, was the British government's publication of pictures that suggested that uranium enrichment facilities did, in fact, exist in Iraq. It turned out that the pictures were lifted from an American student's work at Oxford on his Ph.D. Where did the student get these pictures? From the Internet? He threatened to sue the British government for plagiarism.
Back to my thesis of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, or the more things go around they come around, illustrating our stuckness, it was indeed Bill Moyer, himself, who was press secretary to president Lyndon Baines Johnson who provided that president with his spin to the press. This reached a crescendo when the sham of the Gulf of Tonkin Bay Resolution was first manufactured, and then presented to Congress, with congress voting to escalate the war in Viet Nam.
Historians now dispute the legitimacy of the grounds for this resolution. North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in North Vietnam.
President Johnson immediately ordered retaliatory air strikes on Hanoi-Haiphong. Congress then quickly approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 7, 1964), authorizing the president to take "all necessary measures" to win in Vietnam. This allowed for the war expansion ultimately to 525,000 men on the ground, and the fiasco that followed. Another demonstration of stuckness.
THAT WAS THEN THIS IS TODAY (APRIL 26, 2007)
Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell today (April 26, 2007 in The Tampa Tribune) sees Virginia Tech and Columbine shootings as carry over guilt from the 1960s.
Sowell does make a valid point that since then the intelligentsia has depicted American society in collective rather than individual terms.
This resonates with Moyers' "buying the war," as he shows how politicians repeat the same lie until it has the ring of truth and then is accepted as such. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD , it is shown that we have been programmed to look for authority for our individual destiny outside ourselves rather than trusting ourselves to have discriminating minds and therefore relevant views to accurately access the reality of our experience.
As Sowell correctly points out, with this rationale if we find ourselves lacking, it is society's fault.
To put this in some context, I have often had people come up to me when I have spoken, and say, "I'd have done what you have done if I had had better teachers."
In my whole lifetime, I think I have had about five prominent teachers and two were my parents and one was a coach, leaving only two others.
The best teacher I ever had was myself as student. I had the benefit of coming from a poor family and if I didn't do it on my own it wouldn't get done. I had no safety net, no financial support system to fall back on, and consequently, I am as frugal today as if I didn't have two dimes to rub together.
Therefore, I agree with Sowell that banning or restricting guns is not necessarily going to solve the problem of Virginia Tech or Columbine. His answer is that we have to find our way to individual responsibility from collective responsibility, and I concur.
George F. Will, the pedantic journalistic pundit that loves to use remote language to illustrate the quality of his thought (such as using "ineluctable" instead of inevitable) has a column in the same newspaper. He, who was incidentally duped by the Bush administration's WMDs argument for war, takes the complementary position to Sowell's. He sees collective responsibility or commercial culture dictating the future. China is used as an example.
Will does have a point. People do tend to think the collective of capitalism in China as the eventual corrective if not the cure to communism. I remember when I worked in South Africa a businessman suggested that commercial culture was the answer to the problems of the world. The late great senator Patrick Moynihan wouldn't have agreed. He once said Westerners are likely to be more impressed in China with the absence of flies than the absence of freedom.
We should read Sowell and Will, Moyer and me, or anyone else, and see how the information fits with our own experience and the shape of our mind.
Someone noted that it took millions of years to reach 3 billion souls in the world, and only 50 years to double that amount. We are moving faster and faster as we inevitably move closer and closer together. It is so easy to forget that half that world of six billion souls doesn't have a cell phone nor do they make as much in a month's time as its upkeep of that electronic wonder. It should give pause.
Eric Hoffer once said the most revolutionary thing is to feed a starving man a crumb of bread. That starving man is close by if not at our door, and we have to start thinking in terms of inviting him to dinner and at our table as an equal.
Finally, an aside, Tim Russert of "Meet the Press" is an engaging fellow and kind of an inside-outsider. I say that because he mentions with pride that he is a "blue collar guy," having come from that kind of family in New England.
He said something on the Moyer program that resonated with me in my organizational development (OD) work.
