HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET!
Reference:
Dr. Fisher's essay was written to acknowledge the 63rd anniversary of the American B-29 bomber named Enola Gay, which took off from Tinian Island in the Marianas to drop a single atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945.
More than 80,000 mainly civilians died in less than a minute, and led to 140,000 deaths in later years. In that instant, most of Hiroshima ceased to exist.
Two days after Hiroshima, on August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan (as agreed to at Yalta in February 1945 by president Franklin D. Roosevelt, prime minister Winston Churchill and commissar Joseph Stalin).
An atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 10, 1945, with 40,000 mainly civilian deaths, which eventually led to over 100,000 deaths.
On August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered.
Japan's formal unconditional surrender to the Allied Forces was presented in a document to General Douglas MacAruthur aboard the U. S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.
Humanity had acquired the power to destroy the world and mankind. Sixty-three years later the world trembles in the shadow of the atomic bomb's mushroom cloud.
WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
Apologies for the delayed response.
Minus hospital time in Pearl Harbor, my father spent the time from late 1942 to mid-1946 in the South Pacific, almost all of it on an escort carrier CVE-84, USS Shamrock Bay. He missed Midway, but caught most of the action thereafter. In July 1945, his carrier was part of a task force headed toward Tokyo Bay to join other American forces building there for the final assault on the Japanese home island. Although he’d survived a lot of stuff he shouldn't have, including the kamikazes at Leyte, he was 100% convinced that this was it. The reason being, the ordnance hold of their ship, and those of the others, was loaded with poison gas. One bomb or torpedo and they were all goners.
Based on what they'd seen on Iwo, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa, they were convinced that the Japanese would dig in even more fiercely on their home island. It would take forever to root them out of the mountains and caves of Japan. So, the primary battle plan was the widespread use of gas through aerial bombing. The ground invasion would then focus on ‘mopping up’ operations. Casualty projections were 500,000 – 750,000 Americans, 1.5M Japanese military, and over 4M Japanese civilians.
Roosevelt didn't believe in the bomb, and undertook the project only after considerable nagging by Einstein and others who knew the Germans were working on it. We built four bombs, and used one at Alamogordo, leaving three. The Japanese didn't know that. For all they knew, we were building them hand over fist. Shifting to Dresden, some believe that the firebombing was revenge. More likely, it was an attempt to break the will to fight. Our strategic bombing of military and industrial targets made war fighting difficult, but the fire bombing of Dresden brought despair to the German people, and coupled with their disaster on the Russian front, broke their will.
When Truman took over, he took a more pragmatic stance. He was willing to try the bombs, and if they didn't work, he could still follow the primary plan. They worked in that they convinced the Emperor that we could / would annihilate the Japanese race. He stepped in, ended the war, and was almost assassinated for his trouble.
In the end, about 175,000 people died. That's a lot of folks. However, if you had to make the decision, would it be more moral to incur the casualties of the primary plan rather than use a nuclear device? I’d have to recheck my data, but I believe more Japanese were actually killed in the incendiary attacks on Tokyo leading up to August 1945 than in the atomic bombs themselves. The bombs accomplished a second objective as well. They sent a message to the world that said, “We have it, we’ll use it. Don’t mess with us again.”
It’s easy for artists and poets to wring their hands, but as usual, it’s with less than total context. The Japanese bemoan the events and build memorials, but I see them building no memorials to Nanking.
Atomic weapons are horrible things, but it is their very horror that gave them value – they forced even politicians to constrain their military adventurism. They kept the cold war an economic contest. The good news is their time has passed. Both candidates for President have said they will downsize and DE-alert nuclear weapons, and frankly, the time has come. The Russians welcome that too, as they want to do the same. Nuclear weapons are expensive to maintain and dangerous to have around. The only limit to how fast we can downsize is how fast we can destroy the material in civilian reactors. (It’s not good to have plutonium around in any format.) We can however, DE-alert immediately. It only requires Presidential order.
Unfortunately, we cannot un-invent technology. Neither can we keep the technology to ourselves forever. We’re going to have to face nuclear terror, it is inevitable. However, the time of major powers hoarding thousands of weapons is gone. I see the world’s major powers downsizing to dozens of weapons, not thousands; just enough to be a deterrent. As I write this, USSTRATCOM is doing their homework to determine what to downsize and when to downsize it in anticipation of a new President. I know this because I am personally involved in these exercises. My career today focuses on modernizing the technologies to permit us to go to the minimum number necessary for deterrent. (Every target we can hit conventionally is one more nuke we don’t need.) Good riddance I say.
What of the future? It’s my observation that people who have something worthwhile to lose, don’t much like war. It’s my hope, my dream, that as economic modernization and uplifted lifestyle spreads around the globe, the people themselves will back away from war, leaving the politicians to waggle their tongues and weenies at each other. That’s what they’re best at anyway.
v/r
e
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
e
Thank you for a sage and thoughtful personal and professional response. Man has a future if there are more with a mindset such as yours. I am humbled to have my reflections of this tragedy placed in such meaningful perspective. We are on the same page. May temperance prevail.
Be always well,
Jim
WRITER WRITES AGAIN:
I know this has been beat to death, and I apologize for responding yesterday after you cried uncle; I was working through emails up from the bottom.
I’ve been thinking though, about the civilian target thing. It seems to me that reticence about hitting civilian targets is a product of modern media – bringing into people’s homes the true brutality of war on civilians. Civilians have always gotten the dirty end of war. I could think of no war in history where civilian targets were not attacked, and as you go farther back, the sacking of civilian targets for plunder actually becomes the objective. In modern times, I think attacking of civilian targets reflects a frustration that sticking to military targets is not bringing the conflict to the desired ends. Civilian targets are soft and indefensible.
When the cold war began, both the US and Soviets targeted each other’s cities. As American missiles grew more accurate, the warheads grew smaller, and the targets switched to 100% military. The Soviets today are 50 – 50, targeting both our weapons and our cities. Perhaps, the reticence of attacking civilian targets actually reflects progress in the maturity of our species? Wouldn’t that be Grande? As demonstrated by Gen Giap in Vietnam, all you have to do to win is break the opponent’s will to fight. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to annihilate him. Maybe we’re gradually evolving to where Sun Tzu was in 400 BC – to win without fighting is the highest glory.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Thursday, August 07, 2008
HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET! A Thoughtful and Emotional Response
HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET
A Thoughtful and Emotional Response
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 7, 2008
“Examine what is said, not him who speaks.”
Arabian Proverb
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
That is an evocative piece from beginning to end. Thank you for sharing it with us.
I have to tell you, my immediate reaction to any perceived criticism of the atom bombing of Japan in 1945 is quite visceral. My blood began to boil as I started reading your missive. There are some truths the defense of which I take as a defense of all I hold dear: the sanctity of our Constitution, the righteousness of the Union in the Civil War, the treason of the Confederacy, its leaders, and its entire population in the same, the need for Good nations to act swiftly and decisively to protect the weak from genocide, as in the Balkans in the 90's or Darfur today, and the bombing of Japan in 1945 among them. The fact that there are those among us who question my positions triggers the fight part of my fight-or-flight animal response in a way that rarely happens in other situations. After all, I am an adult, and in most other cases I can control my baser emotions, such as rage or jealousy.
I have taught English to hundreds of adult Japanese students, and the fact that they look upon themselves as innocent victims in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appalls me. To this day, the Japanese are not taught of the horrors of the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the Korean Comfort Women, or any of the many other atrocities perpetrated by their citizen-soldiers. Indeed, they are taught in school that the US was the aggressor in WWII because we cut them off from oil and rubber imports, and their nation would have crumbled had they not "defended" themselves. This travesty is akin to German Holocaust denial, but on an intentional cultural-wide scale.
The bombing of Japan is all the more important to me because of my own father's experience. He turned 18 in November 1944, and signed up for service that same day. He went through basic training to head off to Europe, but had an operation that kept him stateside. His buddies sent him letters from the front. When he had finally recovered, he was redirected to prepare for the invasion of Japan instead. He knew very well that he likely would have been among those estimated hundreds of thousands or one million American servicemen expected to die in the case of an invasion of the Japanese home islands. In all probability, I write this email only because Truman ordered bombs dropped on Japan.
...But it has always bothered me that we chose cities rather than military targets. I haven't got an answer for why that was okay. And so, as I read your piece, I ordered myself to simmer down and let your words sink in. They didn't change my mind about how we ended the war, but they did reinforce my belief that we erred morally in choosing civilian targets.
I look forward to reading your novel. I'll buy it soon. Your talent as a novelist seems even better than your impressive talent as a business writer.
Regards,
T.C.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for a thoughtful and candid reply to this evocative essay. Its intention was the same as Norman Cousins book, MODERN MAN IS OBSOLETE (Viking 1945). The thinking of the 1940s and 1950s, with which we have been locked stepping is irrelevant, and even disastrous.
On this small planet, where water, not oil, will be the call to arms, community, not conflict is the planet’s only salvation. Manuscripts of mine that have addressed this issue have never found a publisher. We can live without oil. We cannot live without water.
The atrocities of the Empire of Japan in China (Rape of Nanking), in the Philippines (Bataan Death March) and Korea, which you list, all happened as well as the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands on December 7, 1941.
What your Japanese students told you, however, was true. Japan was in a state of panic, a burgeoning population with no natural resources, being cut off from these resources by the United States and others, provided theater for the radical war mongering voices.
Japanese historians today admit it was a war Japan could not win, but felt it had to launch. As one put it, “We have awakened the tiger.”
Killing for whatever reason is not natural to man. It is why men at war suffer mightily adjusting to peace. Yet, in war, man is not only given permission to kill, but wins accolades for the killing.
You wonder why a nonmilitary target was chosen for the atomic bomb. It was meant to send a message, and did.
Hate and ignorance are the supple soil for fanaticism.
For this to work, the target must be dehumanized and demonized. I remember a slogan on the side of bread trucks during WWII, “The only good Jap is a dead Jap.” Sixty-three years later, Japan is an ally and an important trading partner. Go figure.
You are a passionate and compassionate man, and do a lot of good. I know this to be a fact. People of passion have strong opinions. The important thing about one’s opinions is to understand their nature, and whether they serve one or not. My service to you is that I have reintroduced you to yours.
Be always well,
Jim
PS Iris Chang, then 29, won the National Book Award for nonfiction with “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II” (Basic Books 1997). I saw her on the "PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer" being interviewed after she had won that prestigious award.
I was devastated learning later that this quiet bright modest young lady with so much talent committed suicide. If you haven’t read her book, I recommend you do so, a book which must have been very painful to research and write.
Another book, a novel by Gerald Seymour titled “The Walking Dead” (Overbrook Press 2007) deals with suicide bombers from the perspective of the whole insanity from recruitment to incineration.
We live in a time of madness with a 1940s mindset. Meanwhile, we distract ourselves with electronic toys.
A Thoughtful and Emotional Response
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 7, 2008
“Examine what is said, not him who speaks.”
Arabian Proverb
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
That is an evocative piece from beginning to end. Thank you for sharing it with us.
I have to tell you, my immediate reaction to any perceived criticism of the atom bombing of Japan in 1945 is quite visceral. My blood began to boil as I started reading your missive. There are some truths the defense of which I take as a defense of all I hold dear: the sanctity of our Constitution, the righteousness of the Union in the Civil War, the treason of the Confederacy, its leaders, and its entire population in the same, the need for Good nations to act swiftly and decisively to protect the weak from genocide, as in the Balkans in the 90's or Darfur today, and the bombing of Japan in 1945 among them. The fact that there are those among us who question my positions triggers the fight part of my fight-or-flight animal response in a way that rarely happens in other situations. After all, I am an adult, and in most other cases I can control my baser emotions, such as rage or jealousy.
I have taught English to hundreds of adult Japanese students, and the fact that they look upon themselves as innocent victims in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appalls me. To this day, the Japanese are not taught of the horrors of the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the Korean Comfort Women, or any of the many other atrocities perpetrated by their citizen-soldiers. Indeed, they are taught in school that the US was the aggressor in WWII because we cut them off from oil and rubber imports, and their nation would have crumbled had they not "defended" themselves. This travesty is akin to German Holocaust denial, but on an intentional cultural-wide scale.
The bombing of Japan is all the more important to me because of my own father's experience. He turned 18 in November 1944, and signed up for service that same day. He went through basic training to head off to Europe, but had an operation that kept him stateside. His buddies sent him letters from the front. When he had finally recovered, he was redirected to prepare for the invasion of Japan instead. He knew very well that he likely would have been among those estimated hundreds of thousands or one million American servicemen expected to die in the case of an invasion of the Japanese home islands. In all probability, I write this email only because Truman ordered bombs dropped on Japan.
...But it has always bothered me that we chose cities rather than military targets. I haven't got an answer for why that was okay. And so, as I read your piece, I ordered myself to simmer down and let your words sink in. They didn't change my mind about how we ended the war, but they did reinforce my belief that we erred morally in choosing civilian targets.
I look forward to reading your novel. I'll buy it soon. Your talent as a novelist seems even better than your impressive talent as a business writer.
Regards,
T.C.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for a thoughtful and candid reply to this evocative essay. Its intention was the same as Norman Cousins book, MODERN MAN IS OBSOLETE (Viking 1945). The thinking of the 1940s and 1950s, with which we have been locked stepping is irrelevant, and even disastrous.
On this small planet, where water, not oil, will be the call to arms, community, not conflict is the planet’s only salvation. Manuscripts of mine that have addressed this issue have never found a publisher. We can live without oil. We cannot live without water.
The atrocities of the Empire of Japan in China (Rape of Nanking), in the Philippines (Bataan Death March) and Korea, which you list, all happened as well as the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands on December 7, 1941.
What your Japanese students told you, however, was true. Japan was in a state of panic, a burgeoning population with no natural resources, being cut off from these resources by the United States and others, provided theater for the radical war mongering voices.
Japanese historians today admit it was a war Japan could not win, but felt it had to launch. As one put it, “We have awakened the tiger.”
Killing for whatever reason is not natural to man. It is why men at war suffer mightily adjusting to peace. Yet, in war, man is not only given permission to kill, but wins accolades for the killing.
You wonder why a nonmilitary target was chosen for the atomic bomb. It was meant to send a message, and did.
Hate and ignorance are the supple soil for fanaticism.
For this to work, the target must be dehumanized and demonized. I remember a slogan on the side of bread trucks during WWII, “The only good Jap is a dead Jap.” Sixty-three years later, Japan is an ally and an important trading partner. Go figure.
You are a passionate and compassionate man, and do a lot of good. I know this to be a fact. People of passion have strong opinions. The important thing about one’s opinions is to understand their nature, and whether they serve one or not. My service to you is that I have reintroduced you to yours.
Be always well,
Jim
PS Iris Chang, then 29, won the National Book Award for nonfiction with “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II” (Basic Books 1997). I saw her on the "PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer" being interviewed after she had won that prestigious award.
I was devastated learning later that this quiet bright modest young lady with so much talent committed suicide. If you haven’t read her book, I recommend you do so, a book which must have been very painful to research and write.
Another book, a novel by Gerald Seymour titled “The Walking Dead” (Overbrook Press 2007) deals with suicide bombers from the perspective of the whole insanity from recruitment to incineration.
We live in a time of madness with a 1940s mindset. Meanwhile, we distract ourselves with electronic toys.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET!
HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 6, 2008
“On Monday, August 7, 1945, I read in The Clinton Herald that yesterday “President Truman reveals a U.S. Army Air Force bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.”
“I never heard of such a bomb or such a place. On Thursday, I read that the day before, Wednesday, August 9, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Each bomb, according to The Herald, was a single missile 2,000 times the blasting power of the largest bomb used previously in the war. I try to fathom this destructive power and the reason for it.
“I listen to my da’s railroad buddies celebrating these bombings with a kind of excitement I hadn’t heard before. ‘Understand it leveled Hiroshima to the ground, and all their papier-mâché huts with it,’ says one. ‘Not a Jap standing,’ says another. ‘Did even a better job at Nagasaki,’ says a third. ‘Heard on the radio tens of thousands killed and tens of thousands more critically wounded in both attacks,’ says a fourth, ‘and we didn’t lose a flier.’ Finally, my da concludes, ‘Won’t be long now.’
‘Thank God for that!’ they echo as one.
“’Does Japan have that huge an army in those two cities,’ I ask innocently, seeing that as the only justification for such an attack. All eyes turn to me in stunned silence. Usually, they don’t even notice me. Then they break out into uproarious laughter. Their eyes go watery. Fists to the eyes stay their tears; legs kick the floor until the house shakes, and some even hold their stomachs in raucous hilarity. I didn’t mean it to be funny. What’s so funny about tens of thousands of people dying? Does war make people like that? I ask my mother who is in the kitchen reading. She says, ‘you wouldn’t understand.’ I ask my da after his railroad buddies leave. He says simply, ‘It saved thousands of American lives.’ Both answers are inadequate.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003 AuthorHouse), pp. 301-302.
* * * * * *
Today, August 6, 2008, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) featured the BBC (Great Britain) and the DW-TV (Germany) News as it does every day, Monday thru Friday, which I watch religiously.
Were it not for this coverage, I might have forgotten how moved and confused I was in 1945 when Hiroshima was bombed. That day and that scene, I thought, had made an indelible mark on my soul, yet were it not for these two foreign news sources, it would have passed from my attention completely.
