The Peripatetic Philosopher shares an excerpt of DEVLIN!

An Excerpt from the novel, DEVLIN, 

About a Year from Publication 

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., PH.D. 

© AUGUST 8, 2017 

REFERENCE:

This is excerpt of DEVLIN to a consultant who is working on a possible cover for the novel. I thought might readers might find it interesting.
JRF

Since DEVLIN has been gestating over four decades and I am leisurely reading through this book now (reduced from 861 to currently 517 pages), waiting for BB to resume her editing/correcting (she is half way through the book), I can see Devlin is more European than American, and that is continental Europe, not Great Britain, and that his interest in science is like someone interested in crossword puzzles for relaxation while his natural propensity is for philosophy and theosophy.  Like Camus, Sartre and Beckett, he has an eye for the absurd meaning he is not handicapped by his academic training but manages to survive by thinking and feeling beyond it.  This is a small sample of Devlin the Absurd as observer:

THE OFFICE

Devlin read the current issue of South Africa Today,” and highlighted the assessment of author Alistair Spark:  “In South Africa as nowhere else, Africans are being pitch forked into the twentieth century.  In the teeming satellite townships outside the cities the drama of one of history’s great social upheavals is taking place.  It is an African renaissance, full of new vistas, new energy.  There is an upsurge of vitality, ambition – and security.  There is creativity and crime.”  

It was in this sense that he considered the physical and demographic landscape of his assignment as he reflected on his office space. 

The offices of Polychem’s subsidiary were housed in an old dilapidated building on the industrial district rim of Johannesburg, a place held together with paint, putty, cement, rotting wood and prayer.  A small sign on the second floor facing the street announced to the world that these were the corporate offices of ADM, Subsidiary of Polychem, International, Ltd. 

The drab structure was a converted industrial warehouse in what previously was the industrial district.  Bulldozers were flattening peripheral industrial enterprises and other warehouses to make way for the spiraling glass and steel high-rise office buildings and hotels as sprawling metropolitan Johannesburg was forcing the industrial district outward toward the suburbs. 

Everything about the structure marked it as temporary.  The windows were painted in soot, which defied window cleaners.  The gray paint of the building was peeling despite desperate attempts to hide its age with constant repainting.  Where the semi-trucks once moved down a cement ramp to the covered docks to pick up and deliver goods, now there was a makeshift underground parking garage with stenciled slots for executives, office staff, laboratory personnel, and visiting customers, contributing to its makeshift status. 

Walking up the cement steps to the dock level, and then into the facility, had the feeling of entering an ancient ruin.  A rusting and creaking freight elevator took passengers only to the second floor where the executive offices were located.  The chemical labs were on the third floor with administrative support, sales and marketing on the fourth floor with the only access to these operations via a cement stairwell.  This was an inverse arrangement of corporate staffing in the States where the higher the flyer the more rarefied the air.  Polychem’s corporate offices were on the top floor overlooking downtown Chicago from Michigan Avenue. 

When Devlin got there early, he could see forty or so Bantu workers waiting for daily assignments.  These assignments ranged from cleaning to maintenance. They could be seen doing plumbing and electrical work, painting, tearing down and rebuilding office and lab partitions, running errands, and landscaping.  It was as if they were invisible as no one paid them much attention.

A half-hearted attempt had been made to beautify the building with small trees and shrubs on a pencil sized lawn along a cement promenade with a fountain facing the street.  Notwithstanding these efforts of worker diligence, it could not mask the warehouse origin of the building.  It sent shivers up Devlin’s spine the first time he came upon the place, feeling the address must surely be a mistake despite the prominence of the ADM sign to the contrary.

The floor of the executive offices had a strange vitality in that the large wide industrial timbers had been given a vigorous alkali cleaning of oil and stains, then grounded to a smooth surface with varnish applied to a gleaming polish that made the floor seem primordially alive.  Devlin likened the hard clipping sound made by his heels as he walked to his office to be like the happy feet of a tap dancer on stage.  It put him in mind of the times his da would toss the throw rugs aside in the living room and do his Fred Astair routine dancing to that famous dancer’s staccato.  He remembered taking off his own shoes as a boy and gliding across its surface with exhilarating joy.

He could see the magnificent Carlton Hotel now under construction just down the street from the managing director’s window.  His office, although next-door, faced the collapsing industrial district to the west.  He mused that it was just as well.  Otherwise, he’d get nothing done.  He was a born sidewalk superintendent of the most obsessive kind. 

There was something magical in all the chaos of construction and activity around him.  A similar kind of chaos resided within him; only he was a builder of ideas, not of things.  The building of things was a manifestation of man’s quest for control. Out of the chaos rose pristine structures that signaled man’s genius to create out of material destruction.  A builder of ideas lacks the signatory zeitgeist of physical construction.    

With an architect’s blueprint, you could envision the building materializing precisely as designed, not so with an idea.  An idea is vague in the mind with many collapsing shadows before it breaks through to a thought with some clarity, but the idea once conceived has a longer life. 

He was trained as an engineer of things but was more comfortable in the wilderness of ideas where he could see how things worked on the soul.  It was his secret and the force behind his iconic material success.  He escaped into this world every chance he got.  It was where he felt more authentic and at home.  Still, it was daunting to bring his function off with perfect pitch given this obsession.  Ideas were however key to his success and not the dogma of his credentials.  Ideas built an edifice of the soul plank-by-plank, nail-by-nail, girder-by-girder, brick by brick in the symphony of the hammer of the will until, voila, it was finished.  People thought him lucky flying by the seat of his pants, but this was how he worked.  Would it work here? 

