IOWA ON A CHILLY APPROACHING WINTER DAY

IOWA ON A CHILLY APPROACHING WINTER DAY

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

© November 5, 2012

REFERENCE:

My readers are used to my serious pontifications on this and that subject, and may have no idea who Rita Waage is, but I guarantee them it will be a respite from my chatter.

I shall admit at the outset that I have never met the dear lady, but have had the enormous pleasure over recent years to read her homespun accounts of nature naturing at her feet from the vantage point of the state of Iowa. She is a writer with no claim to that distinction, but shares a natural tradition with many other Iowans, including yours truly.

Iowa has produced more than its share of writers over the years. Who can forget "The Music Man" or "Bridges of Madison County"?

Meredith Willson (1902-1984) of Mason City, Iowa was a composer, songwriter, conductor and playwright. "The Music Man" was one of many works, but clearly his best known.


Robert James Waller (1939- ) of Rockford, Iowa graduated from Iowa State Teachers College (now versity of Northern Iowa), going on to earn a Ph.D. at Indiana University. He then returned to UNI to be dean of the College of Business. When he retired in the late 1980s, he gave a "seven figure" donation to Indiana University. Notable as well, as an undergraduate at UNI, he was quite an athlete.

* * *

Clinton, Iowa, where Rita Waage resides, has had its share of writers as well. Marquis Childs, celebrated syndicated columnist, author and novelist, came from Clinton's "North End" known as Lyons. He gave the commencement speech at my Clinton High School graduation.

Kathy Flippo, another Clinton author, grew up in "South Clinton," the so-called area "below the tracks" or where immigrant families and working class folks called "home." My people came from that area. It is a place that no longer exists as Archer Daniel Midland (ADM) has obliterated the area, and constructed on its hallowed soil domes and towers, stacks and railroad tracks to process Iowa corn into a cornucopia of products.

Kathy is a "river rat" and knows the Mississippi River better than Mark Twain could ever know it, and has written books about Beaver Island and the many sloughs that make barge traffic hazardous duty. She has also written a definitive history of "South Clinton" that preserves the memory of this blessed place.

There is also Clinton's novelist Dixie Land, who has written several mystery and romantic novels, and heads up her own publishing house. She like Marquis Childs comes from the “North End” of Clinton.

Then there are Clinton’s historians Jeanne and Gary Herrity, who write a weekly column in The Clinton Herald on aspects of Clinton's history from its origin in the early nineteenth century to the present. Gary Herrity was a popular principal of Horace Mann and Elijah Buel Elementary and Lyons Junior High.

There are others authors, but these only now come to mind. Rita Waage differs with them in that she chooses to write in her original and homey style about life around her with no ambitions to publish other than to share her élan with readers on Dr. Donald Farr's network.

Dr. Farr, also a Clintonian from the “North End,” is a former NASA scientist, and now resides in California, but is active in many disciplines and activities. These include but are not limited to creating new universities, coaching, counseling, networking, and giving a platform for the likes of Rita Waage to make our day.

When I read Rita, I can feel the breeze, taste the fruit, touch the flowers, hear the birds, and smell the ambience she illustrates with the whim and rustic truth that would put a smile on the face of James Joyce. This is a sample. This is Iowa, Clinton, Iowa to be exact, on a chilly day approaching winter.

Enjoy!

And always be well,

Jim



CLINTONIAN RITA WAAGE WRITES:












Here and there a flower still blooming but the last week pretty much ended the growing season. Spent yesterday just pulling out annuals and getting the new north garden wall ready to receive the remainders of the perennials bought at 80 % off sales. That left foot has hindered the process.




But a little bit a day, getting it done. Have herbs and other flora hanging up to dry for winter use. Used Mom's old spices up by spraying solid wreaths with adhesive and rolling in the various spices and will finish with the dried sweet Annie, artemisia, and other dried products, then later will finish off as the season demands.




So lucky to have many varieties conifers and lots of holly, the ribbon I buy thru the yr. and can decorate to my hearts content. Grass still green ands only the oaks have a few leaves left. The holly really grew thru the fair weather and complete with red berries finally.




Cut a tote of ornamental crab apples to use too and it dried very nice. Will harvest the pinecones soon. They also were in abundance. Mark grubbed out the favorite source of native crab apples. They dried on the trees and looked good natural or sprayed to the season. The milkweed pods very big and nice too so having the time of my life playing with them all.




Have three businesses I decorate each year, they like the natural material look. One has a fireplace with a huge primitive mantel and this year want homespun, so bought old flannel shirts at Goodwill and cut up and use with natural yarns and do a north woods theme.




Back to the November day, the flocks of birds passing by have dwindled down, the ducks and geese on the river thinning out, noticed the neighbor across the creek on the other side of the woods, their pond is filling more each day with Canadian geese.




They have given up for the year with the bird cannon. Can see the geese sunning themselves on the top of the dam. The tree frogs and bull frogs silent, the crickets too, but did see butterflies yet yesterday but no woolly caterpillars as yet. The lightening tree has closed her wounds and pray her a good winter as love the life she shelters.




Mark took apart my limestone pile of stone have never used and made a foot bridge across the spring brook to the new lily and iris garden just below the cattail garden. We sprinkled forsythia thru the lily garden so should be pretty in the springtime with the new crab apple and cherry trees behind on the hill slope going to the north side neighbors perennial garden and lilac collection.




The birds cleaned the coneflowers and sunflowers already so will have to buy up a winter supply of bird food next time on sale at Farm and Fleet. Just a seasonal report. Need to get north to Dixie Foster's as we are on a quest for bittersweet vines for Fall wreathes now that Halloween over and have to bring in all the witches and ghouls and put to rest til next year. Mark and I made and dressed our army of ghouls and they still march in the perennial garden, and the black cat collection down from the trees and fence posts.




First year did not do the day of the dead. Didn't bake any of the goodies for day of the dead except did bake the witches fingers for Halloween. Son Ben creates and sells a lot of the day of the dead items as has a ready market down near Grant and Sacramento near the park at a landscaper and nursery business.




I am trying to sell some of the wreathes there this year too. They only take a 10% cut as they like to be known as an artist outlet. The new Ovaltine Chocolate Malt is very good for a light cup of hot chocolate, they went all natural and sure can tell.




Hope all is well and keep saying those prayers for those harmed by Sandy. Our friend, Donna Doyle Ries, fared better this year than last in Delaware. Only out of power until Thursday when last year it was weeks. But staying at her daughter,




Mary's, until furnace, etc. gets a go over. She dearly misses Jim almost a year now he is gone. Bless us all, RW the old gal in the woods, fighting those deer and enjoying the wild turkeys. Deer herd this year is 17 strong.




Hope you are faring well yourself Don, as the world travelers, Sally and her sister, are enjoying their latest travels. Be well. Stay away from those nasty yuccas, what were you doing? after a snake when you injured yourself?