The BBC showed some 45,000 mourners in Hiroshima today at the shrine of those who lost their life that August morning so long ago. The BBC reporter said, “Some 140,000 lost their lives in little over a minute, tens of thousands subsequently died from radiation, while many sicknesses to this day can be traced to radioactive contamination.” The reporter said nothing about psychological or emotional damage.
I hope other American news sources to which I am not privy covered this 63rd anniversary because it is that important, that significant in the annals of man.
Lest we forget, this conflagration was the greatest single destruction of human life in a single event in recorded history. Writer Norman Cousins felt such profound guilt over the bomb’s use on human beings that he immediately wrote a slender volume, MODERN MAN IS OBSOLETE (Viking Press 1945), which became a national bestseller.
Cousins opens with these lines:
“The beginning of the Atomic Age has brought less hope than fear. It is a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend. This fear is not new; in its classical form it is the fear of irrational death. But overnight it has become intensified, magnified. It has burst out of the subconscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehension.”
Science, he goes on to say, has eclipsed man. Man can see that piety is obsolete, faith is obsolete, mysticism is obsolete, prophetic vision is obsolete, and any modern man can see he is obsolete. Cousins sees a terrible revenge for making men obsolete, for making their inventions more relevant and powerful and more controlling than they are.
He ends the 49-page book with an absurd course to the future, and he says in all seriousness since man is obsolete:
“Let him dissociate himself, carefully and completely, from civilization and all its works. Let him systematically abolish science and the tools of science. Let him destroy all the machines and the knowledge which can build or operate those machines. Let him raze his cities, smash his laboratories, dismantle his factories, tear down his universities and schools, burn his libraries, rip apart his art. Let him murder his scientists, his lawmakers, his statesmen, his doctors, his teachers, his mechanics, his merchants, and anyone who has anything to do with the machinery of knowledge or progress. Let him punish literacy by death. Let him eradicate nations and set up the tribe as sovereign. Let him, in short, revert to his condition in society in 10,000 B.C. Thus emancipated from science, from progress, from government, from knowledge, from thought, he can be reasonably certain of prolonging his existence on this planet.
“This is a way out if ‘modern’ man is looking for a way out from the modern world.”
I read that little book at my uncle Leonard’s in Detroit the summer of 1946. He was head of the department of finance & commerce at the University of Detroit. He asked me what I thought, and I told him, not understanding sarcasm or absurdity, that I thought the author was quite mad.
“No, Jimmy,” my uncle said, “he’s quite sane. It is madness that he fears and madness that he desires to prevent.”
Sixty years later, we have the genocide of Pol Pot of Cambodia who killed millions of scholars and professional people to drive that society back into the Stone Age.
There are the lawless tribes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey who resemble today what he warned about then when lawlessness prevails.
We have had ethnic cleansing in Serbia and Bosnia, and in many other places in Africa.
There is even fear that terrorist possess nuclear suitcase bombs, bombs more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, that could kill millions in a single blast if detonated in a major city of the world.
Sense and sensibility were expressed in the appendix to this little book with excerpts from THE FEDERALIST on The Making of the Constitution of the United States of America (1788). Cousins’ ultimate declaration for modern man to survive is to make war obsolete.
Incidentally, it was many years later that I learned the answer to my question to my da’s railroad buddies: was there a significant military presence in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped?
There was not. In fact, more than 95 percent of the casualties were civilians, people like you and me, people who get caught up in the hysteria of the times and forget that we are all human beings and members of the same human race.
I was but a boy when that conflagration happened, a curious boy, and one that followed the war almost in an obsessive-compulsive manner in The Clinton Herald. So much so, as I point out in my memoir-as-a-novel, Sister Mary Helen allowed me to update the class daily on events when I was in the fourth grade.
By another curious accident, I was at the University of Iowa when author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a visiting scholar, and I heard him talk about his novel, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. I was chemistry major but loved literature, and was always taking electives outside my discipline.
Vonnegut was at Dresden, Germany as a prisoner of war during the fire bombing of that city in February 1945. Dresden was not a strategic military target, but an ancient and historic city. Why, then, did British bombers attempt to bomb the city into antiquity?
Vonnegut suggested the revenge bombing was for the German V-2 rocket attacks that destroyed much of London in 1943 – 1944. He captured the Dresden insanity with the novelist’s eye and quoted statistics of the tens of thousands of bombs dropped compared to the single one dropped at Hiroshima.
He wondered why the crew of the Enola Gray, or the Allied observers who went into Hiroshima afterwards had failed to write novels of the earth shaking event. I wonder to this day if any of them ever did. Biographies have been written, true, but mind wrenching novels? I don't think so.
We can talk of the shame of the Nazis and the Holocaust, the shame of Russian Siberia in the handling of dissidents, and the shame of the Japanese Bataan Death March in the Philippines in 1942, but why no expression of remorse for Hiroshima?
I didn’t understand as a boy, and I don’t understand now as an old man. It could happen here lest we forget.
* * * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 6, 2008
“On Monday, August 7, 1945, I read in The Clinton Herald that yesterday “President Truman reveals a U.S. Army Air Force bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.”
“I never heard of such a bomb or such a place. On Thursday, I read that the day before, Wednesday, August 9, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Each bomb, according to The Herald, was a single missile 2,000 times the blasting power of the largest bomb used previously in the war. I try to fathom this destructive power and the reason for it.
“I listen to my da’s railroad buddies celebrating these bombings with a kind of excitement I hadn’t heard before. ‘Understand it leveled Hiroshima to the ground, and all their papier-mâché huts with it,’ says one. ‘Not a Jap standing,’ says another. ‘Did even a better job at Nagasaki,’ says a third. ‘Heard on the radio tens of thousands killed and tens of thousands more critically wounded in both attacks,’ says a fourth, ‘and we didn’t lose a flier.’ Finally, my da concludes, ‘Won’t be long now.’
‘Thank God for that!’ they echo as one.
“’Does Japan have that huge an army in those two cities,’ I ask innocently, seeing that as the only justification for such an attack. All eyes turn to me in stunned silence. Usually, they don’t even notice me. Then they break out into uproarious laughter. Their eyes go watery. Fists to the eyes stay their tears; legs kick the floor until the house shakes, and some even hold their stomachs in raucous hilarity. I didn’t mean it to be funny. What’s so funny about tens of thousands of people dying? Does war make people like that? I ask my mother who is in the kitchen reading. She says, ‘you wouldn’t understand.’ I ask my da after his railroad buddies leave. He says simply, ‘It saved thousands of American lives.’ Both answers are inadequate.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003 AuthorHouse), pp. 301-302.
* * * * * *
Today, August 6, 2008, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) featured the BBC (Great Britain) and the DW-TV (Germany) News as it does every day, Monday thru Friday, which I watch religiously.
Were it not for this coverage, I might have forgotten how moved and confused I was in 1945 when Hiroshima was bombed. That day and that scene, I thought, had made an indelible mark on my soul, yet were it not for these two foreign news sources, it would have passed from my attention completely.
The BBC showed some 45,000 mourners in Hiroshima today at the shrine of those who lost their life that August morning so long ago. The BBC reporter said, “Some 140,000 lost their lives in little over a minute, tens of thousands subsequently died from radiation, while many sicknesses to this day can be traced to radioactive contamination.” The reporter said nothing about psychological or emotional damage.
I hope other American news sources to which I am not privy covered this 63rd anniversary because it is that important, that significant in the annals of man.
Lest we forget, this conflagration was the greatest single destruction of human life in a single event in recorded history. Writer Norman Cousins felt such profound guilt over the bomb’s use on human beings that he immediately wrote a slender volume, MODERN MAN IS OBSOLETE (Viking Press 1945), which became a national bestseller.
Cousins opens with these lines:
“The beginning of the Atomic Age has brought less hope than fear. It is a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend. This fear is not new; in its classical form it is the fear of irrational death. But overnight it has become intensified, magnified. It has burst out of the subconscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehension.”
Science, he goes on to say, has eclipsed man. Man can see that piety is obsolete, faith is obsolete, mysticism is obsolete, prophetic vision is obsolete, and any modern man can see he is obsolete. Cousins sees a terrible revenge for making men obsolete, for making their inventions more relevant and powerful and more controlling than they are.
He ends the 49-page book with an absurd course to the future, and he says in all seriousness since man is obsolete:
“Let him dissociate himself, carefully and completely, from civilization and all its works. Let him systematically abolish science and the tools of science. Let him destroy all the machines and the knowledge which can build or operate those machines. Let him raze his cities, smash his laboratories, dismantle his factories, tear down his universities and schools, burn his libraries, rip apart his art. Let him murder his scientists, his lawmakers, his statesmen, his doctors, his teachers, his mechanics, his merchants, and anyone who has anything to do with the machinery of knowledge or progress. Let him punish literacy by death. Let him eradicate nations and set up the tribe as sovereign. Let him, in short, revert to his condition in society in 10,000 B.C. Thus emancipated from science, from progress, from government, from knowledge, from thought, he can be reasonably certain of prolonging his existence on this planet.
“This is a way out if ‘modern’ man is looking for a way out from the modern world.”
I read that little book at my uncle Leonard’s in Detroit the summer of 1946. He was head of the department of finance & commerce at the University of Detroit. He asked me what I thought, and I told him, not understanding sarcasm or absurdity, that I thought the author was quite mad.
“No, Jimmy,” my uncle said, “he’s quite sane. It is madness that he fears and madness that he desires to prevent.”
Sixty years later, we have the genocide of Pol Pot of Cambodia who killed millions of scholars and professional people to drive that society back into the Stone Age.
There are the lawless tribes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey who resemble today what he warned about then when lawlessness prevails.
We have had ethnic cleansing in Serbia and Bosnia, and in many other places in Africa.
There is even fear that terrorist possess nuclear suitcase bombs, bombs more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, that could kill millions in a single blast if detonated in a major city of the world.
Sense and sensibility were expressed in the appendix to this little book with excerpts from THE FEDERALIST on The Making of the Constitution of the United States of America (1788). Cousins’ ultimate declaration for modern man to survive is to make war obsolete.
Incidentally, it was many years later that I learned the answer to my question to my da’s railroad buddies: was there a significant military presence in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped?
There was not. In fact, more than 95 percent of the casualties were civilians, people like you and me, people who get caught up in the hysteria of the times and forget that we are all human beings and members of the same human race.
I was but a boy when that conflagration happened, a curious boy, and one that followed the war almost in an obsessive-compulsive manner in The Clinton Herald. So much so, as I point out in my memoir-as-a-novel, Sister Mary Helen allowed me to update the class daily on events when I was in the fourth grade.
By another curious accident, I was at the University of Iowa when author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a visiting scholar, and I heard him talk about his novel, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. I was chemistry major but loved literature, and was always taking electives outside my discipline.
Vonnegut was at Dresden, Germany as a prisoner of war during the fire bombing of that city in February 1945. Dresden was not a strategic military target, but an ancient and historic city. Why, then, did British bombers attempt to bomb the city into antiquity?
Vonnegut suggested the revenge bombing was for the German V-2 rocket attacks that destroyed much of London in 1943 – 1944. He captured the Dresden insanity with the novelist’s eye and quoted statistics of the tens of thousands of bombs dropped compared to the single one dropped at Hiroshima.
He wondered why the crew of the Enola Gray, or the Allied observers who went into Hiroshima afterwards had failed to write novels of the earth shaking event. I wonder to this day if any of them ever did. Biographies have been written, true, but mind wrenching novels? I don't think so.
We can talk of the shame of the Nazis and the Holocaust, the shame of Russian Siberia in the handling of dissidents, and the shame of the Japanese Bataan Death March in the Philippines in 1942, but why no expression of remorse for Hiroshima?
I didn’t understand as a boy, and I don’t understand now as an old man. It could happen here lest we forget.
* * * * * *
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
WHAT WE REALLY KNOW, WE DON'T!
WHAT WE REALLY KNOW, WE DON’T!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 5, 2008
“Knowledge is but folly unless it is guided by grace.”
George Herbert (1593 – 1633), English poet
When I read carefully skewed quotations from an author’s body of work, I think of the more than a million words I've published in my adult life over the past forty years, not including all the words I have posted on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com).
How easy it would be to craft a case to use my words against my best intentions. It is the danger of being a writer and having your thoughts recorded for posterity, thoughts that are changing, maturing, and being redefined as you move into differing moments of your experience. This occurred to me as I read the political traffic concerning the approaching presidential election.
The paradox of politics is that it has a momentum of its own but nonetheless subject to being personalized. We as a people choose individuals or have them chosen for us to lead. It is true in all aspects of our lives. Politics is not confined to government. Politics pervades every aspect of our existence.
Politicians differ little from ourselves, only they have taken a stride of separation away from us to be celebrated or castigated as the case may be. In the end, we get the leadership we deserve.
Leadership is a reflection of how we think, feel, and behave and embodies our fears, biases, dreams, fantasies, as well as our secret hates and loves. There is a national psyche as well as a personal psyche and no one exploits this better than politicians. We are not simply blue or red states but clusters of attitudes and values.
The irony is that the persons who receive credit or blame or are made scapegoats are only part of the momentum and mainly fortuitous benefactors or victims of this force.
The problem with facts and statistics is that they are subject to misinterpretation or selective interpretation. When people are reduced to numbers, or identified in select categories, the human goes out of being.
This is not new but a product of communication from the time man first invented language. There are predators and prey in all of the animal kingdom, and with man the predator and prey are often opposite sides of man's conscience. Politicians jump on this predilection to ride its momentum, which has a mind of its own.
For example, when I was a boy, I was told Iowa’s only president, Herbert Hoover, caused the Great Depression. Time has proven he was a scapegoat. The actual cause was the "anything goes" insouciance of the Jazz Age and the "Roaring Twenties," which included wild speculation on Wall Street after WWI.
Proof that we never learn is the new century's brand of insouciance. Were it not for some safeguards, God only knows where we would be. Blame it on oil or the sub prime fiasco, but who caused this? People did. We did. Everybody did. People we put in leadership positions didn't have the bottle to say, "Hell, no, we can't do that." They went along because their thinking machine was stuck on "more."
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was given credit for pulling us out of the Great Depression when it was World War II. We were still in the depression in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, which changed the momentum.
More recently, president Bill Clinton was given credit for the economic rebound in the 1990s, which was actually fueled by the late economic policy changes of George H. W. Bush, another case of momentum.
The beautiful thing about our system is that the transition from one administration to another, although heatedly contested during the primary campaign and presidential election, once a winner is declared, the American people usually rally around the elected president.
I say "usually" because that was not the case with Abraham Lincoln. He had to be secretly escorted to Washington, D.C. for fear of being assassinated. I was reminded of this in a book I picked up recently, "Lincoln: His Words and His World."
Imagine the "Great Emancipator" was considered a lightweight, unqualified for the presidency with his single term in the House of Representatives, a "country bumpkin" from Illinois, poorly educated, although a successful lawyer.
Cartoons of hate couldn't have been more vicious in their attacks on him. Known for his silver tongue, cutting humor, and storytelling, even these were lampooned. His mind was crafted in language like a fine carpenter but this, too, was used against him. Fortunately, the momentum of the times was ready for him. Were the waffler general George McClellan to have been elected president, we might have been two nations today.
When I was a lad in high school, I read two books that have stayed with me all my life. Sinclair Lewis called his book, “It Can’t Happen Here”; the other was, "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle) by Adolf Hitler.
The Lewis book was about fascism finding its way into American society, in other words, that it could happen here!
Hitler, the little corporal from Austria was jailed in 1923 after his failed "Putsch" rebellion. This gave him the opportunity to write his book. He had had a history of failure from his earliest days. He blamed the Versailles Treaty in Paris after WWI, which was not as draconian as alleged, for Germany's economic woes. He then played on German pride with ideas spelled out in "Mein Kampf."
It was all there, the idea of a "master race" lifted from Nietzsche, and disposing of the "Jewish Question" with a rationale that Jews were an impediment to Germany's triumph.
For his failure as an artist, he blamed Jewish authorities in Austria and not on his lack of talent. Thus, a personal angst became successfully translated first into national identity, Nazism, and then national shame, the Holocaust.
We have two decent men running for president, but they both ride the momentum of two costly wars that rose out of the terrorist attack of 9/11. George W. Bush, whom I think a decent man, was caught up in the moment and we know the rest.
What do we really know? If the truth were told, we don't know anything. Our minds are locked into selective memory, selective data, and selective justification. I have a son who is so cynical that he refuses to register to vote. Sinclair Lewis was speaking to him in "It Can't Happen Here."
People on Dr. Don Farr's Network are not like my son. I expect that 100 percent of them will vote. I applaud them for this. I would hope, however, that some of them suspend certainty and explore the momentum to which I speak.
The next president is not going to change the momentum. The momentum has too much of a will of its own, and it is not limited to the United States. The next president has to find a way to deal with this momentum outside traditional channels as friends and enemies in the international community suggest war as an option might best to be left behind.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 5, 2008
“Knowledge is but folly unless it is guided by grace.”
George Herbert (1593 – 1633), English poet
When I read carefully skewed quotations from an author’s body of work, I think of the more than a million words I've published in my adult life over the past forty years, not including all the words I have posted on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com).
