NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND

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In this secular 21st century society without a soul, capitalism has become the civil religion. Not only do profits come before people, but money is the central theme of that religion.

Money is the crucial "Energizer Bunny" for candidates running for the American presidency in this latest chapter of quadrennial madness. Money fuels the discourse as candidates talk about jobs and how they are going to make the American economy robust again. One candidate is not subtle about this; with him, everyone will have a job, a free college education and free healthcare. The other candidates promise the same but with more circumspect rhetoric.

“Socialism,” writes Oswald Spengler, “is nothing but capitalism of the lower classes.” What Spengler doesn’t say, but is also true, corporate welfare is nothing but capitalism for the upper classes. It is a case of choosing your own poison.

World peace and prosperity is not possible if the wealth of the world is literally controlled by twenty percent of the world’s 7.2 billion people. Many Second and Third World countries have been under Western powers for centuries and possess little of their own nation’s wealth.

Love, peace and prosperity is not possible in this neoliberal era of capital accumulation going to the few. Low wages and investment has limited consumption and forced workers to borrow beyond their capacity to repay. This casino economy has been in play since the 1980s across the West with deregulated labor, goods and investment markets, signaling the decline and ultimate demise of capitalism as the West has voted for going on the cheap.

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART SEVEN

IS NOWHERE MAN SOULLESS?

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, AUTHOR

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As we move ever faster from the sacred to the profane, from the spiritual to the secular, from the immaterial to the material, from the scientific to the technological, from the soul to the beast within us, from being fearful of what we don’t know to the hubris of feeling equal to all challenges, we find ourselves at the gates of NOWHERE LAND expecting them to be the gates of PARADISE.



Despite man’s conscious profundity, he has failed to escape his own animus, or to recognize that without the credit of a soul, there is little that holds us together as a species. Whether the soul is only symbolic, ephemeral or simply philosophic, it, alone, has held us together on this hostile planet called “EARTH!”



With the soul, we have the sense of possessing a moral compass and the confidence of knowing our way. The irony is that the soul persist even though it is denied.

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART SIX

NOWHERE MAN IN THE DYING

SENSATE CULTURE!

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We wonder how people who have everything could become engaged in fraud; how people who have more power than they can handle could become involved in corruption; how people with no taste for food could become gluttonous; how people with waning libidos could become engaged in shameful debauchery; how people who have everything but still envy people who have little.


Wonder no more. This behavior is evidence of the death rattle of the dying Sensate Culture of our magnificent 600-year-day as we transition through Nowhere Land as Nowhere Man to the Ideational Culture of our creative tomorrow.


Ideas have been a bane as well as a blessing. They have changed the world and changed us in the process. We have allowed ideas to take us wherever they might without much thought where that might be, or what impact these ideas might have on us and others. We take pride in being a conscious thinking animal, which in this transition our actions suggests an oxymoron.

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NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- Nowhere Man's "Cut & Control" Journey Through Time!

Like many writing projects, ideas are conceived and gradually developed in the mind of the author long before they are captured in a book or article.  That has been the case for this author with Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land.  For decades, I committed words to notebooks without uncovering the conceptual core of what I was thinking and trying to say.    

Then I read James Burke and Robert Ornstein’s The Axemaker’s Gift: A Double-Edged History of Human Culture (1995), a book that explained how society cuts existence away from the “way it was” into a new sense of reality, a reality that has gained something much desired but at the expense of something lost, possibly forever.  

The theme throughout these pages Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land will reflect that perspective and core idea.

So each new tool invented changes existence and represents the latest aspect of the “cut & control” phenomenon.  This has become the cultural reality of “Nowhere Man,” for each new tool has devalued what was and replaced it with a more valued tool.  No one worries about the cost or the loss, only the promise. 

The inventor of each new tool is celebrated, which urges him on to invent another tool.  People rush out to buy the new tool to make it part of their daily existence. No one seems concerned about the cost benefits involved as attention is only on the efficacy and convenience of the new tool.

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NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART FOUR -- "GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL!"

A few million years ago, there were tsunamis, hurricanes, and mudslides due to torrential rainfall.  Craggy mountains split off giant boulders that crashed into the valley, glaciers cracked off icy sculptures and thundered into the sea and snow capped mountains produced roaring avalanches.  

There were earthquakes as its plates shifted accompanied by volcanoes that spewed molten lava into the valley to form rivers of heat.  Long periods of drought interrupted by lighting showers led to forest fires that torched millions of acres whilst tornadoes cut through the land as if a menacing knife.  

Spring floods swelled the banks of massive rivers creating temporary lakes changing the landscape and redefining the continent with tectonic shifts. 

Then man entered the equation, and over tens of hundreds of years in existential progression first experiencing these phenomena then resolving to become their master.  In the process, he settled where nature could do him the most harm: along coastlines, in the shadow of awesome mountains and menacing volcanoes, on the banks of giant rivers to sporadically feel the full wrath of nature.  

Man's quest satisfied, he came to poison his adopted home as self-indulgent Nowhere Man turning Paradise into Nowhere Land.

      

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The Peripatetic Philosopher looks at a politician:

Bernie Sanders,

You Can’t have it Both Ways!


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

© March 20, 2016

“The Walton family of Walmart owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, Campaign speech, February 23, 2016

Note:

POLITIFACT confirms the senator’s claim, but what does it tell us?

AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL

Sam Walton was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma on March 29, 1918.  The family was constantly on the move with Sam attending eighth grade in Shelbina, Missouri, where he was the town’s youngest Eagle Scout in the state’s history. 

Sam, like most who eventually assume leadership roles, showed the aptitude early. 

Growing up in the Great Depression, now living in Columbia, Missouri, Sam did chores to help make financial ends meet for his impoverished family: he milked cows, bottled the surplus, drove that milk to customers.  

In addition, he was a paperboy for the Columbia Daily Tribune and sold magazine subscriptions.  He was voted “Most Versatile Boy” by his high school graduating class.

Think of how many young people you know today that fit this description, people who are destined to lead our country because they still have the opportunity to spread their wings and find out what they are made of.

After high school, he decided to attend college, hoping to find a way to better support his struggling family.  He attended the University of Missouri as a Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) cadet, again, doing odd jobs and waiting on tables.  He still found time to be active in extracurricular activities. 

Upon graduating in 1940 with a degree in economics, he was voted for his many services “permanent president” of his class.  

Such leadership designations often are accrued by young people in their formative years, signaling what the future is likely to hold for them and us.

Upon graduating, he joined J. C. Penney as a management trainee in DesMoines, Iowa, a position that paid $75 per month.  After 18 months with Penney’s, he was inducted into the US Army Intelligence Corps to serve in WWII, working in aircraft plant security and prisoner of war camps.        

FIRST STORE

In 1945, once the war was over, he looked around for doing something different. Penney’s still held his job for him, but he was intrigued with the variety store business, and decided to take a management position at such a store. He was 26.


Being a quick study, he decided he wanted to own his own store and innovate it in ways consistent with his ideas, and not have to follow company policy. 

With a $20,000 loan from his father-in-law and $5,000 he had saved while in the service, he purchased a Ben Franklin “Five & Dime” Store in Newport, Arkansas.
 
There, he pioneered many of the concepts that would become his brand. This included how the shelves were to be stocked, always kept full, and colorfully laid out.

His second store, just down the block, was a small department store. It just happened to be next door to his main competitor in town. He was always studying competition, observing and asking questions, a listener, not a teller; a learner, not a knower.  
He didn’t shy away from the more successful business people, but boldly confronted them to learn what their secrets were.


Success, however, has its ghosts lurking in the shadows. No enterprise is without surprises or disappointments. 

As it happens, his store was so successful that his landlord, who had a history in retail sales, refused to renew his lease desiring to reclaim the store (and franchise rights) for his son.

The landlord, however, bought Walton’s inventory at a fair price of $50,000. Using this capital, with the advice of his wife and father-in-law, he managed to purchase a small store in town, and the title to the building in a new location on downtown square of Bentonville, Arkansas. 

Opening May 9, 1950, the store was an immediate success. He was thirty-two.

TESTS AT A YOUNG AGE

Now, he had two successful but struggling stores 220 miles apart, one in Newport and the other in Bentonville. Never considering himself a good delegater, used to depending on himself to handle affairs, he found he now had to train people to adopt what became known as “the Walton way.” Many of these first employees were part of the Walton clan.

Once that was done, and both stores were hitting on all cylinders, he turned his attention to what he found most compelling, scouting out new locations and opening more Ben Franklin franchises.

Competition was great, and getting greater, as this was the zenith in the post-WWII baby boomer business expansion. It seemed that everywhere he turned he would run into a new hard charger ready to cut into his business success.


His only option, as he saw it, was to continue to grow and prosper.


True, Sam Walton had an economics degree, but he was in virgin territory with no family history in retail, and retail like every other industry was changing fast.


Young people, who wish to take a page from the Walton book, would be advised to understand that going forward often means to be limited to little more than instinct and intuition.

Having been a pilot in the war, he decided to purchase a small plane to cut down the time surveying businesses and scouting areas with but one aim, expanding the business.

By now, the Walton business was very much a family business with his brother James “Bud” and son John his direct reports, and all the women very much involved as well.

In 1954, at the age of 36, with his brother Bud, father-in-law, brother-in-law, and son, he opened a store in a shopping center in Kansas City, Missouri. From the beginning, as he hired new people, he encouraged them to set aside part of their salary to invest in the business.

Hundreds if not thousands who did so are multimillionaires today, some even billionaires.


This is for young people: imagine if you were an employee of Sam Walton, and you were not making a great deal of money, indeed, not really enough to live on, as was the case for many early Wal-Mart employees, and you were offered this opportunity and didn’t take it. Over a million former employees didn’t. 

Whom should they blame for this?

By 1962, the Walton clan owned 16 stores in Arkansas Missouri and Kansas (15 Ben Franklins and one independent in Fayetteville).

FRUITION, WAL-MART IS BORN

The first Wal-Mart store opened on July 2, 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas and was called “the Wal-Mart Discount City Store.” 

From the beginning, Sam Walton promoted American products, and had the cunning insight to see the economic advantage to have American manufacturers provide the Wal-Mart brand for the entire chain.


As technology improved, and the science of stocking and tracking sales became more sophisticated, Wal-Mart became brutal in its negotiating strategy.


Sam Walton’s wife considered the Wal-Mart brand designed for middle to lower income shoppers who lived in small towns. That was the initial condition she advocated with new stores to open in only towns of less than 20,000.


Surprisingly, that strategy held for the first decade or so.

Today, Wal-Mart is the single largest employer in the United States, and is able to negotiate the best price for its customers that is possible. 