AFTERWORD

If you have ever had occasion to plow through the somewhat fluid but challenging prose of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” you would see why I find Rita Waage’s report of her day so enchanting. 

She has a feel for life that if I ever had it education has ruined.  You cannot teach what she expresses.  There is a rhythm here that comes right out of her soul, and I thank her for sharing

This past year I was asked to be one of the judges in a writing contest of ten and eleven-year-olds on what the Temple Terrace Library (Tampa, Florida) meant to them.  There were some seventy entries in all, but one stood out. 

The words fairly leaped off the page.  You could tell by the joy expressed, often with poor spelling and even poorer punctuation, that the library was a window to a life he might not otherwise know existed much less experience. 

I read his entry several times, and hoped that he would win the contest.  He did.  I was told that he was a little guy with a beaming smile and so overjoyed he could hardly contain himself. 

My hope is that no teacher in his future ruins this gift by making him subscribe to a mechanistic writing discipline as was already apparent in several of the entries, seeing as they used words and expressions that might have their origin in a parent I should think.

As for this young writer, the discipline will come but must follow not lead the passion of expression.  The painting of life’s pictures with words, and telling stories ranks up there with great landscape artists and musical composers.  The inspiration when it is authentic always comes from within, never from without.

*     *     *

THE DIFFICULTY OF KNOWING WHAT IS WHAT

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

© November 4, 2012

REFERENCE:

Readers know that I make no claims to being an expert.  I’m simply an ordinary person who reads, thinks and processes information to make some sense of it, if for no other reason then to put one foot in front of another and move on.

My sense is that most people of the current generation voting for the first time are too busy with their electronic toys to read much outside academic requirements or their jobs.  Time instead is spent in texting ad nauseum. 

In the current election cycle, they fall into one camp or another and drift towards idealism rather than ideology.  Chances are they don’t see the world they about to inherit in real terms, a world coming apart at the seams, a world driven by misinformation and hysteria in presidential politics.

President Barak Obama will probably win reelection, but not on his record.  It has been a disappointing four years for most Americans.  He will win reelection on the strength of incumbency and the gathering storm of emotion in support of him.  Were he judged on performance, he would unlikely get a promotion to four for years.  But presidents are not judged on performance.  Presidents are judged on charisma, personality and popularity.  Incredibly, voters don’t vote on their self-interest.  They vote on the basis of what they know, whatever that is, versus the fear of what they don’t know and might get.  

Even my generation, which goes back to The Great Depression, is not what you would call readers or informed.  Most readers, I suspect, the kind with which I identify, come from families in which the parents were readers, in my case my mother, or tended to be naturally reclusive.  Americans have never been readers like Europeans.  So, in defense of being non-readers, Americans could take comfort in the chaos of European politics.

The Internet, e-mail and Facebook, among other outlets, have changed everything.  Non-readers are now readers, even writers, diary keepers, ledgers, with websites and elaborate indexes of preferred “friends” or social-professional contacts. 

There is a veritable explosion in communications, which makes my humble attention to the reading of books and periodicals insignificant by comparison.  My problem with this is that it is so much chatter with little depth or meaning other than instantaneous the in situ exchange to the process.  Said another way, there is no story here, and life is all about stories.

It occurred to me when I was a working professional that people would say things to you over the phone that they would never have the courage to say to your face.  Now, I’m told that same behavior is demonstrated on the Internet.  You can read a person’s sincerity face-to-face for that is the nature of intimacy, and without intimacy any stories that developed are more “out there” then hallucinations.    . 

This is the age of the irony of anxiety, an age when reality television is surrogate to a story line, while our greatest daily newspapers and network television programs have headline “stories” once limited to so-called scandal rags.  Now, these “stories” have become the popular diet of readers and viewers that find it necessary to be jolted out of their somnolence.  More than $2 billion have been spent on the current presidential political campaigns to corroborate this society manifestation.

Politicians and celebrities, authors and activists will do about anything short of killing to get their moments on television.  As a result, it has made international celebrities of obsequiously interviewers who throw them softball questions.  My problem with this is not “they,” but we.  We are complicit in this charade because we gave birth to this incessant carnival of dissembling.   

We all have a serviceable filter of skepticism bordering on cynicism that protects us from being unduly influenced by what other people write, say or think.  In this age of media blitz, not only in the entertainment industry, but also in academia, and in the political, industrial, and intellectual community, we look for stars not starters.  We look for those with credentials not ideas.  We look for those with pedigrees not provocateurs.  We look for those with Pulitzers, Nobel Laureates or degrees from celebrated institutions.  We never entertain the doubt that we may be passive participants in a grand hoax.  Somehow, we have abdicated control of our lives and forgotten the watchword,  “Caveat emptor!”

A GERMAN READER WRITES:

Jim,

I'm really impressed. You read so much literature - and obviously also specifically on Germany.

Joachim Fest worked at the same broadcast station as my brother (born in 1925), who was a program director at the NDR.  My brother, who had - despite our Prussian family tradition - refused to fight in the German army, and was not very impressed by Fest.

Fest obviously had written his book on Hitler because he needed the money, and was very much involved in the Historikerstreit.

I recommend to you the book "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War" by Patrick J. Buchanan (Crown Publishers).

Best regards

Manfred

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

“Historian” Pat Buchanan

It so happens I am familiar with Pat Buchanan and his writing, including this work.  He is an Irishman, a devout Catholic, former speech writer and operative in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan White Houses, a regular on the John McLaughlin Group on PBS television, a 1992 primary presidential candidate running as a conservative and isolationist, and a writer of revisionist history.

I say revisionist history because he has a way of reinterpreting the facts to fit his opinions.  There is a racist quality to his writing as it is apparent he has no great fondness for Jews.  It is also clear that he blames Sir Winston Churchill for the breakup of the British Empire, which Churchill adored, and puts this former Prime Minister on a slippery slope nearly as dastardly as Adolf Hitter and Joseph Stalin. 

It makes me fairly cringe when I read the Holocaust and all the other atrocities of WWII were precipitated by villainous policies of Churchill and not the responsibility of the maniacal Hitler.  Buchanan blames the weakness of the British military for Auschwitz, and by extension the Allies, as if the seeds of the Holocaust were not innate to Nazism. 

If WWII was not necessary, how can you explain the end of fascism and Nazism, the liberation of the death camps, the new democracies in Central Europe, the totally reformation of the German Republic to becoming the keeper of the peace and today the core to economic stability in Europe, not to mention the end of Jewish persecution? 

As a consequence, Europe has enjoyed sixty-seven years of relative peace despite the Berlin Wall not falling until 1989.  The previous seventy years Germany had been at war with France three times.  Germany has risen like a sphinx from its ashes to be a central fixture to global stability in the twenty-first century.

An American perspective as a boy

As often is my inclination, I explain my perspective by sharing some of my history.

When I was a boy, I went to the Clinton Public Library in Clinton, Iowa and was browsing through the aisles looking for a book, and came across the intriguing title, “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935) by Sinclair Lewis.  I had read previously the author’s “Main Street” (1920) and “Babbitt” (1925). 