How easy it would be to craft a case to use my words against my best intentions. It is the danger of being a writer and having your thoughts recorded for posterity, thoughts that are changing, maturing, and being redefined as you move into differing moments of your experience. This occurred to me as I read the political traffic concerning the approaching presidential election.
The paradox of politics is that it has a momentum of its own but nonetheless subject to being personalized. We as a people choose individuals or have them chosen for us to lead. It is true in all aspects of our lives. Politics is not confined to government. Politics pervades every aspect of our existence.
Politicians differ little from ourselves, only they have taken a stride of separation away from us to be celebrated or castigated as the case may be. In the end, we get the leadership we deserve.
Leadership is a reflection of how we think, feel, and behave and embodies our fears, biases, dreams, fantasies, as well as our secret hates and loves. There is a national psyche as well as a personal psyche and no one exploits this better than politicians. We are not simply blue or red states but clusters of attitudes and values.
The irony is that the persons who receive credit or blame or are made scapegoats are only part of the momentum and mainly fortuitous benefactors or victims of this force.
The problem with facts and statistics is that they are subject to misinterpretation or selective interpretation. When people are reduced to numbers, or identified in select categories, the human goes out of being.
This is not new but a product of communication from the time man first invented language. There are predators and prey in all of the animal kingdom, and with man the predator and prey are often opposite sides of man's conscience. Politicians jump on this predilection to ride its momentum, which has a mind of its own.
For example, when I was a boy, I was told Iowa’s only president, Herbert Hoover, caused the Great Depression. Time has proven he was a scapegoat. The actual cause was the "anything goes" insouciance of the Jazz Age and the "Roaring Twenties," which included wild speculation on Wall Street after WWI.
Proof that we never learn is the new century's brand of insouciance. Were it not for some safeguards, God only knows where we would be. Blame it on oil or the sub prime fiasco, but who caused this? People did. We did. Everybody did. People we put in leadership positions didn't have the bottle to say, "Hell, no, we can't do that." They went along because their thinking machine was stuck on "more."
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was given credit for pulling us out of the Great Depression when it was World War II. We were still in the depression in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, which changed the momentum.
More recently, president Bill Clinton was given credit for the economic rebound in the 1990s, which was actually fueled by the late economic policy changes of George H. W. Bush, another case of momentum.
The beautiful thing about our system is that the transition from one administration to another, although heatedly contested during the primary campaign and presidential election, once a winner is declared, the American people usually rally around the elected president.
I say "usually" because that was not the case with Abraham Lincoln. He had to be secretly escorted to Washington, D.C. for fear of being assassinated. I was reminded of this in a book I picked up recently, "Lincoln: His Words and His World."
Imagine the "Great Emancipator" was considered a lightweight, unqualified for the presidency with his single term in the House of Representatives, a "country bumpkin" from Illinois, poorly educated, although a successful lawyer.
Cartoons of hate couldn't have been more vicious in their attacks on him. Known for his silver tongue, cutting humor, and storytelling, even these were lampooned. His mind was crafted in language like a fine carpenter but this, too, was used against him. Fortunately, the momentum of the times was ready for him. Were the waffler general George McClellan to have been elected president, we might have been two nations today.
When I was a lad in high school, I read two books that have stayed with me all my life. Sinclair Lewis called his book, “It Can’t Happen Here”; the other was, "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle) by Adolf Hitler.
The Lewis book was about fascism finding its way into American society, in other words, that it could happen here!
Hitler, the little corporal from Austria was jailed in 1923 after his failed "Putsch" rebellion. This gave him the opportunity to write his book. He had had a history of failure from his earliest days. He blamed the Versailles Treaty in Paris after WWI, which was not as draconian as alleged, for Germany's economic woes. He then played on German pride with ideas spelled out in "Mein Kampf."
It was all there, the idea of a "master race" lifted from Nietzsche, and disposing of the "Jewish Question" with a rationale that Jews were an impediment to Germany's triumph.
For his failure as an artist, he blamed Jewish authorities in Austria and not on his lack of talent. Thus, a personal angst became successfully translated first into national identity, Nazism, and then national shame, the Holocaust.
We have two decent men running for president, but they both ride the momentum of two costly wars that rose out of the terrorist attack of 9/11. George W. Bush, whom I think a decent man, was caught up in the moment and we know the rest.
What do we really know? If the truth were told, we don't know anything. Our minds are locked into selective memory, selective data, and selective justification. I have a son who is so cynical that he refuses to register to vote. Sinclair Lewis was speaking to him in "It Can't Happen Here."
People on Dr. Don Farr's Network are not like my son. I expect that 100 percent of them will vote. I applaud them for this. I would hope, however, that some of them suspend certainty and explore the momentum to which I speak.
The next president is not going to change the momentum. The momentum has too much of a will of its own, and it is not limited to the United States. The next president has to find a way to deal with this momentum outside traditional channels as friends and enemies in the international community suggest war as an option might best to be left behind.
Be always well,
Jim
Sunday, August 03, 2008
AMERICA'S BLUES as reported by THE ECONOMIST
AMERICA’S BLUES – As reported by The Economist
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 3, 2008
“Melancholy is a kind of demon that haunts our island, and often conveys herself to us in an easterly wind.”
Joseph Addison (1672 – 1719), English essayist.
Seldom have I read such a concise piece as this article that appeared in the Tampa Tribune, Sunday, August 3, 2008 in the "Commentary Section." It is titled "Red, White and Blues: America's Funk." You can find it on the newspaper's website (www.TBO.com) should you be so inclined.
You have heard me rant about its main points. The rant has become reality. That is what happens when the bottom falls out.
Some main points of the article:
(1) The American swagger is gone as 8 out of 10 Americans are in a depressing funk.
This change is blamed on the hapless administration of president Bush, but that is to be expected. We like to raise our leaders above us to treat them more than human only to tear them down as less than human when our appetites and indulgences drive everything south. We never blame ourselves.
(2) It is American capitalism, stupid!
The August 11, 2008 issue of Time magazine is dedicated to "The Economy." Pundits and Bill Gates tell us how to make capitalism work, and for an old codger such as myself, it sounds strangely like the same palaver I heard in the 1950s when Sputnik reduced education to a whirling nightmare; the 1970s when OPEC's oil embargo, the Iran Hostage Crisis, Watergate and Vietnam warranted the title in my book WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) of "Incipient Catastrophe."
Why catastrophe? I found the circumstances reminiscent of the "fall of Rome." The 1980s confirmed this with Japan eating our lunch, and buying the store.
"WWMs" was written nearly two decades ago when it was clear Detroit was living in a dream world with the die cast. Like a house of falling playing cards, we were all falling prostrate to its momentum.
(3) Consumer confidence an oxymoron?
The Economist list of contributors to the angst adds up to a big headache with an aspirin cure. My wonder is if this article will have any impact.
Last year when I was in Europe, the Euro was worth about $1.20; today it is about $1.59. Gasoline had not yet spiked; so more and more SUVs and trucks glutted the highways and byways.
The Economist points out that "America's beer," Budweiser, is now owned by little Belgium. This gets some people’s attention.
Less attention is given our spiraling debt of $ trillions and $ trillions owned primarily by foreign note holders. Consumer confidence is indeed an oxymoron as we are all mainly renters not owners (although we think we own what we own) and walk the economic tightrope without ever looking up, down or around.
(4) Forever looking for a sure thing. The Economist reports "many Americans feel as if they missed the boom."
Does that explain the rash of casinos across the land? Imagine a growth industry that produces nothing but false hope?
Hope is a passive word; courage is an active word. We have been reduced from doers to hopers.
The Economist reports that "between 2002 and 2006" the incomes of 99 percent rose by an average of 1 percent a year in real terms." How many saved a dime?
It reports further that as impressive as this rise, the top 1 percent saw its wealth rise 11 percent per year "between 2002 and 2006." Then the article hits us where it hurts: "three quarters of the economic gains during the Bush's presidency went to that top 1 percent."
There is deception here. It implies that this is a unique trend indigenous to this sitting president, alone, when it has been a consistent pattern.
In the 1970s, I was teaching a graduate seminar at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida for students of Golden Gate University of San Francisco, California. I presented a set of statistics very similar to those the present article for the United States since WWII.
Several students stayed after class, stunned and incredulous. I gave them references to check out my assertions. They did not want to believe the system was weighed against them. They wanted to believe capitalism’s invisible hand was for all as Adam Smith had promised.
Yet, since the beginning of capitalism, 80 to 90 percent of the wealth has been controlled by 10 to 20 percent of the people. Accessibility to wealth was then and remains now mainly a myth. Time's August issue will not change that.
It is why my books and articles have been provocative. They represent an attempt to engage the ordinary person to do the things that give him or her a chance at some independence and security.
It takes the realization that credit card companies, banks, and commercial enterprises with their tantalizing discounts are not in business for this purpose, but to rest personal independence and security from one to add to their own coffers.
Their economic strategy is for you to want to own a house that looks like those of the rich, a house you can't afford but will give you a sense of connection to the wealthy.
They want you to buy a boat that you can't afford, or some other luxury item that will make you feel as if you are affluent.
They want you to buy clothes you don't need, an automobile you can't afford when the one you are driving is working fine, but isn't the latest model.
See the trend?
It is the cloying need to make an impression convinced that it is your patriotic duty to work and spend paycheck-to-paycheck so the top 1 percent can maintain that ever-increasing edge.
No one can understand how an oil company can have $15 billion in quarterly profits when most people can't afford the gas to drive their car.
Few can understand why medical prescriptions cost so much when pharmaceutical companies have $ billion in quarterly profits. Drug companies insist "it takes years to develop a new drug," but they don't mention the government funded subsidized research. Notice the medical and pharmaceutical professions are less in the business of prevention than in ameliorative treatment.
We are not happy campers; we have lost our self-restraint and are paying dearly for it.
(5) Globalization is under fire.
We loved reading Tom Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” with his glorification of "this electronic age," that is, until free trade and immigration policy became scapegoats to our economic crises.
Politicians always have scapegoats in their pockets to get our dander up, and of course we believe them because they're in the know.
The Economist could not have said it with more bitter irony: panic is on display "when a nation built on immigrants is building a fence to keep them out."
Politicians on both sides of the aisle are endorsing some form of this asinine immigration policy instead of going back to the genesis of the problem, which is the double standard of work and respect. This, too, will blow up in our face.
We cannot have it both ways: cheap labor and cheat policies. People will put their lives at risk as long as survival is at stake.
We never seem to learn from history. As for globalization, we treat it as if it were a new thing. Globalization has existed since the days of the Romans.
We are a consumer driven economy and have never thought about the price of its intemperance.
(6) What about nation-building at home?
The paradox about nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq is that we have failed schools, failing children, and a falling apart infrastructure at home. The Romans allowed this to happen at home as well. It wasn’t terrorists that crippled Rome, but its own excesses. This left it vulnerable for the Visigoths and Germanic tribes of the north to plunder the city and collapse an empire.
(7) Resilience, how real?
The Economist points out that the United States is good at fixing itself, good at rebounding from its excesses and false steps. It claims the US has this capacity because it isn't stodgy and taciturn like Europe.
The Economist suggests self-correction will deal with the collapse and rubble of our misbegotten ways. New life, new innovations, new bursts of inspiration will absolve America of all its sins. Why not? It has always been so before, right?
This resilience sounds very much like "adolescent rebound" where the child has never had to experience the pain and struggle to grow up, or like America's nearly quarter millennium history.
Psychological characteristics may help to describe this collective phenomenon. To wit, personality is the "acquired self." Personality is what is not one's own. It is the "invented self."
Essence is our inheritance. It is what we are born with. Essence cannot be lost, cannot be changed or injured as easily as personality. It is our "real self."
Personality can be changed almost completely with the change of circumstances. Personality can be lost and injured.
Essence is the basis of one physical and mental makeup. It involves natural propensities, talents, our native intelligence, and innate capacities.
Personality is learned behavior consciously or unconsciously.
By unconsciously, I mean the inclination to imitate or attempt to be like someone else even if not compatible with one's own essence. Personality can be reduced to acquired tastes with all sort of artificial likes and dislikes subliminally bombarding the psyche.
When personality is developed at the expense of essence, we become pleasers, true believers, people who need to belong so they go along, people who are captives to self-designed cages.
When personality begins to dominate essence, we become less healthy as we are attracted to what is bad for us and to dislike what is good for us.
Normally, when essence dominates personality, personality can become quite useful. But if personality dominates essence, this can produce wrong results of many kinds.
Personality is not bad. We must have personality to live a social life. Personality and essence should grow parallel to each other with one not outgrowing the other.
Cases of essence outgrowing personality occur among uneducated people. These people may be very good, and even clever, but they are incapable of development in the same way as people with more developed personalities.
Such people often find comfort in using derogatory words to describe minorities or people not as naturally gifted as they are. They are also quick to reduce others to simple stereotypes. Media, advertisers, and politicians study and exploit these propensities with great proficiency.
Cases of personality outgrowing essence are often to be found among the rich and famous, the cultured and privileged, the movers and shakers. They fawn and spawn each other as the celebrity culture.
They often rise to head corporations, educational institutions, charitable foundations, religious institutions, the entertainment industry, media, and government because they embody what current society promotes. Rhetoric trumps reality in the new world order.
Essence in such cases remains in a half-grown, half-developed, half-realized state. Expediency and serendipity prevail at the expense of patience and plodding more essential to release significant essence.
What does this mean, and why do I mention it here?
We have rather implicit but rigid norms for personality and essence.
Quick and early growth of personality and essence to such norms can stop growth and development at a very early age. As our self-indulgent society might suggest, it has.
We are taught to be polite, obedient, submissive, passive, punctual, engaging and conforming, good natured, happy and obliging from preschool on, while we are expected to be modest about displaying our talent or specialness for fear of appearing elitist.
The result is that many grow up physically mature but emotionally immature acquiring high academic, business, professional or political status without growing up, acting in essence as if age of ten or twelve suspended in terminal adolescence. It is why leaders today often appear as if they have never left the sixth grade.
Consequently, while submerged in the wonder of electronics and the sophistication of a postmodern society, there seems a preference for underdeveloped essence when it comes to maturity.
Why else would there be such infatuation with gratuitous violence in entertainment, electronic games, spectator sports, or gamesmanship in business and politics? A competitive society is driven by imitation, replication, and duplication while trumpeting bogus creativity. China and India have fallen prey to this code.
If you want to look at the problems of society, look to the repressed development of essence in our young people. Jean Paul Sartre has said modern society lacks authenticity. He was referring to the artificiality of personality and the warped development of essence. Boredom, he claimed, is indicative of a society intimidated by adulthood.
(8) The Economist “slam-dunk” world of rhetoric.
“Countries like people behave dangerously when their mood turns dark.”
“America is not just hurting allies and trading partners but itself.”
“Credit crunch is in part the consequence of a flawed regulatory system.”
“Lax monetary policy allowed Americans to build up debts and fueled a housing bubble that had to eventually burst.”
“Lessons need to be learned.”
“Over-unionized and unaccountable American school system needs the same competition as its universities which are the envy of the world.”
Then on to health care, the rise of China, and then ending with, “Everybody goes through bad times.”
This rhetorical litany of disaster ends with this softball: “America has had the wisdom to take the first course (i.e., learn from its mistakes) before. Let’s hope it does so again.”
I must confess I thank God for the American blues, for the high cost of gasoline, for the credit card crunch, for the falling prices of homes, for the drop out sufferers, and why?
Because the abstract anodynes of enlightenment fail to move us off the dime, circumstances do. We have needed something to break through our sleepwalking.
Lord Byron’s knew something of our dilemma:
“Melancholy is a fearful gift; what is it but the telescope of truth, which brings life near in utter darkness, making the cold reality too real?”
I take no comfort in hope. I look for the courage to wake up America!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 3, 2008
“Melancholy is a kind of demon that haunts our island, and often conveys herself to us in an easterly wind.”
Joseph Addison (1672 – 1719), English essayist.
Seldom have I read such a concise piece as this article that appeared in the Tampa Tribune, Sunday, August 3, 2008 in the "Commentary Section." It is titled "Red, White and Blues: America's Funk." You can find it on the newspaper's website (www.TBO.com) should you be so inclined.
You have heard me rant about its main points. The rant has become reality. That is what happens when the bottom falls out.
Some main points of the article:
(1) The American swagger is gone as 8 out of 10 Americans are in a depressing funk.
This change is blamed on the hapless administration of president Bush, but that is to be expected. We like to raise our leaders above us to treat them more than human only to tear them down as less than human when our appetites and indulgences drive everything south. We never blame ourselves.
(2) It is American capitalism, stupid!
The August 11, 2008 issue of Time magazine is dedicated to "The Economy." Pundits and Bill Gates tell us how to make capitalism work, and for an old codger such as myself, it sounds strangely like the same palaver I heard in the 1950s when Sputnik reduced education to a whirling nightmare; the 1970s when OPEC's oil embargo, the Iran Hostage Crisis, Watergate and Vietnam warranted the title in my book WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) of "Incipient Catastrophe."
Why catastrophe? I found the circumstances reminiscent of the "fall of Rome." The 1980s confirmed this with Japan eating our lunch, and buying the store.