Yes, many products are now made outside the United States, but many American families would not be able to eat as well as they do were it not for the Wal-Mart prices.


Sam Walton came from very little. He had the determination and diligence to capture the American dream, and in doing so, where is the attention?  

It is not on how the creation of the Walton wealth was possible, and what we can learn from this, but instead on the actual wealth of the family. 


Young people, imagine what this means to you. In a short three-quarters of a century, a man out of nowhere, created one of the most powerful families in the world, economically, politically, socially and personally. He did this by dint of his will, good luck, and with an ability to pay attention and stay focused on an objective.


Sam Walton died in 1992 at the age of 74 of multiple myeloma, a form of leukemia. My da died of the same disease in 1958, three days past his 50th birthday. It is a bad actor and to this day there is no cure for the disease.


If interested in a candid story of this man, I recommend “Sam Walton, Made in America: My Story,” by Sam Walton with John Huey, Doubleday, New York, 1992.

FINAL COMMENT

Were Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist, to rule as President of the United States, it would be impossible for the Sam Waltons of America to ever rise above the poverty status into national, and indeed, international prominence.  What Sam Walton accomplished is one of the reasons masses of people across the globe rush to the American shores.


There were three things that the America that Sam Walton fought to preserve in World War Two that still remained viable when he was Honorably Discharged from the US Army:


(1) It was possible for him to use his mind, heart and energy to create something long lasting;

(2) There were few roadblocks to that opportunity as long as he stayed within the dictates of the law; and

(3) There was no need for him to feel embarrassed or guilty for the success earned.

Take away the drive, the leadership, the risk taking, the failures that lead to successes, and you cut the heart out of America. The Walton family has been diligent giving back to the United States.


It is the American mind employed that makes a difference, a mind that earns its way as it goes, and goes as it earns.

It may be a rallying cry at Bernie Sanders’ political rallies to make the Walton Family seem like a pariah, but imagine where those hundreds of thousands of Americans would be working today if Wal-Mart did not exist. 

Imagine, too, what food prices would be if there was no Wal-Mart in the supermarket competitive business.


You can’t have it both ways. A welfare state is a nation that believes you can get something for nothing when the nothing that is something is arbitrary confinement to the wishes of the state.  This is a truism that never changes.

CONVERSATION ON SUBTEXT WITH A READER

A Conversation with a Reader on Subtext!

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

© March 19, 2016


A READER WRITES  & DR. FISHER RESPONDS 

 THE READER

So...am I correct that you are saying that the subtext we all carry with us will impact how we view the content and context of our current life/affairs? 

It seems to me that the subtext, if that is correct, is the background of our lives and will be different depending on the time and place of our development. Consequently, though you and I are both from small town mid-west up-bringing, your subtext as someone whose formative years were during the late depression and WWII will be different from mine which results from growing up in the 1950s. As one psychologist put it years ago – “who we are depends on where we were when...” If that is all even close to what you mean by subtext let me know.

DR. FISHER: 

That is precisely what I mean by subtext.

But subtext is more than many faceted. Subtext applies equally to race, religion, nationality and culture, indeed, civilization, as they are all protean to its construction.

Subtext relates to us individually and collectively, and is marinated with our distinct histories. We bring our subtext in greetings to those with whom we interact and relate, and ultimately assimilate without conscious awareness of how aspects of that exposure finds its way into our own subtext.

In the end, we are always richer for the exposure and attention although that may not seem so at first.

Humanity is one body. Subtext may differ but it rises from that same source. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin writes that no subtext is superior to another but all can be identified through events.

The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and etymologist E. O. Wilson developed the theory of "sociobiology," claiming that our subtext remains with those who follow. It surfaces quite dramatically and sometimes radically when continuity leads to discontinuity to disruption to catastrophe, or simply to mock catastrophe in comedic relief.  The point is that subtext is not usually apparent.

The stock market crash of 1929 and in 1987, and again in 2008 was evidence of the subtext surfacing and going awry in mass hysteria.  Ironically, people who had no money to lose talked as if they did.  It was an opportunity for subtext to be on display.

On the other hand, the current divisiveness in the Republican Party is playing out as dramaturgic relief as The Donald (Trump) exposes the hypocrisy in subtext. His popular bombast reveals an uptight nation comfortable and complacent in its denial.

Everything is subtext to behavior but most people do not understand that.

Occasionally, over the years, I've published "Fragments of a Philosophy." It was quoted in a missive on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) August 30, 2009, titled "The Subtext of Life and Its Meaning." It remains the most popular piece I have ever posted:

“There is general denial of the subtext of life. It is contained in a kind of culture that exists apart from the kind transmitted by schools and universities, a kind of culture that once flourished in typical neighborhoods across the country, but is gone now. It helped to stem lawlessness, greed, corruption and other social diseases. It was a kind of social resistance that is lacking today, something upheld by average citizens, but by people in authority as well. There was a subtext of restrain undefined, unwritten, unspoken, but nonetheless felt, practiced and experienced.

“Today, the gap between people’s dreams and experience is too large. People have resorted to living life on the edge, running without thinking, on automatic pilot in the rhythm of the content and context of things without a sense of restrain or penalty. We see this in general apathy as people react to the lead stories on television nightly news and in the headlines of morning newspapers regarding murder, mayhem, rape, fraud, and malfeasance with irritations but little more. It is the ghost in the room.

