THE FUTURE -- EXPONENTIAL FORCES OF YESTERDAY ARE AT WORK TODAY!

THE FUTURE – EXPONENTIAL FORCES OF YESTERDAY ARE AT WORK TODAY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 6, 2010

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REFERENCE: EXPONENTIAL REDUX


A reader here responds to my missive, WINNERS AND LOSERS (December 30, 2009, www.fisherofideas.com) sharing how the economic downturn has become a personal struggle to find professional connection again. He, like many others, has had a rocky couple of years. My daughter, after graduating in December 2007 from the University of South Florida, experienced the same difficulty before making connection in 2009. They are WINNERS because they stayed the course against a sea of distractions and alarmism.

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A conversation with another reader generated CORPOCRACY and “THE CULTURE OF CONFUSION” – OMEN FOR THE FUTURE? (January 1, 2010, www.fisherofideas.com). That missive looked at the situation in specific terms. This missive is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), as was the title of my book.

* * *

My objective is to provoke thought, to reveal you to yourself. It is not to solve your problems. I am reminded of Ethan Watters new book, “Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche” (Free Press 2009), where the author shows we have successfully exported our madness. He writes:

“In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been, for better or worse, homogenizing the way the world goes mad.”

Watters shows how we have exported Post Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) to pump up sales of such drugs as Paxil. By 2008, GlaxoSmithKline was selling over $1 billion worth of Paxil to the Japanese, who didn’t know they had a problem with depression until drug marketers informed them.

We have banned cigarette advertisement on television. We should also ban drug advertisements as drugs may be damaging to the suggestive prone consumer’s health as well as pocketbook.

* * *

The future, despite all the noise to the contrary, is not a new experience, or something we should dread. It is something we experience collectively every day. In a world of information overload, telling us what everything means and what everyone needs, we forget we have the moxie to cut through this wasteland.

* * *

A READER WRITES:

Jim,

Why do you think 2010 will be a tougher year than 2009? I am hoping that it will be better because 2009 was not a good year. I did land a full time job after 18 months of looking which was good but I had to take a lower salary than my last position. But I am grateful that I have a job.

I know the economy is still bad and a lot of people are out of work, so that may cause more problems. Housing foreclosures are still high. The government may reduce its spending to bail out the housing and financials markets so that may cause a decline. But I was wondering what prompted you to say that things will get worse.

John

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

John,

I don’t mean to be flippant when I say 2010 may be a tougher year. True, I don’t have a crystal ball, am not a soothsayer, but do pay attention to trends and forces, especially forces.

In fact, I am thinking back to the year 1510, which compares strikingly to the transformation of forces we are experiencing today, forces, which we take for granted because they operate around us and in us as the very air we breathe, but forces that periodically shift from a tectonic pace to explosive breakthroughs such as the current electronic age of the Internet. We are witnesses to a new history. The future is now!

* * *

We are all creatures of history, but few other than scholars take an interest in it. I am no scholar. I am not even well informed. I am simply curious. I read books. I observe. I reflect and interpret what I read and experience in certain ways. Is my way right? Not necessarily. The value is not in that I read and perceive history, but that my missives stimulate thought and further inquiry.

We are living history. Few would argue with this. They might quarrel with the idea we are reliving history of the distant past, which I believe we are and the reason for this missive.

* * *

OUR DEBT TO THE ARABIC CULTURE

After Rome fell in 476 AD, the next thousand years were traumatic and chaotic. Europe drifted into the “Dark Ages,” and was victimized by “The Black Death” that wiped out half its population.

Europe, during this period, retrogressed to a level of barbarism that left the door open for hoards of invaders to fill the vacuum. The Islam nations of the East moved through Greece, the Balkans, and into Sicily, Italy and Germany, and up from Africa into Spain.

The Muslim nations nearly conquered backward Europe, which was coming out of the Dark Ages, but failed for a number of reasons to advance beyond the Rhine and the Danube in Germany.

The Ottoman Turks were spread too thin, ran out of logistical support, had a run on the treasury, lost popular support at home, could not sustain brilliant leadership over the centuries, and eventually retreated back to Persia and their respective homelands as Europe progressively gained its own military, political and economic strength, its ethnic identity and its will to exist.

The Ottomans, however, imbued Europe with its rich culture, a culture that has sustained Europe for the past 500 years, a culture that has found Europe blossoming into the jewel that it has become.

Europe “borrowed” art, architecture, science and engineering, philosophy and language, mathematics and manual arts, navigation and shipbuilding from the Turks, who had before “borrowed” it from the Ming dynasty of China. America would in turn “borrow” it from Europe, and so it has been since the beginning of time, a succession of borrowers.

* * *

By 1500, Europe was on its own feet, having assimilated the rich legacy of the Islam culture as if it had itself invented it. Europe was exploding into what became known as the “European Miracle,” being able to do so because:

(1) Europe wasn’t a monolithic culture as was Islam;

(2) Europe had no central authority or pecking order as did the Ottomans;

(3) Europe was alive with energy, enthusiasm, and an élan that had faded with the Ottomans over the centuries having lost its appetite for conquest. Constant war had depleted the Ottoman Empire of manpower, materials, machines, and treasury not to mention its optimistic aspect.

* * *

Scholars tab 1500 as the beginning of modern society. The political, social, economic and intellectual consequences of Europe’s decentralized, largely unsupervised growth of commerce and merchants and ports and markets were significant in establishing a new power center, towns.

Feudal lords, who had operated like tribal chiefs, suspicious of the emergence of town centers where dissidence might meet and serfs might find sanctuary, had ruled in thousands of separate fiefdoms as Machiavelli would describe and immortalize in “The Prince.” He drafted the manuscript in 1513 to gain favor with the powerful Italian Medici family, but it was not published until 1532, five years after his death.


* * *

By 1510, feudalism was already eroding, as it could not confine history to its will. Nor could feudalism curtail freedom and openness of minds as well as markets. The Roman Catholic Church, which was in league with these feudal lords economically, politically and militarily as well as spiritually, counted on their viability to sustain church authority and control of Europe’s masses. Church power was in a state of erosion. It was a new day. New forces were at work.

The Roman Church was bankrupt due to the extravagances of Pope Leo X. He believed, wrongly, that the papacy could impose its will on the people and the people would oblige.

With this conceit, the pope authorized the selling of indulgences to finance the completion of St. Peter’s Basilica. After all, he was born a prince, himself, a Medici no less, and had been made a Cardinal of the Church when he was 13, and pope at the age 38. He would live only to the age of 46, but in that tempestuous period the history of Western Civilization would change dramatically.

Martin Luther, a scholar of scripture, but a simple cleric and son of a miner, was preaching in a tiny church in remote Wittenberg, Germany, when he posted his 95 theses on the Wittenberg church door (October 31, 1517), where he had been sharing his radical theology with his parish. Called to Rome to attend a conference he saw church corruption first hand. He had seen enough.

* * *

Luther’s 95 theses stated boldly that neither the papacy nor the clergy had the authority to forgive sin, and that salvation could be realized by faith, alone. That cataclysmic idea shattered the universe of conventional Christendom. The posting threw Catholic dogma into the sky shattering it forever falling to earth with new identities, and new rationale to support those identities.

Later, England’s King Henry VIII, who renounced his allegiance to the Roman Pontiff, established the Church of England with himself as its head. His friend Sir Thomas More opposed the move, and refused the king’s appeals to renounce Rome and pledge his loyalty to the throne. He was beheaded in 1535.

In contrast, the Dutch humanist and scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, a close friend of Sir Thomas More, slid through the ecclesiastical void unscathed and in ambivalent fashion. Erasmus agreed with Sir Thomas of the need for a more rational theology and radical reform of the clergy, but was disinclined to take on the historic church, or to make his views too incendiary. Instead, he timidly and surreptitiously published his “In Praise of Folly” (1509), hiding his wrath in sarcasm. He did, however, play a major role in the Counter Reformation that kept the church afloat and intact during this troubling period.

* * *

Ideas are never new, never rise out of virgin soil, never materialize fully blown or precise in meaning much less gravitas. They change as they mature. Some ideas are ephemeral, like soap bubbles, disappearing as quickly as they appear. Others at first only cause a ripple to turn ultimately into tidal waves. This was the case with Pope Leo X who gave Luther’s posting no significance. He did so because he was out of touch with the mind of the times, Luther wasn’t. But even the reclusive cleric failed to understand the symbolic impact his act had on the German imagination.

To measure the significance of the idea, chances are there never would have been an American drive for independence were it not for The Reformation. It championed individualism, while giving a gentle boost to fragile capitalism. The Reformation provided a platform for these nascent ideas.

Adam Smith would describe capitalism as an invisible hand in political economies controlling the “Wealth of Nations” (1776). His book was published the very year our Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence.

* * *

Ideas come together when the soil is fertile. Reformers surface. John Calvin took the broad ideas of Luther’s theology and focused on individualism and the work ethic to create the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. The doctrine holds that God appointed the eternal destiny of some to salvation by grace, while leaving the remainder to receive eternal damnation for all their sins. Selection to “The Elected” is demonstrated by leading an ethical and prosperous life through diligence and integrity. Controversial from the start, Calvinism stimulated economic growth and wide prosperity.

Sociologist Max Weber’s book, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1905), captured the essence of the celebrated work ethic, a claim author Weber rejected stating his study was not deterministic. Still, for the past 100 years, the work ethic has resonated with Europeans, but even more so with Americans giving rise to the twentieth century being called the “American Century.”

The work ethic that Protestantism sponsored, noted Weber, although unplanned and uncoordinated, was an obvious mass movement that ultimately influenced the development of capitalism.

* * *

An idea still needs a catalyst to drive it to completion. That catalyst in 1510 was Gutenberg’s mechanical printing press with movable type invented in 1455, or some sixty years before the Wittengerg saga. A printed version of the 95 theses appeared in Germany two weeks after Luther's posting of his edict, and all over Europe within a month.

Gutenberg had published a 42-line Bible, but it was Luther’s publication of the German Bible that electrified the people. The Word in German gave a sense of identity to German speaking peoples. The new print language created unprecedented ease in daily communication among speakers of a wide variety of accents. By reading German on the page they became aware of their commonality, and began to take pride in this new perception and connection. Thus was born a German way of thinking.

Perhaps not surprising, standardize grammar and vocabulary followed, while punctuation was introduced. Printing of language became a vehicle of conformity and codification paving the way for linguistic and national purity. What happened in Germany was repeated in England, France and Spain, and then in the smaller pockets of local people in the Balkans and Baltic regions.

Nationalism caught fire and spread across the mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes, plains and craggy cliffs that separated indigenous people geographically and demographically from each other. Decentralization and scattered “power centers” proved an enormous positive political, social and economic force. No group or region was strong enough to dominate another.

* * *

In 1455, there was no printed text in Europe. By 1510, there were more than 20 million books in 35,000 editions, or one book for every five inhabitants. In 1455, the only printing press in Europe had been Gutenberg’s. By 1510, there were 245 cities from Stockholm, Sweden, to Palermo, Sicily with printing presses. No innovation in history had spread so far so fast.


* * *

Protestantism slowed but did not eclipse the power of the Roman Church, which relied heavily on a strong hierarchical authority and dutiful obedience of the clergy and laity. The 500-year decline of Catholicism, however, did commence in 510 at the apogee of its power. Meanwhile, Protestantism was finding a new role and identity as individual consciousness grew and the work ethic spread. Feudalism was seemingly replaced with blinding speed by capitalism, but that was not quite true.

The Roman Church was the first to see the potential benefit of Gutenberg’s new technology. It was seen as a means to increase its social authority with the production and dissemination of identical devotional books. This was meant to establish liturgical conformity and obedience on an unprecedented scale. It instead had unintended consequences.

By 1466, or fifty years before Luther’s bold act of defiance, Rome moved to entrench its power among the growing number of literate non-Latin speakers in the rising artisan class with the first printing of the vernacular Bible in German. It failed to produce a ripple. Why?