The novel “Main Street” seemed like the underbelly of my hometown, the part you would see if you lifted up a rock and looked at the teaming duplicity and misery underneath.  I expressed that thought to my teenage friend, Eric Chalgren, on a street corner one night shooting the breeze after reading the book.  I wonder if he still remembers these many years later.

Babbitt was about a business world far removed from my working class family.  The complacency he described would stick with me, and be defined a half-century later in “Work Without Managers” (1991, pp 185-212) as “the culture of complacency,” a culture that had come to dominate the corporate workplace.  

Author Sinclair Lewis was a Midwesterner (like me) and won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1930).  His social criticism registered with my growing awareness of the world I was entering as a professional. 

Already, at that early stage in my life, I was questioning much of what I saw and felt.  It was the aftermath of WWII wondering what the future held for me, a poor Irish American kid with some athletic ability but little else. 

“It Can’t Happen Here” caused me to pay attention not only to history but also to authority figures.  My parents worshipped FDR but were nonplus about the little man from Missouri, now president, Harry S. Truman.  It was hard to imagine Truman as a demagogue who would morph into a totalitarian ruler, which was the subject of the Lewis book.  Truman did drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was very unsettling for my grammar school mind (see In the Shadow of the Courthouse 2003).

The Lewis book was scary.  Senator Windrip (yes, that was the main character’s name) was elected president promising to end crime, restore economic prosperity, and return the nation to pride, patriotism and traditional values. 

He defeats FDR, and immediately neutralizes Congress and the Supreme Court, setting up a paramilitary force to carry out his edicts, organizing concentration camps for those who opposed him.  The book had the feel of Nazi Germany. 

Published in 1935, the parallel to Hitler was even more frightening: Windrip loses popularity and then power, a coup d’etat follows, underlings seize power, the president is exiled to Europe, a power vacuum spawns chaos, which leads to riots and rebellions across the country. 

The book has alerted me to the power of bombast and how it plays on mass society fears to gain control.  Later, I sensed the same mechanism in play in the workplace, the church, the school and the government.  I believed then as I believe now “it can happen here!”

An American's experience as a man

As a man, I have been in organization but never of organization.  I have never been a joiner, but have been most comfortable as an observer and studier of organization and how organization behaves consistent or inconsistent with its stated function.  Likewise, I have observed and studied individuals in organization in that same context.  Writers have provided me with vocabulary to express such sensitivity in words. 

When I read Gunter Grass’s “The Tin Drum” (1964), which was the author’s first book, I could imagine Oscar Matzerath’s refusal to grow up in the rising turmoil of the totalitarian state of Germany under the Third Reich. 

There is a time, I suppose, for us all when responsibility and accountability for our actions can no longer be blamed on our parents, or nuns and priests in our care, but much fall to us.  It is that moment when we might prefer never to grow up.  In my time, there was no cushions, no excuses.  You either grew up or life crushed you.  That all changed in the 1960s and beyond when three generations found no need to grow up.  Now, today they are running things. 

The Gunter Grass is a novel of chaos, and is celebrated in part because of this.  It is also a novel in which Oscar asserts his individuality against a world alien to him. 

I read it during one of my international assignments for Nalco Chemical Company during the 1960s.  I saw great wealth and great poverty; I saw how we exploited countries and their resources to our advantage, and then I was introduced to South Africa apartheid and my life changed forever. 

Like Mazerath, I did my best to rationalize what I saw and felt.  But my mind would not rest.  The evidence was everywhere and it could not be misconstrue, not in my own company or among other professionals I would meet. 

Gunter Grass captured something of twentieth century madness, a world in upheaval, a world in which values were becoming inverted and indistinguishable, a world in which the tragic and the comic had become agonizingly ludicrous, a world I was expected to be grateful for my rise to comfort, but a world that demanded I sacrifice my identity for that luxury.  It was a luxury I could not afford.

Pyramid climbing became the name of the game.  Professionals could never find time to do the job they were paid to do, as they were too busy filling the boxes necessary for the next promotion. 

It suddenly occurred to me there were no adults on the premises.  All the modes of civility and decorum had been tabled, replaced by frantic competition at the expense of cooperation.  The irony is that this insanity was bridged by what was called “teaming,” which now found teams competing against each other as individuals once had.  Madness!

Chaos had become the outward appearance of the inner principle it sought to capture.  Crisis management became routine.  Symptoms of a problem became the focus, but now treated as if the cause.  Imagination and vitality, and creative affirmation had given rise to a dominant sameness everywhere.  People dressed alike, talked alike, behaved alike, and pain and discomfort were avoided at all cost.  Fifty years later, we have the world of today.

*     *     *

Prior to going on assignment to South Africa, during one of these long trips abroad, I read Hermann Hesse’s “Demian” (1919), which had something of the flavor of James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1916).  Both authors used incidents in their own lives to illustrate a growing consciousness through life encounters that led to their individuality. 

Joyce’s resonated with me easily as his background and culture was similar to my own.  This was not so much the case with Hesse.  The German plunged the depths of youth, not so much one youth, exploring the difficulty of personality integration in his time. 

Personality is the acquired self, the self that is a product of society, whereas essence is inherited characteristics of the individual.  When personality and essence are out of balance, so then, too, are the times.  In that sense, you might say Hesse was prophetic.

Having read some Freud, Adler and Jung, I could see the influence of that psychoanalytical tradition on the novelist.  The author was concerned with the self-knowledge necessary to produce a maturity specific to cope in a changing world through the force of will.  It would prove a crisis to me in South Africa (I write about this in my unpublished novel, A Green Island in a Black Sea).

*     *     *   

Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” (1912) was read in one sitting, as it is quite short.  By contrast, I was a young man, while Gustave von Aschenbach, protagonist of the story, is a famous middle-aged writer.  It resonated with me, I suppose, because of its psychological intensity and tragic power to show how aging passion can survive in the midst of the bubonic plague. 

Gustave has lived a disciplined and exemplary life, but is aging and near physical collapse if not death.  He sees a beautiful boy in Venice, who epitomizes his ego ideal in a city surrounded with evidence of the plague, and falls passionately in love with this vision of the boy. 

The denouement of the story comes when the writer is again watching Tadzio (his name) playing with his friends on the beach.  He is pushed to the ground and his face pressed into the sand, then the boys run off.  Humiliated and hurt, the youth walks down to the water, looking seaward, a young Saint Sebastian to the writer, and then turns and looks directly at him.  It overwhelms him with emotions; he tries to rise, only to fall back into his chair, Tadzio wanders off.  He dies that night in his room, a victim of the plague.

Mann brings together in this book conflicting themes of life and death that have held singular fascination for me since my da’s death three days after his fiftieth birthday to multiple myeolma.  I have never taken a single day for granted since. 