“The mind is homeless. It lacks roots. Most people aren’t from where they are. A kind of isolation from a sense of place and space breaks people. Easily forgotten is that shameful acts are committed by people, wounded human beings.

“Once upon a time, they were children, little ones running down the street at the start of school with their backpacks bouncing in cadence to their happy feet. They were on their way to school and on their way out into life. One wonders watching this parade if there goes a thief, a wife beater, an addict, a drug dealer, a murderer, a rapist, an embezzler, a gang member, a prostitute, a pimp, a drag on society, someone on the fringe that will garner those lead stories that we essentially ignore.

“Is this predetermined? Quite the opposite. But only if people use their intelligence and good will to get beyond surface issues of class and race, status and wealth, education and profession, immigration and ethnicity, religion and ideology, language and culture to consider the subtext of life to uncover what destroys social restrain and how to prepare the damage.

“The world gets better or worse one person at a time. Apathetic or psychopathologic behaviors occur because people are not acquainted with the subtext of their lives and therefore enslaved to surface issues. It was the same a hundred years ago and is likely to be so a hundred years hence.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy” (unpublished)

* * *

THE READER: 

What is happening in the world is that at any given time the current content and context are what develop the subtext that will be the life background baggage for those who are at that time in their formative years.

DR. FISHER: 

The subtext can include baggage, but it is not background.  Oh, no!  It is always there working its ways to the fore but just not always apparent.  In any case, acknowledged or not, it influences events.  

The subtext is what is.  It is what drives events.  

The source of subtext is the subconscious (individual or collective) from which the content and context of behaviors are displayed and ultimately managed or mismanaged.  

You could liken subtext to values if you like or collective history but only as a gauge.  The subtext is there, fully operational, but not apparent.  By that I mean that during periods of order surface consistency give the mocking sense that all is well when it never is.

Great disruptions, personal or societal, bring the subtext to prominence and to the confusion of those in charge, who are so schooled in denial that "what is" does not get much attention.  We have seen this in love and war, politics and religion, especially in politics and religion.    

It is during these periods of disruption, such as our current "Age of Technology," that subtext is neither acknowledged nor challenged.  It is avoided by more wondrous technology.

To be fair, there has been more change in the past 30 years than the previous 300.  So, rather than acknowledge subtext, and deal with its root attributes, we call this the "Age of Anxiety" and develop drugs to treat the condition, or writes books to describe it, and on and on.  

We valiantly avoid doing anything constructive about it, which would start by addressing the nature and function of subtext relative to the current age.   

THE READER: 

Hitler had not attacked the US and yet we declared war on Germany and in less than 4 years the US alone killed at least 2 million Germans.  In the 1940s there was no question in our collective mind that Germans were bad and in need of killing.  Hence it was a short war.  

DR. FISHER: 

Oh, dear!  That great justification, attrition!  

Here it is an expression of content (numbers) and context (dead Nazis) as it was also used in Vietnam, but without any attention to the events (including Vietnam history), which were driving subtext.  I will have more to say about WWII shortly. 

The US military routinely published its daily successes in Vietnam in terms of "body count" (Vietnamese killed) on the television nightly news as if a war of attrition was the answer to a war without a purpose.

That attention shows a total ignorance of subtext, and yet no one in power or public life at the time seemed to see the absurdity.

The French ruled Vietnam for more than a century, the subtext of a colonial power.  When France fell to Germany in WWII in 1940, this colonial power base was disrupted.  Finally, in 1954, France lost the First French Indo-China War, and Vietnam received its independence, being divided into North and South Vietnam as if you could separate a common people without disruption. 

Not surprisingly, that solution aggravated the problem of the subtext of Vietnam as a common people wanting total independence from foreign influence.  

President Kennedy stepped into this South Vietnam quagmire in support of a corrupt South Vietnam regime with American advisers and trainers.  

From that point forward it became a descent into the subtext of hell with more than 55,000 Americans in the military losing their lives in a cause that history hasn't treated kindly.  A generation of young Americans who protested against the war and refused to join in the fight were consumed in subtext and eventually stopped its advance.  

The subtext has a very long pull from the collective or historical subconscious of a people.  The book I'm now writing, NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND, is an attempt to give subtext to the American madness that currently dominates the content and context of our times, which is optimism in the face of reality of a pessimistic future.

To give you a closer sense of how pervasive subtext can be to history, consider WWII.  It all started long before even WWI.

Up until WWI, the aristocracy controlled every aspect of life of the European Western world.  The pull of Queen Victoria of Great Britain, alone, is impressive.  Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was a grandchild. Other grandchildren included queens of Greece, Norway, Romania, Spain and Sweden and the Tsarina Alexandra of Russia.  

WWI broke up this comfy aristocratic status but not its aristocratic subtext.  We are still feeling it to this day.

By the end of WWI, the high aristocracy collapsed.  The tsar, a relative of King George V of Great Britain, was overthrown and he and his royal family murdered by the Bolsheviks.  The great disruption didn't end there.

In the 1920s, the royal families across Europe had to find new ways to make a living as the aristocracy was in a state of collapse.  Take Germany's aristocracy as palpable evidence.  By 1938, nearly a fifth of the senior ranks of Heinrich Himmler's SS Gestapo were filled by holders of titles of nobility.  The subtext goes ever deeper.  

The Third Reich of Hitler's Germany had a cozy relationship with King George and Queen Mary, current Queen Elizabeth's parents.  Her father even taught her the Nazi salute as a child.  