"If you want to know what is going on, really going on in an organization, you have to talk to the people doing the work, the workers and managers where the action is."
Moyer said, "Why don't you have those people on your show?"Russert smiled, "First of all they wouldn't want to be on my show to save their life. And secondly, it would put their jobs in jeopardy."
I have written several books directed to top management on this very subject, attempting to explained to them that the spin they get from their direct reports, human resources, and consultants is all self-serving, as Moyer explained is the case in Washington, DC.
It was my job to go talk to these people and then to formulate what they said into a narrative or remedial recommendation. This was then presented to top management. The ideas I expressed were never my own, but always those of the people in the trenches (see WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A View From The Trenches 1990). Most of the time, these data were ignored, and so on a smaller scale, chaos reign supreme. This was not unlike the case presented in "buying the war" in Bill Moyer's Journal alluded to here. Go figure!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxPREORDER INFORMATION: Checks of $30 (plus $5 S&H) or $35 for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617 - 2504
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
WHY I WROTE "A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD!"
WHY I WROTE “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 2007
“Revelation is a telescope kindly given us, through which reason should look up to the heavens. Good reasons must, of force, give place to better.”
Shakespeare
An email correspondent wrote, taking exception to my premise, that we are stuck with the justification, "We have always been stuck. We've been stuck for thousands of years.”
Obviously, I don't agree with his point. “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD” concerns itself with the past thirty or so years, but I see us essentially stuck in the twentieth century.
My emailer continues, "What it was like thirty years ago or three thousand years ago, it is all the same."
Well, is it?
Man got unstuck when he discovered fire.
Man got unstuck when he discovered the wheel.
Man got unstuck when he discovered religion.
Man got unstuck when he discovered agriculture and formed communities.
Man got unstuck when he developed laws and leadership to control and guide communities.Man got unstuck when he discovered America.
Man got unstuck when the Pilgrims came to Plymouth.Man got unstuck when he invented movable type and the printing press.
Man got unstuck when he challenged the authority of a corrupt and self-indulgent church with the Protestant Reformation, which, in turn, used the new printing press to disseminate the word.
Man got unstuck when he used the translation of the bible into his native tongue so that nations could form around a common culture and language.Man got unstuck when The Protestant Reformation led to the celebration of the individual and individual achievement, giving rise to a new economic system to replace feudalism called "capitalism."
Man got unstuck when he formed guilds and developed craftsmen and craftsmanship on a grand scale producing such artifacts that exist as quality antiques to this day.
Man got unstuck when America declared its independence and wrote a constitution and a bill of rights that represented a blueprint for democracy.
Man got unstuck when he developed the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, which led to steamships and international trade on a grand scale, forging the Industrial Revolution.
Man got unstuck when he developed the tools of communication such as the telegraph and telephone, radio and motion picture forming a network of tools to connect people to common interests.
Man got unstuck when he created the automobile and airplane.And then the twentieth century rolled around.
Nearly all of the inventions of the twentieth century were invented during the first decade of that new century or before. In 1905, for example, a German named Einstein came up with four short scientific papers that unstuck science from its 300-year dependence on Newton.
But stuckness started to become engrained in the twentieth century: WWI followed that first decade, which was then continued with the "Roaring Twenties" and the "Great Depression," which in turn was followed by WWII, and then the Korean War followed by the Viet Nam War followed by the First and then Second Iraq War and the Afghanistan War.
Sure, we have the nuclear energy, the computer, the Internet and microprocessors of all descriptions, but none of this is actually "new" in the sense that it wasn't previously conceived and perceived before the twentieth century.
We celebrate progress now but progress is not considered in terms of man being unstuck and reaching a new iteration of himself.
Progress is seen in faster cars, faster computers, faster lifestyles, smaller handheld devices, cell phones and on and on, all of which isolate man personally by imposing electronic wonders in the mix as surrogates to the personal touch. We have become strangers to each other, but more importantly, strangers to ourselves.