It dawned on me that trained in science I saw the world controlled by art.  Like many other projects in my life, the gestation period has sometimes been quite long, but often when it has come to fruition the influence of artists was apparent.  This fact is celebrated in “Profiles of the Leader-as-Artist”  (www.peripateticphilosopher.com, March 27, 2004), a work that has appeared in publications around the globe, but was inspired less by the principals profiled then by such authors as Grass, Hesse, Joyce and Mann.  Incidentally, only Joyce among this group failed to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. 

Historikerstreit

It is true that there is a German influence to my thinking and writing, but I am not alone in this affinity.  Alan Bloom wrote a powerful book in 1987 about this fact in “The Closing of the American Mind.” 

Bloom was a professor at the University of Chicago, and a colleague of Nobel Laureate Saul Bellows.  “Closing” was about higher education and its failure to prepare students for life.  I saw verification; you might even say vindication, for my suspicions when it came to “cultural studies,” and the new wave of “cultural psychology” and “cultural psycho-neurology.”  Bloom saw the “openness” of academia actually closing young students’ minds to the realities they were to encounter. 

It was a charade in the corporation to have an “open door” policy, which was anything but, while in contrast, those who preferred close doors to their offices were most likely to be the most open to those that entered. 

This is mentioned here because I “histoikerstreit” means historical quarrel of matters historical, intellectual or political.  That is precisely what Bloom’s book is about.  Critics, mainly other academics, came out of the woodwork to charge him of all sorts of crimes, including betrayal of his colleagues.

What stayed with me with me the most was the many facets the German influence is endemic to the American character and American culture.

Now, you have a connection with Joachim Fest with which I cannot identify.  I am currently rereading his “Hitler” (1973), and find it spellbinding.  Whether I will reread other Hitler treatments, I don’t know. 

As BB can attest, when I develop an interest, as I have with Freud and Einstein among others, I tend to behave close to a scholar.  To give you a sense of this, here is only part of my library on Hitler and Nazism:

(1)   Hitler in Vienna: 12907-1913 by J. Sydney Jones, 1983

(2)   Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship by Brigitte Hamann, 1999

(3)   The Last Days of Hitler by Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1971

(4)   Dictionary of The Third Reich by James Taylor and Warren Shaw, 1997

(5)   Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs by Albert Speer, 1970

(6)   Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny

(7)   Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum, 1977

(8)   Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet: Hitler by Fritz Redlich, 1998

(9)   The Hidden Hitler by Lothar Machtan, 2001

(10)                       The Hitler of History by John Lukacs, 1997

(11)                       The Man Who Invented Hitler: The Making of the Fuhrer by David Lewis, 2003

(12)                       The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report by Walter C. Langer, 1972

(13)                       Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bulloch, 1962

(14)                       The Birth of the Nazis: How the Freikorps Blazed a Trail for Hitler by Nigel Jones, 2004

(15)                       The Secret Diaries of Hitler’s Doctor by David Irving, 1983

(16)                       Blood & Iron: From Bismarck to Hitler: the von Moltke Family’s Impact on German History by Otto Friedrich, 1995

(17)                       Hitler by Joachim C. Fest, 1973

These are representative, and as you can see, from many different perspectives without anyone being sympathetic to the former dictator.  That is why Pat Buchanan’s book is in stark contrast.  My wonder is if James Buchanan our fifteenth President of the United States (1857-1861), or president before Abraham Lincoln, is a relative of Pat Buchanan. 

My sense is these volumes capture a great deal of the historiography of Germany after WWII.  As mentioned earlier, I don’t think Americans should take any comfort in “this” only happening elsewhere, as the seeds of malevolence are quite apparent in the American culture.

*     *     *

Finally, my research of that European period also includes an extensive library on the Roman Catholic Papacy, especially that of Cardinal Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII.  My ship, the flagship of the Sixth Fleet (USS Salem CA-139), had a private audience with the pope shortly before his death.  The ship’s photographer captured me on the aisle as the pope came by carried in the papal chair by the Swiss guards.  It reminds me now of “six degrees of separation,” the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world.

I purchased a book at the Book Nook of our local library on the subject: “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age” (2003) by Duncan J. Watts.  It is mentioned here because the idea didn’t come from a scientist or mathematician.  It came from a short story writer, John Guare.  Pay attention to artists.  They are often light years ahead of scientists.  

Be always well,

Jim

EYES WIDE SHUT!

EYES WIDE SHUT!

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

© October 31, 2012

A READER WRITES:

I read your take on Edward Bernays’s “The Engineering of Consent and OD.”  It is apparent you like Bernays.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I suppose the reason Edward Bernays (Engineering of Concent and OD) interested me is the same reason Gustave Le Bon, and others of the same ilk do.  OD relates to the mindset of the organization, which includes "the crowd."

For example, I've read several histories of Nazi Germany including Joachim Fest's "Hiter," and his "Speer," Alan Bullock's "Hitler," and about twenty other volumes, mainly, because it fascinates me how the crowd is energized, manipulated and ultimately directed away from its best interests. 

Now I'm set to reading "Not Me: Memoirs of a German Childhood" (2012), a manuscript left by Fest, who died at nearly 80 in 2006.  I'm also rereading his other books.

I'm planning to read "The Occupy Handbook" by Janet Byrne to get a better sense of that crowd moment (I can't call it a movement).

What intrigues me about "Not Me" is what the Fest family endured because it refused to be sucked into the Nazi moment.  The book is largely about the father who was a staunch German Catholic with incredible courage and unfailing perception of the Nazi betrayal of the German people and its culture.

I come from a staunch Irish Catholic family, a family with nuns and priests in the family tree, but I wonder if my family could stand up to what the Fest family did, losing their upper middle class status, their friends and forced to live in veritable poverty and isolation while surrounded by a nation of Nazi sympathizers. 

Fest doesn't see his family as heroic, but as people who held deep beliefs that couldn't be easily changed.  A quote from the nineteenth century historian Leopold von Ranks puts this in perspective:

Neither blindness nor ignorance corrupts people and governments.  They soon realize where the path they have taken is leading them.  But there is an impulse within them, favored by their natures and reinforced by their habits, which they do not resist; it continues to propel them forward as long as they have a remnant of strength.  He who overcomes himself is divine.  Most see their ruin before their eyes, but they go on into it.

This is as true today when we embrace fads and panaceas at the expense of our core values and beliefs.  The sense of danger and even dread plays at the base of our reptilian brains, as we do so, but far too often it is not heeded for the mob rules, and we go into the abyss with our eyes wide shut. 

*     *     *

THE ENGINEERING OF CONSENT and OD!

THE ENGINEERING OF CONSENT and OD!

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

© October 30, 2012

Reference:

William L. Livingston III, author of “Design for Prevention” (2012), sent me an article written by Edward L. Bernays and Doris E. Fleischman © 1947, published sixty-five years ago. 

Livingston’s comment: “This essay is D4P in short form especially as it relates to the emphasis of front end design.”  He went on to say, “It is also the equivalent of "The Prince" by Machiavelli,” but for CEOs. 