Many of the English aristocracy were fond of Hitler's Germany and believed he had restored political and social order.  They also saw him as a perfect foil to communism.  That was the content and context of the times with many with royal ties advocating an Anglo-German alliance.  

Great Britain's Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, gave an appeasement speech (Munich Agreement) in 1938 essentially conceding the Czech Republic to Hitler while ceremoniously declaring, "We have peace in our time."

This speech was given one year to the month before Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, launching WWII.

Appeasement was but a mask to the prevailing subtext of those in power in the British government.  Many prominent Brits were willing to make huge concessions to Hitler to avoid war.  One man understood the subtext of events and their meaning, and he saved the day for the West.  

Were it not for Winston Churchill being elected Prime Minister, it is difficult to imagine Great Britain not capitulating to the will of Adolf Hitler.  Chamberlain resigned eight months after the start of WWII, the war going badly at the time, with Churchill taken office on May 10, 1940, and having to resist Nazi sympathizers in Great Britain from the first. 

THE READER: 

In the new century, based on changed subtext we have a very different context and content.  We accept Islam as the religion of peace and are careful to sort out the bad Muslims who have hi-jacked the religion, from the good ones.  The war being, for that reason, more nuanced is longer but we are killing far fewer.  That is not business as usual for us – that is progress.

DR. FISHER:

I hope what you imply is true, that our subtext reaches such maturity.  It is possible.

The People of Islam are victims of history as were the Japanese, and as are we all. Demagogues throughout history have adulterated the subtext of a people to present aspects of subtext in a twisted content and context to further their aims.  

Yet, the subtext of a people's history can be ripped from the bowels of their beliefs to present ugly aspects of that subtext.  No history is without this occasional momentum, not even ours.

The al-Qaeda terrorists present themselves as fighting a holy war, but what they want is power and the pride and identity of that power with their people.  They are using religion the way Roman Catholicism justified the the Inquisition, or forcing Jews to become Christians, and the list goes on.  No people or history is without the ugly side of subtext.    

Interestingly, your last word is "progress," seeing tolerance for Islam and Muslims a sign of progress.  I see it as a common sign of decency for differences. 

 Everyone thinks progress is good, at least most Americans. General Electric once boasted "Progress is our most important product."  Progress is as deceptive a word as is Islam or Christianity.  African Americans understand what I mean by this.

Everyone influenced by such words thinks they understand and are simply dealing with the content and context of matters when it is subtext that is ruling the day, and not necessarily wisely.  

For example, Spain wouldn't be as Spain is today without the invasion of the Moors from North Africa in the eight century.  Nor would Europe be Europe without the Moors who would dominate well into the sixteenth century.  The Moors brought with them art, literature, architecture, mathematics, science and culture to the continent, a culture of black men who were then called "Negros" and who also taught discipline, military expertise and tolerance.   

Shakespeare would capture something of this with his "Othello" in the sixteenth century.

My views, I must confess, were influenced by a nun.  I had the good fortune of having Sister Mary Cecile as my seventh and eighth grade teacher in grammar school at St. Patrick's School, who taught me about the Moors and about their influence and culture.  It has never left me.  

No, I have no love for terrorists of any stripe, but I have no fear of a new mosque going up in my neighborhood, or of a family of Muslims moving in next door.  

Thank you for stirring up my little gray cells.  Keep thinking and reflecting.

And always be well,

Jim 

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares an essay from a new book:

Search for Identity

James R. Fisher, Ph.D.

© February 17, 2016

NOTE:

This is one of the previously published essays in periodicals and trade journals that will appear in my new book, A WAY OF THINKING ABOUT THINGS.  It will be Kindle e-book.  At the end of this piece, you will see where and when it was published.

*     *     *

With the crumbling of unfailing spiritual symbols, we have become untethered from ourselves as person and each other.  We grovel in the uncertainty of our personal identity.  We are no longer sure who or what we are.

We have retrogress from “making one’s way” to being obsessed with “finding oneself.”  The urgent question is no longer “What can I do?” but “Who can I be?”  Who has taken precedence over what?  We see this in everyday life as people struggle with the question who is right not what is right. 

People as persons are searching for a “new self” with a multitude of personal trainers, charismatic gurus, Zen masters, psychologists, psychotherapists and astrologists, who are at the ready to show them the way. 

Identity however is a fragile mechanism that is largely not of our making as we grow from the outside in, not the inside out.  We become everyone else before we break free, if we somehow manage to do so, by rebelling against the programming of our parents, teachers, preachers, friends, and favorite heroes. 

 Beyond these limitations, identity is created from experience.  Identity is sensitive, not flamboyant, private, and not public. 

Nor is identity found in the latest technological fad.  On the contrary, the latest hi-tech widget can further isolate the individual from a sense of his or her unique self. 

Technology has unwittingly become the universal pacifier for anxiety in the form of the latest handheld electronic gadget.  So employed, it ceases to be a necessary tool, but a convenient a prop. 

For example, Apple, Inc. has discovered that annually repackaging its iPhone in tantalizing colors ensures that people like a herd of robotic junkies will rush to purchase it no matter how superficial its modifications as it has become a toy of the mind.

Identity has shifted from the self to super heroes and celebrities while masculine and feminine roles have merged into gender neutral.  We are no longer sure what it is to be a man or woman.  We have also lost pride in work and joy in our craftsmanship.  We are pressed into mediocrity to fit into a cybernetic machine that programs us not to make waves and to be safe hires on the job, forfeiting our individualism. 