Stuckness is shown in the sickness of society, in the flabbiness of society, in the lack of stimulating music and literature, in the lack of breakthrough art, in the lack of leadership, indeed, in the lack of anything resembling a breakthrough in originality.
Instead we have anger in music and literature, anger in art, anger in leadership, and anger with life itself. It is "in" to reduce everything down not raise anything up. We have become a competitive society, worldwide, with bigger GDPs and more pollution leading to an increasingly unstable environment.
Nations imitate each other to the point that they all rest on the stuckness of the dime. They all look alike, speak alike, think alike, behave alike, and build towers across their skies as they rape their environments alike. The monsters of the time are inanimate skyscrapers dwarfing and smothering people in their shadows.
Stuckness is shown in that we cannot control crime; we cannot control drug abuse; we cannot control obesity; we cannot control terrorism; we cannot control violence, we cannot control disease; we cannot control pollution; we cannot control global warming; we cannot control immigration; we cannot control spending; we cannot control immorality; we cannot control poverty; we cannot control ourselves.
We want to take comfort in the fact that it has always been that way throughout history and therefore it will always be that way into the future.
We don't consider ourselves pessimists. We consider ourselves realists. We give both words the emptiness of meaning that stuckness generates.
We are not doers anymore but reactors to crises. We manage these crises and then congratulate ourselves on our management and leadership skills in managing them failing to see that they never should have occurred in the first place.
We congratulate medical science on all its wonderful work when much of what it does is compensate for what it didn't do in the first place. The largest contributor to longer life and quality of life is not modern medicine, but public health.
And public health was a result of people that were not medical professionals but men who could see that safe drinking water and sewage treatment as well as sanitary working and living conditions provided such advantages.
You don't hear about these heroes today, but they are the ones that have created public health.A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is written for thinking people, college age students, professionals, mothers and fathers, everyone that has a stake in the future. We are in trouble and to minimize the fact is not the answer. The answer is embracing our resistance to stuckness. That is why the book was written.
PREORDER INFORMATION:$30 (plus $5 S&H) or $35 with checks to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 336117-2504
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 2007
“Revelation is a telescope kindly given us, through which reason should look up to the heavens. Good reasons must, of force, give place to better.”
Shakespeare
An email correspondent wrote, taking exception to my premise, that we are stuck with the justification, "We have always been stuck. We've been stuck for thousands of years.”
Obviously, I don't agree with his point. “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD” concerns itself with the past thirty or so years, but I see us essentially stuck in the twentieth century.
My emailer continues, "What it was like thirty years ago or three thousand years ago, it is all the same."
Well, is it?
Man got unstuck when he discovered fire.
Man got unstuck when he discovered the wheel.
Man got unstuck when he discovered religion.
Man got unstuck when he discovered agriculture and formed communities.
Man got unstuck when he developed laws and leadership to control and guide communities.Man got unstuck when he discovered America.
Man got unstuck when the Pilgrims came to Plymouth.Man got unstuck when he invented movable type and the printing press.
Man got unstuck when he challenged the authority of a corrupt and self-indulgent church with the Protestant Reformation, which, in turn, used the new printing press to disseminate the word.
Man got unstuck when he used the translation of the bible into his native tongue so that nations could form around a common culture and language.Man got unstuck when The Protestant Reformation led to the celebration of the individual and individual achievement, giving rise to a new economic system to replace feudalism called "capitalism."
Man got unstuck when he formed guilds and developed craftsmen and craftsmanship on a grand scale producing such artifacts that exist as quality antiques to this day.
Man got unstuck when America declared its independence and wrote a constitution and a bill of rights that represented a blueprint for democracy.
Man got unstuck when he developed the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, which led to steamships and international trade on a grand scale, forging the Industrial Revolution.
Man got unstuck when he developed the tools of communication such as the telegraph and telephone, radio and motion picture forming a network of tools to connect people to common interests.
Man got unstuck when he created the automobile and airplane.And then the twentieth century rolled around.