Wow, I said to myself, that is some endorsement.  Edward Bernays, for those not familiar with the name, is the father of media “spin” and the creator of public relations or PR.  He also lived to be nearly 104 (1891-1995).

My interest, I must confess, is that I saw a remarkable connection between Bernays’s communications expose with organizational development (OD).

THE ENGINEERING OF CONSENT

Given that this piece was written sixty-five years ago, and is culture bound by that limitation, the reader might wonder what relevance it has.  As it turns out, the engineering of agreement that predisposes consensus is as relevant today as it was those many years ago.  Why?  Because with all our electronic tools being used essentially as toys we are the same hapless critters that we were then.

Bernays writes:

For only by mastering the techniques of communication can leadership be exercised fruitfully in the vast complex that is modern democracy in the United States.

He was writing of a much less formally educated society:

The average American adult has only six years of schooling behind him.

If that were not bad enough, he continues:

Today’s leaders have become more remote physically from the public; yet, at the same time, the public has much greater familiarity with these leaders through the system of modern communications.

Indeed, the President of the United States, if nothing else, is a media star, constantly on with his image appearing everywhere so that subliminally he is in the mind if not in one’s thoughts 24/7.

THE ENGINEERING APPROACH as PUBLIC RELATIONS

Bernays was not quite a contemporary of the French philosopher and psychologist Gustave Le Bon (see references to him in this blog), but he understood the mechanisms and motives, as did Le Bon of the group mind, and the impossibility of controlling and regimenting the masses according to an outside will without satisfying the crowd’s internal psychosocial needs. 

He is very pragmatic in his dictum.  You manage this process as assiduously as a civil engineer goes about analyzing the elements of the situation before he builds a bridge which entails:

(1)   Calculating resources, human and physical;

(2)   Developing as thorough a knowledge of the subject as possible;

(3)   Determining the objective, subject to possible change;

(4)   Researching the public to learn why and how it acts individually and as a group.

Public relations differ little with this formula today.  It is consistent with organizational development (OD) as well.  I say that because Bernays’s favorite technique was the manipulation of public opinion by the indirection of a “third party.”  OD is that third party in assaying the lay of the land and the problems that seem endemic to the system.  Bernays’s writes:

If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group, which they sway.

As Livingston implies in his remarks, CEOs could benefit from “the engineering of consent” because they don’t always pay that much attention to the front end, whereas Bernays’s engineer would know precisely where he was going and what he desired to accomplish.  He writes:

He may intensify already existing attitudes; he may induce those holding favorable attitudes to take constructive action; he may convert disbelievers; he may disrupt certain antagonistic points of view.

WHERE ARE WE RIGHT NOW?  STUDYING THE PUBLIC

It is not enough to have the objective clear in your mind, but this must be balanced with a clear understanding of the crowd, the group, the public or the organization.  Bernays asks:

These are people, but what do they know? 

In other words, what is the organic construction of their will?  How do we go forward without first asking ourselves:

What are their present attitudes towards the situation with which we are concerned?  What are the impulses, which govern these attitudes?  What ideas are the people ready to absorb?  What are the people ready to do?  Where do they get their ideas?

Again back to Livingston’s CEOs and front end attention.  Attitude is all about people’s predisposition to act.  If we don’t precisely know people’s beliefs, values, interests, attitudes and cultural proclivities, then we don’t know them at all, or how they will act. 

Given this set of circumstances, whatever we do is more or less like trying to pin the tail on the donkey blindfolded.  As absurd as this sounds, this is too often the case. 

One must try to find out what they (people) are in any situation in which one is working. 

That is to say, know the group formations with which one is to deal from every vantage point, that is, material, spiritual, economic, psychological and political.

STUDY THE LEADER

To function well, Bernays advises, select leaders who usually remain in a controlling position for stated intervals of time.  These leaders reflect their followers’ wishes and work to promote their interests.  In turn, they can only lead them as far as, and in the direction in which they want to go.

Study the leader to see if he has the make-up to realize that leadership, in the end, is complete followership, that is, if the leader understands the mind of the group that establishes a common denominator between the leader and the group. 

Once established, Bernays says, it provides a blueprint of action and clarifies the question of who does what, when, and why.  It will indicate the over-all strategy to be employed.

Study the leader to see if he has the flexibility and the integrity to modify planned goals and to change actions and methods that circumstances necessitate. 

This furnishes, Bernays says, the equivalent of the mariner’s chart, the architect’s blueprint, the traveler’s roadmap.  It is also happens to be excellent OD.

THEMES, STRATEGIES AND ORGANIZATION

Bernays sees the thematic brief as the story line, the strategic intervention as the structured overarching principle to be carried out by the tactics that flow in an ever modifying process to the completion of the task.  The mechanism is holistic, intelligent and organic.  In that sense, it has much in common with OD.

Too often the story line is assumed when no one has checked beforehand to see if everyone is on the same page.  The strategy then is reduced to tactics.  The tactics then go off the grid of the intended target due to unanticipated or unintended consequences.  The tartet is then changed to accommodate the new contingencies. 

What is actually accomplished, if anything, is far removed from the objective.  This can lead to dire consequences.  I saw this when organizations aspired to creating a culture of contribution but, instead, created a culture of complacency with passive behaviors dominating (see Six Silent Killers, 1998).    

This has been the fate of MBOs (Management By Objectives) and PAS (Performance Appraisal System), exercises meant to energize operations to excellence only to see them wandering far off the grid of intended purpose.  They became ends in themselves instead of means to any useful ends. 

An organization when there is a disconnect between purpose and performance can lead to unusual internal stress and strain that finds it unable to recognize much less cope with external demands.  Markets disappear, manpower needs shift, and the economics of survival too often gravitate to panic mode.

Here is how Bernays looks at themes, strategies and communications:

Do not think of tactics in terms of segmental approaches.  The problem is not to get articles into a newspaper or obtain radio time or arrange a motion picture newsreel; it is rather to set in motion a broad activity (strategy), the success of which depends on interlocking (complementary) phases and elements of the proposed strategy, implemented by tactics that are timed to the moment of maximum effectiveness.

Livingston is so right on when he insists this short document is a manifesto for CEOs alerting them as to how routine practices (e.g., MBOs and PAS) can cripple operations.  Bernays writes:

An action (or activity) held over but one day (that may no longer be relevant) may fall completely flat.  Skilled and imaginative timing has determined the success of many mass movements and campaigns.

Management is a dinosaur and it has been now for several generations, yet it operates with the hubris that it is irreplaceable (see Work Without Managers, 1991), which is not the case at all. 

We have had a revolution in what is considered “work,” and with the exception of a few high-tech companies, work is defined, scripted, implemented and performed as if most workers have those "six years of formal education" that Bernays speaks about. 

Moreover, we are in a machine age, but it is the second machine age, which finds that new machine too often the master and the worker too often the machine's willing slave. 