The Carlton Hotel was advertised to be the most majestic hotel in all of Africa, and it was being constructed on his watch.

The Polychem executive offices were modest but spacious compared to those in the United States.  Devlin’s office was easily as big as the 900 square foot house in which he grew up.  The second floor housed the managing director, the comptroller, and Devlin’s office, along with offices for three secretaries.  There was also an executive conference room, and a waiting room for clients, who must come in from the street, walk up two flights of cement steps against a corridor of gray walls, to arrive in these offices.  Clearly, the facility was not brochure material.

Martin Mathews, as managing director, had the corner office with large floor to ceiling windows taking in the Johannesburg skyline.  These windows were washed twice daily and from the street, shined with brilliance against their soot-encrusted neighbors that appeared above like bushy eyebrows.  Cleaning was not a matter of economics but manpower.  The executive windows were surrounded by scores of tiny steel framed smutty windows, reminding passersby of the building’s original function.  To maintain all these windows, with the care of the executive windows, would require the entire Bantu staff doing little else.  In any case, that was the reasoning presented to Devlin for the selective attention.

Devlin’s office next door faced the collapsing industrial district behind.  The view resembled a war zone after a blitzkrieg bombing.  Skeletal frames of falling down buildings, long ago gutted of any utilitarian content with hundreds if not thousands of windows of shattered glass.  Penciled across the abandoned railroad tracks were weed infested vacant lots, bridged by mountains of trash and rats as big as cats.  Men as dark as the shadows they clung to could be felt more than seen.  He suspected this death trap provided vagrants, the homeless and the lawless with filthy cover.  Part of him hated to look out the window for what he might see.  Another part of him held demonic fascination for the theatre of the absurd that it provided. 

The giant rats seemed unperturbed when the black truancy police climbed through the rubble and into the buildings looking for people.  So far the law had always failed, causing his heart to race as if his side had won.  He knew these shadow people were there somewhere by the smoldering remains of a fire, or empty liquor bottles and open cans that weren’t there the day before, and yet not once had he seen anyone.  It was as if these shadow people were invisible and a continuing frustration to their pursuers.  It reminded him of a film of the Keystone Cops climbing through the piles of rubble, breaking through doors and running into each other.  Only this was real.

* * *

DEVLIN is a sojourn through the mind of a man in a most traumatic time (1968), being the benefactor of the victorious Great War (WWII), but not at home in its benediction.

The Peripatetic Philosopher offers some intrigue:

It Can’t Happen Here, or Has it?

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© August 4, 2017

When I was a teenage boy, I read “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935) by Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), an American political novelist and satirist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature (1930) for a series of powerful novels:

“Main Street” (1920) describes smug self-satisfied Americans who consider their hometowns flawless while clueless of the world beyond;

“Babbitt” (1922) is the main character who typifies American complacent mediocrity in business behaving with the acumen and boring consistency of his standardized cigar lighter, worshiping his gadgets, money and fine cars as indicators of his American virtue;

“Arrowsmith” (1925) attempts to expose the American doctor complacent mediocrity the way “Babbitt” had done for the American businessman.

“It Can’t Happen Here” (1930) was somewhat of a departure imagining the rise of Nazi Germany and the totalitarian regime being manifested in the United States when a demented populous politician rises to the presidency and dissolves the checks and balances of America’s constitutional democracy. 

In 1936 Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a charismatic and power-hungry politician, wins the election as President of the United States on a populist platform, promising to restore the country to prosperity and greatness, and promising each citizen $5,000 a year. Portraying himself as a champion of traditional American values, Windrip easily defeats his opponent, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). 

Windrip, once in power, rapidly outlaws dissent, incarcerates political enemies in concentration camps, and trains and arms a paramilitary force called the Minute Men, who terrorize citizens and enforce the policies of Windrip and his "corporatist" regime. One of his first acts as president is to eliminate the influence of the United States Congress, which draws the ire of many citizens as well as the legislators themselves. But there are always apologists before the fact in this book. To wit: 

“They'll all be convinced that, even if our Buzzy (Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip) defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt and is elected President of the United States, maybe (even though he) has got a few faults, he's on the side of the plain people, and against all the tight old political machines, and they'll rouse the country for him as the Great Liberator (and meanwhile Big Business will just wink and sit tight!) and then, by God, this crook—oh, I don't know whether he's more of a crook or an hysterical religious fanatic . . . will be able to set up a régime that'll remind you of Henry Morgan the pirate capturing a merchant ship.” 

Then regarding a journalist who attempted to alert the country to the danger Windrip represented:

“There were two things, they told Doremus (the political journalist opposed to the new regime) that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes (President Windrip). He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts - figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.” 

It has often occurred to me that these books of Sinclair Lewis had a powerful impression on my young mind as a teenager that I’m sure are reflected – to some extent – in my writing today as a man in his last innings. My reaction has been somewhat more circumspect if not more surprised, given the current preoccupation of the media and Congress with President Donald J. Trump’s possible connection and collusion with Russia to win the presidency. 