Nearly all of the inventions of the twentieth century were invented during the first decade of that new century or before. In 1905, for example, a German named Einstein came up with four short scientific papers that unstuck science from its 300-year dependence on Newton.
But stuckness started to become engrained in the twentieth century: WWI followed that first decade, which was then continued with the "Roaring Twenties" and the "Great Depression," which in turn was followed by WWII, and then the Korean War followed by the Viet Nam War followed by the First and then Second Iraq War and the Afghanistan War.
Sure, we have the nuclear energy, the computer, the Internet and microprocessors of all descriptions, but none of this is actually "new" in the sense that it wasn't previously conceived and perceived before the twentieth century.
We celebrate progress now but progress is not considered in terms of man being unstuck and reaching a new iteration of himself.
Progress is seen in faster cars, faster computers, faster lifestyles, smaller handheld devices, cell phones and on and on, all of which isolate man personally by imposing electronic wonders in the mix as surrogates to the personal touch. We have become strangers to each other, but more importantly, strangers to ourselves.
Stuckness is shown in the sickness of society, in the flabbiness of society, in the lack of stimulating music and literature, in the lack of breakthrough art, in the lack of leadership, indeed, in the lack of anything resembling a breakthrough in originality.
Instead we have anger in music and literature, anger in art, anger in leadership, and anger with life itself. It is "in" to reduce everything down not raise anything up. We have become a competitive society, worldwide, with bigger GDPs and more pollution leading to an increasingly unstable environment.
Nations imitate each other to the point that they all rest on the stuckness of the dime. They all look alike, speak alike, think alike, behave alike, and build towers across their skies as they rape their environments alike. The monsters of the time are inanimate skyscrapers dwarfing and smothering people in their shadows.
Stuckness is shown in that we cannot control crime; we cannot control drug abuse; we cannot control obesity; we cannot control terrorism; we cannot control violence, we cannot control disease; we cannot control pollution; we cannot control global warming; we cannot control immigration; we cannot control spending; we cannot control immorality; we cannot control poverty; we cannot control ourselves.
We want to take comfort in the fact that it has always been that way throughout history and therefore it will always be that way into the future.
We don't consider ourselves pessimists. We consider ourselves realists. We give both words the emptiness of meaning that stuckness generates.
We are not doers anymore but reactors to crises. We manage these crises and then congratulate ourselves on our management and leadership skills in managing them failing to see that they never should have occurred in the first place.
We congratulate medical science on all its wonderful work when much of what it does is compensate for what it didn't do in the first place. The largest contributor to longer life and quality of life is not modern medicine, but public health.
And public health was a result of people that were not medical professionals but men who could see that safe drinking water and sewage treatment as well as sanitary working and living conditions provided such advantages.
You don't hear about these heroes today, but they are the ones that have created public health.A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is written for thinking people, college age students, professionals, mothers and fathers, everyone that has a stake in the future. We are in trouble and to minimize the fact is not the answer. The answer is embracing our resistance to stuckness. That is why the book was written.
PREORDER INFORMATION:$30 (plus $5 S&H) or $35 with checks to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 336117-2504
Sunday, April 01, 2007
HOW DO WE EXPECT BLACKS TO OVERCOME 142 YEARS WHEN WHITES CAN'T DEAL WITH 50?
NOTE: This is kind of a routine exchange I have with Joseph Brown, lead editorial writer with The Tampa Tribune of a Sunday. Joseph is a Chicago boy who graduated from my alma mater, the University of Iowa. So, we have a connection. Also, I worked for Nalco Chemical Company, a Chicago international firm.
I share it with you as it is apropos to A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, which is still in the preordering phase.If interested in receiving a preorder autographed copy of this book, send a check(s) to: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504 in the amount of $20 (S&H included) within the US, and $30 (plus S&H) outside the US. All checks in US dollars.
__________________
Subj: How do we expect blacks to overcome 142 years when whites can't deal with 50?