This need not be.  Bernays was a pioneer in media and a student of Freudian theory and the changing nature of the American culture.  He stepped outside his discipline to learn how social psychological and anthropological research was changing the conception of people as operatives. 

He recognized how cultures clashed and how events out of that collision change people; how these changes do not occur by accident but are driven by forces meant to accomplish some purpose, and that that purpose is influenced by the acceptance of certain ideas, which lead inevitably to certain actions.  In his words, he explains it thusly:

Events may set up a chain reaction.  By harnessing the energies of group leaders, the engineer of consent can stimulate them to set in motion activities of their own.  They will organize additional, specialized, subsidiary events, all of which will further dramatize the basic theme (the story line). 

This is Livingston’s “front end” attention, which he gives in his “Design for Prevention” (2012).  If the preparatory work is done comprehensively and completely, if everything that should go into the equation is properly understood and executed with precision, then the outcome is organic and flows naturally to its purpose. 

Bernays says:

Communication is the key to engineering consent for social action.

I couldn’t agree with him more.  He continues:

Words, sounds, and pictures accomplish little unless they are the tools of a soundly thought out plan and carefully organized method.  If the plans are well formulated and the proper use is made of them, the ideas conveyed by the words will become part and parcel of the people themselves.

An OD specialist can go into a workplace and can gain an understanding of that workplace without speaking to a single soul.  He does this by looking around, studying behavior, and absorbing the place.  He can tell in that obsevation whether or not the words are part and parcel of the people themselves, or if there is a great disconnect.  Bernays saw this in terms of public relations whereas I see it in terms of OD. 

With OD the language expressed is in behavior in which the word is, indeed, action:

The structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates organizational behavior; organizational behavior establishes whether the organization thrives or even survives.

*     *     *

A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS -- The Tyranny of Politics in the Age of Executive Collapse in the Office of the President

A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS – The Tyranny of Politics in the Age of Executive Collapse in the Office of the President

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

© October 27, 2012

The quadrennial madness of presidential politics seems to get less tolerable as one ages, at least that has been my experience.  When a political ad flares up on the television screen, I hit the mute button. 

Years ago I did this on a commercial ad, and my father-in-law said, “You can’t do that!  How are those people expected to sell their products?”

I answered, “By putting that money to better use by making quality products.” 

Two billion spent by a superfund blitzkrieg of Democratic and Republican ads on television, as I rest my case. 

I watched the score of Republican primary debates, the three presidential debates and the one vice presidential debate, have read scores of articles on the candidates in newspapers, magazines and books.  I’ve even watched Charlie Rose Monday through Friday with his cavalcade of experts giving their two cents on the candidates and the coming election, only to conclude that they are as clueless as everyone else. 

We live in a corporate society in which content and context have led to a confluence of pundits and personalities who believe proximity to the malarkey grants them an advantage, when I think they are part of the problem.

If I was a little green man from another planet, given the debates, alone, I’m sure I would conclude that Barak Obama was the challenger and that Mitt Romney the president. 

Looking and being presidential has taken a real hit, and media, the corporate horn of corporate society, is busy creating empty expressions such as the American president “is the most powerful leader in the world” when facts on the ground suggest otherwise.

Corporate society has spawned corpocracy, which I call the American disease.  It has now settled on the sick American presidency.[i]  We have moved in corporate society to an increasing reliance on the machine at the expense of the man, to drone on forward with robotic zeal not realizing how hapless we have become, and now we see it so clearly as presidential politics are center stage in this quadrennial madness.

FROM THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY ….

Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States (1829-1837), was a man not a machine.  He won the popular vote in 1825, but lacked an electoral majority as did his opponent, John Quincy Adams.  The election was thrown into the House of Representatives and Adams was given the nod.  It helped that Adams was the son of one of the Founding Fathers and second president of the United States.  Likeability was even important then, and Adams won on that score but was not much of a president.  Wouldn’t it be something if this election finds its way into the House to determine the winner?

Adams attempted to expand the executive powers of the presidency, but didn’t have the temperament to be successful.  Jackson had the stones to not only expand the powers of the presidency but to establish “the imperial presidency,” intact to this day.

He took on the likes of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, and distracters such as Nicholas Biddle of the Second Bank of the United States.  His detractors looked to Europe for approval, he to the American people in the hinterland.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. writes in “The Age of Jackson” (1945) that the Tennessee country bumpkin established lopsided authority in the presidency not envisioned by the checks and balances in the Federalist Papers of Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.   

*     *     *

The imperial presidency has been waning since WWII.  Power in the 1950s shifted to the Supreme Court as it stepped into the vacuum of governmental indecision mainly on civil rights. 

Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954 abolished segregation in schools but not in public places such as restaurants.  The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s had Supreme Court support, while Congress was forced to act after the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. 

President Lyndon Johnson took advantage of the moment pushing through Civil Rights Legislation.  This success was quickly compromised by his escalation of the war in Vietnam with the bogus Tonka Bay resolution.

After Johnson, the imperial presidency continued to fad culminating in the Watergate “break-in” and the “Nixon tapes,” the embarrassing defeat in Vietnam, and the near impeachment of President Richard Milhous Nixon, who resigned in disgrace. 

President Gerald Ford completed Nixon’s term, attempted to heal the nation, but lost in his bid for his own term when former governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter was elected. 

Carter couldn’t seem to get on track.  As president, he was a quantitative thinker who couldn’t seem to make qualitative decisions.  With double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation, he addressed the nation on television as if “it” had a crisis in confidence, not he.  In an open collar shirt and cardigan sweater, apparently to suggest intimacy, which was foreign to his personality, it backfired.  The unfortunate thing is that quantitative thinkers are slaves to data, and never seem to have enough to make timely decisions.

With the Iran Hostage Crisis, the nation went into a tailspin matching its economic woes.  Carter surrendered power to his Republican opponent Ronald Wilson Reagan after one term.  Reagan, hardly an intellectual, was a man from the movies who had treated the governorship of California and now the presidency of the United States as if it was a motion picture in his head.  He pictured a global shield like “Star Wars” and then built the greatest war machine since WWII.  It threw the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and ultimate dissolution. 

Republican George Herbert Walker Bush followed promising “no new taxes,” but pursued the First Gulf War, which forced him to raise taxes, and gave way to his democratic opponent President William Jefferson Clinton after one term. 

Clinton was a dandy.  Quick on his feet, a party boy from a small rural state, Arkansas, where he had been governor, he treated the presidency as if it were a video game in which he always won.

The United States enjoyed an economic boom during the Clinton years, which everyone thought would continue forever.  He managed to balance the budget and create a surplus.  Flying high and mighty, his personal and surreal dandyism caught up with him in a sexual tryst with a White House page, was then impeached, but unsuccessfully.  He left the presidency in moral tatters, only to be succeeded by a reformed party boy as president.