Over the years, mainly when I was flying about the world on various assignments, I would read many of British espionage novelist Ted Allbeury’s (1917-2005) spy novels, but I had never read his “The Twentieth Day of January” (1980) until now.

THE SOVIET UNION ATTEMPTS TO MAKE THE U.S. PRESIDENCY ITS PUPPET

This fantasy espionage novel published in 1980 predicted the rise of the Donald to the Presidency of the United States thirty seven years ago.  It imagined the blatant and incredible collusion of a President-elect with the Soviet Union.  Consider the time.

It is 1980 and the Cold War continues to rage on. Seemingly out of nowhere, wealthy businessman Logan Powell has become President-elect and is only weeks away from assuming the most powerful position in the world on the twentieth day of January. 

Across the Atlantic, veteran British intelligence agent James MacKay uncovers shocking evidence that suggests something might be terribly wrong with the election. With the help of a reluctant CIA, MacKay sets out on a dangerous and daring mission to discover if the unthinkable has occurred: is President-elect Powell actually a puppet of the Soviet Union?

This remarkably plausible thriller offers a heady mix of political intrigue and intense suspense — with the very future of America and the free world hanging in the balance. It does not have John Le Carre panache, but it is a workmanlike effort to show in the era of modern technology that the impossible is possible if not inevitable.

Ted Allbeury, bestselling author and former lieutenant colonel in British Intelligence, captures with wit and style the high stakes of this eerily prescient spy story. 

How Logan Powell went from a lecturer at Yale to a successful consultant to breaking a union strike to a state governor to the political nominee of the Republican Party to the President-elect is one of American and Soviet intrigue with a gaggle of co-conspirators, while Powell himself chooses to claim ignorance while seized with blind ambition. 

Here (in my italics) is the President-elect talking to reporters outside his aircraft in the bitter cold as described by author Allbeury in a too familiar and unsettling rhetoric:

He (Logan Powell) looked even younger than Kennedy . . . He was forty in two weeks’ time . . . He craned forward to catch the first question.

“Have you any comment to make on the statement issued today from Bonn regarding US troops in Europe?”

“Yes, I think that the Federal German Chancellor is saying to the American people – remember your commitments in Europe.”

"And what is your answer, sir?”

“Our commitments remain, but the form of our demonstration of that commitment will not necessarily, in the future, be represented by American forces in Europe.  They could be sent there when, and if, they are needed.”

“There have been recent comments from the Pentagon indicating that without US troops in Europe, Soviet forces would be at the English Channel in a couple of days.  Have you any comment?”

Powell smiled.  “Not unless they’re all driving Ferraris.  Europe’s a big area, ma’am.”

“Could I have a serious answer, Mr. Powell?”

“Yes, of course.  My administration are already preparing an agenda for talks with the Soviet leaders.  They are spending billions of roubles (sic) on missiles and weapons.  We are spending billions of dollars doing the same.  There comes a point when this madness has to stop.”  He paused.  “So far as I am concerned it stops on January twenty.”

“Did you discuss the effect on California unemployment of a cut-back in the arms programme (sic) while you were in Los Angeles?”

“I certainly did, and I made clear that my administration will give the highest priority to providing alternative work to all those areas of the country affected by these changes.”

“What do you expect the Soviet reaction to be, sir?”

“I guess they’ll start making more freezers and colour (sic) TVs.”

“There has been talk of a possible trade and peace pact with the Soviets.  What would you say to that?”

“I like trade, Mr. O’Dell, and I like peace.  That’s what I’d say.”

“But what would be your first action in response?”

Powell looked down at his feet and stamped them before he looked up.  “I guess my first action would be to break open a bottle of champagne.”  He looked around.  “And now, ladies and gentlemen, I must go.  I don’t want to read in the headlines tomorrow that the President-elect admits he’s got cold feet.”   

There was the ripple of laughter and a barrage of flashes, and Powell turned to walk to the car (pp. 104 – 105).  

With the influence of the Soviet Union well placed in the President-elect’s inner circle, Moscow was confident in its plans to have the newly elected president withdraw US troops and satellite launchers from Europe, start the process of disassembling NATO, developing a game plan to withdraw American troops across the globe, cutting defense spending to pre-WWII levels, and ultimately bypassing the US Congress and the Supreme Court as arbiters of “checks and balances.”

If anyone has ever viewed the television series, “The Americans,” which deals with Russian spies having been successfully integrated into American society as a typical American family, you can imagine how palpable and pragmatic espionage intrigue can ultimately be. 

We have become a paranoid nation in a paranoid world.  As legitimate as the presidency of Donald J. Trump may prove to be or not to be, novels such as this will always play on our fears.  Indeed, after a twenty-five year absence, John LeCarre is set to bring back his George Smiley of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” fame in another espionage novel.

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares a process:

LOOKING FOR A TRIGGER FOR THE NOVEL, “DEVLIN!”

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© August 3, 2017

REFERENCE

This is an exchange with a consultant for the novel, “Devlin!”  It is meant to give the reader an insider’s look into the creative process, which is slow, time consuming and often erroneous albeit constant.

JRF

THE CONSULTANT WRITES:

My understanding of Devlin is incomplete since I’ve not read the novel

But for developing a book cover, perhaps one can get by with a rudimentary grasp of the story. To be effective, a book cover has to emphasize a single appealing, or intriguing aspect of the underlying book. Does an effective movie trailer usually reflect the actual content of the movie it promotes? Ha! Almost never. But it peaks our curiosity, which is the goal.