Date: 4/1/2007 12:22:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From: THEDELTAGRPFL
To: jbrown@tampatrib.com
HOW DO WE EXPECT BLACKS TO OVERCOME 142 YEARS WHEN WHITES CAN'T DEAL WITH 50?
Joseph,
I have been remiss in reading you the last few Sundays as I've been correcting galleys and working the format of my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. The book just happens to bear on your current theme: "It's Bad Choices, Not 'The System'."
I think you and minority faculty members of higher education you reference both have a point. All life is a matter of making choices from our earliest days.
Some of us have been lucky in that we were grounded in the consequences of making bad choices, with clear evidence that should we fall there would be no safety net to catch us.
I have felt one of the luckiest coincidences of my life was that I was born poor in which I had no chance to get ahead without initiative and intuition of making choices congruent with my best interests. As a consequence, I have had a considerably easy and productive life but I will admit that I have worked hard, usually harder than anyone else in my group, and that I have not been attracted to cultural diversions supposedly endemic to my "needs." I never drank or smoked in college, never joined a social fraternity, and would not go to athletic contests if my studies demanded attention. I didn't date because I was always afraid that should I let up I might flunk out, yet I became involved in leadership campus activities. I was on the varsity fencing team for three years, joining it only to avoid physical education classes, and I did go out for baseball, but dropped out when scheduled to go to Arizona for three weeks during spring training.
My point is that I am a white guy that made choices that have given me a good life, and several successful careers as a chemist, salesman, executive, consultant, professor, author, publisher, poet, journalist (columnist), as well as a husband, father and grandfather.
In a high school class of some two hundred, there were about fifteen of us that took four years of math, four years of English, physics and chemistry, psychology and biology, as well as the other required courses.
Every one of those fifteen graduated from college, nearly all with most distinguished careers in medicine, academia, engineering, management, law, and as owners of industries.
Several of that fifteen came from families if not wealthy of comfortable circumstance that ensured that they would get a college education.
I grew up in the era of two-parent families where divorce was less than rare; it was nonexistent. All fifteen of these students were white.
My four children went to private schools, traveled the world, and got a sense of the sights and sounds beyond the American shores. Not one of them graduated from college. I have a stepdaughter who is attempting to break that record.
It didn't help my children, I suppose, that I left that affluent lifestyle and circumstance when they were young, retiring the first time in my thirties. It probably didn't help either in that I considered education a privileged and not a right, not forcing the privilege on them.
Yet three of the four are more affluent than they ever experienced as children.
This is a microcosm of the problem you described and I've used myself as laboratory to explain why the minority professors are correct in saying we have a systemic cultural and social problem that holds blacks back. You are also correct in saying blacks are not showing the gumption to make "right choices."
My life forces were formed a half-century ago when parents were honored, older siblings and friends respected, and nuns, priests, police officers and merchants were authority figures in charge. It was a controlled existence, and therefore not too dynamic.
Everything disintegrated after WWII when the working middle class exploded, leaving conventional values, beliefs and wisdom behind.
When you don't have a cultural history in place that supports and frames your life, as was the incipient case then, you can and often do go off the rails. I have relatives that in today's dollars would be making $70,000 or more who never owned a home, always rented, never had a savings account, were always borrowing from relatives to make ends meet, hated their jobs, envied everybody and smoked and drank themselves to death.
These relatives loved to entertain, loved to be the "big spenders" and loved to tell the same "want to be" and "going to be" stories over and over again, while they remained permanently stuck in place. What is worse, they connived to manipulate their aging parents or to outright steal from them. Not a pretty picture.
Speaking systemically, then, I have watched since a half-century ago the working middle class fade. I would visit my professor uncle in Detroit, and play baseball with the kids of these well heeled automotive working class families. In those days, they earned incomes as lucrative as professionals in medicine and law, and yet they lived paycheck to paycheck. Now, that well-heeled existence is all but gone.
Everything you say about black kids is as true of white kids, only exponentially different because blacks are still only about 12 percent of the population but always heavily profiled as if a larger segment. It appears Hispanics will soon surpass them in numbers, which are even having more difficult adjustments.