"WWMs" was written nearly two decades ago when it was clear Detroit was living in a dream world with the die cast. Like a house of falling playing cards, we were all falling prostrate to its momentum.
(3) Consumer confidence an oxymoron?
The Economist list of contributors to the angst adds up to a big headache with an aspirin cure. My wonder is if this article will have any impact.
Last year when I was in Europe, the Euro was worth about $1.20; today it is about $1.59. Gasoline had not yet spiked; so more and more SUVs and trucks glutted the highways and byways.
The Economist points out that "America's beer," Budweiser, is now owned by little Belgium. This gets some people’s attention.
Less attention is given our spiraling debt of $ trillions and $ trillions owned primarily by foreign note holders. Consumer confidence is indeed an oxymoron as we are all mainly renters not owners (although we think we own what we own) and walk the economic tightrope without ever looking up, down or around.
(4) Forever looking for a sure thing. The Economist reports "many Americans feel as if they missed the boom."
Does that explain the rash of casinos across the land? Imagine a growth industry that produces nothing but false hope?
Hope is a passive word; courage is an active word. We have been reduced from doers to hopers.
The Economist reports that "between 2002 and 2006" the incomes of 99 percent rose by an average of 1 percent a year in real terms." How many saved a dime?
It reports further that as impressive as this rise, the top 1 percent saw its wealth rise 11 percent per year "between 2002 and 2006." Then the article hits us where it hurts: "three quarters of the economic gains during the Bush's presidency went to that top 1 percent."
There is deception here. It implies that this is a unique trend indigenous to this sitting president, alone, when it has been a consistent pattern.
In the 1970s, I was teaching a graduate seminar at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida for students of Golden Gate University of San Francisco, California. I presented a set of statistics very similar to those the present article for the United States since WWII.
Several students stayed after class, stunned and incredulous. I gave them references to check out my assertions. They did not want to believe the system was weighed against them. They wanted to believe capitalism’s invisible hand was for all as Adam Smith had promised.
Yet, since the beginning of capitalism, 80 to 90 percent of the wealth has been controlled by 10 to 20 percent of the people. Accessibility to wealth was then and remains now mainly a myth. Time's August issue will not change that.
It is why my books and articles have been provocative. They represent an attempt to engage the ordinary person to do the things that give him or her a chance at some independence and security.
It takes the realization that credit card companies, banks, and commercial enterprises with their tantalizing discounts are not in business for this purpose, but to rest personal independence and security from one to add to their own coffers.
Their economic strategy is for you to want to own a house that looks like those of the rich, a house you can't afford but will give you a sense of connection to the wealthy.
They want you to buy a boat that you can't afford, or some other luxury item that will make you feel as if you are affluent.
They want you to buy clothes you don't need, an automobile you can't afford when the one you are driving is working fine, but isn't the latest model.
See the trend?
It is the cloying need to make an impression convinced that it is your patriotic duty to work and spend paycheck-to-paycheck so the top 1 percent can maintain that ever-increasing edge.
No one can understand how an oil company can have $15 billion in quarterly profits when most people can't afford the gas to drive their car.
Few can understand why medical prescriptions cost so much when pharmaceutical companies have $ billion in quarterly profits. Drug companies insist "it takes years to develop a new drug," but they don't mention the government funded subsidized research. Notice the medical and pharmaceutical professions are less in the business of prevention than in ameliorative treatment.
We are not happy campers; we have lost our self-restraint and are paying dearly for it.
(5) Globalization is under fire.
We loved reading Tom Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” with his glorification of "this electronic age," that is, until free trade and immigration policy became scapegoats to our economic crises.
Politicians always have scapegoats in their pockets to get our dander up, and of course we believe them because they're in the know.
The Economist could not have said it with more bitter irony: panic is on display "when a nation built on immigrants is building a fence to keep them out."
Politicians on both sides of the aisle are endorsing some form of this asinine immigration policy instead of going back to the genesis of the problem, which is the double standard of work and respect. This, too, will blow up in our face.
We cannot have it both ways: cheap labor and cheat policies. People will put their lives at risk as long as survival is at stake.
We never seem to learn from history. As for globalization, we treat it as if it were a new thing. Globalization has existed since the days of the Romans.
We are a consumer driven economy and have never thought about the price of its intemperance.
(6) What about nation-building at home?
The paradox about nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq is that we have failed schools, failing children, and a falling apart infrastructure at home. The Romans allowed this to happen at home as well. It wasn’t terrorists that crippled Rome, but its own excesses. This left it vulnerable for the Visigoths and Germanic tribes of the north to plunder the city and collapse an empire.
(7) Resilience, how real?
The Economist points out that the United States is good at fixing itself, good at rebounding from its excesses and false steps. It claims the US has this capacity because it isn't stodgy and taciturn like Europe.
The Economist suggests self-correction will deal with the collapse and rubble of our misbegotten ways. New life, new innovations, new bursts of inspiration will absolve America of all its sins. Why not? It has always been so before, right?
This resilience sounds very much like "adolescent rebound" where the child has never had to experience the pain and struggle to grow up, or like America's nearly quarter millennium history.
Psychological characteristics may help to describe this collective phenomenon. To wit, personality is the "acquired self." Personality is what is not one's own. It is the "invented self."
Essence is our inheritance. It is what we are born with. Essence cannot be lost, cannot be changed or injured as easily as personality. It is our "real self."
Personality can be changed almost completely with the change of circumstances. Personality can be lost and injured.
Essence is the basis of one physical and mental makeup. It involves natural propensities, talents, our native intelligence, and innate capacities.
Personality is learned behavior consciously or unconsciously.
By unconsciously, I mean the inclination to imitate or attempt to be like someone else even if not compatible with one's own essence. Personality can be reduced to acquired tastes with all sort of artificial likes and dislikes subliminally bombarding the psyche.
When personality is developed at the expense of essence, we become pleasers, true believers, people who need to belong so they go along, people who are captives to self-designed cages.
When personality begins to dominate essence, we become less healthy as we are attracted to what is bad for us and to dislike what is good for us.
Normally, when essence dominates personality, personality can become quite useful. But if personality dominates essence, this can produce wrong results of many kinds.
Personality is not bad. We must have personality to live a social life. Personality and essence should grow parallel to each other with one not outgrowing the other.
Cases of essence outgrowing personality occur among uneducated people. These people may be very good, and even clever, but they are incapable of development in the same way as people with more developed personalities.
Such people often find comfort in using derogatory words to describe minorities or people not as naturally gifted as they are. They are also quick to reduce others to simple stereotypes. Media, advertisers, and politicians study and exploit these propensities with great proficiency.
Cases of personality outgrowing essence are often to be found among the rich and famous, the cultured and privileged, the movers and shakers. They fawn and spawn each other as the celebrity culture.
They often rise to head corporations, educational institutions, charitable foundations, religious institutions, the entertainment industry, media, and government because they embody what current society promotes. Rhetoric trumps reality in the new world order.
Essence in such cases remains in a half-grown, half-developed, half-realized state. Expediency and serendipity prevail at the expense of patience and plodding more essential to release significant essence.
What does this mean, and why do I mention it here?
We have rather implicit but rigid norms for personality and essence.
Quick and early growth of personality and essence to such norms can stop growth and development at a very early age. As our self-indulgent society might suggest, it has.
We are taught to be polite, obedient, submissive, passive, punctual, engaging and conforming, good natured, happy and obliging from preschool on, while we are expected to be modest about displaying our talent or specialness for fear of appearing elitist.
The result is that many grow up physically mature but emotionally immature acquiring high academic, business, professional or political status without growing up, acting in essence as if age of ten or twelve suspended in terminal adolescence. It is why leaders today often appear as if they have never left the sixth grade.
Consequently, while submerged in the wonder of electronics and the sophistication of a postmodern society, there seems a preference for underdeveloped essence when it comes to maturity.
Why else would there be such infatuation with gratuitous violence in entertainment, electronic games, spectator sports, or gamesmanship in business and politics? A competitive society is driven by imitation, replication, and duplication while trumpeting bogus creativity. China and India have fallen prey to this code.
If you want to look at the problems of society, look to the repressed development of essence in our young people. Jean Paul Sartre has said modern society lacks authenticity. He was referring to the artificiality of personality and the warped development of essence. Boredom, he claimed, is indicative of a society intimidated by adulthood.
(8) The Economist “slam-dunk” world of rhetoric.
“Countries like people behave dangerously when their mood turns dark.”
“America is not just hurting allies and trading partners but itself.”
“Credit crunch is in part the consequence of a flawed regulatory system.”
“Lax monetary policy allowed Americans to build up debts and fueled a housing bubble that had to eventually burst.”
“Lessons need to be learned.”
“Over-unionized and unaccountable American school system needs the same competition as its universities which are the envy of the world.”
Then on to health care, the rise of China, and then ending with, “Everybody goes through bad times.”
This rhetorical litany of disaster ends with this softball: “America has had the wisdom to take the first course (i.e., learn from its mistakes) before. Let’s hope it does so again.”
I must confess I thank God for the American blues, for the high cost of gasoline, for the credit card crunch, for the falling prices of homes, for the drop out sufferers, and why?
Because the abstract anodynes of enlightenment fail to move us off the dime, circumstances do. We have needed something to break through our sleepwalking.
Lord Byron’s knew something of our dilemma:
“Melancholy is a fearful gift; what is it but the telescope of truth, which brings life near in utter darkness, making the cold reality too real?”
I take no comfort in hope. I look for the courage to wake up America!
Thursday, July 31, 2008
BOOK REVIEW OF Jerzy Kosinski's National Book Award 1969 Novel, STEPS
BOOK REVIEW of National Book Award (1969) novel of STEPS by Jerzy Kosinski
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 31, 2008
Reference: Amazon.com requested that I submit a review of this novel for their website. It follows.
My agent, Ned Hamson, knowing I was writing an unconventional novel of my experience in South Africa as a young American executive (GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA) during apartheid, suggested I read STEPS.
Kosinski and I were born in the same year at opposite ends of the bloody Second World War. He never had time for innocence while I was an American boy held safely in her bosom in Middle America. All that was shattered for me when I went to South Africa as a young executive to form a new chemical company in 1968, the year before Kosinski won the National Book Award for STEPS.
I not only read this novel and his other works of fiction, but also James Park Sloan's biography, JERZY KOSINSKI.
STEPS and other Kosinski fiction demonstrate a mind that has been shattered by people he admires and people he finds out to be both brutal and brutish. THE PAINTED BIRD is an unexpurgated version of reality as a bookend to Alan Paton's TOO LATE THE PHALAROPE. Both authors deal with the inhumanity of man to man, but Kosinski chooses to walk the tightrope of despair and psychosexual fantasy.
Kosinski and I are both trained social scientists and published authors in that discipline. He went to one of the most prestigious universities in the country (Columbia) and had difficulty with his faculty advisers and never acquired his Ph.D. I had similar problems only I found my way from land grant institutions (Iowa, and University of South Florida) to safe haven in the university system of the future, writing my dissertation and defense for Walden University, a fully accredited university but not yet prestigious in the same sense as the Ivy League.
STEPS is a triumph of mind over matter and soul over eternity, a book that will stay with you the way Sherwood Anderson’s WINESBURG, OHIO does which was written for an earlier generation. Kosinski saw life naked, undisguised, and as Joseph Campbell might add, a time that never rose above its sexual organs or its lust for power and pleasure.
STEPS is concise, anecdotal and experimental the way James Joyce’s ULYSSES was. The anecdotes are connected by style, mood, and tone that bite the psyche as if it had teeth. You know the work is art because the fragments hold together like an illuminating collage.
STEPS shows an intensely grim world characterized by brutality, exploitation, and calloused indifference. The impact is like a nightmare where violence breeds only more violence, and the protagonist is lost in the maze of emotion with no way out.
Many of the incidents in STEPS depict sexual exploitation. It is the predator-prey dance where the narrator exploits a woman, but he himself becomes the victim. In one instance, the narrator, an archeological student stranded without money on an island, collapses from hunger. Two fat old women feed him and then assault him sexually.
Among the scenes of perversion, many include accounts of sexual pleasure being derived from inflicting or witnessing pain. Sociological studies of Theodore Adorno (Authoritarian Personality) and Erich Fromm (The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness) come to mind to confirm Kosinski’s thesis.
STEPS captures the whirling dervish of postmodern society with no leavening with virtue. Most of the episodes present actions of lust, greed, brutality, and corruption without mitigating circumstances, a little like watching the nightly news on television.
STEPS could be viewed as a series of “dirty” anecdotes. The reality it portrays is the vicious and perverted side of life debased from human nature.
STEPS suggest narcissistic disassociation of a single person, or perhaps a series of people. That is the subtle strength of its fragmentation and a narrator who is never identified, leaving open the possibility that different narrators are functioning in the various episodes. In any case, regardless of the reader’s reaction, the concrete style and raw intensity of the actions are not likely to be quickly dismissed from the mind of the reader.
To give you a sense of the fickle nature of publishing, 21-pages of STEPS was sent to its original publisher and several others six years after it had won the National Book Award. All turned it down. In 1981, the entire text of STEPS was sent to several literary agents and was turned down again by everyone. Kosinski committed suicide in 1991 at the age of 57, hounded by detractors, none of whom recognized his genius. If you are a writer, take note and persist.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 31, 2008
Reference: Amazon.com requested that I submit a review of this novel for their website. It follows.
My agent, Ned Hamson, knowing I was writing an unconventional novel of my experience in South Africa as a young American executive (GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA) during apartheid, suggested I read STEPS.
Kosinski and I were born in the same year at opposite ends of the bloody Second World War. He never had time for innocence while I was an American boy held safely in her bosom in Middle America. All that was shattered for me when I went to South Africa as a young executive to form a new chemical company in 1968, the year before Kosinski won the National Book Award for STEPS.
I not only read this novel and his other works of fiction, but also James Park Sloan's biography, JERZY KOSINSKI.
STEPS and other Kosinski fiction demonstrate a mind that has been shattered by people he admires and people he finds out to be both brutal and brutish. THE PAINTED BIRD is an unexpurgated version of reality as a bookend to Alan Paton's TOO LATE THE PHALAROPE. Both authors deal with the inhumanity of man to man, but Kosinski chooses to walk the tightrope of despair and psychosexual fantasy.
Kosinski and I are both trained social scientists and published authors in that discipline. He went to one of the most prestigious universities in the country (Columbia) and had difficulty with his faculty advisers and never acquired his Ph.D. I had similar problems only I found my way from land grant institutions (Iowa, and University of South Florida) to safe haven in the university system of the future, writing my dissertation and defense for Walden University, a fully accredited university but not yet prestigious in the same sense as the Ivy League.
STEPS is a triumph of mind over matter and soul over eternity, a book that will stay with you the way Sherwood Anderson’s WINESBURG, OHIO does which was written for an earlier generation. Kosinski saw life naked, undisguised, and as Joseph Campbell might add, a time that never rose above its sexual organs or its lust for power and pleasure.
STEPS is concise, anecdotal and experimental the way James Joyce’s ULYSSES was. The anecdotes are connected by style, mood, and tone that bite the psyche as if it had teeth. You know the work is art because the fragments hold together like an illuminating collage.
STEPS shows an intensely grim world characterized by brutality, exploitation, and calloused indifference. The impact is like a nightmare where violence breeds only more violence, and the protagonist is lost in the maze of emotion with no way out.
Many of the incidents in STEPS depict sexual exploitation. It is the predator-prey dance where the narrator exploits a woman, but he himself becomes the victim. In one instance, the narrator, an archeological student stranded without money on an island, collapses from hunger. Two fat old women feed him and then assault him sexually.
Among the scenes of perversion, many include accounts of sexual pleasure being derived from inflicting or witnessing pain. Sociological studies of Theodore Adorno (Authoritarian Personality) and Erich Fromm (The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness) come to mind to confirm Kosinski’s thesis.
STEPS captures the whirling dervish of postmodern society with no leavening with virtue. Most of the episodes present actions of lust, greed, brutality, and corruption without mitigating circumstances, a little like watching the nightly news on television.
STEPS could be viewed as a series of “dirty” anecdotes. The reality it portrays is the vicious and perverted side of life debased from human nature.
STEPS suggest narcissistic disassociation of a single person, or perhaps a series of people. That is the subtle strength of its fragmentation and a narrator who is never identified, leaving open the possibility that different narrators are functioning in the various episodes. In any case, regardless of the reader’s reaction, the concrete style and raw intensity of the actions are not likely to be quickly dismissed from the mind of the reader.
To give you a sense of the fickle nature of publishing, 21-pages of STEPS was sent to its original publisher and several others six years after it had won the National Book Award. All turned it down. In 1981, the entire text of STEPS was sent to several literary agents and was turned down again by everyone. Kosinski committed suicide in 1991 at the age of 57, hounded by detractors, none of whom recognized his genius. If you are a writer, take note and persist.
LETTER TO FLORIDA GOV. CHARLIE CRIST -- REF. BOB BUTTERWORTH, QUINTESSENTIAL LEADER
Governor Charlie Crist
State of Florida
Tallahassee, Florida
Reference: Bob Butterworth, Quintessential Leader
Dear Governor Crist,
More than thirty years ago, I met Bob Butterworth. He was in his mid-twenties and I in my mid-thirties; he an adjunct professor teaching a graduate course in criminal justice for Nova University and I regional coordinator for that university while pursuing a Ph.D. in social-industrial psychology at USF. The seminars were held at the University of Tampa.