For “Devlin” then, the right question to ask and to answer is: What "trigger" will impel your target audience to investigate the book? However, before you can answer the question you have to decide what target audience you're hoping to attract. Take a guess even. Only then can you formulate a potentially appealing cover... or covers. It's a trial and error process, but it begins with a premise, an assumption. What moves the herd? Gustav le Bon might have known.

Cheers

DR. FISHER REPLIES:

Here is what I expect to be THE AUDIENCE:

College educated.

Internationally oriented -- having traveled outside the continental United States at least once in the last ten years.

Reader of books featured in The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, Saturday Review of Literature, The Nation, etc. -- books not confined to national bestsellers but books that stretch the imagination beyond convention and the expected and accepted.

International travelers -- see No. 2.

Religious plurality -- empathetic to those with strong religious convictions without being hampered by their own in the reading.

Moral sophisticates -- appreciate the potential effect of the "clash of cultures" on emotional and moral stability.

Professional careers -- familiar with failure as well as success in the arena of work.

Socioeconomic sophisticates -- appreciate the dystopia of an exclusive materialistic orientation and career.

Purchasers of at least a dozen books a year -- books that stretch the imagination as well as entertain -- see No. 3.

Age -- 22 and beyond -- see No. 1.

Equally comfortable with the conceptual as the concrete, the abstract as the certain.

Taking these eleven demographics as a single idea, we have the failure of post modernity to provide a home for the restless mind.

Sanity and maturity, civility and common sense have taken a holiday as progress like greed can never be satisfied -- there must always be more progress. This has resulted in the near extinction of common decency, caring, love, intimacy and the appeal of privacy -- in other words, humanity. We are not happy campers; we have lost our moral compass and our way.

Devlin has entered this nowhere land and has attempted to thwart this advance of nihilism only to realize that escape is his only option and that life is his only penance.

THE CONSULTANT RESPONDS:

I see. You have very specific criteria for your audience. Next question, what visual cue might attract this group's interest? Who are they? Where are they? Are they an optimistic group, involved, active in the community? Or the opposite?

The title does not suggest much, but have you thought about a subtitle or explanatory sub heading?

Regards

DR. FISHER REPLIES:

First of all, I cannot imagine anyone optimistic in the present climate, but I do see most everyone involved. Activity has become a place to hide.

Looking for triggers for “Devlin” is difficult for me. I'm a visual person who reacts to visual covers of books, but clearly I am not very good at creating them. Moreover, I'm not very good at titles and subtitles of my books as you well know.

VELVET GLOVE & IRON FIST is a good example, which was meant to show the shift to a feminine dominated cultural problem solving motive from a male dominated one. I feel ahead of the curve on this, perhaps by 50 years, but I fully feel that since this book is in print and in Kindles Library it will eventually be discovered only I don't expect to be around.

As I've often told you, I write primarily for an audience not yet born. I don't say this facetiously. It is the nature of things. In another missive, which will be a surprise to my readers, I'm going to discuss a novel written 37 years ago that is so prescient that it mirrors the very moment.

Readers look for different things in novels least of which is enlightenment. DEVLIN, as a title is purposely vague because everything revolves around Seamus "Dirk" Devlin as if he is every man in a time warp.

"Devlin" is a novel about the "End of the American Century," which happened in 1968.

What has been the life blood of the American people for over two centuries has been an idea, and that idea has been increasingly replaced by technology with the world wildly imitating America's descent into nihilism in full retreat from that idea.

Socialism and Communism have been the face of that descent but they are actually incidental actors with regard to this idea as capitalism has replaced greed as the greatest sin of human civilization, obliterating this idea.

Capitalism's mantra is progress, and as with greed, you can never have enough progress. Creative destruction is its mechanism which has reached a fever pitch with the world on the brink of an atomic war with trillions of dollars of civilization's wealth going to weapons of mass destruction that have no practical value to mankind except to mask its inevitable descent into ubiquitous fear.

Philosophers and academics, novelists and poets have been writing about this descent, which has largely been ignored, while affluent societies and those on the fringe have systemically and systematically fled from reality with their electronic pacifiers as "Toys of the Mind."

Thirty year old Devlin finds himself in South African paradise in 1968. The Christian Society (Dutch Reform Church and Afrikaner government) of South Africa has unwittingly created a human zoo where the majority population (Bantus peoples) are treated as if part of the wild kingdom on display at Kruger National Park.

As point of reference, Devlin personifies sleepy American society forced by circumstances onto the international stage less than a quarter century after World War Two (1945).

The retreat from the idea of America took hold after the total unconditional end of that war with the United States the only major nation not suffering collateral damage on its own soil. Thus, with a world decimated by war, heady with its new advantage, morality and good sense no longer had a place in the mind of the times.

Devlin appears atavistic driven as he is by the pastoral nature of the American idea which had become increasingly anachronistic.

More specifically, Devlin embodies stubborn idealism where he found sanctuary in the American idea. To put it another way, "Devlin," the novel shows repeatedly that Devlin, the protagonist, is "not for sale."

Clearly confused with an inclination to retreat into cynicism, Devlin is in everyone's face without apology, especially those who march in somnambulant compromise into the future feeling no discomfort or concern that in their actions they have sacrificed the idea that once was America.