As a status obsessed society, we have an abundance of status symbols without status, a plethora of information sources but little new knowledge.  History and tradition are playing on another channel. 

Place and Space

There is no longer a hometown as most everyone is on the move.  A rarity is a person who lives where he was born, where values and beliefs have roots, where the distant voices of youth still ring true.  Every day bulldozers crush landmarks of this hollowed past to make room for the new with little pause as to the impact on identity.

Evidence of this is that the young no longer look to the old for what has proven true.  Instead, the old mimic the young in their ephemeral obsessions.  No one wants to grow old or grow up or be left behind.  Indeed, no one claims to be comfortable with the past. 

Society has replaced its moral compass with the existential.  We have lost our way relegating history to the attic of our minds. 

If the past is prologue to the future, are we embracing the future blindfolded?  The void of place is now filled with empty space.  Everyone seems anxious to be somewhere else doing something else than being where they are doing what they are doing.  This pathology of normalcy has reduced connection to an electronic grid of text messages.

Space has taken over place.  Homes, hotels, shopping malls, athletic arenas, churches, and educational institutions are all bigger and more imposing, but have acquired a tragic sameness no matter where you find yourself.  The quiet sanctity of place has been reduced to monotonous and predictable opulent self-consciousness.

Mobility defines our rootlessness as we chase after each other in Brownian motion in other-directness with little sense of our own self-direction.  Obsessed with knowing the right people and being on the right track, we find ourselves gullible to opinion makers, polls, bestselling books, lifestyle fads and cliques.  We are willing to place our security hostage to the celebrated and acclaimed to see that our children attend the right schools, pursue the right professions, live in the right neighborhoods, and hang out with the right people. 

With place, there is a sense of belonging; with space, a sense of rootlessness.  Place nurtures us; space collects us.  Place tells us who we are; space erases identity.       

Lack of Identity Rituals

Identity is a ritual that unfolds through living, learning and experiencing life. 

Identity is neither totally self-created nor indiscriminately imposed by others.  It is learned and earned behavior by embracing fear, anxiety, insecurity, and embarrassment rather than retreating from such inevitable psychological encounters.  Identity is a private affair and not found by flaunting our stuff. 

Young people bleach their hair, streak it with blaring colors, cut it short, grow it long, or shave their heads, all to draw attention to themselves.  They paint their bodies with tattoos or wear clothes that shock.  They scream for heroes, vicariously transporting themselves from the mundane to be preoccupied with violent sports.  They plunge off jagged cliffs into shallow pools, swim into the depths of dark caves, climb treacherous mountains, or bungee jump from great heights, canoe through the rapids of perilous waters, or drop out of school and life. 

They are terrorized by the boring and the mundane, and can only feel themselves alive when living on the edge.  Curiously, adults are aping their behavior because they have lost interest in leading. 

In a society with no one in charge, sentiments of doubt prevail.  Romantic love, family unity, patriotism, morality, civic pride, school spirit, the transcendent majesty of religion and natural beauty have been shelved for the synthetic.  

In this void, identity rituals are not only desirable but necessary.  It gives people a sense of place and space through belonging, energizing routinized existence to meaningful connection with family, church, school, and community. 

The lack of identity rituals is largely the reason for the poverty of sentiment.  Sacred anchors have been replaced by pseudo-symbols of commercialism with synthetic rituals.  The rites of passage have been replaced by the mania of spectator sport -- NFL the Super Bowl, the NHL, MLB, and other sports revenues – eclipsing Hollywood and commercial television. 

These rituals fail to recharge our emotional batteries the way Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Presidents’ Day once did.  Current identity rituals have lost touch with touch.  We seem ashamed to proclaim our heritage and for that self-alienation fill the void with self-estrangement.

Personal Excellence magazine, November 2000     

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares an intimacy:

When Someone Dies!

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

© February 4, 2016

When someone dies that you value, no, that you love, someone whom you haven’t seen much of during most of your life, and only remember best from your youth, when that someone dies, something happens to the rhythm of your soul.  

Perhaps it is your soul speaking to you that, although it is eternal, but reminding you that residence in your body in only for a brief spell.  Then again, this may only be the mythic legends that wells up in you from your Irish ancestors.

George Eric Chalgren, Jr. died January 22, 2016 at the age of 84.  He was two years ahead of me in school, and you might say that I only knew him occasionally because we didn’t move in the same circles, and I never had a course in school with him although we went to the same high school.

In a way, almost from the beginning, he reminded me of my da.  Now, these many decades later, I find myself remembering the wisdom of that father who went to the seventh grade at St. Patrick’s Catholic Grammar School, the same school I attended, but beyond that I didn’t think we had much in common.  

Now, I find myself telling my wife, Beautiful Betty, this and that thing he said about this and that, as if he was the Oracle of Delphi.  Eric was clever like my father.

Another comparison was my da was short and compact, and not afraid of a living soul on the face of the earth.  I remember when I was a boy, when he and my mother had taken my two sisters, my brother and I to Chicago for a day, and we were crossing the street, my mother holding my little sister in her arms, and a man in a semi-truck almost failed to stop at a red light, nearly running into my mother.    

My da jumped up on the cab of the truck, and cold cocked the driver before he could open his mouth.  His head spun around like it was a top and a slumped over the wheel.  