His career was just getting underway, while I was a recent corporate executive drop out after forming a new company in South Africa for my employer, Nalco Chemical Company. South African apartheid gave me pause.
The 1970s was the only time we met, but we connected. We have exchanged letters but I’ve observed his career basically from afar. I sensed even then that he was special. You could tell he had social bearing and quiet competence. It was evident as his students; veteran police officers, attorneys, and aspiring criminal justice careerists paid him the compliment of complete attention to the tasks at hand.
Bob knew I was interested in writing, having had one book published (Confident Selling Prentice-Hall 1970), primarily on the subject of leadership. I had witnessed an absence of leadership in my work for Nalco in Europe, South America, South Africa, and the United States, as a chemical sales engineer, field manager and finally corporate executive trouble shooting across the globe becoming increasingly intrigued with the subject.
Not unlike Dionysus seeking an honest man, I was looking for leadership when I saw it personified in Bob Butterworth, first in those seminars, and then confirmed in his long career. How, you might ask?
He knew his subject but not his students. He had just met them. From the beginning, he took risks with them with an openness and confidence that displayed an ability to adjust to their needs, not his own. He embraced possible failure and therefore soared over it.
From the beginning, there was little separation between the mission and the means that might differentiate him from them, or them from him. He was unique.
You know this because you convinced him to head the Department of Children & Families (DCF) when the function was in shambles. He approached that challenge directly and empathetically as he did those first seminars. He created a structure and culture that restored order upon which others might build. Now, he is stepping down after his 18-month tenure at the age of 65 with a daughter readying herself for college, and relishing his involvement in that selection.
What is special about his leadership?
He is a student of what he does. He prepares himself by not only understanding the problem but the people involved. He is a people person. He doesn’t approach a situation with preconceived notions but is a listener, not a teller. I saw that demonstrated again and again. He is first fully on board before he enlists others to join him. That is important. With leadership, there is little separation between the thinker and doer; the teacher and student; the director and representative. They form a common bond in message and mission. Stated otherwise, Bob is the complete follower and quintessential leader rolled into one. Who can resist that combination?
The best way to communicate your message is in action that is consistent, firm, fair and unwavering. Bob was in charge without being in charge, which was part of his appeal. His “Two Sense Strategy” with DCF employees to act with urgency and common sense is consistent with this legacy.
At another level, Bob was comfortable with total transparency by openly answering questions of status and career possibilities. The professor-student bond was a dialogue with little differentiation between the two. When leadership is transparent, feedback is genuine, and confusion is minimal with ample opportunity for meaningful exchange.
Bob didn’t have a weighty syllabus but planned comprehensively. He left ample wiggle room to maximize opportunity for surprise. He didn’t prefigure outcomes but took on the thorny problems of process.
Leadership is the vision to see and the ability to serve. As you know only too well, Bob Butterworth has demonstrated this as a prosecutor, attorney general, sheriff, mayor, judge, head of the Florida’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, adjunct professor of Nova University, dean of the St. Thomas University Law School, and head of the Department of Children & Families.
While doing these things, he has been quiet about his accomplishments. His most visible role was when as one of the attorneys general of the United States, he and his colleagues successfully sued the tobacco companies for damages to lifelong smokers suffering with emphysema. I wish him well.
Sincerely,
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617 – 2504
Phone/Fax: (813) 989 – 3631, Cell phone: (813) 990 – 7472
Website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
State of Florida
Tallahassee, Florida
Reference: Bob Butterworth, Quintessential Leader
Dear Governor Crist,
More than thirty years ago, I met Bob Butterworth. He was in his mid-twenties and I in my mid-thirties; he an adjunct professor teaching a graduate course in criminal justice for Nova University and I regional coordinator for that university while pursuing a Ph.D. in social-industrial psychology at USF. The seminars were held at the University of Tampa.
His career was just getting underway, while I was a recent corporate executive drop out after forming a new company in South Africa for my employer, Nalco Chemical Company. South African apartheid gave me pause.
The 1970s was the only time we met, but we connected. We have exchanged letters but I’ve observed his career basically from afar. I sensed even then that he was special. You could tell he had social bearing and quiet competence. It was evident as his students; veteran police officers, attorneys, and aspiring criminal justice careerists paid him the compliment of complete attention to the tasks at hand.
Bob knew I was interested in writing, having had one book published (Confident Selling Prentice-Hall 1970), primarily on the subject of leadership. I had witnessed an absence of leadership in my work for Nalco in Europe, South America, South Africa, and the United States, as a chemical sales engineer, field manager and finally corporate executive trouble shooting across the globe becoming increasingly intrigued with the subject.
Not unlike Dionysus seeking an honest man, I was looking for leadership when I saw it personified in Bob Butterworth, first in those seminars, and then confirmed in his long career. How, you might ask?
He knew his subject but not his students. He had just met them. From the beginning, he took risks with them with an openness and confidence that displayed an ability to adjust to their needs, not his own. He embraced possible failure and therefore soared over it.
From the beginning, there was little separation between the mission and the means that might differentiate him from them, or them from him. He was unique.
You know this because you convinced him to head the Department of Children & Families (DCF) when the function was in shambles. He approached that challenge directly and empathetically as he did those first seminars. He created a structure and culture that restored order upon which others might build. Now, he is stepping down after his 18-month tenure at the age of 65 with a daughter readying herself for college, and relishing his involvement in that selection.
What is special about his leadership?
He is a student of what he does. He prepares himself by not only understanding the problem but the people involved. He is a people person. He doesn’t approach a situation with preconceived notions but is a listener, not a teller. I saw that demonstrated again and again. He is first fully on board before he enlists others to join him. That is important. With leadership, there is little separation between the thinker and doer; the teacher and student; the director and representative. They form a common bond in message and mission. Stated otherwise, Bob is the complete follower and quintessential leader rolled into one. Who can resist that combination?
The best way to communicate your message is in action that is consistent, firm, fair and unwavering. Bob was in charge without being in charge, which was part of his appeal. His “Two Sense Strategy” with DCF employees to act with urgency and common sense is consistent with this legacy.
At another level, Bob was comfortable with total transparency by openly answering questions of status and career possibilities. The professor-student bond was a dialogue with little differentiation between the two. When leadership is transparent, feedback is genuine, and confusion is minimal with ample opportunity for meaningful exchange.
Bob didn’t have a weighty syllabus but planned comprehensively. He left ample wiggle room to maximize opportunity for surprise. He didn’t prefigure outcomes but took on the thorny problems of process.
Leadership is the vision to see and the ability to serve. As you know only too well, Bob Butterworth has demonstrated this as a prosecutor, attorney general, sheriff, mayor, judge, head of the Florida’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, adjunct professor of Nova University, dean of the St. Thomas University Law School, and head of the Department of Children & Families.
While doing these things, he has been quiet about his accomplishments. His most visible role was when as one of the attorneys general of the United States, he and his colleagues successfully sued the tobacco companies for damages to lifelong smokers suffering with emphysema. I wish him well.
Sincerely,
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617 – 2504
Phone/Fax: (813) 989 – 3631, Cell phone: (813) 990 – 7472
Website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
Monday, July 28, 2008
THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER: VICTIM vs. BEING SPECIAL
THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER: VICTIM vs. BEING SPECIAL
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 28, 2008
“No preacher is listened to but time; which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have tried in vain to put into our heads.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist, Dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, Ireland.
A WRITER WRITES:
Over four years ago you emailed this to us. It seems to be a deeper exploration of the victimology concept you described recently, but it has a different tone. It shows more empathy for the plight of those who see themselves as victims. And, consistent with your core, it does not absolve the self-pity.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
I am flattered that you keep hold of things that I've written so long ago. It is humbling and also reassuring.
You are perceptive to note a seasoning in me, which, I believe, comes with age. It is the reason I am just now writing my South Africa book forty years after experiencing that country and time. I was not ready before as I told BB today.
You are remembered fondly and I pray that the bump in the road has turned out well for you. It is all in a life. As you have expressed so well, it is a spiritual journey.
THE REFERENCE ARTICLE
Everyone!
My daughter is a communications major and junior in college, and she asked me a question: Do you believe white privilege exists? If so, what can we do about it?
I asked her if she wanted the long or short answer. She said both. "Let me think about it on my walk," which I did and this is what my walk told me.
The short and obvious answer is "yes," white privilege does exist, why else would most good jobs and opportunities and wealth go mostly to whites, right?
But as I walked I thought it was more complicated than that. Many whites never participate in this privilege as they see themselves as "victims of circumstances."
They see themselves imprisoned in a socioeconomic class in a supposedly classless society.
They see the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. They see their jobs disappearing, their economic stability eroding, and opportunity going elsewhere, not to them. And they have done nothing wrong. But what is worse, they think they can do nothing about it.
Books I've read came to mind, one a scathing analysis, not of white privilege but of black under privilege and how it is essentially a myth.
This book is by a black intellectual admonishing his fellow African Americans to let loose of their defeatism and take responsibility for their lives. It was as if this defeatism was peculiar only to blacks. I've spent most of my life surrounded by whites bemoaning their plight.
I also thought of another book that embraces the rapture of lifelong learning, of grabbing hold of all that you are and finding the maturity to engage its ecstasy.
An old reliable essay also came to mind, which was about embracing life and not waiting for opportunity to knock on your door.
The books were John McWhorter's "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America" (2000) and Charles H. Hayes's "The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning" (to be published in 2004). The essay was "Self-Reliance" from "The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson" (1950).
McWhorter asks himself this question: Why do so many African Americans, even comfortable middle-class ones, continue to see racism as a defining factor
in their lives?
Instead of seeing racism as a given, he sees it as the ugliest legacy of his people in the form of the disease of defeatism. This cultural virus has three components: the cults of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism.
He claims this makes blacks their own worst enemy.
While walking and thinking of this book, I could see it was a disease not only endemic to blacks but to so-called "privileged whites" as well and how defeatism may have taken hold.
I thought of our American history. Some 400 years ago settlers, mainly Pilgrims from Great Britain, came to these shores to practice their religion and establish their culture in freedom sui generis, as a unique society, or class by itself.
Out of this grew a white Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) society that knew
survival depended on hard work with no other options. Emerson was to
express this essence in many essays of which one is that of Self-Reliance, where he
wrote:
”There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction
that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself
for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of
good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil
bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”
Calvin Protestantism and capitalism fostered individualism. McWhorter knows this is the base of the American character. Detractors of individualism often view Americans as irresponsible, narcissistic and self-centered. The individualism that has made America great is self-responsibility. And as Emerson has shown, self-responsibility can never be transformed into self-centeredness.
VICTIMOLOGY
Although black Americans have been part of America nearly from the beginning, the ugly hand of slavery has shackled them, but as McWhorter points out, no more. He argues convincingly strides have been made to establish a thriving black middle-class.
Yet he is saddened that many children of middle-class blacks lag behind whites and Orientals academically. Poverty, ghetto living and racism can no longer justify poor performance in the classroom, as these conditions are the exception rather than the rule.
It is also a white problem as well. Many whites excel, but many more do not. Ask any professor in a land grant institution.
Self-responsibility has gravitated to self-aggrandizement. This does not apply only to middle-class blacks but middle-class whites as well. Many have lost the sense of uniqueness and individualism and the self-responsibility therein contained. I wrote in "The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend" (1996):
"We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels
inscribed in our hearts. Everyone's life, without exception, are sacred,
unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one
actor on stage. The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the
bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves."
McWhorter writes black students are motivated to impress their teachers while Oriental students are motivated to impress their parents. It is a family affair. He finds this, as it should be. Curiously, he makes no mention of students motivated to satisfy themselves.
Yet he discloses his own satisfaction in being able to acquire graduate degrees from first-rank institutions, confessing his love of learning. It s this love of doing that is missing in the equation. He was the genuine article.
Not a copy. "In The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain" (1995), I ask the question: If you should lose everything, to whom do you turn? Whom do you blame?
During my corporate career, I saw colorblind privilege being usurped from individual workers on all fronts. My reason for writing the books that I have written has been to make them aware of this and rally them to do something about it.
Likewise, the McWhorter, Hayes and Emerson messages are not solutions to problems but ways of defining of them. The heavy lifting is always up to the individual, and that is the manual labor of thinking their way out.
Answers are never with gurus or self-help manuals but always in the individual's own heart, unique, based on a will to prevail. There are no short cuts, no substitutes. When that is missing, victimology becomes a given.
Identifying whites as privileged is a way of forgiving blacks for underachieving. The irony is that many whites also fall into the same trap.
McWhorter's writes:
"Black Americans too often teach one another to conceive of racism not as a
scourge on the wane but as an eternal pathology changing only in form and
visibility, and always on the verge of getting not better but worse."
It is the porous safety net of non-responsibility of people afraid to make choices, preferring to have choices made for them, and then play the blame game.
When I was a boy my da's Irish Roman CATHolic railroad buddies would sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and crying, "Woe is me!" They were white but had this black disease. They saw Protestant managers putting them down, keeping them in their place. They pulled suspect statistics out of their hats and adopted victimhood as an aspect of identity rather than addressing it as a problem.
McWhorter says blacks are doing the same. In 1960, he writes, 55 percent of blacks lived in poverty; today it is 23 percent. In 1940 only one in one hundred blacks were middle class (middle class being defined as earning twice the poverty rate); today half of American blacks are middle class.
The problem is that victimology is as prevalent among educated blacks with concrete success and ample opportunity. It is a cultural disease (and psychology) that holds on like a chronic virus.
My mother did everything possible to overcome the Irish strain of this virus, which I write about In the Shadow of the Courthouse. She would say, "You're big, beautiful and bright, heads will turn when you enter a room." It wasn't important how true it was. It was important for me to believe it because she was celebrating my uniqueness and saying, "We're going to build on that."
She emphasized my specialness to overcome my da's victimology, and of course realized imperfect results.
McWhorter writes:
"Every time a white person lifts her glass to a black person's Victimology, she is unwittingly contributing to the very interracial strife that she supposed herself to be against -- because Victimology is not about change; it is all about nothing but itself."
With regard to the "Cult of Separatism," McWhorter says, "I couldn't help thinking of how very few black people I have ever met who were so passionately interested in a subject that had nothing to do with being black."
That statement brought a smile to my face. A black clerk at Barnes & Noble sold me McWhorter's book, looking curiously at me and at the book as she rang up the sale.
"Are you a professor?"
I shook my head, "Alas, no."
The suspicion in her eyes said, "Why then are you reading that? What has that
to do with you?"
SEPARATISM
Perhaps without consciously knowing it, she falls into McWhorter's paradigm as Separatism is a direct product of Victimology.
McWhorter is a prominent linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
One of his colleagues, a black professor, invited him to speak on how the use of media had affected the controversy over the O. J. Simpson trial. He responded that he would be glad to speak, but that he might want to know in advance that he thought Simpson was guilty and that Johnnie Cochran (Simpson black trial lawyer) was no hero of his. He never heard from the professor again because, clearly, he wasn't a brother.
The author is not enamored of Louis Farrakan or Al Sharpton either. But he does admit that he probably would be a racist and of another mind had he been born before 1960.
Separatism has many curious dimensions. I can recall interviewing with the CEO of Bristol-Myers in Cincinnati in 1974 for an executive position. The CEO was a part owner of the Cincinnati Bengals of the NFL with Paul Brown the principal owner and coach. He told of visiting training camp and seeing all the rookies, wondering how the coach determined who would make it and who wouldn't.
Coach Brown told him, "Didn't I tell you? Losers and winners hang together. They separate themselves."
(Incidentally, I won the position, but the vice president's job was frozen when OPEC's 1974 embargo hit the US. So, I was hired and fired before ever going to
work.)
Separatism took another form while an undergraduate student at Iowa. There was a core group of us that always had lunch together. We were all what you would call grinds, setting curves and very serious about our studies. Gradually, some peeled away making the core group much smaller. They couldn't party and keep up so they voluntarily separated themselves from the group, never to rejoin it.
McWhorter shows how welfarism and even affirmative action has aided and abetted Separatism. He blames a cadre of white activists who weren't convinced that blacks could work their way out of poverty as whites and Orientals had. He claims white guilt fed directly into Separatist sentiments, making excuses for blacks that whites wouldn't make for themselves.
My da's railroad buddies said they would never play a "CATHolic" boy at the public high school I was scheduled to attend. Yet, they were wrong. I played varsity in football, basketball and track and won seven major letters.
Undaunted, when I planned to go to college, they assured me the railroad was the place for me, "You'll always have a job even if you don't make a lot of money." It was all about SECURITY in capital letters.
Fortunately, I had a Ph.D. uncle, my mother's brother, who was a successful academic and my role model. Having a role model cannot be over emphasized. "Deprived of role models who work, welfare children," writes McWhorter, "cannot help but develop a much less strong sense of work as central to adult existence."
The result is a Separatist sense that work is an option rather than a given when it comes to black people.
Separatism has the ring of self-fulfilling prophecy. McWhorter writes of people who never seem to connect, who are always passed over, who seem stuck in the slime of hate. He writes, "People black, white, yellow, and brown would rather not spend time with people who have something against them."