It is a novel that I have worked on for fifty years and it makes no apologies for Devlin being the face of mankind in its last innings.

The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects of a Sunday morning:

The New Reality that has Everyone Flummoxed!

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

© July 23, 2017

The new reality that everyone is experiencing in America but which no one is addressing much less talking about including all the well-paid pundits and journalists is that we finally have a corporate president that not only has created his own wealth, but has found his children and the people his children have married creating their own as well.

Without planning to, I have been writing about President Donald J. Trump for years with a simple message, one that has found few readers, but which “The Donald” manifests to the last crossing of the t’s and the dotting of the i’s.

He embraces challenges he doesn’t run from them; embraces his fears doesn’t run from them; embraces his controversies and malapropisms doesn’t run from them; and he embraces his enemies and doesn’t run from them.  How odd, to be president without being presidential; to be loyal to yourself and your quest come hell or high water.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and his brothers Robert and Ted Kennedy were millionaires, but all of them with inherited wealth that allowed them to economically coast through life, whereas Donald Trump took his father’s suburban real-estate business of some value, but essentially stagnating, and was able to turn it into an international corporate empire embracing all kinds of obstacles and impediments but managing through the power of mind, bravado, confidence and courage to succeed and fail on a colossal level over and over and over again, always picking himself up and moving forward, always forward.

We often put such people in a separate category that is marked with all our own biases and rationalizations as we paradoxically are inclined to underestimate them as being less than intelligent and honorable human beings, seeing them instead as devious achievers while having no idea of what it has taken for them to rise to the level that they have.

Consequently, few including members of his own acquired Republican Party took him seriously as a candidate.  This was also true of the celebrity culture of Hollywood as well as the pundits and journalists from one end to the other of these United States. 

It was easy to see him as a blowhard, bombastic and not a man of substance or intelligence.  How could he stand on the same stage as the venerated son of one president and the brother of another in the person of Jeb Bush?

He not only punctured the Jeb Bush façade almost from the opening debate surrounded by 16 other potential presidential candidates, but did so by questioning his energy and repressed sensitiveness. 

No one has ever questioned the now 71-year-old President Trump’s energy, or his resolute determination to win the presidency by working the final 36 hours to the November 2016 election with little if any sleep, traveling from one state to another to yet another to the very last moment. 

He has been called arrogant as if the word were a pejorative, which Webster so defines it, but Webster also says it is the disposal to exaggerate one’s worth or importance.  I say balderdash to that. 

If we are not in our own corner; if we do not esteem ourselves; if we do not embrace that which we happen to be with full acceptance; if we are not loyal to the soul of that being in every way, but depend on what others think of us, value in us, believe in us, and choose to esteem us to be, we become the epitome of the cage that others have created for us.  We are not an individual; we are a stereotype.   

Donald Trump’s message that resonated with many forgotten Americans was “Make America Great Again!”  What could be more arrogant and yet more simple than that?

We recently had a president that went to Europe and apologized for America’s wealth, America’s energy; America’s resilience; America’s economy; America’s military and industrial flexibility; America’s inventiveness; America’s confidence, and yes, America’s arrogance.

We were told this is the way to win friends and influence people, but it always backfires and it has backfired in this latest instance by a world submerged in dependence on the United States for its largesse. 

When an individual or a company or a country does more for its people than it expects its people to do for themselves it weakens them and their resolve and diminishes them as a people. 

When an individual, a company, a country, indeed, a civilization is in a dependent mode on one society in particular, in this case the United States, to shore up its economy, finance its defense, and fight its battles be they economic, political or military, you have the Western World that has been created since World War Two.

For the past thirty years, I have been writing on this theme but essentially with regard to the individual exhorting that individual to be loyal to himself; to be his own best friend; to worry more about how he feels and thinks about himself before worrying about how others think and feel about him.  This theme has gone counter to our predominant Western belief system going against that prevalent cultural grain. 

Yet, if we do for others at the expense of ourselves, we do them no favor.  Instead, this leads to our inevitable collective sadness if not insanity, as we now have created a world that is not full of self-love, but rather consumed with self-hate.  For confirmation, you need only turn on your television or surf the Internet.

President Donald J. Trump may not survive the constant attacks for believing in himself and embracing his challenges, but he represents a new day.  Destroy him, and you destroy something in all of us that has heretofore not survived World War Two.  Alas, there is an army out to do just that, and if it succeeds, we will be in full retreat not only from the future but from what has represented the survival mode of our past.

The Peripatetic Philosopher is complimented by a reader:

A READER COMMENTS ON-- 

TEN CREATIVE STAGES TO CONFIDENT THINKING!

THE READER WRITES:

Dear Dr. Fisher,

I've read only to the third stage of your new book and it is already helping me.  You mention that many years ago you read a similar book that changed your life when you were about my age, which is 36.  I've forgotten the title or the author but I can imagine your experience as that is something that is happening to me now.  You read many of this authors other books.  What other book by you should I read?

Tom T

DR. FISHER REPLIES:

Dear Tom T,

I'm glad you are finding this book useful.  The book to which you refer was "The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are," a book I read when I came back from South Africa in 1969.  Yes, it had an impact on me, leading to reading many more of Alan W. Watts's books.