Without ceremony, my da returned to his family, took my mother’s arm and we crossed the street and went on about our business.  I was about ten at the time.  Never having been spanked by my da, I knew better after that not to talk back to him, so when I had a problem, I grumbled quietly to myself outside his hearing.

In thinking about Eric, who was about an inch taller than my da at five-eight to my six-three going on six-four, I remember the first time I saw him in action.  It was at the local YMCA, where I went to play basketball of a Saturday while going to St. Pat’s.  

Eric was not an athlete, but blond like I was and quite handsome like my da. 

Much as I liked football, basketball and baseball, I had little interest in ping pong or pool.  The Y had a policy of pool players being only allowed to play a certain amount of time, and then having to give up the pool table to the next signee.  

I was just sitting there reading a Sport’s Illustrated when I heard a raucous in the area of the pool table.  This little blond guy had a much bigger guy splayed out on the pool table and was beating the living business out of him.  It was Eric the pugilist, and my first introduction to him.

Later, talking to him, he told me that it was his pool time and this guy was ten minutes into his time, and gave no sign of surrendering the pool table.  With a smile, he said, “What choice did I have?”  What choice, indeed! 

I went home and excitingly told my mother about the incident.  Smoking her perennial cigarette, she said, “Now, who does that remind you of?”  Of course, it was my da.

*     *     *

Several months later, now the summer, I lied about my age and was able to get a sacking and shelving job at the local A&P Super Market because I was so tall.  

Low and behold, who do I find there, but Eric?  We hit it off immediately, as he remembered talking to me at the Y after his altercations over the pool table. 

The A&P was in the shadow of the courthouse, where I lived.  Even so, after work I would walk with Eric a few blocks his way simply to talk to him.  We discussed books and stuff kids in my day talked about.  He was into girls.  I wasn’t into girls yet, and quite frankly terrified of them, but not Eric.  It didn’t surprise me because he was quite handsome, funny, and unabashedly passionate. 

Though it was his cleverness that I found most appealing.  He was smart like my da, not so much book smart, because school grades didn’t seem to mean all that much to him, but life smart.  He knew things that I didn’t even think about.

I read a lot, too, but mainly about saints, as I thought I was going to be a Catholic priest.  Eric wasn’t into religion.  I don’t think he even believed in God, but there was no question he believed in life. 

He shared with me the joy he felt in reading, especially The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.  He told me about the integrity of the main character and his consuming passion for life. 

I read the book later and told him I read it quite differently than he had.  I was in high school now, and he was two years ahead of me in school.  I reminded Eric that the main character, an architect, in blowing up his own magnificent structure rather than compromise his principals didn't compute for me the way it did for him.

"That wasn’t a rational decision," I said, "but a totally irrational one."  Nor was it a display of integrity but an indicator of a flawed character, obviously a projection of that of the author.'s  “Clearly,” I added, “she has an agenda.”

He looked at me under the streetlight, smoking a cigarette.  He was experimenting with smoking.   His stare made me feel uncomfortable.  “Fisher,” he said, “that’s quite profound.  I wouldn’t doubt if one day you become a philosopher.”

I walked home that night filled with warmth, a kind of warmth that I’ve seldom experienced.  I didn’t know what his words meant, but I knew it was an honest assessment of me, his new friend.  

I’ve gone through this long life of mine valuing only a handful of people.  I’ve never had much affection for people in general as my attention and focus has always been quite narrow.  That has been a mixed blessing.  I’m not distracted by what others wish for me but I’m also not much of a connector with others.  I sensed a kindred spirit in Eric.

Work at the A&P was an important chapter in my life, and I think Eric’s as well.  I saw how clever he was at everything he did.  Even as a boy, I thought he could have managed that store without any trouble.

We found it pure joy unloading the A&P semi-trucks of canned goods and produce.  For me, a high school football player, it was good training.  In those days, we didn’t have weight training at school. 

On one occasion, when the truck was unloaded and we were standing around shooting the breeze, Eric asked me if I could put one of the produce crates over my head.  The crate probably weighed more than one hundred pounds and was quite bulky.  

I’m not a big risk taker and shook my head that I didn’t want to try for fear I might hurt myself. 

He egged me on, and so I did it, surprisingly without much trouble.  I put it down and he picked it up, and did the same, but once he had it over his head, he lost his balance and fell on his behind with lettuce going all over the place.  He wasn’t hurt, but got up laughing like a hyena.  I didn’t laugh.  I thought he had been hurt.

About this time, he lost his mother whom I didn’t know but knew from his comments that she was important to him.  I asked Sam Spalding, my boss at the A&P, if I could go to the funeral.  He said, “Yes,” so I did. 

I didn’t know anybody, not even his dad or his sister, Lu Betty.  I felt totally uncomfortable and out of place, so stood in a corner out of the way.  I was asked to accompany everyone to the grave site, which I did reluctantly, and was extremely self-conscious because it was clearly a Protestant affair and I was a strict Roman Catholic, wondering if I was sinning.  I saw Eric, of course, at the funeral home and the grave site, but never spoke to him.

So, it was something of a surprise when he took me aside at the A&P the next time we were both there, and thanked me for coming.  “Do you know you were the only one of my friends who showed up?”  I liked the ring of “friend,” which sounded a lot better than mere acquaintance.  After that, we were, indeed, friends and did much together.

*     *     *

Later, I read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road with the main character reminding me of Eric.  To give you a sense of this, we would go to the fabulous Clinton Municipal Pool when we stayed until midnight stocking shelves at the A&P, climb over the pool fence, which was low, and swim in the nude for an hour or more. 