How true! A young woman once confessed to me she "hated Jews."
I said, "But you are employed by one."
She smirked, "How about that!" She was earning a good salary with benefits, only to one day be "let go."
She came to me wailing, "I never said one word against him, not one." I told her she didn't have to. He felt it. That was enough.
Given McWhorter's attention to these two aspects of his model, it is the "Cult of Anti-intellectualism" in which he reaches his stride. That will be my next missive.
Be always well.
JRF
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 28, 2008
“No preacher is listened to but time; which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have tried in vain to put into our heads.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist, Dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, Ireland.
A WRITER WRITES:
Over four years ago you emailed this to us. It seems to be a deeper exploration of the victimology concept you described recently, but it has a different tone. It shows more empathy for the plight of those who see themselves as victims. And, consistent with your core, it does not absolve the self-pity.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
I am flattered that you keep hold of things that I've written so long ago. It is humbling and also reassuring.
You are perceptive to note a seasoning in me, which, I believe, comes with age. It is the reason I am just now writing my South Africa book forty years after experiencing that country and time. I was not ready before as I told BB today.
You are remembered fondly and I pray that the bump in the road has turned out well for you. It is all in a life. As you have expressed so well, it is a spiritual journey.
THE REFERENCE ARTICLE
Everyone!
My daughter is a communications major and junior in college, and she asked me a question: Do you believe white privilege exists? If so, what can we do about it?
I asked her if she wanted the long or short answer. She said both. "Let me think about it on my walk," which I did and this is what my walk told me.
The short and obvious answer is "yes," white privilege does exist, why else would most good jobs and opportunities and wealth go mostly to whites, right?
But as I walked I thought it was more complicated than that. Many whites never participate in this privilege as they see themselves as "victims of circumstances."
They see themselves imprisoned in a socioeconomic class in a supposedly classless society.
They see the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. They see their jobs disappearing, their economic stability eroding, and opportunity going elsewhere, not to them. And they have done nothing wrong. But what is worse, they think they can do nothing about it.
Books I've read came to mind, one a scathing analysis, not of white privilege but of black under privilege and how it is essentially a myth.
This book is by a black intellectual admonishing his fellow African Americans to let loose of their defeatism and take responsibility for their lives. It was as if this defeatism was peculiar only to blacks. I've spent most of my life surrounded by whites bemoaning their plight.
I also thought of another book that embraces the rapture of lifelong learning, of grabbing hold of all that you are and finding the maturity to engage its ecstasy.
An old reliable essay also came to mind, which was about embracing life and not waiting for opportunity to knock on your door.
The books were John McWhorter's "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America" (2000) and Charles H. Hayes's "The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning" (to be published in 2004). The essay was "Self-Reliance" from "The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson" (1950).
McWhorter asks himself this question: Why do so many African Americans, even comfortable middle-class ones, continue to see racism as a defining factor
in their lives?
Instead of seeing racism as a given, he sees it as the ugliest legacy of his people in the form of the disease of defeatism. This cultural virus has three components: the cults of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism.
He claims this makes blacks their own worst enemy.
While walking and thinking of this book, I could see it was a disease not only endemic to blacks but to so-called "privileged whites" as well and how defeatism may have taken hold.
I thought of our American history. Some 400 years ago settlers, mainly Pilgrims from Great Britain, came to these shores to practice their religion and establish their culture in freedom sui generis, as a unique society, or class by itself.
Out of this grew a white Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) society that knew
survival depended on hard work with no other options. Emerson was to
express this essence in many essays of which one is that of Self-Reliance, where he
wrote:
”There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction
that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself
for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of
good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil
bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”
Calvin Protestantism and capitalism fostered individualism. McWhorter knows this is the base of the American character. Detractors of individualism often view Americans as irresponsible, narcissistic and self-centered. The individualism that has made America great is self-responsibility. And as Emerson has shown, self-responsibility can never be transformed into self-centeredness.
VICTIMOLOGY
Although black Americans have been part of America nearly from the beginning, the ugly hand of slavery has shackled them, but as McWhorter points out, no more. He argues convincingly strides have been made to establish a thriving black middle-class.
Yet he is saddened that many children of middle-class blacks lag behind whites and Orientals academically. Poverty, ghetto living and racism can no longer justify poor performance in the classroom, as these conditions are the exception rather than the rule.
It is also a white problem as well. Many whites excel, but many more do not. Ask any professor in a land grant institution.
Self-responsibility has gravitated to self-aggrandizement. This does not apply only to middle-class blacks but middle-class whites as well. Many have lost the sense of uniqueness and individualism and the self-responsibility therein contained. I wrote in "The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend" (1996):
"We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels
inscribed in our hearts. Everyone's life, without exception, are sacred,
unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one
actor on stage. The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the
bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves."
McWhorter writes black students are motivated to impress their teachers while Oriental students are motivated to impress their parents. It is a family affair. He finds this, as it should be. Curiously, he makes no mention of students motivated to satisfy themselves.
Yet he discloses his own satisfaction in being able to acquire graduate degrees from first-rank institutions, confessing his love of learning. It s this love of doing that is missing in the equation. He was the genuine article.
Not a copy. "In The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain" (1995), I ask the question: If you should lose everything, to whom do you turn? Whom do you blame?
During my corporate career, I saw colorblind privilege being usurped from individual workers on all fronts. My reason for writing the books that I have written has been to make them aware of this and rally them to do something about it.
Likewise, the McWhorter, Hayes and Emerson messages are not solutions to problems but ways of defining of them. The heavy lifting is always up to the individual, and that is the manual labor of thinking their way out.
Answers are never with gurus or self-help manuals but always in the individual's own heart, unique, based on a will to prevail. There are no short cuts, no substitutes. When that is missing, victimology becomes a given.
Identifying whites as privileged is a way of forgiving blacks for underachieving. The irony is that many whites also fall into the same trap.
McWhorter's writes:
"Black Americans too often teach one another to conceive of racism not as a
scourge on the wane but as an eternal pathology changing only in form and
visibility, and always on the verge of getting not better but worse."
It is the porous safety net of non-responsibility of people afraid to make choices, preferring to have choices made for them, and then play the blame game.
When I was a boy my da's Irish Roman CATHolic railroad buddies would sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and crying, "Woe is me!" They were white but had this black disease. They saw Protestant managers putting them down, keeping them in their place. They pulled suspect statistics out of their hats and adopted victimhood as an aspect of identity rather than addressing it as a problem.
McWhorter says blacks are doing the same. In 1960, he writes, 55 percent of blacks lived in poverty; today it is 23 percent. In 1940 only one in one hundred blacks were middle class (middle class being defined as earning twice the poverty rate); today half of American blacks are middle class.
The problem is that victimology is as prevalent among educated blacks with concrete success and ample opportunity. It is a cultural disease (and psychology) that holds on like a chronic virus.
My mother did everything possible to overcome the Irish strain of this virus, which I write about In the Shadow of the Courthouse. She would say, "You're big, beautiful and bright, heads will turn when you enter a room." It wasn't important how true it was. It was important for me to believe it because she was celebrating my uniqueness and saying, "We're going to build on that."
She emphasized my specialness to overcome my da's victimology, and of course realized imperfect results.
McWhorter writes:
"Every time a white person lifts her glass to a black person's Victimology, she is unwittingly contributing to the very interracial strife that she supposed herself to be against -- because Victimology is not about change; it is all about nothing but itself."
With regard to the "Cult of Separatism," McWhorter says, "I couldn't help thinking of how very few black people I have ever met who were so passionately interested in a subject that had nothing to do with being black."
That statement brought a smile to my face. A black clerk at Barnes & Noble sold me McWhorter's book, looking curiously at me and at the book as she rang up the sale.
"Are you a professor?"
I shook my head, "Alas, no."
The suspicion in her eyes said, "Why then are you reading that? What has that
to do with you?"
SEPARATISM
Perhaps without consciously knowing it, she falls into McWhorter's paradigm as Separatism is a direct product of Victimology.
McWhorter is a prominent linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
One of his colleagues, a black professor, invited him to speak on how the use of media had affected the controversy over the O. J. Simpson trial. He responded that he would be glad to speak, but that he might want to know in advance that he thought Simpson was guilty and that Johnnie Cochran (Simpson black trial lawyer) was no hero of his. He never heard from the professor again because, clearly, he wasn't a brother.
The author is not enamored of Louis Farrakan or Al Sharpton either. But he does admit that he probably would be a racist and of another mind had he been born before 1960.
Separatism has many curious dimensions. I can recall interviewing with the CEO of Bristol-Myers in Cincinnati in 1974 for an executive position. The CEO was a part owner of the Cincinnati Bengals of the NFL with Paul Brown the principal owner and coach. He told of visiting training camp and seeing all the rookies, wondering how the coach determined who would make it and who wouldn't.
Coach Brown told him, "Didn't I tell you? Losers and winners hang together. They separate themselves."
(Incidentally, I won the position, but the vice president's job was frozen when OPEC's 1974 embargo hit the US. So, I was hired and fired before ever going to
work.)
Separatism took another form while an undergraduate student at Iowa. There was a core group of us that always had lunch together. We were all what you would call grinds, setting curves and very serious about our studies. Gradually, some peeled away making the core group much smaller. They couldn't party and keep up so they voluntarily separated themselves from the group, never to rejoin it.
McWhorter shows how welfarism and even affirmative action has aided and abetted Separatism. He blames a cadre of white activists who weren't convinced that blacks could work their way out of poverty as whites and Orientals had. He claims white guilt fed directly into Separatist sentiments, making excuses for blacks that whites wouldn't make for themselves.
My da's railroad buddies said they would never play a "CATHolic" boy at the public high school I was scheduled to attend. Yet, they were wrong. I played varsity in football, basketball and track and won seven major letters.
Undaunted, when I planned to go to college, they assured me the railroad was the place for me, "You'll always have a job even if you don't make a lot of money." It was all about SECURITY in capital letters.
Fortunately, I had a Ph.D. uncle, my mother's brother, who was a successful academic and my role model. Having a role model cannot be over emphasized. "Deprived of role models who work, welfare children," writes McWhorter, "cannot help but develop a much less strong sense of work as central to adult existence."
The result is a Separatist sense that work is an option rather than a given when it comes to black people.
Separatism has the ring of self-fulfilling prophecy. McWhorter writes of people who never seem to connect, who are always passed over, who seem stuck in the slime of hate. He writes, "People black, white, yellow, and brown would rather not spend time with people who have something against them."
How true! A young woman once confessed to me she "hated Jews."
I said, "But you are employed by one."
She smirked, "How about that!" She was earning a good salary with benefits, only to one day be "let go."
She came to me wailing, "I never said one word against him, not one." I told her she didn't have to. He felt it. That was enough.
Given McWhorter's attention to these two aspects of his model, it is the "Cult of Anti-intellectualism" in which he reaches his stride. That will be my next missive.
Be always well.
JRF
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
THE PRICE OF CRONY CAPITALISM
THE PRICE OF CRONY CAPITALISM
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 23, 2008
"Where's the outrage?"
Senator Bob Dole during his losing 1996 campaign for president.
Everything I've read from Dr. Donald Farr’s Network makes sense, and clearly people responding are very concerned with high gasoline prices, falling real estate values, declining graduation rates, and the sub prime mess with nobody seemingly in charge, not to mention that water, not oil, is the most pressing crisis.
Some, in the case of people like Dr. Farr living in California, have monumental problems, as they are essentially in a separate nation with one hand tied behind their backs.
I have three perspectives on this problem. One is the home, another is the school, and the third is the real problem, the leadership, which is nonexistent.
Home and school get all the attention as if parents and teachers are truly responsible for poor guidance at home and poor performance at school, when all the prescriptions from the leadership are iatrogenic, or worse than the problem in the first place.
Leadership has been disintegrating for more than one hundred years now and everyone in society across the face of the earth is suffering for it.
You cannot lose 20 million people in the hot wars of the first half of the 20th century and another 20 million in the COLD WAR of the last half and not suffer systemic societal problems.
We little people who pay for these wars with our lives and our capital have multiplied in number while only a few have multiplied in wealth.
In the early 20th century, there were a few hundred millionaires. Now, there are tens of millions of millionaires, and a few thousand billionaires.
War does this because war destroys the moral fabric of society when people are given license to let loose and send caution to the wind.
Meanwhile, the orchestration of these wars are always by people who have an ax to grind or suffer from the nostalgia for empire as did Churchill, Stalin, and yes, Mussolini and Hitler, as well as Emperor of Japan Hirohito.
Typical of our reactionary American style, the sinking of the Lusitania got us into World War I, and Pearl Harbor into World War II.
Behind these two Great Wars were men of devious motivation and duplicitous minds. But we little people are trained to go along with our masters, and we do.
Society is like one giant organism that breathes collectively with the same instinct for survival as if in the caldron of hell, which the 20th century happened to be.
It is hard to imagine that in 1900 there were less than one billion people in the world. It took 50,000 years to reach that number, but a mere hundred years to increase to nearly seven billion and counting. War does you see. The population explodes and explodes and explodes because the instinct for survival is the nervous tic.
This mechanism has been demonstrated since the beginning of time.
When war comes, the fragile nature of society fragments. Morality is always in the mind of the times, not in any sacred book or institution. That morality is a response to human crisis, which is always a fabrication, and predictably, each crisis is followed by monumental change as everything is breaking down, reforming, and not necessarily for the better.
Little people who had little before the crisis have even less after, but those that orchestrate these crises always share in the spoils.
This goes on in plain sight but none of us notice because we are busy blaming each other or blaming our parents or teachers or our children, never the leadership.
Leaders have us waving the flag, listening to their rhetoric and promises, clapping our hands, and believing their every word because it doesn't cost us anything, now. The cost is always later when nothing changes for the better, always for the worse, and always at our expense.
There is always an explanation by the leadership why things go awry, and always we had a significant role in why they went awry.
That is not quite true. No, not quite true at all. The leadership sometimes takes us off the hook and redirects our focus on to someone else to blame for our plight, but certainly never the leadership.
When I was a boy, not only did Catholics not divorce neither did Jews nor most Protestants. It was not because there were so many happy homes but quite the opposite. Divorce was not approved of by society. Not being able to maintain a marriage was a sign of weakness, or something being wrong with you. "For the sake of the children seldom came up," that was an invention later on. Certainly, no one would openly live together in "sin" in those days.
Now, everything goes, but is there more happiness, better functional relationships, more intimacy between people, more of a commitment to a common cause? I don't think so.
I would sense from what I have experienced in counseling more than 1,000 married couples in my professional career, and many others living in various shades of togetherness that people today are not happier but more anxious.
And that is where leadership plays its trump card of having everyone chase money, careers, celebrity, technology, narcissistic indulgence, and always on the ball of deception. .
War and chaos give people permission to let it all hang out, and once out of the genie there is no way to get it back.
I've written about the 1960s but that was only a pimple on the ass of society. Woodstock was one thing, but children in their innocence listened to loud music, slept and made love in the mud, smoked pot or whatever, as they were lost in defiance because there was no control; no direction; no consistency, and no loyalty, more importantly not even to themselves.
Why do you think people like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison died in their twenties? They were sacrificial lambs on the altar of hedonism in the hippie movement that wasn't going anywhere.
But strangely, in going nowhere, Hippie's knew the Vietnam War was a sham, and somewhere deep in their soul young people found the courage to say, "Hell no, I won't go!"
Four presidents were complicit in that war: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, two Republicans and two Democrats, and so it isn't the party that makes the difference.
How could you expect children to be loyal when their parents weren't loyal right under their noses, and flaunted it as if they were invisible?
They saw their parents lie, cheat on their income tax, make merry with their friends, lose control and forget how they behaved under their children's eyes, and then expect children to behave not as they behaved, but as they said they should behave.
In my long life, I have seen corruption, duplicity, chicanery, malfeasance, and betrayal by leaders who had much in common with Judas. Some of them got away with it, some of them are still flying high today, and a few had their wings clipped, but only trimmed a little. And I'm only one soul in the firmament. Like you, I read about them every day.
This is brief note but I'm going to mention a controversial subject.
My heart goes out to every child that was ever molested by a Catholic Priest, but my heart also is angered by the stupidity of the Church, its arrogance, and its flippant apology in Australia, as if the apology of a pope means anything when priests are meant to behave as eunuchs once they become ordained. The church created this hell and its leadership now gives its Dante's definition.
Predator and prey are both victims in a society orchestrated by leaderless leadership.
Only yesterday, I was listening to my son and his friends blaming the Mexicans and African Americans for everything from high gas prices to the lack of jobs, to so many people on the dole, while not being responsible and on and on.
I have had the privilege to be in leadership positions and I will tell you one aspect of leadership that leaders share in common and that is the consummate skill to find convenient scapegoat to deflect criticism.
Currently, the economy is in trouble for mainly errors committed by Republicans and Democrats, who have had sweetheart arrangements with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when they were in banking or real estate or government, or lobbying government, or in some other connection with the current sub prime fiasco.
The other day listening to C-span, a caller called in and said, "I lost my home. I make $9 an hour and my real estate broker closed a contract for me for a house costing $238,000. How could he do that?"
He could do that because people like secretary of treasury Henry Paulson, formerly head of Goldman Sachs investment bank with close ties with Democratic-dominated Fannie Mae turned a blind eye, as did several other investment banks.