What I suggest to you is that you read my book, reread parts that are particularly helpful, make notes of that fact, and not worry about reading anything else for a while.  That is what I did with the referenced work by Watts.  

His book didn't give me a road map, but got me out of my funk.  Ten Creative Stages to Confident Thinking is designed to provide the reader with a helpful guide to get over what I call "the wall" from success to continuing success.  I put into this work what has worked for me with the hope that the same proves true to you, the reader.

Once you complete this reading, and should you be of the same mind, it would be helpful to others who know nothing of this book if you wrote a brief comment on amazon.com.  It doesn't have to be anymore than what you have said here.

Thank you for your interest.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. 

The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects:

Nancy Isenberg’s WHITE TRASH –

The 400-Year Untold History of CLASS in AMERICA

A Retrospective

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

© July 6, 2017

Dr. Isenberg has come in for quite a bit of abuse for writing this book although she is not the first to make such claims. 

In reading this book, it found me reflecting throughout how openly and honestly she has presented her picture of that history, obviously knowing full well that she would upset those on the liberal left and the conservative right; the poor as well as the rich; those who have escaped poverty and now live in the comfort of the assumed nouveau riche, while never being accepted by the actual rich; those who claim some degree of upward mobility, power and authority while denying any association with those who they now dominate; and those who have never lost their admiration for the trappings of English and European royalty and gentrified nobility and of inherited wealth and station as opposed to earned wealth, power and authority as most Americans like to think that is true of themselves.

Kevin Williamson of the National Review (August 20, 2016) writes a blistering review of this book seeing it as “bad history,” while failing to make the case for this charge.  Instead, he punishes author Isenberg for her poor grasp of English grammar and conceptual presentation skills.

Interestingly enough, google has deleted the most hysterical comments on this book from its Internet pages.  These detractors are paradoxically verifying the author’s study, that is, that we are a much more class conscious nation than we would like to admit. 

My heritage is Irish, and the Irish that came to the United States in the second quarter of the 19^th century were generally seen as “lace curtain” and “shanty” Irish with a disproportionate of the latter category coming in the greatest numbers as Ireland was suffering a potato famine and the "shanty" Irish came to America feeling they had no other recourse to survive.

Not being an historian and reading history eclectically, I found myself however quite familiar with the profiles of our Founding Fathers and leading lights down through the last 200 years as I am interested in biography, especially of those who have assumed leadership roles as I am an industrial and organization psychologist, which makes it part of my turf.

Most of us have no trouble learning that the dregs of Great Britain were dumped off in Australia in the 18^th and 19^th century, but we don’t like to think that was also true of the esteemed Pilgrims or other people of the 17^th and 18^th and 19^th century who found their way to America, yet as Isenberg shows it was also true of these immigrants to the new land. 

These people identified as wastrels, over time, have become known as Offscourings, Lubbers, Bogtrotters, Rascals, Rubbish, Squatters, Crackers, Clay-eaters, Tackies, Mudsills, Scalawags, Briar hoppers, Hillbillies, Low-downer, White niggers, Degenerates, White trash, Rednecks, Trailer trash, and Swamp people.  

Isenberg takes pains to show the origin of these sobriquets explaining them in some detail.

The author profiles Benjamin Franklin, clearly an autodidact, John Adams, Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington showing them, among others, on how they managed their image of class with due diligence and conscious zeal. 

“Plain” John Adams is, however, contrasted with the slippery side of his family in cousin Samuel Adams who insisted on being chauffeured in a fancy carriage when he attended the Continental Congress. 

The antebellum South comes in for microscopic perusal mainly because of the aristocratic class of southern plantation owners and Negro slavery, but also for the pervasive presence of the class of “White trash” that in many ways was more encased in poverty and pain, illiteracy and inbreeding, imbecility and disease.  

The fact that we still have what the author calls “white niggers” in Kentucky and Appalachia as well as hovels throughout the country to this day speaks to a class President’s Johnson’s “War on Poverty” was unable to defeat.

It may surprise the reader after reading the first one hundred pages, which provides the foundation of the narrative, that such lights as Franklin and Jefferson preferred to see themselves as a “new breed” and separate from the “rubbish,” Jefferson’s word for those of us who have risen out of the misbegotten.  

Their kindness was not necessarily always in evidence, as it is not always shown today by the majority of us.  We expect people to be able to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and find their way to a fulfilling life and economic comfort however unrealistic that is.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the book was that on eugenics where many in power including Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes were for forced sterilization of those labeled feebleminded.   

Those who read me know that I have a special place in my heart for Andrew Jackson, the personification of the cracker, uneducated, uncouth, brawler, not a reflective or cognitive minded man, but nonetheless leader during an important moment in American history, and without that moment, well, chances are we would not be the United States of America we are today.

Jackson was the first western elected president from the land of squatters and thieves, landless people who lived in squalor and wouldn’t know a grammatical sentence if it penetrated their ear.  Like Donald J. Trump of the 21^st century, Jackson spoke their tongue and was rallied by them to be swept into the presidency on the strength of all they were against with little appreciation of what they were actually for. 

Isenberg paints Presidents Carter and Clinton with the broad brush of hayseed with Clinton playing the redneck for all it was worth, while Carter behaving as if he didn’t have the taint. 