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is about the 1970s and published to show the problems haven't changed. I quote The Thin Edge Report (1975) that indicated live births for adults were up by 23 percent since 1940, but up 323 percent for teenagers to record 608,000 illegitimate children.
It is in the seven figures today and not just among black teenagers.
This points to a systemic problem.
Now, to your point about "bad choices." How do we correct that? You see it as a self-inflicted caste system, a system to which you have escaped because you are a respected journalist and your opinion on many faceted subjects is sought and taken seriously. You also see black kids who stay in school, graduate from high school, get a job, and get married as a remedial corrective. I don't disagree, but how do these kids escape the caste system to make that happen?
I don't think any of us escapes our caste system. I still see myself as a poor lower class white guy that writes books now, and has had a decent life through hard work. You can't spend your impressionistic years in an Irish conclave and think differently.
The other night on "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS a man who keeps statistics on NCAA basketball players found that in the Final 65 NCAA Teams there is a deplorable failure of players to graduate. Most of these failures are among blacks who dominate basketball. Georgetown and the University of Florida were the exception with 100 percent of their players graduating.
This is not systemic poverty but its twin, which does have the feel of a caste system.
I tutored black athletes when I was in college, some of them all-American. Football was a job to them and college was a necessary nuisance. They found it boring. Most of them didn't see themselves as student-athletes; nor did they see themselves playing in the NFL, but going back home and getting a menial job, not a professional position. I am talking college now, not high school.
The other night I was talking to my college student daughter. She was wondering if I thought the middle class was disappearing. I answered, the working middle class is. She asked, why, and this bears back on all I've said here.I told her the working middle class has been taken care of for more than fifty years, many companies paying them generously, paying 100 percent of their medical insurance, free permanent life insurance policies, free college tuition for taking classes after work, generous vacations, and holiday schedules. I told her seventeen years ago I wrote that this was the golden goose that was about to croak (Work Without Managers 1990) because entitlements had exceeded the National Debt in being over $3 trillion, while companies continued to ignore the fact living on the edge, disregarding competition looming from the East.
As for workers of this working middle class, when you are taken completely care of, when you never have to grow up, when you are suspended in terminal adolescence from birth to death, I continued, you ignore or miss the changes, because you're not trained to face them, or to be responsible for yourself, and thus your future is left up for grabs. That is an indictment of the working middle class after fifty years.
It is 142 since the Emancipation Proclamation, not fifty years, and systemically the transition from a color conscious to a colorblind society has not been complete. You were lucky and I was lucky, too, but both of us know something about dysfunctional families and dysfunctional extended families. Neither of us, I believe, is totally out of the woods on that score.
Am I suggesting patience? No, I am suggesting prudence in working your considerable intellectual influence in support of more faces on television in all its media, more faces on campus in the faculty and student population, more faces among priests and teachers, police officers and business owners, more faces as writers and poets, novelists and dramatists, more faces as actors and musicians, more faces on school boards and city councils, and more faces in the stands and theaters when blacks perform.
We have to see ourselves in others before we see ourselves in ourselves.
The middle working class worker who has lost his high five or low six figure job is now too proud to work for less, so he sits home drinking beer, badgering the family, and moaning "woe is me."
It was the same fifty years ago in my extended family, but I had a mother that would have no part of that. I see a lot of black mothers with equal strength today. One mother defended her six-year-old child who was sentenced to jail for hitting a teacher. Six-years-old! That is not even the age of reason, yet a police officer arrested and charged her. That is insane.
Joseph, we are a society out-of-control with our leaders are not leading. They are not leading because they think it is all about them and not all about what I have written here. This is a systemic problem and it is why I wrote this book.
Always be well and never lose your courage,
Jim
I share it with you as it is apropos to A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, which is still in the preordering phase.If interested in receiving a preorder autographed copy of this book, send a check(s) to: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504 in the amount of $20 (S&H included) within the US, and $30 (plus S&H) outside the US. All checks in US dollars.