The answer is one that has held special interest to me. Then as now, the corporate mindset, which then was that of the Roman Church, failed to get it even when it was on the right track.

While it attempted to solidify its power by printing devotionals, kings were solidifying their power through the politics of the printed word in the vernacular language and common idiom of the people leading to a new kind of society, the nation.

Item No. I:

In 1471, an Italian Bible was on sale in Venice. In 1477 the Delphi Press had printed a Dutch Bible. By 1500, there were 30 editions in six languages. Why did these publications not create a groundswell of spiritual renewal?

The fifteenth century Catholic Bible, although translated from the Latin into extant languages, was impossible to be read or understood by common churchgoers.

Item No. 2:

The scriptural text of the Catholic Bible was adulterated consistent with church dogma and teachings. That was not otherwise apparent as only the church owned Bibles, and these were read to the laity in Latin. Priests also taught what they wanted the people to believe, picking and choosing and changing scripture to support doctrine and liturgical practices while omitting sensitive points vital to the Gospels.

Item No. 3:

Luther wrote his Bible not only in German but consistent with scriptural scholarship. He was, after all, a professor of Biblical exegesis at Wittenberg. He went to great pains to write in a German that would resonate with the rich and the poor, kings and plowboys, and would confront them with the pure and unadulterated truth of the Word. The force of the Word, its logic and reality, could not be easily compromised. It was Luther’s format and delivery that was electric. Language and grammar and careful expression of ideas enriched his text. Peoples throughout Europe copied Luther’s blueprint.

Item No. 4:

The unexpected consequences of common people being able to read and understand the Bible in their native tongue were political as well as spiritual. Common identity developed consensus that was spontaneous, first starting in small conclaves with the unity and power of the Word producing social cohesion. This happened with Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Wales, Ireland, Catalonia and Finland, despite the fact that these smaller communities were economically dependent on more powerful countries.

To dramatize the point, where the Bible was not translated into a provincial language, the people and the culture disappeared absorbed into and subordinate to the political and economic language dominant in the region, surviving if at all only as a dialect.

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ETERNAL FORCES A WORK

If this gives you a modicum of identity with the past, and how the Information Age of 500 years ago differed little with the Information Age today, we are on the same page. Momentum then was less contrived, less goaded on by false prophets because the medium of the message was less mechanized, and more spontaneous.

Today it is easy to get caught up in the moment, to think times have never been worse, when they are only different. It is a matter of perspective. The forces operating now that could not be countermanded then are the same forces today:

(1) There are the forces within us.

We want freedom but we need security. We want wealth but we need certainty. We want happiness but we need comfort. We want fame but we need acceptance. We want success but we need safety and security. We want something for nothing. We never want to pay for anything, and above all, we don’t want to pay for what is most important for us. We know that everything must be paid for, and that it must be paid for in proportion to what is received. But we actually think to the contrary. For trifles, for things that are perfectly useless to us, for those things, we will pay anything. But for something important? Never. That must come to us itself.

Five hundred years ago when the majority had little formal education, and life was hard, wants and needs were undifferentiated as need was the only thing 95 percent of the population knew. Now, 95 percent of the population translates wants into needs.

* * *

There are conscious and instinctive forces at work within us. We need food to live and maintain our energy. When want becomes need, we live to want and call it need.

The five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch we take for granted and have been known to abuse ourselves by overeating, smoking and drinking and taking drugs.

We have an internal calibrator in us sensitive to weights, temperature, to dryness and moisture, and yet show a general indifference to sensation, when sensation warns us of danger.

We react sensibly to physical pain but insensibly to psychological pain. We persuade ourselves it is psychosomatic and not real, when it is very real, and can be quite damaging. Disappointment, sorrow, betrayal, grief, hate, and envy are as real as an unpleasant taste or smell. When we have an eerie feeling about someone, we find it odd but reject it as meaningless. The eerie feeling could be a signal of danger or exploitation. We will avoid food or beverage that makes us sick, but not people who make us sick. Why is that?

We are reflective and given to laughter and yawning, stretching and dancing in place when we have memory of pleasant or boring moments, moments that gave us pleasure or pain but that happen to surface now without prompting. Why do we see this as odd?

We have motor skills that function as if we are on automatic pilot, driving to work not remembering when we left home, finding ourselves at the workplace, wondering how we got there. We walk, talk, write, eat, and then catch a falling piece of paper off our desk in mid-flight without thinking, and call it an instinctive move. What do we call all the others?

Instinctive functions are inherent. Moving functions are learned behavior.

Moving functions we don’t think about, but are aware of at least after the fact. Then there are the “useless moving functions” such as dreaming, imagining, daydreaming and talking to ourselves. I talk to myself every day with my recorder in hand as I walk. Are these expressions of wasted energy?

* * *

So, there you have the four forces within us that color everything we do:

(1) Intellectual;
(2) Emotional;
(3) Instinctual; and
(4) Movement.

These operate within us and to a large degree determine our understanding of our conscious self.

* * *

Now why would I fold this expository essay into this missive on THE FUTURE?

The year 510, Gutenberg, Martin Luther, the Roman Church, time, and history, among other things were rattling around in my head when I thought of our obsession with the idea of the future. People got through events of the past and have given us what we experience today.

Yes, I am fascinated with Martin Luther as I am with other individuals who changed the course of history. It is true he was supersensitive, maniacal, self-centered, manic, given to depression, but passionate and deterministic. In other words, he wasn’t too different from many of us.

Yet Luther changed the world that popes and kings could not because they did not have his eyes, his mind, or his heart. Luther was just a man. He had to know himself to leverage his complex drives to some foreseeable end. Otherwise, he would have spontaneously combusted and self-destruct.

Sanity and insanity, self-realization and self-destruction are kin to each other, as are good and evil, love and hate. You can’t have the one without the other. Men have gotten rich promising you can, but you can’t. We sit on the shoulders of men who understood this.

The forces within are elusive to self-observation. In a way, we are not one but many. We are a Darwinian specimen evolving, the product of many iterations and generations in our genealogical chain, forced by circumstances to confront, compare, verify, and straighten out what we think we have experienced to what we actually have, and always, alone! (See the Fisher Model of Conflict and Stress Resolution in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND 1996).

A gift of our resilient mind is that as wrong headed as we sometimes are we still manage to believe in ourselves, which is good. We should realize though how deceptive our observations could be, and therefore learn how to punch holes in them, not for anyone else’s satisfaction but only for our own.

(2) There are the forces outside of us.

They can be people, places or things. It doesn’t matter. They are bound to impact us, and no place in more real terms than on the job.

Since we are people ourselves, and I use the plural because while we are an individual many ghosts haunt our presence from our unconscious ancestors to every person of influence that was there in the dawn of our creation and came to influence the way we think, feel, operate on automatic pilot, and react to crisis.

In a word, we are programmed, and that programming may not serve us. It is my considerate opinion we have failed to take proper measure of it, failed to acknowledge it was designed for another time, failed to assess its detriment to our health and well being.

* * *

2010 was not created in a vacuum. It represents the tsunami of past excesses and false steps to impact the direct future, and the days beyond.

Our programming is illustrated in the way we talk and walk, think and write, work and live, and how we face the world that confronts us. Today we are rich in denial because the problems we face are too complex to solve. We find it easier to attack those problems we know but aren’t facing. We have reliable solutions for them in our hip pocket. After a while, no one seems to notice these solutions are wrong for the problems we face, or that our problems are getting more toxic. Everyone finds satisfaction in doing something.

* * *

A curious operative word is key to this dilemma, “acceptance.”

If we accept others as we find them, we don’t own their problems. If we don’t own their problems, then we won’t attempt to solve them. The moot point is it is impossible to solve them in the best of circumstances because they are not our problems. Imagine that? Simple, right? Well, if it is, why do we try to solve other people’s problems?

The quick answer may be guilt, but I don’t think so. I think we believe we have better answers. We want to demonstrate this, which gives us an excuse to avoid our own. We derive satisfaction in telling others what they should and shouldn’t do. We think we are helping by imposing our answers to their problems, when we are muddying up the works.

Individuals, groups, companies and countries think in this way, and it always results in a muddle. We can’t get it out of our heads that not everyone wants to live in a Georgetown flat outside Washington, DC.

* * *

When we fail to accept others as we find them, warts and all, we own their problems. We have made their problems our problems. We have complicated our already overloaded consciousness with their stuff. By volunteering to be their problem solver we have made an impossible situation worse because their problems aren’t ours.

You shake your head, and say, I hear you. I don’t do that. But you do. Every time you give advice, make a suggestion, loan people money, carry their load to lighten their burden, while they stand around watching and cheering you on, you have sunk the ship before it clears the dock.

* * *

The more successful we are the more vulnerable we are. Others have a way of making us feel guilty for our success.

When I was 27-years-old and doing well, I loaned a neighbor $400, of which he never paid me back a dime. He was going through a rough patch with three little kids, on the road a lot, and a harried wife who often was crying on my shoulder. That $400 today would be worth $2,860.27 (www.google.com “value of the dollar over time”).

Eventually, he got angry when I asked for the money, and never spoke to me again. I was the bad guy, and I was. I owned his problem, and he reminded me of that fact when I failed to change his circumstances, which I couldn’t of course, because they weren’t mine. A variation of this always happens when we loan money because a problem doesn’t get solved with the loan, it only gets postponed.

Incidentally, there is one person we can influence, and only one person, ourselves. The influence we have on others is greatly exaggerated.

* * *

If we can accept others as we find them, then there is a much better chance that we will accept ourselves as we are.

The two ideas – self-acceptance and acceptance of others -- are mutually inclusive. Animosity, contempt, hypersensitivity, and revulsion may be projected towards others but the origins of such malcontent are in self-hatred, self-contempt, and self-revulsion.

Beware of the person who is going to save you from yourself.

Your savior is likely to be projecting a reflection of his own inner demons and chaos. There has never been a guru out to save the world that was not a closet manic.

People are always surprised when the manic side of the “savior” surfaces in some shocking scandalous way. They have a predisposition to trust the “saviors” more than themselves.

Think of that! To trust a stranger more than the person living within one’s own skin. But the “savior” knows that. He knows the susceptible ones to his silver tongue are looking to be rescued, and paradoxically and coincidently, the savior finds by rescuing others he rescues himself. It is madness but legitimate business in the poltergeist shop of the guru. So, when the guru fails in life in some shocking way, the “saved” one feels betrayed when he had already betrayed himself by being so cavalier with his trust.

* * *

We have seen in recent years Catholic priests accused of sexual misconduct with children. Here in the Tampa Bay area there have been repeated cases of middle school female teachers seducing male students. There was a case of a middle school official responsible for funds for countywide school activities guilty of stealing more than $560,000 over the years. We have had county school principals of middle and high schools caught in Internet stings attempting to have sex with teenagers. Trust is a commodity in bankruptcy court at the moment.

We put our hands over our mouths in disgust, but fail to see we are complicit in these affairs. Novelist Joseph Wambaugh, a long time police sergeant of the Los Angeles Police Department, states a community gets the law enforcement it deserves. Community standards are in trouble across the nation as there is little sense of community much less standards. We cannot wash our hands of public malfeasance anymore than we can wash our hands of our personal wrongdoing. They are interconnected.

* * *

“Know yourself,” we are told is the answer, but knowing is not enough. Knowledge is not action. We must understand ourselves. We must know, understand and accept the way we behave and why we behave that way without being judgmental. Once we see our behavior in the light of day we can choose to change, or not.

No one can corrupt or compromise us except ourselves. When we are not a stranger to ourselves, we have an advantage other people don't have. We are aware and accepting of ourselves as we are, not because we are perfect, not because we don’t have demons taunting us, but because we are all we have, and if it is not working for us, we can choose to change, but we cannot change if we don’t first establish self-acceptance.