One writer reflected that Jimmy Carter would have been a much more effective president had he embraced some of his “down country” origins that were reflected in his brother Billy, who smoked five packs of Pall Malls a day and always had a beer in his hand, and whose attitude was “hoo-Lord-what-the-hell-get-out-the way” compared to his brother, Jimmy’s prudent self-righteousness. 

The author sees Americans as a strange breed with a long legacy of “white trash,” which incidentally has been my experience as well.  Lady Bird Johnson had no trouble accepting that label, admitting she came out of this milieu as did I. 

Isenberg uses an interesting approach to illustrate this "white trash" ambience, citing novels, such as the Grapes of Wrath and To Kill a Mockingbird; television dramas, such as the Andy Griffin Show, Green Acres, Gomer Pyle, Petticoat Junction and The Beverly Hillbillies; celebrity personalities such as Elvis, Minnie Pearl, Duck Dynasty, Dolly Parton and Faye Bakker; politicians such as Sarah Palin, Huey Long and Slick Willie Clinton and Tricky Dick Nixon; and evangelists such as Jimmy Bakker, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

The author concludes:

White trash is a central, if disturbing, thread in our national narrative.  The very existence of such people – both in their visibility and invisibility – is proof that American society obsesses over the mutable labels we give to the neighbors we wish not to notice.  (We claim) “They are not who we are.”  But they are who we are and have been a fundamental part of our history, whether we like it or not.

From my vantage point, as paradoxical as it may sound, I think this is why we have survived as a people and as a free society.  From a cultural standpoint, it finds someone such as myself able to read her book with humor and foreknowledge that although she is right she is also wrong.  Otherwise, someone such as myself would be unable to muse over her words or write these words. 

   

  

The Peripatetic Philosopher introduces his new book:

LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO YOURSELF!

Nearly fifty years ago when I came back from South Africa, only in my mid-thirties, I decided to take a “time out” to assess my life.  It meant leaving my executive position and putting my family in something akin to limbo for the next several years. 

Once back in the United States, I came across British philosopher Alan W. Watts’ book, “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” (1966).   

The book was like a life line to a very disturbed young man.  Over the next two years I would read everything he had written up to that time, some twenty books, along with other authors he introduced me to, while attempting to get my legs under me to propel me into the future.

When I was nearly broke, I went back to graduate school for the next six years (year around) in an entirely different field than chemistry and chemical engineering, which was industrial psychology to earn my Ph.D., consulting on the side while writing one book (Confident Selling 1971), which turned out to be a national bestseller.   

Then reentering corporate management in 1980, my writing necessarily took a hiatus until 1990 when I retired for the second time to devote my full time to writing. 

“Confidence” often appears in the title of my works as I’ve learned in retrospect that confidence (or the lack of same) was the driver in my subtext that has allowed me to have the life that I’ve enjoyed.

And so, like “The Book” by author Watts got me back on my feet, I have written this book hoping that some lost or indecisive soul as I once was will pick it up and find his or her legs and be able to move forward and off the dime into the life that he or she deserves.

The ten stages amount to a roadmap to a fulfilling life that is awaiting everyone if they are ready.

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

DESCRIPTION OF “TEN CREATIVE STAGES TO CONFIDENT THINKING”

Imagine you have filled all the boxes and completed all the blanks, using your intelligence to pursue an education developing your talent, and launching your career only to find once you have experienced some success that you have run into the wall.  It could be any obstacle that throws you off course such as poor health, a soured relationship, downturn in the economy, collapse of your workplace or any other sundry possible snags that are inevitable in a lifetime of work and living, leaving you however confused as to how to continue.  We have all been there; we have all experienced such disruption, but we have not all dealt with such disturbances as latent opportunities to restart to a more promising future.  That is because we lack a roadmap, a flexible design forward that makes allowances for false steps, surprises, disappointments and setbacks.  "Ten Stages of Confident Thinking" provides a narrative of discrete stages or steps that can assist you in not only getting back on track but leaping over that wall to success to continuing success.   

Paperback: $19.95 -- 348 pages -- schematics & illustrations -- bibliography 

E-book: $9.99 -- www.amazon.com -- Kindle Library 

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares yet another:

TEN CREATIVE STAGES TO CONFIDENT THINKING

Excerpt

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 29, 2017

FALLACY OF COMPANY "AS FAMILY"

Companies encouraged the prevailing attitude of dependency by creating the impression that the company "is a family." No company or workplace "is a family." No organization in any type of enterprise "is a family." The idea that an overreaching authority is “family” to the man inside the group is an illusion. Yet, the symbolism of "family" is powerful. It was formed in childhood and has been altered little to become something of a truism. Unfortunately, the truism has no legs.

You don't throw the family out on the street; don't make fam­ily members redundant; don't move everything to another state or country and claim you had no choice. With family, there is no such thing as an "outside authority." Family is blood and des­tiny with no special lifeboats for select members when the ship is going down. Family controls its destiny if it has the courage to do so. Companies often lack such gumption.

We are born alone; we live largely alone; and we die alone. We all have peers, but the child is parent to the man. Each man is sovereign in his own life and way. The illusion of "fam­ily" or outside authority that wraps its magnanimous arms around us and looks after us is a utopian dream. It is the fear of freedom that finds us craving a safety net to escape responsibility for ourselves. English poet John Donne’s (1571 - 1631) "Triple Fool" touches on this woe:

"I am two fools, I know for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry:

But where's that Wiseman, that would not be I, if she would not deny!