__________________
Subj: How do we expect blacks to overcome 142 years when whites can't deal with 50?
Date: 4/1/2007 12:22:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From: THEDELTAGRPFL
To: jbrown@tampatrib.com
HOW DO WE EXPECT BLACKS TO OVERCOME 142 YEARS WHEN WHITES CAN'T DEAL WITH 50?
Joseph,
I have been remiss in reading you the last few Sundays as I've been correcting galleys and working the format of my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. The book just happens to bear on your current theme: "It's Bad Choices, Not 'The System'."
I think you and minority faculty members of higher education you reference both have a point. All life is a matter of making choices from our earliest days.
Some of us have been lucky in that we were grounded in the consequences of making bad choices, with clear evidence that should we fall there would be no safety net to catch us.
I have felt one of the luckiest coincidences of my life was that I was born poor in which I had no chance to get ahead without initiative and intuition of making choices congruent with my best interests. As a consequence, I have had a considerably easy and productive life but I will admit that I have worked hard, usually harder than anyone else in my group, and that I have not been attracted to cultural diversions supposedly endemic to my "needs." I never drank or smoked in college, never joined a social fraternity, and would not go to athletic contests if my studies demanded attention. I didn't date because I was always afraid that should I let up I might flunk out, yet I became involved in leadership campus activities. I was on the varsity fencing team for three years, joining it only to avoid physical education classes, and I did go out for baseball, but dropped out when scheduled to go to Arizona for three weeks during spring training.
My point is that I am a white guy that made choices that have given me a good life, and several successful careers as a chemist, salesman, executive, consultant, professor, author, publisher, poet, journalist (columnist), as well as a husband, father and grandfather.
In a high school class of some two hundred, there were about fifteen of us that took four years of math, four years of English, physics and chemistry, psychology and biology, as well as the other required courses.
Every one of those fifteen graduated from college, nearly all with most distinguished careers in medicine, academia, engineering, management, law, and as owners of industries.
Several of that fifteen came from families if not wealthy of comfortable circumstance that ensured that they would get a college education.
I grew up in the era of two-parent families where divorce was less than rare; it was nonexistent. All fifteen of these students were white.
My four children went to private schools, traveled the world, and got a sense of the sights and sounds beyond the American shores. Not one of them graduated from college. I have a stepdaughter who is attempting to break that record.
It didn't help my children, I suppose, that I left that affluent lifestyle and circumstance when they were young, retiring the first time in my thirties. It probably didn't help either in that I considered education a privileged and not a right, not forcing the privilege on them.
Yet three of the four are more affluent than they ever experienced as children.
This is a microcosm of the problem you described and I've used myself as laboratory to explain why the minority professors are correct in saying we have a systemic cultural and social problem that holds blacks back. You are also correct in saying blacks are not showing the gumption to make "right choices."
My life forces were formed a half-century ago when parents were honored, older siblings and friends respected, and nuns, priests, police officers and merchants were authority figures in charge. It was a controlled existence, and therefore not too dynamic.
Everything disintegrated after WWII when the working middle class exploded, leaving conventional values, beliefs and wisdom behind.
When you don't have a cultural history in place that supports and frames your life, as was the incipient case then, you can and often do go off the rails. I have relatives that in today's dollars would be making $70,000 or more who never owned a home, always rented, never had a savings account, were always borrowing from relatives to make ends meet, hated their jobs, envied everybody and smoked and drank themselves to death.
These relatives loved to entertain, loved to be the "big spenders" and loved to tell the same "want to be" and "going to be" stories over and over again, while they remained permanently stuck in place. What is worse, they connived to manipulate their aging parents or to outright steal from them. Not a pretty picture.
Speaking systemically, then, I have watched since a half-century ago the working middle class fade. I would visit my professor uncle in Detroit, and play baseball with the kids of these well heeled automotive working class families. In those days, they earned incomes as lucrative as professionals in medicine and law, and yet they lived paycheck to paycheck. Now, that well-heeled existence is all but gone.