Something happens when we have clarity as to who we are. We define situations more accurately, and in doing so, we have a better chance at solving them, a better chance at making good choices, and a much better chance at happiness.

* * *

An aside:

In 1969, after Prentice-Hall, Inc. accepted my unsolicited manuscript that would become my first book, CONFIDENT SELLING (1970), the publisher asked me to describe the essence of my book in one paragraph. Readers, who have become accustomed to my lengthy missives, might be surprised that I did it in a single sentence:

“The key to confidence is the acceptance of ourselves as we are and others as we find them.”

I didn’t realize it at the time that I was also defining “tolerance.”

* * *

In the dynamics of interpersonal exchange, in life’s conversations as well as the selling situation, there are two forces at work simultaneously in each of us:

(1) Essence; and
(2) Personality.

Essence is what we are born with. It is our physical and mental makeup.

Personality is learned behavior. It is what we acquire. We are male and female, but sex role identity is learned behavior and is culturally dependent.

That said we are imitators and from a very early age we unconsciously start building our personality. Our acquired tastes, our artificial likes and dislikes are acquired by imitation and imagination. Everything we see, experience, read, study, succeed or fail in doing ratchets up our acquired self. Artificial likes and dislike play an important, and sometimes disastrous part in our life. We can become addicted to what is not good for us. That can be people, places or things.

* * *

We are in the computer age of cell phones, iPods, laptops, and the Internet. They bombard our senses as Gutenberg’s printing press did 500 years ago.

In 510, reading books in one’s own language opened minds of the Enlightenment to new ideas, new discoveries, and new biases. Nations set boundaries, so did owners of private property. Industry, commerce and world trade were changing the role of artisans and the relevance of guilds. A new entity, the factory, was on the horizon. People moved from the country to the city and from an agrarian society of staid and predictable values to an urban society of constant change, uncertainty and ambivalent values.

New city dwellers with little education or skills crowded into slums sending their children off to work in factories instead to school to fend off benumbing poverty. The gap between haves and have nots now exceeded that of feudalism. Serfs became misplaced persons with no skills or place or space to call their own. Fanaticism of all stripes was on the rise. It was modernity.

The Information Age of Gutenberg created a more worldly society that threatened the authority of the Roman Church, displaced moral sensibilities, and spawned the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, and new discriminations. Nations large and small – Great Britain, Portugal, Holland, Denmark, Spain, Belgium and Germany – claimed the spoils of indigenous peoples of South and Central America, Africa and India. The sins of colonialism haunt the world today in Third World poverty, pollution, pestilence and pessimism that has in recent days metastasized into metamorphic terrorism.

* * *

We are now in the dawn of the Cyber Nation. It has no boundaries, no distinct nationalities, no dominate language, no specific cultural identity, but is robust and ubiquitous with electronic connections to the most remote regions of the globe.

“Power cells” still exist in the Cyber Age, but they are like Forth of July sparklers, likely to flash colorfully in the sky, radiate artificial beauty, and then dissipate like phantoms in the night. Meanwhile, man goes forward in postmodernity.

* * *

Celebrity once tantalized the fringes of our consciousness. It has become central to our existence. We are in the Age of Celebrity, the age of personality. Barak Obama was elected to the presidency on the strength of his personal charisma, his artful facility with language, his mensch from east coast matriculation, and his stolid game face as bombs blow up all around him to background elevator music.

Obama, make no mistake has essence, but does his essence trump his personality or does his personality trump his essence? He has one of the finest minds to occupy the White House, but this is no guarantee his essence will prevail.

* * *

When personality begins to dominate essence, we begin to prefer what is bad for us candy coating it as good; we become wrongheaded when we choose to believe we are clear minded; we make decisions that are disastrous while using the power of our essence to paint them in positive hues; we lose our perspective and fall victim to our demons. It happened to President Richard Milhous Nixon with Watergate. By a curious turn of events with 9/11 it happened to President George W. Bush, who is the antithesis of celebrity. Yet, after 9/11, he found himself in the “Klieg lights” of celebrity but only in a negative sense.

In the Age of Celebrity the popular trend is to seek fifteen minutes of fame, confirmation of the superficiality of our times. Looking good trumps doing good, and what you see is not necessarily what is there.

(3) Unexpected forces wreak unintended consequences.

In 510, we saw the facile dissemination of books, the lust for learning, and the quest for social and cultural identity in a common language turn people into nations, towards secular pursuits, and away from the Roman Church. Protestantism started out as a religious movement but quickly became a new political and economic force.

Fast forward to 2010, we see chaos and conflict everywhere: Israel continues to build houses on the West Bank of Jerusalem derailing peace talks with the Palestinians; Iran continues to enrich uranium in defiance of the United Nations Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; Wall Street continues to defy Main Street providing million dollar bonuses to its employees after receiving a multi-billion dollar bailout from taxpayers; North Korea continues to launch missiles into the Sea of Japan; the war in Afghanistan continues unabated with little progress. It is a bleak picture, but is it really? Or is it only the world rumbling toward a new configuration?

* * *

We are in the first days of a WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS, a world in which nothing gets past the amateur iPod camera, a world in which common humanity embraces people of different cultures and countries superceding the political jockeying for power, a world that is becoming increasingly young, idealistic, ideational and passionately concerned for the two-thirds of the world impoverished, diseased and left to rot.

Religion has been the scapegoat. It is not the culprit. Religion is now more important in the World Without Borders. Followers of the great religions are attracted to them by love not hate, by harmony not violence, by a common humanity, not exploitation. Followers are a world ahead of their leaders who still don’t get it, but followers do.

Many journalists and commentators who write books and fill the air with doom don’t get it either. They blame religion for the chaos and conflict and point to corruption and chaos in churches, temples, synagogues and mosques, and with some reason. Human groups of the highest forms are vulnerable to the weaknesses of their times.

Media sound the alarm, titillate with stories of gloom and doom. It sells books and attracts advertisers, while failing to show the World Without Borders has a different agenda. The unintended consequences of the ghoulish focus of nightly television news, radio and television talking heads on terror without a balanced presentation of constructive activities of the day stokes the boilers of fear, hate and mass hysteria. It is no accident “Law & Order” and other network programs have found a market for the macabre, the more ghoulish the wider the audience.

The agenda of A World Without Borders is to provide safe drinking water where terror cells exists, not more soldiers; to create an infrastructure with jobs, not fly drones across neighborhoods to seek out and kill terrorists; to learn the language and customs and dreams of the indigenous people where terrorists are successfully recruiting new members; to build churches and synagogues and mosques where suicide bombers have laid villages to waste; to support Doctors Without Borders and build hospitals and clinics that provide a lifeline to remote communities.

Terrorism will die where poverty is abated, where the rule of law is established, where jobs are readily available, where schools and hospitals serve all the people. Doing too little too late in Third World countries has caused the cancer that terrorism feeds upon.

Terrorists frustrated the Romans when they attempted to conquer Europe a millennium ago. Terrorists frustrated the Russians when they attempted to exploit Afghanistan a generation ago. And terrorists in Afghanistan today demonstrate the pusillanimity of a military solution to a tribal society.

Young Afghans in A World Without Borders may approach a postmodernity society in fifty years, but not today and not tomorrow. The country today is mainly roadless, mountainous and craggily inhospitable to outsiders. With less than 20 percent of the population literate, or skilled in any craft, with most Afghans living essentially as their forefathers lived centuries ago the challenge is real.

Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is Afghanistan. It is unique. Somalia is Somalia, Yemen is Yemen, and people of the World Without Borders understand this if their leadership doesn’t. The world they envision doesn’t only melt guns into plowshares, but turns ideas into food, clothing, water, shelters, hospitals, schools, and trust.

* * *

We have seen the unintended consequences of the real estate subprime fiasco, Wall Street meltdown, and the hollow factories of American manufacturing as Detroit failed for forty years to see the unexpected forces of global warming, the economic rise of India and China, and the spiraling cost of petroleum. .

For more than two years I researched and wrote NEAR JOURNEY’S END? CAN PLANET EARTH SURVIVE SELF-INDULGENT MAN? (2004), which was never published. Whether you have been self-indulgent or not, we all share in the fruits and burdens of our collective actions.

* * *

The forces of history, the cumulative forces of time and circumstances eventually affect us all.

Sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin claims we are at the end of a 600-year Sensate day and are entering an Ideational and creative tomorrow. In “THE CRISIS of OUR AGE” (1941), published seven decades ago, he outlines the collapse of conventional morality, predicts the sexual revolution, scopes the loss of direction of society, outlines the domino effect of crumbling traditional institutions, and details the continuing lapse of society in crisis gravitating to the ordeal of change to the spiraling superficiality of charismatic leadership while people wait for the new age to arrive.

Some think that Ideational tomorrow is the current Information Age. I think it is only an aspect of it. The future, as I see it, is the arrival of a collective civilization in a WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS. What do you think?

* * *

CORPOCRACY AND "THE CULTURE OF CONFUSION" -- OMEN FOR THE FUTURE?

CORPOCRACY AND “THE CULTURE OF CONFUSION” – OMEN FOR THE FUTURE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2, 2010

REFERENCE:

A perceptive reader shared the following thoughts in his reaction to my missive, “THE WAY IT IS, THE WAY WE ARE!”

* * *

A READER WRITES:


Hello Jim,

Fun stuff is too difficult to turn away from. I get a couple of this multi-colored graphic filled pieces of political commentary every week. As the individual members of Congress called out by first name are all Democrats, the source of the message is clear.

More indicative of the dissonance that exists in public discourse is the fourth element of the your "Culture of" group. That is the Culture of Confusion resulting from unconscious competence.

On one hand, when the Government institutes expand social programs, it is on a slippery slope leading to communism. On the other hand, when the Government fails to pad the social program that benefits me, it is evil and should be voted out of office. This is the unconscious part. The computers, software and the Internet combine to provide even the unconscious the competence to communicate their confused and confusing views of the world.

Your introduction of unions into the discussion is appropriate. When has anyone in America, when given the chance, voted for sustaining pay rates over increasing them? In hard times, unions have even voted in favor of decreasing their ranks rather than take pay cuts. Your argument emphasizes that the people we elect are no different, nor should they be, than the people that elected them.

We are, as a nation, filled with distrust as we see the institutions, which appeared as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, fades away. The discomfort of those disorienting events drive many to lash out at the obvious targets, Bush, Obama, Republicans, Democrats, neo-cons, liberals. Congress earns the extra $10K as a kind of abuse pay. Meanwhile, the shadow government of big business lobbyists probably gets ten times that for pushing laws that contribute to the net income of the conglomerates they represent.

None of these multi-colored graphic filled pieces of political commentary ever address that.

The unconscious competence of the Culture of Confusion flourishes.

Happy New Year!

Michael

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael,

Happy New Year to you, too!

What you say is true. We have indeed entered the Culture of Confusion in unconscious competence in many respects. What is not so apparent is that institutional society lags in the storyline in the New Age. It has failed to appreciate or take seriously society’s new construction.

* * *

THE FAILURE OF CORPORATE SOCIETY

For the nearly the past forty years or since the Jimmy Carter Presidency, no fault of his, incidentally, Corporate Society has designed, constructed and institutionalized what Peter Drucker declared as “Corporate Society.” This society has failed again and again and again to realize it is anachronistic:

(1) Corporate Society has failed to realize a workforce of professionals educated in the sciences and technologies, languages and cognitions, philosophies and religions, economies and ecologies could not be treated as interchangeable pieces in a machine as workers in the past have been treated, and get away with it, or could it?

That is precisely how the professional workforce has been treated over the last forty years. Corporate Society has instituted a contrived system of meaningless performance appraisals and incentives, while confining workers to pigeonhole cubicles expecting them to dutifully react to inane directives of the leadership, a leadership nostalgic for compliant and obsequious workers of the past whom they could control by fear and intimidation.