Paulson didn't want anything to jeopardize his abundant salary then, and now he doesn't want to ruffle the feathers of investment bankers too much.
Democrat Jim Johnson was CEO for Fannie Mae in the 1990s and made $9.5 million a year on this crony capitalism.
You could say how could this guy making $9 an hour expect to be able to afford a house costing $238,000? He couldn't, in fact he didn't have a clue. "I was caught up in the euphoria," he said, "when the broker said, 'Not to worry,' everything will work out okay, besides, if you get into trouble, you can always sell it for more than you paid," so stay cool.
While little Jimmy or Johnny, Sally or Sarah is not behaving in school, and parents and teachers are on the rack for their poor performance, people in power have done a number on everyone and you can go all the way back to the First World War for evidence.
If you have watched the three-hour PBS series "The War of the World," you know this historian gives ample proof that the First and Second World War were both mistakes.
What is your point Dr. Fisher?
My point is that there is no point in pointing fingers at ground level. Most parents, even single parents are doing the best jobs they know how. Most teachers are doing the best job they know how as well. As for the children, they are caught in the confusion between home and school where parents and teachers are trying to solve problems they did not create. That is my point. Leaders create the culture, and we all behave blindly to its dictates, and suffer for the attention.
Leaders don't talk about school being fun, creative joy, and expressions of individualism. They talk about jobs, careers, high incomes, and all the material fruits that they deem so important at the expense of all the spiritual pursuits that make us human. Ironically, they get great assistance in this smokescreen from the church.
Parents and teachers are trying to do this but with little help from a leadership that keeps putting everyone in the soup. That is why I say we are pointing the finger at the wrong people, the wrong situation, and for the wrong reasons.
JRF
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 23, 2008
"Where's the outrage?"
Senator Bob Dole during his losing 1996 campaign for president.
Everything I've read from Dr. Donald Farr’s Network makes sense, and clearly people responding are very concerned with high gasoline prices, falling real estate values, declining graduation rates, and the sub prime mess with nobody seemingly in charge, not to mention that water, not oil, is the most pressing crisis.
Some, in the case of people like Dr. Farr living in California, have monumental problems, as they are essentially in a separate nation with one hand tied behind their backs.
I have three perspectives on this problem. One is the home, another is the school, and the third is the real problem, the leadership, which is nonexistent.
Home and school get all the attention as if parents and teachers are truly responsible for poor guidance at home and poor performance at school, when all the prescriptions from the leadership are iatrogenic, or worse than the problem in the first place.
Leadership has been disintegrating for more than one hundred years now and everyone in society across the face of the earth is suffering for it.
You cannot lose 20 million people in the hot wars of the first half of the 20th century and another 20 million in the COLD WAR of the last half and not suffer systemic societal problems.
We little people who pay for these wars with our lives and our capital have multiplied in number while only a few have multiplied in wealth.
In the early 20th century, there were a few hundred millionaires. Now, there are tens of millions of millionaires, and a few thousand billionaires.
War does this because war destroys the moral fabric of society when people are given license to let loose and send caution to the wind.
Meanwhile, the orchestration of these wars are always by people who have an ax to grind or suffer from the nostalgia for empire as did Churchill, Stalin, and yes, Mussolini and Hitler, as well as Emperor of Japan Hirohito.
Typical of our reactionary American style, the sinking of the Lusitania got us into World War I, and Pearl Harbor into World War II.
Behind these two Great Wars were men of devious motivation and duplicitous minds. But we little people are trained to go along with our masters, and we do.
Society is like one giant organism that breathes collectively with the same instinct for survival as if in the caldron of hell, which the 20th century happened to be.
It is hard to imagine that in 1900 there were less than one billion people in the world. It took 50,000 years to reach that number, but a mere hundred years to increase to nearly seven billion and counting. War does you see. The population explodes and explodes and explodes because the instinct for survival is the nervous tic.
This mechanism has been demonstrated since the beginning of time.
When war comes, the fragile nature of society fragments. Morality is always in the mind of the times, not in any sacred book or institution. That morality is a response to human crisis, which is always a fabrication, and predictably, each crisis is followed by monumental change as everything is breaking down, reforming, and not necessarily for the better.
Little people who had little before the crisis have even less after, but those that orchestrate these crises always share in the spoils.
This goes on in plain sight but none of us notice because we are busy blaming each other or blaming our parents or teachers or our children, never the leadership.
Leaders have us waving the flag, listening to their rhetoric and promises, clapping our hands, and believing their every word because it doesn't cost us anything, now. The cost is always later when nothing changes for the better, always for the worse, and always at our expense.
There is always an explanation by the leadership why things go awry, and always we had a significant role in why they went awry.
That is not quite true. No, not quite true at all. The leadership sometimes takes us off the hook and redirects our focus on to someone else to blame for our plight, but certainly never the leadership.
When I was a boy, not only did Catholics not divorce neither did Jews nor most Protestants. It was not because there were so many happy homes but quite the opposite. Divorce was not approved of by society. Not being able to maintain a marriage was a sign of weakness, or something being wrong with you. "For the sake of the children seldom came up," that was an invention later on. Certainly, no one would openly live together in "sin" in those days.
Now, everything goes, but is there more happiness, better functional relationships, more intimacy between people, more of a commitment to a common cause? I don't think so.
I would sense from what I have experienced in counseling more than 1,000 married couples in my professional career, and many others living in various shades of togetherness that people today are not happier but more anxious.
And that is where leadership plays its trump card of having everyone chase money, careers, celebrity, technology, narcissistic indulgence, and always on the ball of deception. .
War and chaos give people permission to let it all hang out, and once out of the genie there is no way to get it back.
I've written about the 1960s but that was only a pimple on the ass of society. Woodstock was one thing, but children in their innocence listened to loud music, slept and made love in the mud, smoked pot or whatever, as they were lost in defiance because there was no control; no direction; no consistency, and no loyalty, more importantly not even to themselves.
Why do you think people like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison died in their twenties? They were sacrificial lambs on the altar of hedonism in the hippie movement that wasn't going anywhere.
But strangely, in going nowhere, Hippie's knew the Vietnam War was a sham, and somewhere deep in their soul young people found the courage to say, "Hell no, I won't go!"
Four presidents were complicit in that war: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, two Republicans and two Democrats, and so it isn't the party that makes the difference.
How could you expect children to be loyal when their parents weren't loyal right under their noses, and flaunted it as if they were invisible?
They saw their parents lie, cheat on their income tax, make merry with their friends, lose control and forget how they behaved under their children's eyes, and then expect children to behave not as they behaved, but as they said they should behave.
In my long life, I have seen corruption, duplicity, chicanery, malfeasance, and betrayal by leaders who had much in common with Judas. Some of them got away with it, some of them are still flying high today, and a few had their wings clipped, but only trimmed a little. And I'm only one soul in the firmament. Like you, I read about them every day.
This is brief note but I'm going to mention a controversial subject.
My heart goes out to every child that was ever molested by a Catholic Priest, but my heart also is angered by the stupidity of the Church, its arrogance, and its flippant apology in Australia, as if the apology of a pope means anything when priests are meant to behave as eunuchs once they become ordained. The church created this hell and its leadership now gives its Dante's definition.
Predator and prey are both victims in a society orchestrated by leaderless leadership.
Only yesterday, I was listening to my son and his friends blaming the Mexicans and African Americans for everything from high gas prices to the lack of jobs, to so many people on the dole, while not being responsible and on and on.
I have had the privilege to be in leadership positions and I will tell you one aspect of leadership that leaders share in common and that is the consummate skill to find convenient scapegoat to deflect criticism.
Currently, the economy is in trouble for mainly errors committed by Republicans and Democrats, who have had sweetheart arrangements with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when they were in banking or real estate or government, or lobbying government, or in some other connection with the current sub prime fiasco.
The other day listening to C-span, a caller called in and said, "I lost my home. I make $9 an hour and my real estate broker closed a contract for me for a house costing $238,000. How could he do that?"
He could do that because people like secretary of treasury Henry Paulson, formerly head of Goldman Sachs investment bank with close ties with Democratic-dominated Fannie Mae turned a blind eye, as did several other investment banks.
Paulson didn't want anything to jeopardize his abundant salary then, and now he doesn't want to ruffle the feathers of investment bankers too much.
Democrat Jim Johnson was CEO for Fannie Mae in the 1990s and made $9.5 million a year on this crony capitalism.
You could say how could this guy making $9 an hour expect to be able to afford a house costing $238,000? He couldn't, in fact he didn't have a clue. "I was caught up in the euphoria," he said, "when the broker said, 'Not to worry,' everything will work out okay, besides, if you get into trouble, you can always sell it for more than you paid," so stay cool.
While little Jimmy or Johnny, Sally or Sarah is not behaving in school, and parents and teachers are on the rack for their poor performance, people in power have done a number on everyone and you can go all the way back to the First World War for evidence.
If you have watched the three-hour PBS series "The War of the World," you know this historian gives ample proof that the First and Second World War were both mistakes.
What is your point Dr. Fisher?
My point is that there is no point in pointing fingers at ground level. Most parents, even single parents are doing the best jobs they know how. Most teachers are doing the best job they know how as well. As for the children, they are caught in the confusion between home and school where parents and teachers are trying to solve problems they did not create. That is my point. Leaders create the culture, and we all behave blindly to its dictates, and suffer for the attention.
Leaders don't talk about school being fun, creative joy, and expressions of individualism. They talk about jobs, careers, high incomes, and all the material fruits that they deem so important at the expense of all the spiritual pursuits that make us human. Ironically, they get great assistance in this smokescreen from the church.
Parents and teachers are trying to do this but with little help from a leadership that keeps putting everyone in the soup. That is why I say we are pointing the finger at the wrong people, the wrong situation, and for the wrong reasons.
JRF
Saturday, July 19, 2008
THE PROBLEM WITH THE PROBLEM SOLVING
THE PROBLEM WITH THE PROBLEM SOLVING, A PROBLEM REVISITED
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 19, 2008
"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak, and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His Laws."
John Adams (1735 - 1826), statesman and second president of the United States
* * * * * *
People come to me all the time for advice mentioning my books in the conversation, books, which by their comments clearly they have not read.
CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s is a book in point of fact. It was misnamed because it is actually a book about confident thinking.
The book is basically about the world of problem solving in a world of predators and prey, suggesting that the greatest predator we face is ourselves, and the most likely prey to be consumed by us is that same self.
It is not other people problems, relationships or money that throws us into the soup. It is our own. We invariably put ourselves into the soup only to blame everyone else.
CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s is therefore a problem solving book with the major problem we all face every day looks at us in the mirror, and by God's mysterious guile, we seldom see the real face staring back at us.
THE SPOILED BRAT GENERATION PERSONIFIED
Recently, someone came to me "to write" something for him after he had been "taken to the cleaners" by his ex-wife for more than $300,000 and counting.
"I cannot see my kids." I was to imply from this that his ex-wife was an evil woman, as only an evil woman could do that.
He wants me to write a two-page something that he can put on the Internet and tons of men in the same boat will agree with him, and want to embellish him with money and support for his cause - to mount a cause to result in changed legislation more favorable to dads separated from their kids.
"It is a common problem today, and many men are facing it the same as I am and they have no recourse but to suck it up and comply. It isn't fair."
When he had calmed down. I said, "What is your problem?"
"What is my problem? I've told you."
"No, you have told me your frustration, which has flooded your brain. So, I repeat, 'what is your problem'?"
When faced with complex problems, problems we cannot resolve, we attempt to change the problem to one we think we can solve letting us off the hook. We hope by some mysterious accident the problem will solve itself. Notice how far from the problem this man is by preferring mounting a costly and time-consuming campaign to lobby for "changed legislation" than to face his problem today.
We're not alone in this type of thinking. It is all around us. It is how the government thinks, the church thinks, the school thinks, the business community thinks, the man and woman on the street thinks.
Solving problem by avoiding the pain of the problem solving is a plague, an epidemic with no way out because we try to resolve the complexities with old, well established but ill-suited practices.
The human community changes slowly to new experiences. It is a cautionary tale that has preserved humanity for at least 50,000 years. The reason for this is the brain, and its hard wiring.
Don't be confused with everyone with a cell phone attached to his or her ear or an iPod in his or her hands. They're as lost as everyone else only they are hip, which gives them a false sense of security.
Our brain has a finite capacity to process information. We suffer today from information overload. This is obvious, you say. Still, when the information fits the network and is within bounds of our ability to process the information, things go reasonably well. When such conditions fail to exist, things go belly up.
This man is attempting to deal with a problem that has grown in complexity and out-of-hand, and yet he prefers to think it just happened, and unfairly so, and he must do something monumental to deal with it, which is not dealing with it at all.
The brain uses the principle of the "match" by which incoming information matches more or less exactly the patterns already stored in the brain, or else it is not recognized and summarily rejected.
This is another fail-safe mechanism that is neither a negative nor a positive but a human condition of conscious thinking.
Present behavior depends heavily on previous behavior; present learning depends heavily on previous learning.
To be hit with changed values, beliefs, or imposed behaviors is to approach gridlock, or worse.
I'm writing a novel about my time in South Africa in 1968. Yesterday, Nelson Mandela celebrated his 90th birthday. He was in prison when I was in South Africa, and was not released until the 1990s, and became president of South Africa in 1994 with the abolition of apartheid, or separate development of the races.
South Africans are crying, people mainly white, how bad things are in that country what with crime, AIDS, poverty, unemployment, corruption, and so forth.
What has happened is that the repressed majority population which has been subjugated for 300 years, was suddenly liberated, and expected to behave as if they had been in power all those years, with an equal opportunity for a quality education, jobs, property, voting rights, and so on when they had none of the above.
The majority population of Bantu or Blacks is working their way through this maelstrom, and they will, but it will not be in my lifetime, nor should anyone expect it to be so.
Whatever our core belief system, it represents an amalgam of our genetic inheritance, social conditioning and cultural experience. The perceptual structure, whatever it is and has been, matches information to our existing mental models. We cannot dispose of them as we like but must treat them with the reverence and attention that they deserve.
In these times of rapid technological change, rigid belief systems threaten our individual and collective ability to cope, display confidence and exercise control. Chaos is a manifestation of our current frustration in this transitional and transforming period.
The problem solving is an adaptive mechanism but it must be understood and used or chaos follows.
THE PROBLEM SOLVING
When a person encounters complexity, the rules of social conditioning automatically translate the scene into another order for standard practice.
For example, the guy that wants me to write two magic pages of wisdom to place on the Internet to invite all other wayward husbands to rally around him, change the law so that deadbeat dads have more recourse to being deadbeat dads, doesn't see the folly in this.
As I said earlier, he has access to my books but hasn't read them or he would know that I name baby boomers like him among the spoiled brat generation that expects to have its cake and eat it too, without consequences. And sadly, these spoiled brats have essentially succeeded.
He is insensitive to the plight of single mothers, but only sees his plight in terms of lost cash. This is a mismatch between reality and self-interest. His Internet blog, should he realize it, will not represent a quick fix; will not rally tons of people to his plight, but will magnify rather than resolve his problem.
Complex problem-solving involves four systems and two pairings all of which are inner related, and which can prove successful, but it takes people acting like grown-ups and I don't see many of them around at the moment.
PROBLEM SOLVING MECHANISM
(1) TECHNICAL SYSTEM (the tools to deal with the complexities of the problem) is inseparable from the
(2) SOCIAL SYSTEM (the current relationship of the parties and their common or uncommon history, including all the dirty linen) and the
(3) PURPOSEFUL SYSTEM (the problem domain from all perspectives honestly wrought and ethically established) is mated to the
(4) CONTROL SYSTEM (the solution domain where a win-win proposition is meted out).
Good solutions are flexible; bad solutions are not. Good solutions never give anyone everything they want but everything they need. Good solutions are alive and sensitive to unexpected problems and changing circumstances. It is not simply that good solutions anticipate unanticipated demands, but they have the flexibility to absorb them.
All of you know I am a writer who has been writing for nearly forty years (Confident Selling 1970), but am still unknown. That is okay. I mention this because many established writers are still struggling to get our attention to the problem solving with shock therapy.
Most recently, I read WILD FIRE (2006) by Nelson DeMille, which is more disturbing than you can imagine.
WILD FIRE is about a group of high government officials in the State Department, Defense Department, White House, and so forth, along with billionaire industrialists who have conceived of a plan to solve the energy crisis and the threat of Islam.
They have in their possession several small dirty nuclear bombs and they plan to bomb American cities -- I'll let you read the book -- and blame it on the nations of Islam in the Middle East, justifying a blitzkrieg of nuclear retaliation by the United States against the entire Islam World from the Middle East to Indonesia. The code name for this is "Wild Fire."
It is a novel. It is fiction. But it demonstrates what some twisted minds might believe a problem-solving strategy to remove the threat of a changing world.
WILD FIRE is scary and it reminds this writer that I dare not slow down in my desire to advocate the middle ground to sanity where we are all one race, the human race, made up of men and women, with neither gender more important or more gifted than the other, or no people more important or superior to any other.
How would something like a request for two pages of whining self-pity generate this response? I don't know. You'll have to answer for me. I promise BB I wouldn't write these things anymore.