President George Walker Bush expected to have an Eisenhower style presidency, only to be hit with September 11, 2001 when New York City’s Twin Towers were destroyed by al qaeda terrorist attack with the flying of two American commercial jets into the towers.

Nearly 3,000 died.  Shock was followed by the awe of a preemptive invasion into Iraq on the bogus charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.  The Iraq war led to the war in Afghanistan, which is now ten-years-long and still unresolved. 

At the end of the Bush administration, an economic crisis surfaced, which resembled the Great Depression of 1929.  President Barak Obama, the first African American to be president, stepped into this maelstrom, but after four years has been unable to end the crisis. 

An ambivalent Supreme Court and dysfunctional Congress haven’t helped as Bob Woodward shows in “The Price of Politics” (2012).

TO CORPORATE SOCIETY CORRUPTED TO CORPOCRACY

Over my long life, I have watched the United States go from a democratic republic to a corporate society.  Born during the Great Depression, growing up during WWII, coming of age going to college and doing my military service then joining the workforce, moving from the trenches to the boardroom, working on four continents, you could say I have been an active corporate participant.

We talk today about the exploitation of workers in Third World not realizing the United States has been so engaged since WWII across the globe.

As a consultant and educator, I’ve conducted seminars across the United States for the Professional Institute of the American Management Association with participants from state and federal government as well as lobbyists associated with these workers.

If congressmen and women covered their suits and dresses with the decals of their favorite lobbyists in the manner that NASCAR drivers cover their, we would have a better representation of who runs the country.

THE PRICE OF POLITICS

Bob Woodward, who with Carl Bernstein gave us “All the President’s Men,” which exposed the Watergate cover-up, tells a story through interviews and observations in “The Price of Politics” (2012) that reads like a horror tale.  It is the high-stakes personal and political struggle between the President and the Speaker of the House and their appendages. 

The House is now dominated by Republicans many of whom are of the “Tea Party” persuasion, while the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd influences many Democrats in the House cowered by the “One percent” who allegedly own everything and don’t pay their fair share in taxes.

The book covers the summer of 2011 when the two sides attempted to come to a grand bargain by cutting entitlements and increasing revenue.  It totally failed, as these players on stage are manipulated the corporate string pullers off stage of corporate CEOs and lobbyists.  Nothing is as it seems.

The President of the United States appears pathetically weak and indecisive matched only by the incompetence of the Speaker of the House.  There is no leadership on display only sound bytes and jargon.  It is cruelly funny and even entertaining if it were not for the fact this is hardly the way to run a country. 

THE TYRANNY OF POLITICS OVER GOVERNANCE

I share some of my highlighted passages from Bob Woodward's "The Price of Politics" (2012) to give the reader a sense of this:

It (budget) is just math.  Don’t get yourself crazy.  Economics is not politics.

Under Keynesian economic theory, cutting government spending hurt economic growth.

The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. (This was said later) I don’t want the president to fail.  I want him to change.

The joke among reporters on Capitol Hill was that the most dangerous place in Washington was between (Senator) Chuck Schumer and a television camera.

Allocating goodies in negotiations is a little easier than allocating pain.

Excessive pragmatism meant that Obama’s views and actions were not easily pigeonholed (leaving) the left and right perpetually unsatisfied.

President Obama doesn’t have the joy of the game.  Clinton the game and all the players (Congressmen and women, lobbyists).  Obama really didn’t like any of these guys.

Be a specialist, not a generalist.  Focus on one set of issues.  Get on a committee that you care about, and then learn more about the topic than anybody else (How to get ahead in Congress).

Obama in his gut is a fiscal conservative.  There is a Blue Dog streak in him.

This wasn’t an olive branch.  This was not Bill Clinton, not triangulation, not Simpson-Bowles.  This was game on demagoguery (Congressman Ryan’s take on Obama’s plan).

Why isn’t Obama doing what presidents are supposed to do? (Congressman Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee).

A growing feeling of incredulity came over Van Hollen (Republican).  The administration didn’t seem to have a strategy.  It was unbelievable.  There didn’t seem to be any core principle.

Republicans want Democrats to sell their sisters, to give up everything we (V.P. Biden) hold dear without making any sacrifices themselves.

Jargon on both sides prevailed at the expense of thinking and talking clearly.

Revenue would not need a trigger.

Polarization had increased among the Democrats.

The president and I whupped ‘em pretty good (Speaker Boehner on Obama and him teamed up against V.P. Biden and Ohio Governor Kasich)

Obama seemed energized.

He’s a golf playing, cigarette smoking, country club Republican, who’s there to make a deal (Obama or Boehner).

Tea Partiers were dangerously irresponsible (Obama on his opposition).

You see how crazy these people (Tea Partiers) are (Obama).  Boehner is not one of the crazies.

That’s theology.  That’s your theology.  Just tell us which of these items you hate the least?  Corporate jets? (Democrats on Republicans)

We’re not going to keep going down this road.  We’re not going to keep talking about them until you talk about revenue (Republicans on Democrats)

It’s a scam.  The states were gaming the system, taxing doctors and hospitals so they could get federal reimbursements and then returning the money to the providers.

We may as well call it quits.

Cantor (House Republican) was stunned.  He had no idea that the speaker and the president were planning to hold separate talks (behind their backs).

He (Boehner) did offer a path to comprehensive tax reform.  I (Boehner) want entitlement reform.

I’m (president) for tax reform, but I’m not going to have a situation in which we have a vague promise of tax reform later – because tax reform would take a year, year and a half to actually get done, rewriting the tax code – but all the entitlement cuts are locked in on the front end.

The president asked if he felt they were on the road to a deal.  Let me preface (my remarks) by saying generally that I like John Boehner.  I genuinely think John wanted to get a deal done.  I don’t think he is in his bones an ideological person.  I think he’s a pretty practical old school country club Republican (in other words, out to lunch).  I like him, I mean, by that time I’d quit smoking, but I was making sure he had an ashtray.

Washington was dysfunctional.

Boehner’s probably a little over his skis here (Democrat on the speaker’s competence)

Republicans were demanding the tax code be made more regressive.

(Republican) Cantor thought, gee whiz it’s (White House plan to scuttle talks) going to blow up. The Democrats are going to blow up the Biden discussions and finger me.

The entitlement trajectory here is going to bankrupt the country.  Biden hung up the phone.  His search party had been a failure.

Ridiculing Republican sacred cows, he (president) said, the tax cuts I’m proposing we get rid of are tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires oil companies and hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners

With closely cropped hair, at 6-foot-2, Loper (Boehner’s policy director) was the ultimate Republican efficiency man.

I looked at myself (speaker), looked at the president, and I just started chuckling to myself. Because all you need to know about the differences between the president and myself is that I’m sitting there smoking a cigarette, drinking Merlot, and I look across the table and here is the president of the United States drinking iced tea and chomping on Nicorette. 

There’s discretionary (general and Defense), there’s mandatory (food stamps), and there’s entitlements (Medicare and Medicaid).