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) and SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998) addressed the consequences of this mindset. Workers have retreated into passive behaviors that have played havoc with productivity and have destroyed corporate infrastructures from within to the point that few corporations are surviving on much more than life support.

(2) Corporate Society has failed to realize that the moral authority of society is the foundation upon which the economic society is built. Religious and educational institutions have ignored the changing nature and complexity of society’s citizens in terms of expectations and demands along with the disappearing barriers between parents and children, teachers and students, managers and workers, and elected officials and citizens.

Instead of updating and promulgating linchpins to bridge the gaps inevitable when a society is in transition, Corporate Society has attempted to finesse its citizens by jerry-rigging a defunct system with workplace slogans (empowerment) and cosmetic change (open door policy), bogus academic curriculums (cultural studies) and new slants on grading (students evaluating teachers), fooling no one.

Corporate Society is broken and its pillars are crumbling along with its walls. The storyline is that draconian measures no longer work as they did one hundred years ago. Society has been turned inside out and upside down with students now the teachers and professionals now the face of the future and not well-heeled executives. Corporate Society has suffered a backlash, as surely we should have expected.

(3) Corporate Society has failed to realize how important spirituality is to the most sophisticated to the least sophisticated. Everyone needs spiritual sustenance as much as bread to live, breath and function as human beings. When religious and educational institutions bought into the Corporate Society model, the die was cast. We are now plagued with its consequences.

A spate of books claims God is not only dead but is irrelevant; that all the violence and chaos in the world can be placed at the door of religious institutions. These books have a point. The Christian, Judaic and Islam religions, in many cases, have been contaminated with secular corpocracy. Clerics and followers in such cases no longer practice the sacred that is preached. They have instead been tainted with fanaticism and gotten caught up in the politics of the moment. Love is at the center of all major religions, but that love is crippled when poisoned with the fatal flaw of secular corpocracy.

(4) Corporate Leadership has failed because it is the architect of a failed system. Even as I write these words, there are people who think President Obama runs the country, that he is the most powerful leader in the world, that Pope Benedict XVI is the spiritual guide of more than one billion Roman Catholics, and his word is law through encyclicals. None of this is true. Such leaders have a bully pulpit, to be sure, but depending on their respective charisma and persuasive seduction, they fail or succeed at the discretion of the people.

Leadership since the beginning of time has been local, regional and specific to clans, tribes and now gangs. Afghanistan and Pakistan are not mirages.

Peter the Great knew this. That is why he roamed among his subjects in disguise to see how they thought and what they thought of him. How many leaders today would take such a chance? How many, if they did, would use what they learned and have the courage to lead more appropriately?

Peter the Great wanted to bring his backward Russian society of mainly illiterate serfs into the modern world, and knew he couldn’t do it with a pitchfork, but could do it by the sage wisdom of his moral authority.

* * *

Ask yourself, how many leaders you know would attend a conference much less wander incognito amongst their people where they could not display their credentials or mention the authority of their position? This is not a rhetorical question. When I was a Honeywell OD psychologist, I asked executives to attend such a conference, and they all refused.

* * *

READ THE TEALEAVES!

We have seen 100-year-old institutions such as Montgomery Wards disappear.

We have seen the “Big Blue,” IBM, stumble and retrogress into the postmodern age, as it failed to see the significance of the personal computer age.

We have seen Xerox engineers develop the personal computer only to have it stolen from them by two college dropouts, Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, who were working out of Jobs’ garage, when Xerox management refused to fund their engineers’ research.

We have seen Bill Gates literally steal the software and write a contract with IBM that would turn him one day into the richest man in the world.

We have seen Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University college students, create www.google.com in their spare time. Google was first incorporated as a private company on September 4, 1998, and first offered as an initial public offering (IPC) on August 19, 2004, which raised $1.67 billion, making them instant billionaires.

We have seen, on the other hand, the failure of Homeland Security and the US Government to react quickly and effectively to Hurricane Katrina, making a mockery of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of Homeland Security.

Meanwhile, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda play havoc with American Troops in Afghanistan and Pakistan with Al-Qaeda managing the same devastation in Somalia, Indonesia and other parts of the world. Corporate Society is flummoxed in the climate of turbulent change where terrorists with no national origin or allegiance control the game.

Rome, once again, has fallen, and we cannot rebuild it to its former majesty, not now, not tomorrow, not ever.

What have we learned fighting corporate wars against bands of renegades? Have we learned nothing? Can we not see that our failure is institutional as well as strategic? Do we have to be hit with a sledgehammer to realize this?

* * *

HOW LATE WISE!

Apple, Inc. has learned the hard way that it is hard to resist the urge to adopt the Corporate Society model.

Steven Jobs thought that Apple needed a true corporate executive to run the company. He hired John Sculley of Pepsi Cola fame to run Apple and Sculley nearly ran it into oblivion.

John Sculley was born, bread, trained, and programmed in corpocracy, and knew nothing else. He came from the management school of ITT Harold Geneen, who claimed a good manager could manage anything irrespective of the technology or industry. Geneen had no respect for culture. Incidentally, neither did the celebrated management guru Peter Drucker.

Geneen and Drucker saw culture as an aberrancy, something dreamt up by softheaded shrinks. Sculley attempted to impose Pepsi’s cultural corpocracy on Apple employees, who were of a different mindset, experience, spirit and inclination. It should come as no surprise it proved disastrous.

Bill Gates has essentially departed from Microsoft management but Paul Allen, a co-founder of the company is still actively involved. The culture is still nostalgic of its origins, but what happens in the future if the mind of that time is not leading the way? It is something to ponder.

* * *

BACK TO THE FUTURE

In the nineteenth century, most industry and commerce was conducted in guilds. There was no boss, per se, but co-workers complementing each other in tasks to get the work done. They were skilled craftsmen, and took pride in their work. Most education was on-the-job training, and not in trade schools or academic institutions.

When students were able to attend school, it was rigorous and comprehensive. The high school curriculum (see IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, AuthorHouse, 2003) in 1900 for a Clinton High School student in Clinton, Iowa rivaled and perhaps surpassed what a four-year college graduate today would likely experience in terms of range and depth of learning. Only 5 – 10 percent of Clintonians then graduated from high school in 1900, whereas today 90 percent or more do. But are they educated for life, for a job, or for anything?

* * *

Early in the twentieth century, tool and die makers worked as independent contractors. Henry Ford was a bicycle mechanic. He didn’t invent the automobile. He bought into the industrial engineering schemes of Frederick Winslow Taylor of assembly line production, and the rest was history.

Small manufacturers and tool and die makers combined to form General Motors. In doing so, they gave up their independence, falling in line to new rules and regulations, policies and procedures, and further surrendering their control of what they did for better pay and benefits as the union rushed in to establish parity.

In the early days, there was resistance to control. Like in all times of transition, independent guilds and private contractors were reluctant to cave in to Corporate Society.

(1) Guild workers didn’t have any organization, but were skilled and took pride in their work.

(2) They knew and respected each other, and valued their connection in terms of competence.

(3) When times got tough, they stuck with each other. They didn’t have a corporate umbrella upon which to rely or hide. Nor did they look to the government to bail them out of their distress.

If this seems radical, the “Skunk Works” of the Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Program is reminiscent of the guilds. It is famous for its aircraft designs of business, engineering and technical teams with a high degree of autonomy unhampered by bureaucracy of the wider organization.

These autonomous groups are several times more productive than conventional operations, and have brought designs in under budget and ahead of schedule. They are synergistic, electric and alive with camaraderie. Why not more in evidence? Corporate Society is still locked into the past.

Tracy Kidder won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Soul of a Machine” (1981), which tracked a “skunk work” like team in the creation of a mega computer, only to dispense with the team once the job was done.

* * *

Organized people in a corporate complex are wide open for exploitation because they think they are too big to fail and too secure to be exploited. Therefore, they fail to pay proper attention to the nuances of change. They don’t misread the tealeaves; they disregard them.

Employees of corporations who are of a passive, reactive and vengeful nature look around them and see how easy it is to manipulate the system to their unsavory ends.

The corporation, too busy counting its loot, disregards the behavior of these social termites until it is too late for damage control. What is the point of lecturing an employee after he has been late for work 167 times but no notice taken before? This was the case of one supervisor who came to me for advice. I asked him, “What was so special this last time?“ He scratched his head, and answered, “Nothing, really.”

* * *

Thomas Jefferson has been out of fashion for a number of years because he was so strongly for states rights, individual authority, decentralized federal government, and a more pastoral agrarian society. The Information Age may not look as Jefferson envisioned the future, but “cultural capital” and intellectual and spiritual innovation thrive in his kind of world while they collapse in Corporate Society.

Steven Jobs, Stephen Wozniak, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Marc Andreessen, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and many more like them are bringing us back to the future.

* * *

THE WAY IT IS, THE WAY WE ARE!

THE WAY IT IS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 1, 2010

REFERENCE:

Reaction to my friend's disgust with Congressional raises, among other things.

* * *

George,

I wrote this and accidentally deleted it. Perhaps God was telling me "let well enough alone!" Since I cannot sleep, however, I've given it another go. You know my intentions are always sincere and respectful. So, I'll try again.

* * *

This is not an attempt to defend Congress or to justify the raises they have given themselves, but to point out some realities that indicate "the way it is" has a lot to do with "the way we are."

* * *

You are right. We could and should vote Senators and Members of the House of Representatives out of office when they are not doing the people's business to the people's satisfaction.

Yet, in point of fact, following Pareto's formula, more than 80 percent of them are likely to be reelected every time. Moreover, it is nothing for a Congressman to be reelected to 15 to 20 two-year terms, or for Senators to be reelected for 3 to 5 six-year terms. In fact, it is the rule.

* * *

Politicians, as I've pointed out in another essay, are in the seductive business. That was as true of Lincoln as it is of Obama. It is the nature of the beast. Politicians know how to divide and conquer, and have since the days of the Founding Fathers. So, this is no new.

As for the generous raises Congress has voted itself, my wonder often is how we can get people to run for elected office at all:

(1) A person needs a war chest of considerable amount to run for Congress, which means that the devil is in the lobbyist who is always whispering in his ear, "do this, not that."

Then, too, there is the business of campaigning for reelection, which takes more time than doing the people's business under the best of circumstances.

(2) A person has to maintain a home in the District of Columbia and in his home state, which means that the income and perks of public office, which at first blush seem generous, finds few ordinary citizens without private incomes able to run for much less stay in office without extreme economic hardship.

(3) A person has to be in physical, emotional and mental health to sustain the energy it takes to maintain a presence in politics.

* * *

My quarrel has always been with the social termites - the lobbyists - that write, edit and proofread what eventually comes out of the mouths of Congressmen. Lobbyists are a shadow government that is behind the scenes in healthcare and, yes, social security as well. Lobbyists create pork and Congress barrels it through into law.

* * *

I could go on but I'd like to turn my attention to ordinary sorts such as you and me, private citizens in this Great Republic, and how we are complicit in this affair:

(1) We believe the myth of a corporate society and have followed that myth as self-fulfilling prophecy.

I can remember when Iowa farmers would not take government handouts because they knew it would reduce their power and control of farming as independent businessmen.

Look across Iowa, Illinois and Indiana today, and what do you see, but giant expensive windmills on the premises? This is meant to showing farming country is growing green, but the green it is growing is in the coffers of Co-ops!

Corpocracy has taken over farming and driven it into the ground. The army of the night for Co-ops is the lobbyist. Have no doubt that ADM right in your backyard has an army of lobbyists on Capital Hill every day writing the lines that puppets in Congress move lips and legislation to.

(2) From the private citizen, the manager of work to the workers on down no one expected that anything could go wrong as long as they respectfully behaved as safe hires.

Ordinary workers led by the nose by unions bled their places of employment dry by asking for more and giving less, as if they were simply working for a wage and weren't owners of what they did.

In the 1960s I worked in the field with among my customers giant automotive plants, and saw the industry fading long before it did.