Then as the earth's inward narrow crooked lanes do purge sea water's fretful salt away, I thought, if I could draw my pains through rhyme's vexation, I should them allay,

Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce.

But when I have done so, some man, his art and voice to show,

Doth set and sing my pain, and, by delighting many, frees again, grief, which verse did restrain.

To love and grief tribute of verse belongs, but not of such as pleases when `tis read,

Both are increased by such songs: for both their tri­umphs so are published,

And I, which was two fools, do so grow three; who are a little wise, the best fools be."

I've often read this poem when I've been down on myself and   somewhat discouraged for whatever reason. The poem reminds me that we stumble forward as individuals, and that it is a false promise to believe the "family" sentiment of corporate society as parent rescues us from that reality. 

The workplace or the Congress of the United States or the church cannot protect us from ourselves, but it can make us weak and vulnerable children. Our employers can intimate they have our backs and can protect us from the ravages of life; from the ravages that make us strong, straight, wise and courageous.  All we have to do is give up our freedom.  

But we were not made to be protected from life or ourselves.  Nor were we meant to be protected from failure which is the only route to success.  We were meant to be free which allows us to fail and fall and to pick ourselves up again and again. Why deny us that possibility; why trap us in the permanent state of children forever dependent as employees on the CEO or his equivalent as parent with him with a "god complex"?

It is because of this social syndrome why parents still control their fifty-year-old children, and why CEOs make 500 to 1,000 times as much as the aver­age worker. We are willing to pay that heavy price to an "outside authority" to maintain the approval of a parent or stay in the perpetual good graces of the boss. When we do this, and most of us do in corporate society, we abdicate our "inner authority" and our freedom but not without consequences.

We hear and believe the CEO when he says, "It is only a rumor that there will be massive layoffs. We are optimistic about our future." Countless examples of these dissembling lines sur­faced in the 2007-2008 with the global economy meltdown. A generation ago, Enron's founder and CEO said those precise words repeat­edly before he and the Enron CEO team vanished into scandal­ous infamy in 2001.

President Barak Obama lied dozens of times from 2008 through 2013, when Obamacare was being implemented stating, "With the Affordable Care Act, you can keep your health care plan if you want, period!" Dissembling has become second nature to those in leadership positions, while paradoxi­cally advocating transparency.

Notice the pageantry, the pomp and circumstance when the CEO of a company visits one of his far-flung satellite operations. You can see the trusting eyes of the workers as the CEO utters his reassurances. He is their father figure, affable, approachable, and always godlike. Workers place him on a pedestal so his head is always higher than theirs; his reach always farther, his horizons always wider, and his words balm for their worried souls. They believe because they want to believe, like children.

The CEO entertains selected questions collected beforehand. The questions have the implicit character of infantile demands: "Is this plant going to stay open?  Will we have the option to continue working if we don't want the buyout?"

Workers want the reassurance once provided by their parents. The CEO, coached by his public relations people, answers as if on a political stump:

"I looked in our three acre parking lot this morning and I saw it full of vehicles, not an empty space. Does that answer your question?"

Of course it doesn't, but who is going to challenge “god”?  The comment is appropriately followed by supportive laugher, clap­ping, and even a few hoorahs.

The child-in-the-worker says, "He means we're in business for the long haul." Wishful thinking fueled by the CEO's comment can become a fatal disease.  Then, to the second question about a "buyout," the CEO grows merry; his countenance takes on the demea­nor of a cherubic archangel. "I've been looking at those buyout packages, and think I'd be tempted to take one myself and go fishing."

Laughter again rises from the floor to another non-answer to the question. It lifts the CEO off his throne and carries him through a sea of complacent idolaters. No one dare break the spell.

Companies have paid dearly for this, as we now know. The only guarantee a worker should truly expect is a full day's pay for a full day's work. There are no guarantees in life, and why should work be any different? It puts the worker on his mettle when he knows he always has to perform. When I was a college student, and something of a grind, I was often asked, "Why do you study so hard? You've already clinched an “A”? You could flunk the final and still ace the course."

First of all, it was my nickel that put me in school, all my own nickels. Secondly, I was determined to learn as much as I possibly could. And thirdly, and this was important, I believed in my own heart that I could flunk out at any time. Nothing was ever taken for granted because I knew I could never charm a professor to get a good grade. I was stuck with me, and that me was not always too easy to take.

It will take some time, and I'm sure, reprogramming, if work­ers are to assume responsibility for their own security and future. It is clear they must find a way to add value status to their job. This will promote individual security, and by extension, company stability. Somehow this got lost in post-World War II euphoria, and now everyone is suffering for this failure.

It has been my observation that for every hard working per­son, there are four that are dogging it.

What is sad about this is that everyone knows who these peo­ple are, but no one does anything about them. Mired in learned help­lessness, hard workers don't want to be labeled snitches, while loafers know how to play the system to their advantage. Since loafers are paid the same, they busy themselves looking for ways to redirect attention by constant complaining or flattering their bosses. Like the disruptive child that used tears to get its way, these workers know the squeaky wheel gets the oil. So, while hard workers are focusing on work, these other workers are nitpicking or focusing on making an impression. Loafers have killed the golden goose, and now, with matters as they are, with a global economy in full swing, the blame game has no fire or audience.