Be always well,
Jim
* * * * * *
Check out Dr. Fisher's blog: www.fisherofideas.com
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 19, 2008
"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak, and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His Laws."
John Adams (1735 - 1826), statesman and second president of the United States
* * * * * *
People come to me all the time for advice mentioning my books in the conversation, books, which by their comments clearly they have not read.
CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s is a book in point of fact. It was misnamed because it is actually a book about confident thinking.
The book is basically about the world of problem solving in a world of predators and prey, suggesting that the greatest predator we face is ourselves, and the most likely prey to be consumed by us is that same self.
It is not other people problems, relationships or money that throws us into the soup. It is our own. We invariably put ourselves into the soup only to blame everyone else.
CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s is therefore a problem solving book with the major problem we all face every day looks at us in the mirror, and by God's mysterious guile, we seldom see the real face staring back at us.
THE SPOILED BRAT GENERATION PERSONIFIED
Recently, someone came to me "to write" something for him after he had been "taken to the cleaners" by his ex-wife for more than $300,000 and counting.
"I cannot see my kids." I was to imply from this that his ex-wife was an evil woman, as only an evil woman could do that.
He wants me to write a two-page something that he can put on the Internet and tons of men in the same boat will agree with him, and want to embellish him with money and support for his cause - to mount a cause to result in changed legislation more favorable to dads separated from their kids.
"It is a common problem today, and many men are facing it the same as I am and they have no recourse but to suck it up and comply. It isn't fair."
When he had calmed down. I said, "What is your problem?"
"What is my problem? I've told you."
"No, you have told me your frustration, which has flooded your brain. So, I repeat, 'what is your problem'?"
When faced with complex problems, problems we cannot resolve, we attempt to change the problem to one we think we can solve letting us off the hook. We hope by some mysterious accident the problem will solve itself. Notice how far from the problem this man is by preferring mounting a costly and time-consuming campaign to lobby for "changed legislation" than to face his problem today.
We're not alone in this type of thinking. It is all around us. It is how the government thinks, the church thinks, the school thinks, the business community thinks, the man and woman on the street thinks.
Solving problem by avoiding the pain of the problem solving is a plague, an epidemic with no way out because we try to resolve the complexities with old, well established but ill-suited practices.
The human community changes slowly to new experiences. It is a cautionary tale that has preserved humanity for at least 50,000 years. The reason for this is the brain, and its hard wiring.
Don't be confused with everyone with a cell phone attached to his or her ear or an iPod in his or her hands. They're as lost as everyone else only they are hip, which gives them a false sense of security.
Our brain has a finite capacity to process information. We suffer today from information overload. This is obvious, you say. Still, when the information fits the network and is within bounds of our ability to process the information, things go reasonably well. When such conditions fail to exist, things go belly up.
This man is attempting to deal with a problem that has grown in complexity and out-of-hand, and yet he prefers to think it just happened, and unfairly so, and he must do something monumental to deal with it, which is not dealing with it at all.
The brain uses the principle of the "match" by which incoming information matches more or less exactly the patterns already stored in the brain, or else it is not recognized and summarily rejected.
This is another fail-safe mechanism that is neither a negative nor a positive but a human condition of conscious thinking.
Present behavior depends heavily on previous behavior; present learning depends heavily on previous learning.
To be hit with changed values, beliefs, or imposed behaviors is to approach gridlock, or worse.
I'm writing a novel about my time in South Africa in 1968. Yesterday, Nelson Mandela celebrated his 90th birthday. He was in prison when I was in South Africa, and was not released until the 1990s, and became president of South Africa in 1994 with the abolition of apartheid, or separate development of the races.
South Africans are crying, people mainly white, how bad things are in that country what with crime, AIDS, poverty, unemployment, corruption, and so forth.
What has happened is that the repressed majority population which has been subjugated for 300 years, was suddenly liberated, and expected to behave as if they had been in power all those years, with an equal opportunity for a quality education, jobs, property, voting rights, and so on when they had none of the above.
The majority population of Bantu or Blacks is working their way through this maelstrom, and they will, but it will not be in my lifetime, nor should anyone expect it to be so.
Whatever our core belief system, it represents an amalgam of our genetic inheritance, social conditioning and cultural experience. The perceptual structure, whatever it is and has been, matches information to our existing mental models. We cannot dispose of them as we like but must treat them with the reverence and attention that they deserve.
In these times of rapid technological change, rigid belief systems threaten our individual and collective ability to cope, display confidence and exercise control. Chaos is a manifestation of our current frustration in this transitional and transforming period.
The problem solving is an adaptive mechanism but it must be understood and used or chaos follows.
THE PROBLEM SOLVING
When a person encounters complexity, the rules of social conditioning automatically translate the scene into another order for standard practice.
For example, the guy that wants me to write two magic pages of wisdom to place on the Internet to invite all other wayward husbands to rally around him, change the law so that deadbeat dads have more recourse to being deadbeat dads, doesn't see the folly in this.
As I said earlier, he has access to my books but hasn't read them or he would know that I name baby boomers like him among the spoiled brat generation that expects to have its cake and eat it too, without consequences. And sadly, these spoiled brats have essentially succeeded.
He is insensitive to the plight of single mothers, but only sees his plight in terms of lost cash. This is a mismatch between reality and self-interest. His Internet blog, should he realize it, will not represent a quick fix; will not rally tons of people to his plight, but will magnify rather than resolve his problem.
Complex problem-solving involves four systems and two pairings all of which are inner related, and which can prove successful, but it takes people acting like grown-ups and I don't see many of them around at the moment.
PROBLEM SOLVING MECHANISM
(1) TECHNICAL SYSTEM (the tools to deal with the complexities of the problem) is inseparable from the
(2) SOCIAL SYSTEM (the current relationship of the parties and their common or uncommon history, including all the dirty linen) and the
(3) PURPOSEFUL SYSTEM (the problem domain from all perspectives honestly wrought and ethically established) is mated to the
(4) CONTROL SYSTEM (the solution domain where a win-win proposition is meted out).
Good solutions are flexible; bad solutions are not. Good solutions never give anyone everything they want but everything they need. Good solutions are alive and sensitive to unexpected problems and changing circumstances. It is not simply that good solutions anticipate unanticipated demands, but they have the flexibility to absorb them.
All of you know I am a writer who has been writing for nearly forty years (Confident Selling 1970), but am still unknown. That is okay. I mention this because many established writers are still struggling to get our attention to the problem solving with shock therapy.
Most recently, I read WILD FIRE (2006) by Nelson DeMille, which is more disturbing than you can imagine.
WILD FIRE is about a group of high government officials in the State Department, Defense Department, White House, and so forth, along with billionaire industrialists who have conceived of a plan to solve the energy crisis and the threat of Islam.
They have in their possession several small dirty nuclear bombs and they plan to bomb American cities -- I'll let you read the book -- and blame it on the nations of Islam in the Middle East, justifying a blitzkrieg of nuclear retaliation by the United States against the entire Islam World from the Middle East to Indonesia. The code name for this is "Wild Fire."
It is a novel. It is fiction. But it demonstrates what some twisted minds might believe a problem-solving strategy to remove the threat of a changing world.
WILD FIRE is scary and it reminds this writer that I dare not slow down in my desire to advocate the middle ground to sanity where we are all one race, the human race, made up of men and women, with neither gender more important or more gifted than the other, or no people more important or superior to any other.
How would something like a request for two pages of whining self-pity generate this response? I don't know. You'll have to answer for me. I promise BB I wouldn't write these things anymore.
Be always well,
Jim
* * * * * *
Check out Dr. Fisher's blog: www.fisherofideas.com
Monday, July 14, 2008
FURTHER THOUGHTS ON DEMING and A DIMINISHING AFFECT
FURTHER THOUGHTS ON DEMING and A DIMINISHING AFFECT
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 14, 2008
“We are culturally conditioned from birth, programmed to value, believe and behave in a prescribed manner, a manner dictated by society. Conditioning is a powerful force with which few of us stop to wonder. Generations subjected to a particular style of cultural inculcation establish behavioral patterns, patterns, which stubbornly refuse to desist when they are no longer appropriate. Why are there no Catholic priests who are women? Why no American popes? Why has the United States never had a woman or African American president? Why are there no great female philosophers? Why has work gotten a bad name?”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain” (Delta Group 1995), p. 86.
WRITER’S COMMENT:
Jim,
I think you will find this interesting: a new element has been discovered.
Recent hurricanes and gasoline issues are proof of the existence of a new chemical element. Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
Forces called morons, who are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons, hold these 312 particles together. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes, slowing down or actually stopping, every action with which it comes into contact.
A minute amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second to anytime from days to years to complete. Governmentium has a normal half-life of two-six years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.
In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration.
This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass. When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Manfred,
As usual, you're too funny. Your humor is always engaging and right on mark, as this surely is. Thank you for sharing. This is so true, unfortunately, but for cause.
Incidentally, the reason I had "DIMINISHING AFFECT" in the title falls right in line with what you have said, only I was speaking more directly to my fellow Americans.
By "affect," I mean "feelings" in the psychological sense, or awareness of what is happening, and making appropriate adjustments, as well as what is missing, and why. Our collective weak affect has dire consequences.
You know the story about the donkey, blocking traffic in the middle of the road. A farmer comes up and hits the donkey with a broad board on the bridge of its nose, and the donkey moves slowly out of the way. When asked to explain his actions, the farmer said, "First you have to get the donkey's attention, then the rest is easy. "
That is my American rubric. You have to get our attention before we act. It seems true in war and peace, or the economics of our health and welfare.
Bad as things appear today, for instance, most Americans don't feel the crunch except psychologically. Yes, we are driving less; eating out less, paying more for food and everything else, but that is perhaps for the better in any case. Self-indulgence has never shown our best side. Wall Street is not a good barometer of our collective awareness. Wall Street panics about once a week. It rides on frayed nerves, and most of us pay it little attention.
Bread lines, however, speak. I was four-years-old when I saw soup kitchens and bread lines in my hometown, and I've never forgotten them. It was the Great Depression. God help us if we don't wake up soon.
It isn't only the government that has played quick and dirty with us. It is mainstream America. We conveniently forget, "We are the government!" If so, we also are the isodopes.
American novelist Sinclair Lewis published a novel "MAIN STREET" in 1920, nine years before the crash on Wall Street in October 1929.
He wrote the novel to puncture the smug egos of Americans, their self-satisfied hubris considering their hometowns flawless, and most importantly, safe from the inane fluctuations around them.
Lewis didn't attack the government, but spoke bluntly about the inadequacies of small-town American life where the center is ripped out, as if the heart, and anything goes because it’s the Jazz Age, and life is beautiful.
This book was published two years after W.W.I, or at a time of great euphoria and celebration. What is different now is that small-town America is tired. Its central role in American life has been ripped out, its economic base depleted, its stability threatened.
At first glance, its seemingly innocuous retreat into diversions has raised little concern. Huge casinos are turning up on the outskirts of small-town America sucking its core wealth and identity from its "main street" center. It has happened in my hometown. It has probably happened in yours.
I have also dwelled on the implicit dangers of our collective preoccupation with electronic wonders, which valuable as they may be in one sense, generate little more than escape toys from self and others in another. People using them are constantly playing games of distraction or talking to someone from a distance. I say this knowing no one is listening or taking this old codger seriously.
The Great Depression was a heart attack brought on by wild speculation. It was like the farmer hitting us with a two-by-four.
Today is different. We are killing ourselves with silent invasions. Much has been written about the recipe for disaster that eating, drinking, smoking, and debauching can be. These hiccup invasions, though dangerous, are still peripheral to the more telling ones. I'm talking about what I wrote in "The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain" (1995):
"We live in a world of invasions. Countries invade other countries without provocation. Governments invade our bedrooms as they attempt to legislate morality. Men invade women as if it is their right. Television invades our homes and minds to create a wasteland of purpose. Obscenity as art invades our culture forsaking its role of promoting the nobility of man. Information invades all aspects of our private lives so that everything once sacred is now profane.
Conceivably, to invade each other's privacy is the basic way, perhaps the only way workers can relate to each other. There is little intimacy. The void created by its lack is now replaced by licentious gossip.
Humans think and dream. They love. Love requires intimacy. Without love, there is no intimacy. Intimacy is quite possible without being sexual, but intimacy is absolutely a disaster when sexual without being intimate.
Love is the sinew missing from the muscle of today's society: love of work, life, friendship, and being useful. Lust, greed and pleasure are the void fillers for those afraid to love." (The Worker, Alone, pp. 9 - 10)
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 14, 2008
“We are culturally conditioned from birth, programmed to value, believe and behave in a prescribed manner, a manner dictated by society. Conditioning is a powerful force with which few of us stop to wonder. Generations subjected to a particular style of cultural inculcation establish behavioral patterns, patterns, which stubbornly refuse to desist when they are no longer appropriate. Why are there no Catholic priests who are women? Why no American popes? Why has the United States never had a woman or African American president? Why are there no great female philosophers? Why has work gotten a bad name?”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain” (Delta Group 1995), p. 86.
WRITER’S COMMENT:
Jim,
I think you will find this interesting: a new element has been discovered.
Recent hurricanes and gasoline issues are proof of the existence of a new chemical element. Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
Forces called morons, who are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons, hold these 312 particles together. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes, slowing down or actually stopping, every action with which it comes into contact.
A minute amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second to anytime from days to years to complete. Governmentium has a normal half-life of two-six years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.
In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration.
This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass. When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Manfred,
As usual, you're too funny. Your humor is always engaging and right on mark, as this surely is. Thank you for sharing. This is so true, unfortunately, but for cause.
Incidentally, the reason I had "DIMINISHING AFFECT" in the title falls right in line with what you have said, only I was speaking more directly to my fellow Americans.
By "affect," I mean "feelings" in the psychological sense, or awareness of what is happening, and making appropriate adjustments, as well as what is missing, and why. Our collective weak affect has dire consequences.
You know the story about the donkey, blocking traffic in the middle of the road. A farmer comes up and hits the donkey with a broad board on the bridge of its nose, and the donkey moves slowly out of the way. When asked to explain his actions, the farmer said, "First you have to get the donkey's attention, then the rest is easy. "
That is my American rubric. You have to get our attention before we act. It seems true in war and peace, or the economics of our health and welfare.
Bad as things appear today, for instance, most Americans don't feel the crunch except psychologically. Yes, we are driving less; eating out less, paying more for food and everything else, but that is perhaps for the better in any case. Self-indulgence has never shown our best side. Wall Street is not a good barometer of our collective awareness. Wall Street panics about once a week. It rides on frayed nerves, and most of us pay it little attention.
Bread lines, however, speak. I was four-years-old when I saw soup kitchens and bread lines in my hometown, and I've never forgotten them. It was the Great Depression. God help us if we don't wake up soon.
It isn't only the government that has played quick and dirty with us. It is mainstream America. We conveniently forget, "We are the government!" If so, we also are the isodopes.
American novelist Sinclair Lewis published a novel "MAIN STREET" in 1920, nine years before the crash on Wall Street in October 1929.
He wrote the novel to puncture the smug egos of Americans, their self-satisfied hubris considering their hometowns flawless, and most importantly, safe from the inane fluctuations around them.
Lewis didn't attack the government, but spoke bluntly about the inadequacies of small-town American life where the center is ripped out, as if the heart, and anything goes because it’s the Jazz Age, and life is beautiful.
This book was published two years after W.W.I, or at a time of great euphoria and celebration. What is different now is that small-town America is tired. Its central role in American life has been ripped out, its economic base depleted, its stability threatened.
At first glance, its seemingly innocuous retreat into diversions has raised little concern. Huge casinos are turning up on the outskirts of small-town America sucking its core wealth and identity from its "main street" center. It has happened in my hometown. It has probably happened in yours.
I have also dwelled on the implicit dangers of our collective preoccupation with electronic wonders, which valuable as they may be in one sense, generate little more than escape toys from self and others in another. People using them are constantly playing games of distraction or talking to someone from a distance. I say this knowing no one is listening or taking this old codger seriously.
The Great Depression was a heart attack brought on by wild speculation. It was like the farmer hitting us with a two-by-four.
Today is different. We are killing ourselves with silent invasions. Much has been written about the recipe for disaster that eating, drinking, smoking, and debauching can be. These hiccup invasions, though dangerous, are still peripheral to the more telling ones. I'm talking about what I wrote in "The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain" (1995):
"We live in a world of invasions. Countries invade other countries without provocation. Governments invade our bedrooms as they attempt to legislate morality. Men invade women as if it is their right. Television invades our homes and minds to create a wasteland of purpose. Obscenity as art invades our culture forsaking its role of promoting the nobility of man. Information invades all aspects of our private lives so that everything once sacred is now profane.
Conceivably, to invade each other's privacy is the basic way, perhaps the only way workers can relate to each other. There is little intimacy. The void created by its lack is now replaced by licentious gossip.
Humans think and dream. They love. Love requires intimacy. Without love, there is no intimacy. Intimacy is quite possible without being sexual, but intimacy is absolutely a disaster when sexual without being intimate.
Love is the sinew missing from the muscle of today's society: love of work, life, friendship, and being useful. Lust, greed and pleasure are the void fillers for those afraid to love." (The Worker, Alone, pp. 9 - 10)
Be always well,
Jim
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)