(3) From the private citizen, the manager of work to the workers on down had no conception of what life would be like without the automotive, chemical or appliance manufacturing plant in their community. These plants employed husbands and wives, brother and sisters, aunts and uncles, and had been doing so for generations.

When I was a boy visiting my uncle (the professor) in Detroit, GM, Ford and Chrysler assemblyline working families had more impressive homes and lived better than most professionals, including doctors of medicine.

(4) No one from the private citizen on down thought anyone or anything could take the advantage away from them. After all, as GM goes so goes the country! No one disputed that.

Yet, traveling in Europe in the 1970s, I could see European streets and most highways were not built for American cars.

(5) Workers, whether in the public or private section, took comfort in not being self-aware, self-reliant, self-directed, or self-motivated. That was the company's job through its managers.

Workers were programmed to be passive and submissive, and as long as the pay was good, where's the problem?

Since WWII, we have forgotten our roots. We were competent because we relied on ourselves. As we have increasingly relied on others, we have become increasingly incompetent.

I have expressed this in my books as going from "unconscious incompetence" (Culture of Comfort) to "conscious incompetence" (Culture of Complacency) when we sought what had once been our domain, "conscious competence" (Culture of Contribution).

We didn't think the gravytrain would ever end, hadn't given it a thought what to do if it did disappear, quit taking risks and paying the price but became addicted to shortcuts, and couldn't conceive that workers had as much to do with the collapse of the American economy as their leaders.

Just one data point. The United States entered 2000 producing 32 percent of the world's gross domestic product. We leave 2009 producing 24 percent. No nation in modern history except the Soviet Union has had such a precipitous decline in relative power in a single decade. It should give us pause.

What to do about it?

What we have always done in crisis - pull together; look for what we have and build on it rather than looking for scapegoats to blame.

We are a good and resilient people that have had the luxury of never having to grow up. The positive side of this adolescent state is that we have had the energy of youth, but know we need the sobering reflection of age. To that end I wish you and all of us well.

Jim

WINNERS AND LOSERS AND HOW EASILY THEY REVEAL THEMSELVES!

WINNERS AND LOSERS AND HOW EASILY THEY REVEAL THEMSELVES

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 30, 2009

* * *

Everyone is a winner but also a loser. Winning and losing are inextricably connected. That is the nature of life. Winning becomes a problem when we need to win at any cost. Losing becomes a problem when we are so fixated with losing we cannot get beyond it. This is written to provide some insight from someone who has had his share of wins and losses, and is still standing.

* * *

In 1974, five years after I retired the first time, and four years after my first book CONFIDENT SELLING (Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1970) was published, I got a call from Cincinnati, Ohio from a division of Bristol Myers, Inc., the Dracket Company, makers of “Drano.” The executive vice president of Bristol Myers had read my "Confident Selling" and wanted to interview me for the position of vice president and national sales manager of the Dracket division.

This presented a peculiar set of circumstances:

(1) I wasn’t looking for a job, but was pursuing a Ph.D. in organizational-industrial psychology;

(2) I was using my G.I. Bill, which was quite generous for a full-time student and father of four. This was supplemented by doing seminars for the Professional Institute of the American Management Association across the country;

(3) I had not yet gotten the bad taste out of my mouth for corpocracy;

(4) I was teaching a course at St. Petersburg Junior College (now four-year St. Petersburg College) based on “Confident Selling”; and

(5) Although encountering failure after failure to get published after successfully launching my writing career with “Confident Selling,” I had run into a wall but still persisted in becoming an author.

An exchange of letters accompanied with incentives found me traveling to Cincinnati to interview for the job. The vice president of Bristol Myers from New York City treated me as if I was already hired. I left the company after three days of interviews with the job in hand.

The next four weeks, a man flew down from Cincinnati every week, and briefed me on company business to give me a running start when I got my affairs in order, acquired transcripts of my academic work to transfer to Xavier University, sold my house, found schools for my children, and other details.

Then the unexpected changed everything: OPEC in 1974 placed an embargo on oil, which essentially dried up American automobiles at the gas station pump. Dracket made its products from petrochemicals. Petrochemicals came from crude oil. Dracket, in a panic, placed an immediate freeze on all hiring. So, I was hired and fired before I assumed my new job.

* * *

That may seem traumatic but it wasn’t. It was comedic and made me, once again, aware of how fickle corpocracy is, and how quick to panic.

Still, I didn’t come away from the experience empty handed. The Bristol Myers vice president was a minority owner of the Cincinnati Bengals, and a personal friend of Paul Brown, the owner, general manager, and coach of the Bengals, and former legendary coach of the Cleveland Browns when the legendary Jim Brown played for him.

It was the fall of the year and the NFL was ending preseason play. “The other day I attended a Bengals practice,” the vice president told me, “and I noticed that some of the guys were working their butts off while others were jawboning and jiving. So, I asked my friend looking at these men, coach, how do you decide who will make the team and who won’t? The coach looked at me and said, ‘I don’t decide. They do.’

“Now, if you know the coach you know he often talks in riddles and this was yet another. I told him that didn’t make sense. ‘But it makes perfect sense,’ he answered. ‘Look at those guys over there.’ They were the ones doing nothing. ‘They've already decided they’re not going to make the team. When I tell them, it will only be anticlimactic, simple as that.’ I understood then what he meant.”

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A COACH TO PICK OUT WINNERS AND LOSERS

Anthropologists define winning and losing, sociologists chart these attributions, while coaches deal with the fact with grown men, men who are not likely to have matured beyond adolescence. Losers project how the die will be cast by dogging it, while winners are working their tails off. Most of us fall somewhere between these perimeters as winners hang out with winners and losers with losers. To wit:

(1) Young people of high moral character hang out with other young people of similar character.

(2) Bright students are attracted to other bright students.

(3) Motivated workers are a magnet to other motivated workers.

(4) Students who are aggressive, extroverts, adventuresome and defy the status quo find each other with little trouble.

* * *

Some years ago when I was counseling a young man who had spent time in Raiford, a maximum security prison in Florida, I asked him, a nice man in many respects, why he got into such serious trouble? He answered, “Trouble followed the people I hung out with.” But why those people? He replied, “They were the only ones who would accept me.” Billy, practically illiterate with little formal education, abandoned by his prostitute mother, and beaten often by her drunken lovers, discovered he had much in common with other damaged young men, and got caught up in petty crime that gravitated to felonies.

* * *

5) The bully is attracted to other weak-minded individuals. Bullies hide their cowardice in the patina of false courage. Bullies can smell fear and are quick to exploit it.

(6) Poor students hang together and make fun of excellent students who also hang together.

* * *

Where it gets more complicated is when physical attractiveness and popularity is the primary gauge of acceptance.

As fading as physical beauty, our culture is obsessed with it. We don't want to grow old so we never plan on growing up. We have made the cosmetic and plastic surgery industry a multi-billion dollar business. It then follows that sincerity between beautiful people is often like watching a pretend drama on screen, especially when conversation seldom rises above banal nonsense. This was once limited to Hollywood; now it is a problem of everyone of every age.

An index of this cultural proclivity is the prominence of cheap gossip, celebrity worship and bizarre self-disclosure, once limited to television, radio and gossip columns, now a staple of the Internet on FaceBook.

* * *

When nothing is personal or sacred to the individual, then winning and losing is a moot point because there is no “is” there. And when there is no “is,” then a society of gangs fills the vacuum, which is the case today.

Everyone belongs to some kind of a gang.

Check out anyone’s association, and you will see they qualify as gang status. Gangs are loose federations of individuals that provide identity with dress, manner, rites and rituals, as well as language, interests and values, less we forget, equal contempt for nonmembers.

Gangs strut their stuff as if the world is envious of them when they are prisoners of compare and compete.

Gangs think it is “cool” to paint their bodies with tattoos because it gives them gang status and identity.

Gangs think one political party is superior to another when they are both vying for the same thing and in the same way. All politicians are professional seducers. They woo people for a living. If they are clever, and good at what they do, they'll strike a popular chord, and will prosper. So, when you hear advocates of one political party or another, you don't hear the speaker's voice but that of the politician. Professional seducers trade on mass appeal, count on it.

Name any subject of value and you will reveal a multitude of gangs. Notice I have not called such status “tribes.” We once were tribes but the lines between tribes have been obliterated so that no tribes exist except in gang status. Notice also that I haven't limited gangs to the nefarious counterculture ethnic gangs that plague our cities. Gangs exploit what is precious to the wider culture, but in a less systemic or critical way than politicians.

* * *

We are now in an economic downturn, and have been sold on the idea that the problem is one of money. We have been programmed to associate money and jobs as interchangeable, when they are not.

We all need money to live on, but we need a job to have a sense of purpose, and somewhere to go and something to do. A job gives meaning to life.

We are not programmed to vegetate at any age. That is a myth that has kept medical doctors, psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies in business. Raised to prominence are gurus with their simple-minded theories of health, wealth and purpose. Meanwhile, as relief from this fact, we have the gossip and sexual innuendo industry of matrons, madams and gents promoting exhibitionism on television as if society has become a merry madhouse.

The purpose of life is what we do. We have all been put on earth to do something. Choosing not to find out what that is fuels anxiety, angst and aggravation. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I indicate on how we have stayed the same, missed the changes and left the future up for grabs.

* * *

Economic Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman is even more blunt. He calls the decade we are leaving the “big zero decade” with zero job creation over the decade, zero gains in homeownership (25% of all mortgages in America and 45% of mortgages here in Florida find homeowners owing more than their houses are worth), zero gains for stocks even without taking inflation into account, while the celebrated dot-com bubble has deflated.

Krugman adds, “What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.” Economics are always in a state of instability but the same people are the victims of this instability because they are in a state of perpetual denial and choose to never see beyond their noses.

* * *

Last night I was shopping late with BB in a department store in a large mall. One sales lady was complaining to a colleague about how tired she was, how long she had been working that day. The other young lady, who had been working equally long, but was listening patiently, said finally, almost voce sotto, “I feel lucky to have a job.” If you’re interested in stereotypes, the complainer was white; the accepting young lady was black.

* * *

Losers are the last to come into work and the first to leave.

Losers do exactly as they are told and no more, and often less.

Losers are quick to say, “that’s not my job” when someone needs help and is too busy to complete a task.

Losers are always waiting for the big break, the big score, the right connection, the right patsy to snow and exploit, or to make the well-heeled feel obligated to bail them out when they get in over their head.

Losers are knowers and never learners. They are too smart to take an entrance level job, or go back to school because they don’t want to sacrifice the time or make the commitment for fear of failure, plus there are no guarantees that the effort will be worth the cost. Besides, they might have to give up their beer, time with their friends, who also are knowers and would never think of going back to school and breaking their routine.

Losers want “theirs” but the last thing they are willing to do is to work for it.

* * *

When I was in my late thirties, I went back to school sitting in classes with students ten to fifteen years younger, and they would say, “Aren’t you a little old to be here?” When I got my Ph.D., one of my classmates, much older than I was, in his late sixties, was asked, “Now that you’ve spent all this time going through this ridiculous process, what are you going to do with your Ph.D.?” He smiled, and said simply, “Enjoy it.”

Over my long life, I have encountered far more losers than winners because winners have 80 percent of the power and money, and are only 20 percent of the people.

Winners also own 80 percent of the real estate and investment capital, enjoy 80 percent of the leisure, and live longer and more productive lives than losers.

If you think this is a phenomenon of capitalism, you would be wrong. This has been true in feudalism, communism, socialism and combinations of these isms. Opportunity to break this Pareto differentiation is possible in the United States, but less so in Western Europe, yet the differentiation holds firm.

Why? Because we are programmed from birth and inculcated with a culture, value system, education and mindset of exceptionalism. We are drugged with social, economic and cultural nets to break our fall and prevent us from failing and therefore from succeeding to a large extent.