We’re not dealing just with talking points about corporate jets or other loopholes (Boehner speaking to the president).

Loper (Boehner’s man) found Lew (president’s man) obnoxious. Jackson (Boehner’s man) found Lew’s tone disrespectful and dismissive.

You realize that all the Democrats think we’ve got you by the balls and you think we’re going to give it up in one fell swoop?

I call that opportunity savings, as nobody knows what the tax rates are going to be.

Boehner’s staff worried that the president thought if he got Boehner in a room with the rest of the leaders and announced a deal, Boehner would fold in front of everybody.

Boehner wondered if Obama was using the meeting as a means of managing Reid (Senate Majority Leader) and Pelosi (House Minority Leader) who were increasingly upset about being cut out of the negotiations.

Boehner had no confidence the negotiations with the president would produce a deal and had to cover his own back by keeping McConnell (Senate Minority Leader), Cantor, McCarthy and Hensaling (Boehner’s team) busy doing something because they were really nervous about what the hell he was up to. And he realized that was an understatement. 

Don’t insult us, Pelosi retorted. You guys don’t know how to count (votes in the House).

There was often theater in these meetings.

The president and Boehner were each red-lining (drawing a mark in the sand) of each other’s proposals.

Golf, a game of recovery, was a good metaphor for what they were doing.  A bad or unlucky shot wasn’t fatal. Follow it up with a good second or third shot, and you could still find yourself on the green with a chance at par, or even better.  Negotiations were similar.

The predominate school of thought in the conservative movement held that you shouldn’t ever negotiate with Obama.

He (the president) calls me (Boehner) and says, you know what?  I’m going to have to walk away from this right now.  And to his credit, he said, I’m not closing the door to ever doing anything on this.

Boehner had realized that doing a deal with Obama would put his speakership in jeopardy.

The White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes (the core of why the road to nowhere became the only road either side could see).

Was it possible that The Wall Street Journal had such influence? …. What was clear was that Boehner had just got blown up.  If someone doesn’t come back to the table, they don’t want a yes in any form.

Hundreds of years of the history of negotiations suggested, strongly, that this is not the way you do it.

The speaker had to shift the debate to the more abstract issue of tax reform.

Obama was being subjected, dramatically, to the long, tortuous ways of budget negotiations and Washington deal making …. Obama was admitting that he was constrained.

Obama said he would get support for the deal from the business community, the media and the opinion pages.  But that was not enough.  Even at great political cost, he was going to have to be responsible, be the adult.

Prominent members of the House Republicans who are not only prepared to see default (stalemate), but in some cases are welcoming the prospects of default.

Biden (VP) jumped in.  We’re not going to become a banana republic.  So what is it going to be?  Or are we going to live or die on the election?

Votes were a touchy subject for the speaker and everyone knew it.

The president was still pushing for decoupling (entitlement reduction from increased taxes).  Republicans couldn’t believe it.  Even the White House staffers realized that the president still saw it as his sword.

The vice president did say consistently that nothing was agreed to till everything was agreed to.

Boehner had already concluded that the whole thing was a pointless dog and pony shows.  Was the president really naïve enough to think that he could get all these members in a room and come to an agreement on a deal?  That never happened.

You do not be disrespectful of the office of the president, he (Republican Barry Jackson) told the staff in Boehner’s office.  You just don’t.  It’s the worst job in the world.  They don’t need people kicking them in the shins for the heck of it.  But in the speaker’s office, respect for the office didn’t extend to the man who occupied it.  Jackson believed that Obama lacked courage, was a poor negotiator, and was completely out of his element in dealing with Congress.

Boehner said.  The president talks a good game, but when it comes time to actually putting these issues on the table, making decisions, he can’t quite pull the trigger.

WHAT DOES THIS ALL SEEM TO MEAN?

Journalist Woodward puts it succinctly when he says that historians won’t write about the Boehner (Speaker of the House) administration, nor will they write about the Reid (Majority Leader in the Senate) administration, but they will write about the Obama administration. 

He goes on to say that Obama cannot blame the Bush administration or the collapse of the Euro Zone, or the turmoil in the Middle East, or the rapacious nature of China’s economic policy or currency manipulation for his woes.  He has to lead!

According to the journalist, Obama is not comfortable in that role, or psychologically motivated to fulfill its demands.  He would prefer the comfort of bosom of his family.

The principals highlighted here talk largely in code and metaphor.  They also swear a lot (except for the president) and hardly ever display a touch of eloquence (again with the exception of the president).  

Woodward shows in the president to be a man still on a steep learning curve, a man out of his depth, and a man that would undoubtedly be happier doing something else, possibly writing the great American novel. 

I have purposely left out many passages where people of both parties in Congress show disrespect for the office of the president as well as its current occupant.

In the age of corporate society, civility has retreated to bluster.  President Obama is, on the other hand, inclined to civility but is not comfortable with the pull of corpocracy. 

What comes through is that the president is a very decent man, indeed, a very good man, but a man who lacks the anger or angst that motivated an Andrew Jackson to rain on the parade of his enemies, which were many, and not make a backward glance.  Jackson knew fear keeps people in check and nice guys don’t make good presidents, especially of the imperial kind. 

That said presidential historians are likely to compare President Obama to the “great liberator,” Abraham Lincoln.  Obama has the same fine mind and the same sorrowful gravitas, a man more comfortable with his own counsel than any other, a man who feels the best way to keep his adversaries at bay is to keep them close at hand. 

Lincoln was president just as corporate society was taken hold.  The Civil War hastened the Industrial Revolution.  Now, CEOs and their army of lobbyists run an invisible government that most of us don’t see but all of us experience.  I wonder how Andrew Jackson would have dealt with this.

Gridlock in Congress is a product of corpocracy.  It is the reason why whomever wins the election is bound to disappoint because the office of the president is never an independent contractor, not even for the interests of the American people.  Corpocracy rules and it never rules well.

*     *     *

---

[i] Corpocracy is a virus common to the corporate society.  It has metastasized through the American system first in business after WWII, and now in all quadrants of the private and public sector impairing the ability to function and/or govern.

It has spread also to Europe and Asia (India, China, Japan and South Korea), and now Latin American, notably Brazil.  Paradoxically, through the draconian practices of the Putin administration, it would appear to have stalled in Russia.

Common to this virus is:

(1)     Management is insensitive to employees other than rhetorically,

(2)     Internal politics dominate and negatively impact productivity,

(3)     Secrecy and paranoia are a measure of what is communicated,

(4)     The principal activity is nonproductive electronic dalliance,

(5)     Endless meetings, boards, committees and task groups are a blind to avoid tackling problems,

(6)     Trapped in business as usual practices as potential markets disappear,

(7)     Short term planning creates an inability to think beyond the next quarter,

(8)     Individual initiative is the mantra, but those who get promoted follow the party line,

(9)     Bottom up partnerships is the talk but the top down power is the walk, and

(10)  Transparency is advocated but covert hostility rules the game.