Everything you say about black kids is as true of white kids, only exponentially different because blacks are still only about 12 percent of the population but always heavily profiled as if a larger segment. It appears Hispanics will soon surpass them in numbers, which are even having more difficult adjustments.
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is about the 1970s and published to show the problems haven't changed. I quote The Thin Edge Report (1975) that indicated live births for adults were up by 23 percent since 1940, but up 323 percent for teenagers to record 608,000 illegitimate children.
It is in the seven figures today and not just among black teenagers.
This points to a systemic problem.
Now, to your point about "bad choices." How do we correct that? You see it as a self-inflicted caste system, a system to which you have escaped because you are a respected journalist and your opinion on many faceted subjects is sought and taken seriously. You also see black kids who stay in school, graduate from high school, get a job, and get married as a remedial corrective. I don't disagree, but how do these kids escape the caste system to make that happen?
I don't think any of us escapes our caste system. I still see myself as a poor lower class white guy that writes books now, and has had a decent life through hard work. You can't spend your impressionistic years in an Irish conclave and think differently.
The other night on "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS a man who keeps statistics on NCAA basketball players found that in the Final 65 NCAA Teams there is a deplorable failure of players to graduate. Most of these failures are among blacks who dominate basketball. Georgetown and the University of Florida were the exception with 100 percent of their players graduating.
This is not systemic poverty but its twin, which does have the feel of a caste system.
I tutored black athletes when I was in college, some of them all-American. Football was a job to them and college was a necessary nuisance. They found it boring. Most of them didn't see themselves as student-athletes; nor did they see themselves playing in the NFL, but going back home and getting a menial job, not a professional position. I am talking college now, not high school.
The other night I was talking to my college student daughter. She was wondering if I thought the middle class was disappearing. I answered, the working middle class is. She asked, why, and this bears back on all I've said here.I told her the working middle class has been taken care of for more than fifty years, many companies paying them generously, paying 100 percent of their medical insurance, free permanent life insurance policies, free college tuition for taking classes after work, generous vacations, and holiday schedules. I told her seventeen years ago I wrote that this was the golden goose that was about to croak (Work Without Managers 1990) because entitlements had exceeded the National Debt in being over $3 trillion, while companies continued to ignore the fact living on the edge, disregarding competition looming from the East.
As for workers of this working middle class, when you are taken completely care of, when you never have to grow up, when you are suspended in terminal adolescence from birth to death, I continued, you ignore or miss the changes, because you're not trained to face them, or to be responsible for yourself, and thus your future is left up for grabs. That is an indictment of the working middle class after fifty years.
It is 142 since the Emancipation Proclamation, not fifty years, and systemically the transition from a color conscious to a colorblind society has not been complete. You were lucky and I was lucky, too, but both of us know something about dysfunctional families and dysfunctional extended families. Neither of us, I believe, is totally out of the woods on that score.
Am I suggesting patience? No, I am suggesting prudence in working your considerable intellectual influence in support of more faces on television in all its media, more faces on campus in the faculty and student population, more faces among priests and teachers, police officers and business owners, more faces as writers and poets, novelists and dramatists, more faces as actors and musicians, more faces on school boards and city councils, and more faces in the stands and theaters when blacks perform.
We have to see ourselves in others before we see ourselves in ourselves.
The middle working class worker who has lost his high five or low six figure job is now too proud to work for less, so he sits home drinking beer, badgering the family, and moaning "woe is me."
It was the same fifty years ago in my extended family, but I had a mother that would have no part of that. I see a lot of black mothers with equal strength today. One mother defended her six-year-old child who was sentenced to jail for hitting a teacher. Six-years-old! That is not even the age of reason, yet a police officer arrested and charged her. That is insane.
Joseph, we are a society out-of-control with our leaders are not leading. They are not leading because they think it is all about them and not all about what I have written here. This is a systemic problem and it is why I wrote this book.
Always be well and never lose your courage,
Jim
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