* * *

Winners are not smarter, more gifted, or talented, or in any way superior to losers, except in one dimension: they are willing to take risks and endure the pain of failure, embarrassment and losing everything in order to grow and keep growing. We treat them as exceptional when they only stay with a problem longer.

Winners do not take risks with reckless abandon but with simple, persistent and determined effort with benchmarks along the way focused on the process not the outcome.

Winners get there because the pleasure is in the risk taking, and the delight in the process of failing and then succeeding in a continuous journey of highs and lows with progress measured in inches and not miles.

Winners are not focused on retirement, on wealth creation, per se, or on accolades and celebrity, but on the excitement of being alive in the spirit of work, enjoying the moment with every day an opportunity and challenge to encounter the unexpected. Certainty is not in winners’ vocabulary because they know certainty is a myth that losers embrace at the expense of gainful experience.

Losers are looking for guarantees, for the certainty that the company, the country, the government will bail them out of their excesses, or take the blame when their failure to be winners sinks the company, country, the industry and themselves into the tank.

* * *

No worker, whatever the profession or job, should expect more than a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. Beyond that it is nigh impossible of the 20 percent winners to carry the 80 percent losers for the long haul, as recent events have proven.

Are the fat cats on Wall Street winners because they get multimillion-dollar bonuses?

Hardly. They are one-dimensional personalities that believe money spells the difference between winning and losing in life. Beyond basic necessities for health and comfort, wealth is relatively irrelevant.

Two-thirds of the world is impoverished with the simple conveniences of a roof over people’s heads, food on the table, adequate schooling for the children, medical facilities for the sick, and proper drinking water and sanitation for all as if this described Paradise.

In my long life, I have seen people become spectacularly wealthy overnight, think like they were part of the elite, behave like they were living in a film, and then see the wealth disappear, along with their fair weather friends, and then blame each other for the crash. They were into fast cars, upscale dwellings, boats and all the other accouterments that define the wealthy from the rest of us, and yet in the end, they acted as losers.

* * *

An entire fantasy industry has played with the mind of instant millionaires, and that is the industry of self-help books, self-esteem psychologists, and men of the cloth promoting purposefulness.

We are in the age of canned goods and microwave dinners, which this fantasy industry has now borrowed with spectacular success. Self-help books are nothing more than canned goods, while self-esteem psychology relies on microwave theories to provide quick fixes. Add to the spiritual recipes of purposefulness and you have a description of the moral dilemma of our times: shortcutitis!

* * *

When I was a Honeywell psychologist, people would come to me and say they suffered from a low sense of self-esteem or self-worth. Bluntly, I would say, “What do you expect me to do about it?” They would look at me aghast. “Isn’t that your job?” I would smile, and say, “No, it is yours. And guess what? Do something worthwhile and you will discover self-esteem.” I would then turn my attention to that challenge.

PBS has a popular psychological evangelist who promotes self-esteem dribble, and people buy it because they want easy answers to difficult questions. They want to join the winners who represent only 20 percent of the people by taking short cuts, by attending seminars, reading self-motivational books, complaining constantly that they are surrounded by negativism, while never thinking of getting off their asses and doing something, including leaving and doing something else if the climate is too confining. They want inspiration without perspiration, which is like wanting to breathe without oxygen. They want instant relief from what is crashing down on them without doing anything other than complaining, acquiring a personal trainer, or something cosmetic like attending a seminar or reading a book to correct the problem. Ironically, corpocracy acts in the same way as the individual with the same dispirited outcomes.

* * *

Winners don’t dwell on being positive or negative. They don’t have that luxury, as they are too busy focused on the process of doing. They are not waiting for inspiration but exerting perspiration. They work long hours and don’t complain. They have no time for bromides or cliché but are in the business of giving their all and not worrying about what they will get for the giving.

Winners can be polite or brash, but in either case it is a matter of patience with them, as they hate to spend much time jawboning about things that move nothing in any direction other than forward inertia.

* * *

We have expensive clinics for drug addicts, alcoholics and the obese. People pay as much as $10,000 a week for some of these digs, when the cure for such addictions would be much more effective, much more permanent and much more meaningful were the suffering addicts to disassociate themselves with others with the problem behavior.

Addicts, whatever the addiction, are attracted to other addicts. To break connection with this downward spiral requires painful and complete separation. To do otherwise means the cure, as expensive as it might be, will not take for long.

THEN THERE ARE LONERS

Over the course of my life, living in many parts of the globe, experiencing various cultures and people, studying in various institutions, and reading thousands of autobiographies and biographies, I have been amazed at the disproportionate number of high achievers who described themselves as loners.

Most high achieving writers admit to being loners straightaway. You would think it fits them given that writing is a singular activity between the writer, his material and his mind’s ability to organize data into some semblance of thought or stories of interest.

But then I found this is not always the case. Popular novelists can be quite gregarious. This is especially true since the publishing industry sells authors the way the food industry sells cereal. Books are packaged, programmed, promoted and sold identical to Quaker Oats. It is no accident books appear on supermarket shelves the same as cereals where books outsell conventional bookstores. Popular novels have become a staple at Super Wal-Marts for example.

And like cereal, the popular novelist is likely to create the raw material of an outline of a story while a grunt does the dirty work of turning it into a book, sharing royalties and book credit, but leaving no doubt that the marquee of the product is that of the celebrated celebrity novelist. His name sells the book just like Quaker Oats sells a proprietary product.

Even dead authors are reaping the benefits of this new industry such as the late Robert Ludlum. Yet it fails to alarm the reader that the author’s latest novel differs little with his previous twenty or thirty because it follows a formula that the living grunt writer honors with great integrity. How do they get away with this? Ask a reader to describe the book just read two days after the fact, and you will find the reader has already forgotten the storyline. The industry is counting on this.

* * *

Formula thinking and writing offend the loner because the loner writes about the timeless. J. D. Salinger wrote a book about a young man’s angst and boredom written more than fifty years ago that is still a perennial seller, but he no longer publishes, and lives as a hermit. He has no desire to compete with potboilers.

Loners take the risks and endure the pain of embracing if precariously universal themes. Philip Roth is another American author who continues to write and live in the bosom of society that will also be read far after his earthly days, but alas, I think more enduring fiction will survive written by women. Herta Muller won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009 and Doris Lessing in 2007 both incidentally are European women.

Too many fiction authors, male and female, write the way the fat cats of Wall Street leverage residuals, measuring their literary significance by how many books they sell and royalty income they receive. Few if any of these mega-authors will be in print in 100 years.

* * *

It has been my privilege to know and study under several loners in the scientific and engineering community from high school on, and to marvel at their expertise and humility, far from the maddening crowd.

Such people provided tools to the Steven Jobs and Bill Gates of this world. These loners quietly applied their trade as these students soared to billionaire status. So, it has been over the past 500 years: the loners create and the entrepreneurs exploit. The hard work and heavy lifting, the grueling science of inquiry, wondering, pondering, failing and succeeding in a quest to understand Nature’s mysteries has been the isolated lot of loners, and the supple material of technologists. Loners are not complaining as they are in to process not product.

* * *

It is when this grueling work is done for glory that losers are treated as winners. This was the case when Rosalind Franklin discovered the stucture of DNA studying coal. She took the famous “Photograph 51,” which revealed the B form of DNA. James Watson literally stole this research as he now could see the DNA molecule was a “double helix.”

Franklin, after spending thousands of hours x-raying coal, suffered severe radiation damage to her system and died in her mid-thirties before James Watson, Francis Crick, and her boss, Maurice Wilkins, were awarded the Nobel Prize for her work. If this were not enough, posthumously, she was called the “Dark Lady” in Watson’s book, “The Double Helix” (1968) with no mention that she had died. Only the living are awarded the Nobel Prize.

Sobriquets that diminish a person have always offended me. I feel the same way about people called “nerds” or some other deprecating term to make them seem more odd and out of the mainstream, especially when they stir the mainstream’s drink.

* * *

The absurdity of the times finds the identity of people once on the fringe, such as people plastered with tattoos, now mainstream. People today would rather appear to look rebellious than to rebel, to seem unconventional when conforming to uncertain identity, to parade about with body paint symbols of values as if human billboards while professing no particular faith in anything.

Another absurdity, as we become increasingly amalgamated into a homogenous society the more we retreat into polarized monolithic biases, of either/or as if all goodness or badness was proprietary to one group or another, when that could never be the case in the best of circumstances.

* * *

In a celebrity culture, which we have at the moment, winners and losers are irrelevant as society’s awareness of itself is skin deep. The bottom feeders better known as “Main Street” have spent the past score of years living and behaving as if they were “Wall Street.” But now that mass excess has hit overload, they want to distant themselves from societal greed, fraud, corruption, and failure, as if they were not complicit in its creation.

* * *

In the beginning of the twenty-first century, money was loose in the United States, but from another angle it was tight. The end of the Cold War made money tight at the top. This was a result of a reduction in defense spending, heavy manufacturing shifting abroad, collapse of the automotive industry, and a general belt-tightening of the national economy as it made adjustments to a peace economy. The men at the top looked gloomily at this situation and contrived a counterattack. Money already loose to bottom feeders was made even looser to them so as to restore looseness at the top.

Credit became the new guise for men at the top to regain the advantage. Good credit, bad credit, or no credit, it didn’t matter, anyone could purchase anything from household staples to homes to automobiles to boats and other big-ticket items as the purse strings were loosened to the point of being nonexistent. Cash flowed back to the men at the top to eclipse the cold war economy.

Clever people devised ways to make the poor, the disadvantaged, the indulgent, and the derelict carry the red ink for them as they painted their world green with capital. With the Twin Tower terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, the decade of greed followed fueled by fear and paranoia. It loosened money even more for men at the top with the willing participation of bottom feeders in the charade.

When the collapse came, it was a complicit fall, which media and everyone else has chosen to ignore. It is the fault line in capitalism, and it has been so since the early eighteenth century.

* * *

RICHARD STARK NOVELS -- A REVIEW

RICHARD STARK NOVELS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 28, 2009

* * *

Call me an intellectual snob, but I wasn’t aware of the Richard Stark novels until I saw an advertisement for them from the University of Chicago Press in The New York Review of Books, a journal of essays on books to which I have subscribed to for many years.

A writer myself, over the years since a boy, I have gone through the American and European classic novels, and then increasingly on to novels of the more superfluous and contemporary class of what I call escape reading, which includes a good number of mystery novels. Joyce Carol Oates is right. Once you read a typical mystery novel, a few days later you can’t remember the story much less the plot line.

In my undergraduate years at the University of Iowa, I was a chemistry major but was opened to a whole new world when taking two required core courses for a degree. They were “Modern Literature” and “Greeks and the Bible.”


Being an Irish Roman Catholic boy, I was familiar with the writings of St. Paul through the gospels, but I had never read the Bible, or, indeed, the Greek classics. The epistles of the gospels provided moral lessons, which the texts of the Letters of St. Paul provided grounding. I found Protestants were much more familiar with the Bible than I was, and so this was a further revelation of my ignorance, while my Jewish friends in college could quote the Old Testament as if it were a family heirloom, which it was to them.

Before such exposure, I felt all the answers were in science and mathematics and I didn’t have to bother my mind about literature, sentence structure, or any of those light weight subjects that went nowhere and ordinary people filled their minds with.

Because of exposure to these two core courses, I was moved to squirrel in electives far from my major in such courses as “Shakespeare,” “The American Novel,” and “Understanding Fiction and Poetry.”

Once I graduated, and now was a chemist in research & development, I returned to only reading science, that is, until I took a job as a chemical sales engineer in the chemical industry to make more money to support my family. It was then that I discovered the importance of those two core courses and the subsequent electives. They became the foundation to my understanding of people and how to deal with them. No surprise, I imagine, my first book was CONFIDENT SELLING (Prentice-Hall 1970).