One night three girls came by, girls guys would say in my day with a reputation for being “fast,” and they asked if they could join us.  I was terrified at the thought.  What did Eric do?  He got out of the water and walked towards the fence where they were standing, giggling, and of course he was totally in the nude, with them rushing off in terror.  We laughed over this until we got stomach aches. 

Like boyhood friends who go their separate ways, you soon lose track of each other.  Eric went on to school at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, where he earned a doctorate in veterinary medicine, and I went to the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa where I earned a degree in chemistry.  

Shortly after joining Standard Brands, Inc. in R&D, I was called into the U.S. Navy. 

While in my second year in the Mediterranean on the USS Salem (CA-139) as a hospital corpsman, I was given emergency leave to return home to my da, who was 49, and dying of multiple myeloma.  

Never close, I still loved and respected him completely, and never more than in his dying days, as he displayed unbelievable physical courage. 

Before he died, he talked to each of his four children separately.  I, being the oldest, was the last to speak to him.  “Your mother tells me that you want to be a writer.”  I nodded.  “Well, Jimmy, I hate like hell to tell you this, but you don’t even write a good letter.  How the hell are you ever going to make a living as a writer?”  

The answer was clearly apparent, I wasn’t, but what my da missed was that you don’t necessarily love something because you're good at it, or because of its return, but because it feeds something in your soul.  How could I tell him that? 

I thought he was through with me, but he wasn’t, he grabbed my arm feebly, as I moved to get up.  

“Remember that summer that George (he always called Eric Chalgren “George”) wanted you to join him and hitchhike to California, and I said, ‘no’?”  I nodded. 

“That was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.  George was a man, and you were a little boy in a man’s body.  It would have helped you to grow up.” 

The inference was that I was not only a poor writer but also not very mature.  He was right on both counts, but his words, then, only angered me.  He was dying and I was angry.  I went to confession and told the priest how cruel I had been.  He listened, but didn’t say anything, comforting or otherwise.  I was sixteen that summer Eric invited me to go "on the road" with him.  

When my da died, I found something in me had died as well.  I went from worrying about making an impression, doing what others thought was important, being a patriot and a team player, or being like him to being something totally different.

He had had amazing physical courage, but little moral courage.  He thought everyone was better than he was because they were better educated, had better connections, and had more money.  He was a yeller at home but never took on a boss.  There is not a boss in my long life that I haven’t taken on, or a system or circumstance that I didn’t make clear to those in authority precisely where I stood.  And I have the lumps to show for it.

This was markedly shown when I was with Nalco Chemical Company facilitating a new conglomerate in South Africa during the time of Apartheid.  I not only took on my company but the Irish Roman Catholic Church of South Africa as well, for the betrayal of the majority population of that country.

In my mid-thirties, a soaring executive career with this burgeoning company on the line, I resigned with a wife and four small children to support and returned to the United States.

My sister, Pat Waddell, had a small reception party for me in Clinton, Iowa, which included Eric and his wife, Carol, a classmate of mine in high school.  I had not seen Eric since college.  He had a beard, and was his usual ebullient self, wanting to know about my work in South Africa, South America and Europe.  I watched Carol’s face as she studied her husband’s, which was clearly bursting with vicarious joy as I related some of my experiences.  “Don’t get any ideas, buster!” she said to him, and we both laughed knowingly.  She didn’t.

Here he was the staid father and husband, and I was not; here he remained close to home, and I was working the world; here he was behaving like I had in my youth, and I like him in his.  It was like a total reversal in roles and lifestyles.  Go figure!

I would not see him again until my 50^th High School Class Union, where I was given the role of class speaker because I was an author.  Ron McGauvran, who organized the class reunion, thought it appropriate since Marquis Childs, the celebrated Washington, D.C. journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning author had grown up in Clinton and had given the commencement address for my high school graduating class.

 

After the class reunion assembly broke, Eric and I talked briefly.  He was once again generous with his praise for my speech and for my new career as a writer of books, giving seminars and consulting.  He said, “Jim, there were two people I looked up to in my youth.  One was Hans Andreasen, the other was you.”

Hans was a big guy, an athlete and scholar, who went on to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics at Cornell University in New York, and I had had this eclectic ill-defined career that defied explanation.  Eric was as beautiful as ever, and I carry that picture of him in my head as I write these words. 

In the summer of 2011, BB and I took an extended trip through the Midwest and the South, hitting all the universities we could, as well as the Presidential Libraries and State Capitols.  BB did most of the driving over the 4,000 mile jaunt, while I took notes that I planned to publish as a journal as I did for our trip through the European Balkans, but alas, it has never materialized.       

We had planned to stay at the Best Western Motel that Eric owned, and called for reservations, only to find he had sold it and was fully retired.  He had been a veterinarian of big animals, and had nearly lost his life when kicked by one, which was the reason for the career change. 

We talked fleetingly on the phone, didn’t say much, as neither one of us were phone people, but I remember that conversation, and hold it close to my heart, as I hold him as well.

P.S.  To show how we sublimate pain, I am writing about George Eric Chalgren, Jr., while on this day, five years ago today, my daughter, Jeanne Marie Fisher was hit and killed by a driver who left the scene of the accident to leave her dying in the street in Pinellas Park, Florida.  Jeannie was fifty years old.  May Jeannie’s soul and that of Eric forever rest in peace, and God love them both.