* * *

Fast forward to the time of my first retirement in my mid-thirties, now with a passion to be a writer, yes, of novels and short stories, finding instead that I lacked the tools, the cadence, the sense and the connection such writers have with their readers. Curiously, now forty years later, I have written seven other nonfiction books, and only one novel, which was a memoir of my youth (IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE Authorhouse 2003). I am working on a novel of South Africa where I lived during the time of apartheid. I mention this because I find writing good fiction very hard work. So, I have great respect for those that do it well.

It was then that I timidly started to read such writers as Ross McDonald, to reread Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and others. I had worked around the world and had seen pathos first hand, finding that these writers, and others like them, looked into the heart of man with the ability to express what they saw honestly and convincingly. Increasingly, I found myself reading mystery novels, and there I discovered some of the best writing I had experienced, a genre I had always considered inferior to mainstream fiction.

* * *

It was how I came to read Richard Stark’s “The Hunter,” with one of the pen names of the prolific crime fiction writer, Donald Westlake. I have since read “The Man With the Getaway Face” and “The Outfit.” I am reading them in order as they were published, and plan to read all twenty-four of his novels under that pen name. I’ll tell you why.

Stark writes like a movie in your head. You forget that you are reading a book and hear the characters talking, are surprised and shocked by their actions, and wonder why you are not appalled by antics of the main character, “Parker.” He is paradoxically moral in an amoral way, visceral without the claptrap of stereotype, and has a code of conduct that is outside the law but works for him because he never abandons it. Secular and sacred society is irrelevant to him because he has no appetite for the ambivalence of truth or the ambiguity of justice.

Parker, however, is not a one-dimensional “American Adam” as depicted by actor John Wayne and described by Garry Wills as “the archetypal American displaced person who has arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, a killer for cleaning the world of things that need killing, loving but not bound down by love, rootless but carrying the center in himself, a gyroscope direction-setter, a traveling norm.”

Parker, alas, would find this pathetically romantic. He has no redeeming features to think of, although he resembles the American Adam but in three-dimensions. He is surviving in a jungle in which the world has become using his wits, which are considerable, to get in and out of danger to embrace the next episode he knows inevitably confronts him. He lives in a godless world where homicide is only an option of the last resort and the killing must be consistent with his godless code. He is a survivor in which the world has gone dead to meaning, where the moment only resonates with the prehensile mind.

Read “The Hunter” and you are introduced to a man who understands why his wife tried and thought she killed him, and why he had to kill his wife, and then why he had no other option than to look for and kill the man who made that her only option.

In “The Man With the Getaway Face,” the economy of style has the bite of a language of clarity and power, and of imagery that compares favorably with Graham Greene’s “This Gun for Hire.” Parker has killed the man who orchestrated his murder using his wife as his instrument. He then feels obliged to kill the man’s boss in “The Outfit,” which is akin to the Mafia. This set of actions has him on the run seeking anonymity in plastic surgeon. But with everything Parker does, it comes up with double crosses that he has to finesse only to again become finessed by them.

In “The Outfit,” his cover blown, and his new face now the object of the Outfit to permanently erase, Parker doesn’t run from contract killers but embraces the challenge against a stacked deck. He is a thinking man without portfolio, a man of the street, hard as nails, as resolute to exterminate his enemies as they are resolved to do him in. So, he hijacks their hijacked trucks, kills their hired guns, and disrupts their businesses, knowing all the time that this war has no end but simply new beginnings.

Crime novelist Elmore Leonard, an artist of the genre in his own right, celebrates the power and economy of Stark’s style. Leonard once advised never to start a novel with the weather. Stark goes one better: he sets the tone of the whole novel in the first sentence. In the three books I’ve read to date, here are the first sentences:

(1) “The Hunter”: “When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.”

(2) “The Man With the Getaway Face”: “When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger.”

(3) “The Outfit”: “When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed.”

You get a sense in the first novel of an angry guy, in the second surprised at the disconnect between the image in the mirror and himself, and in the third something abrupt and devastating has entered the sanctuary of his uneasy peace.

These are dark or noir novels of the underbelly of society where people live in what William Faulkner called “quiet desperation.” The twenty-four novels were published from 1962 to 2008, the year of the death of their creator, Donald Westlake. You only have to listen to the nightly television news of your city to know that Parker lives, breathes, and is plotting his revenge around the corner from where you live. This gives a sense of urgency, timeliness, and trepidation against the softness and denial in which most of us encounter our daily world, choosing not to see or experience the ugliness that poisons the air we breathe.

These are not detective novels, not police journals, not law and order court dramas, but gnarled, sinewy, scarred, knotted and gripping stories of life that feeds off society but pays it no mind. The women are as hard and as cunning as the men, while love is a word that has never entered either gender’s vocabulary. Why read these novels?

If you are an inveterate reader, read these novels for the prose, style and clarity of the writing. If you are a writer, read them to experience the humbling sense of being in the presence of a master of language and ambience. If you are a student of human behavior, read them to get a sense of the ugliness that hides in us all under the patina of beauty. If you are a philosopher, and who isn’t, read them to get a sense of why the world periodically goes haywire.

* * *

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 27, 2009

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIRS OF 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003) was written as a snapshot of an important era in American history, an era that is long gone now with many of the faces and facts already fading away, but never dying. It was true across America, and Clinton, Iowa. The courthouse neighborhood was but a reminder of the strength, resiliency, purpose and passion of ordinary people called on to do extraordinary things in a time of war (WWII).

Many readers have asked me over the years to provide actual pictures of the era and the young people I write about with so much affection. That is my purpose here. I hope wherever you are that this helps you remember your own roots, which bring forth similar memories.

ST. PATRICK’S CHAMPIONSHIP BASKETBALL TEAM (1945 – 1946)


From left to right: Jim Holle, Bobby Witt, Bill Christiansen; back row, Jim Fisher and Bing Shepherd. Jim Holle went on to play basketball for Clinton Junior College, Bobby Witt for Illinois Normal, and Bing Shepherd and Bill Christiansen for Iowa State University.


THE CHAMPIONSHIP COURTHOUSE TIGERS OF THE CLINTON RECREATIONAL LEAGUE, SUMMER OF 1944:


From left to right front row: Dick Morris, Bill Benson, Phil Leahy, Bobby Witt, Dick Dunmore, Russell Annear; second row, Jim Fisher, Jim Holle, Walt Ferguson, Ken Tharp, David Cavanaugh, Chuck Holm; back row, Gus Witt, Jack Dunmore, Lyle Sawyer; front row, Rock Carver and Jackie Fisher. The baseball bats spell “CHT,” which stands for the Courthouse Tigers.

Phil Leahy was honored with being Clinton's first recipient of the Niles Kinnick Academic and Athletic Scholarship at the University of Iowa, where he earned a Bachelor's Degree in Chemical Engineering. Bobby Witt was three years a starter on the Clinton High Basketball Team, and a First Team All-State basketball player his senior year for the Stat of Iowa. Jack Dunmore and Gus Witt were professional baseball players on their way to the Major Leagues when their careers were interrupted by military service in W.W.II. Lyle Sawyer became an acclaimed high school teacher in Mexico and the United States. Chuck Holm and Bobby Witt became high school teachers and coaches. Bobby Witt is in the Illinois High School Hall of Fame of Coaches.


THE COURTHOUSE TIGER COACHING STAFF (in front of the Clinton County Jail):



Left to right: Lyle Sawyer, Gus Witt, Jack Dunmore, and Deputy Sheriff Jim Gaffey. In front of the group is Gus Witt’s dog, Hoimen, the Courthouse Tiger mascot.


FAST FORWARD TO 2009



Left to right: Taylor Fisher and Gus Witt. Taylor is my grandson and a baseball player at Camanche High School, Camanche, Iowa. Gus Witt has coached the baseball team at Mount St. Clare College, which then became Franciscan University. Today, it is an on-line university of some 20,000 students. Taylor Fisher is a senior in high school looking forward to playing baseball in college. Imagine some sixty years ago Gus Witt was coaching Taylor's grandfather over at the courthouse, and he still hasn't lost a step today.


FINAL WORD

Commentary on all these people can be found IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE.

Be always well,

Jim

PROFESSIONALS WAIT FOR PERMISSION TO TAKE CHARGE!

THE DILEMMA OF OUR TIMES – PROFESSIONALS WAIT FOR PERMISSION TO TAKE CHARGE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 25, 2009

* * *

There is a central theme to Dr. Fisher's body of work, and that is "cultural capital." What is cultural capital? It is the grand total of will, resolution and intellectual capacity to exert change and sustain the momentum and direction of that change in a positive and synergistic direction.

Dr. Fisher’s books are linchpins in building a skeletal structure of possibility in a climate of chaos, confusion, conflict and creative opportunity. The world improves one person at a time, and that improvement is predicated on the individual showing the will to prevail with the capacity and maturity to accept and deal with the inevitable challenges of an ever changing and more complex world.

"Cultural capital" is the intellectual capital and the power of the people. Dr. Fisher has studied and tracked the process or acculturation and change as intellectual capital and power has transitioned and concomitantly “changed hands” over the centuries. It is this phenomenon that always finds lagging indicators holding up and sometimes even derailing smooth transitions from one dominate group to another. He has developed The Fisher Paradigm ™ to explain and track this observable fact with three interlocking spheres of influence: Personality Profiles, Geographic Profiles, and Demographic Profiles.

* * *

Over the ages:

(1) Explorers dominated in the fifteenth century led by such men as Vasco de Gama, Hernando Cortez, and Ferdinand Magellan.

(2) Theologians emerged from the Dark Ages of the sixteenth century to breathe new life into Western man in the persons of Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus.

(3) Pilgrims in their quest for freedom of religion and expression in the seventeenth century ventured to the New World to land on Plymouth Rock in North America, while a similar group of Dutch and French Huguenots established a colony at the Cape of Good Hope in Southern Africa.

(4) Lawyers were the force of the eighteenth century as commercial expansion and capitalism were thriving and King George III of England provoked the American Revolution and the subsequent independence of the Thirteen Colonies in North America, while the antics of King Louis XVI in France precipitated the French Revolution. Constitutional law translated rebellion into the rights of man.

(5) Engineers showed the way in the nineteenth century fueling the Industrial Revolution, the building of the Suez Canal and the Eiffel Tower, while introducing the telegraph, telephone, electricity, the modern factory and city, and establishing a new way to wage war with the American Civil War, the first fully technological war.

(6) Managers dominated the twentieth century with the invention of mass production and logistical control creating a well-oiled machine in which workers were essentially interchangeable parts. Modern management was born in WWI and perfected in WWII with battlefield success the product of a well-managed military industrial complex spelling the difference. It was the management of science and technology that proved the superiority of the West over the Axis Powers of WWII.

(7) Professional workers represent the twenty-first century with the cultural capital, that is, the intellectual capital and power to integrate its predecessors in the story of man. Professionals embody the collective wisdom of explorers, theologians, pilgrims, lawgivers, engineers, and managers. They are now on center stage, reluctant inhabitants of this singular focus. They have been educated, acculturated and programmed for another time, and lack the maturity, temperament, capacity and energy to take charge, but take charge they must. It is their century. Thus far they have treated their tools as toys and have attempted to escape reality in virtual reality living on the Internet, biding their time. The world waits for them to wake up and accept their new role.


* * *

It is the purpose of Dr. Fisher’s body of work and this blog to help them in that regard.

* * *

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D., BIOGRAPHY AND BODY OF WORKS!

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., PH.D. BIOGRAPHY and BODY OF WORK

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 24, 2009

* * *

Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. started out as a chemist, then chemical sales engineer, then a Nalco Chemical Company executive. He retired the first time in his mid-thirties went back to school for six years, year around, to acquire his Ph.D. in organizational-industrial psychology, consulting on the side followed by becoming an adjunct professor. He then reentered the corporation as a psychologist for Honeywell, Inc., again being promoted to executive status by Honeywell Europe, Ltd., retiring for the second time in 1990.

He put himself through college working as a laborer in a chemical plant, has experienced college at all levels, undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate education. In the late 1950s, he was a member of the crew of the USS Salem CA-139 operating in the Mediterranean Sea. As a professional, he has worked at every level of the complex organization in both line and staff positions from production, research & development, sales & marketing, to mid-level and top management to the boardroom. He has lived and worked across the United States, South America, Europe and South Africa. He is now writing a novel of his time in South Africa during the reign of apartheid.

Everything he writes, whether nonfiction or fiction, emanates from his empirical experience. He identifies his work as "cultural capital," seeing Western society and its economy, social, industrial and cultural life in radical transition. Western institutions from the family, church, school, government, business and leisure are in shambles looking for a Sphinx to bring them back from their ashes.

Others have written about such things, but with Dr. Fisher there is a personal bite to his prose that ordinary people cannot escape, as they no longer have masters but are now masters of their own fate, something they would still rather pass on to others. They like to believe they have had no complicity in the collapse of the automotive industry or the failure of Wall Street in the recent past, that they were innocent and helpless victims of the charade. He will have none of it.

Dr. Fisher claims everyone is a leader or no one is, that "cultural capital" relates to the risk-taking, self-esteem, social cohesion, work ethics and habits, and relationships to power of everyone. The workforce, he writes, has changed from primarily manual power to predominantly brainpower, from blue-collar to white-collar, from unskilled to professionals. Yet, despite this changing workforce and climate, with power shifting from management to workers with decision-making primarily at the level of consequences of work, workers continue to be managed, motivated, mobilized and manipulated as if it is 1945 except cosmetically. The system, he says, is anachronistic and management is atavistic.

The hierarchical organizational structure is no longer effective much less relevant. Workers have the power but want to enjoy the fruits of such power without the responsibilities or accountability of such power. They want security and have traditionally been willing to sacrifice power for guarantees, but in the postmodern world no such reality exists except in virtual reality.

Dr. Fisher looks at problems from the perspective of ordinary people and therefore his books are not entertaining but gut wrenching.

* * *

CONFIDENT SELLING (1970) was written in six weeks and sent off to Prentice-Hall, Inc. without protocol as "Let's Take The Worry Out Of Selling." He discovered going from a lab rat or chemist to a chemical sales engineer that the greatest problem in selling was not the buyer, but the seller. He never read sales books but taught himself to sell on the basis of this premise, and became the most successful salesmen in his district, being promoted to an area manager, and then to an international corporate executive in a brief six years. Confident Selling was in print for twenty years (1970 - 1990), serialized in a national sales magazine, airline magazine, and the basis of college courses in sales psychology.

* * *

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1990) signals the rise of the worker and the demise of the manager in the work environment. It predicts the collapse of the automotive industry and the reluctance of management in every endeavor to share power with workers, and the consequences of this reluctance. It introduces to the reader the "social termites" that invade the workplace as six passive silent behaviors that destroy the workplace from within while remaining essentially invisible. Industry Week named it one of the ten best business books of 1991, the Business Book Review Journal named it one of the four best, The Wall Street Journal alerted management to its provocative indictment, while National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" gave it a positive review.

* * *

CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992) is an elaboration of Confident Selling with a more sophisticated toolbox and tool kit for the reader. It claimed that everyone whatever the nature of the work is in the business of selling, and that the buyer is not the problem but the seller, often failing to package, promote, and persist in the competitive struggle of putting the best face on his or her efforts. The idea that selling is "that profession" equivalent to intimidators and manipulators is characterized as not only a myth but the most destructive force of all in the failure of the individual to make adequate progress in his or her career and life. Confident Selling for the 90s was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for 1992. It is as relevant today as it was in the 1990s as awareness of the individual's challenge has not receded but intensified.

* * *

THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN! (1995) is a call to battle of professionals claiming they have no choice but to get beyond the charade of empowerment and cosmetic change and to take charge by taking action. The chapter headings alone tell the story: (1) An Upside Down World; (2) Silent Invasions; (2) The Price of Innocence; (4) Late Blooming Roses; (5) Architects of a Failed System; (6) Not Happy Campers; (7) The Challenge of Learning; (8) A Question of Control; (9) Going Against the Grain; (10) Life Without A Cause! Alas, virtually everything Dr. Fisher felt might transpire has, and yet professionals are still looking for someone else to blame or provide the miracle. The book is a wake up call and a description of the dilemma if it is not heeded.

* * *

THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996) is an attack on the fact that American culture programs its young to be self-hating. The book was a response to an article by Dr. Fisher published in the June 1993 issue of The Reader's Digest, which opens with the line: "To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself." It generated thousands of requests for reprints, and a call by The Reader's Digest for Dr. Fisher's opinion on such matters. Unfortunately, some readers saw it as a guide to self-assertion. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was instead a conversation with the reader to understand how he or she has become programmed to be so negative and self-hating, and what can be done about it. Self-assertion is not an end but a process, which requires reprogramming. The book shows how this can happen.

* * *

SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT'S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998) looks inside all the fault lines, all the end runs, and hapless interventions of human resources management that have resulted in a passive, reactive and dependent workforce. For the past sixty years or since World War II, corporate management and the unions have been complicit in destroying the will and independence of workers to (1) make choices; (2) make decisions; (3) act as individual contractors; and (4) mature into contributing adults. Systematically, management and unions have contrived, Dr. Fisher insists, to make workers counterdependent upon the organization for their total well being, which has found workers - both blue-collar and white-collar -- self-indulgent and suspended in terminal adolescence with the mindset of a twelve-year-old. Now, when workers are needed as independent contractors and partners in enterprise, the sixty years of programming are all wrong for the demands of the times. Consequently, workers have retreated into the arms of the "six silent killers" of passive behavior. The Conference Board of the Wall Street Journal advocates that SIX SILENT KILLERS is a book every executive in America should read and resolve to change, or suffer the consequences. The first decade of the twenty-first century has made those consequences quite palpable.

* * *

CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS AND DISSONANT WORKERS (2000) indicates there is no payoff in pointing fingers as managers and workers have both approached the abyss in equal ignorance. While the East and Wall Street continue to see themselves as the center of the universe, circumstances have proven them wrong. There isn't an institution that Dr. Fisher doesn't find guilty of "corporate sin." And what is corporate sin? It is the failure of leaders and workers to understand and deal diligently and effectively with the times. He shows how Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite (HYPE) have driven society into the ground while celebrating their crisis management strategies, which he claims only solve the problems they create. We have gone from a culture of comfort (unconscious incompetence) to a culture of complacency (conscious incompetence) while believing the Ship of State was being steered to a culture of contribution (conscious competence). Meanwhile, the initiative has shifted from the United States to the Far East, just as it did a hundred years ago from Europe to America. Meanwhile, he claims we have lost our moral compass and our way: "In a society without a moral compass, we easily become addicted to affluence and obsessed with irrelevance." Ten years after it was published, the Federal Reserve bailed out banks "too big to fail," and once functioning again, what did these banks do? They paid themselves $billion bonuses with the rationale, if they hadn't they couldn't compete. So, the more things go around they come around.

* * *

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003) is a personal snapshot of Clinton, Iowa in the middle of the twentieth century in the middle of the community and during World War II from the perspective of working class families and the eyes of an eight-year-old boy. Clinton was a thriving industrial community on the banks of the Mississippi River with a population of 33,000 dedicated to and involved in the war effort. There was no television, no mega sports, or manicured lawns. There was radio, movies, high school sports, the Clinton Industrial Baseball League, where men too young or too old to go to war played baseball for the fun of it. Clintonians had victory gardens where their front lawns once were, drove old jalopies, took the bus, or rode their bikes to work. It was a time when the four faces of the Clinton County Courthouse clock chimed every half hour, and therefore young people had no excuse not to be home in time for meals prepared from victory garden staples. The courthouse neighborhood had most stay-at-home mothers in two-parent families. Few parents managed to get beyond grammar school, nearly all worked in the Clinton factories or on the railroad. Divorce was as foreign as an ancestral language. It was a time in hot weather people often slept in Riverview Park, left windows of their homes open, and doors unlocked, bicycles on the side of the house unchained, and if they had a car, knowing neither stranger nor neighbor would disturb their possessions, left the keys in the car. In winter, schools never closed even when shoveled snow banks were four feet high. It was also a time when kids created their own play, as parents were too busy or tired to be involved. Clinton youngsters would never again know such Darwinian freedom, or its concomitant brutality. There was no point in crying or running to mother if you weren't chosen. Kids learned to find their own alternatives. It was a different time with people of a different mindset and it has been lost to nostalgia.

* * *

A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) shows a remarkable repeat of the same sins, the same misadventures, the same false steps as were true in the 1970s, when this original essay was first written. Dr. Fisher shows how young people were forced to participate and die in an unpopular Vietnam War, a time when political upheaval was in the air, when corrupt politicians and change agents had lied and deceived the public with the Watergate fiasco, when drugs were ruining lives, when morality took a holiday, when new forms of bigotry and hatred were hatching, when the automotive industry was in sharp decline, while foreign automakers were eating our lunch; when an energy crisis rocked the country with the OPEC embargo, when a paranoid president hunkered down and became a law unto himself, when Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, and left the future up for grabs. Dr. Fisher uses the device of a look backward because the indicators were all there that we were heading for trouble, a trouble that now consumes us at every level.

This is his body of work to date, which you can see is consistent with the theme of "cultural capital," which he pursues with unrelenting zeal.

* * *

A SHORT STORY IN VERSE -- ONE

A SHORT STORY IN VERSE -- ONE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 22, 2009

The train station was a relic of the past, now a soot covered red brick block building with crumbling cornices that once flared out with energy and confidence. It is located stolidly on Nebraska Avenue at the entrance to Ybor City, the Cuban community that once displayed a booming Cuban cigar manufacturing industry. Now, the decorative streets are empty, the balloon lights of Seventh Street opague with age, the recreational square once alive with ageless bowlers now unattended, while the rich aroma of tobacco coming from factories and warehouses now only a stale odor. Only montages in Cuban restaurants show scores of workers carefully wrapping leaves of tobacco while the caller reads the daily newspaper to them in Spanish.

The past here was all but dead, as was Seamus “Dirk” Devlin, although only 38, as he made his way into the Amtrak Railroad Depot for a coffee.

The station's waiting room with its giant rafters in the ceiling and long benches far below was dark, dusty and dreary. Yet Devlin came here every day to wrap its deadness around him because of one bright candle of light, a young lady named Bonnie serving coffee. Radiant as her light, he noticed she had difficulty making change. He chose to give this little mind as in his deadness she was keeping him alive.

“I’ve written you another poem.” He had asked her to read his previous poems but she demurred. It soon became apparent she could not read. It saddened him to see one so lovely so handicapped in life. But then he thought, who is more handicapped them I?

She puckered up her nose, smiled shyly and said, “Please, Shaymus, read it to me, please!”

Devlin took a sip of his coffee, after adding cream and sugar, and felt his body once again become alive with its warmth, warmth he only felt of late when he was writing his poetry. “It is not very good. You might think it a bit sentimental.”

“Senti-what, what do you mean Shaymus?”

“Syrupy like the sugar I load my coffee with.”

“Oh, silly, I’d never think that. Please read it.”

So he did.

* * *

I close my eyes and I see you there, wild eyes, and a loving stare,

I open my soul and I see you there Irish nose and a lass so fair,

I dream my dream and I see you there, loving lips and a taste so rare,

I fly to thee and I see you there sensual form and a love to bare.


* * *

“That’s it!” He waits. Tears form in the corner of her eyes.

“That’s about me?”

“Well, yes, I mean, yes, yes it’s about you.”

“It’s so loving. It’s so different than your last poem about me.”

Devlin felt awkward. He knew what she meant but feigned being confused. She read his eyes.

“We live in different worlds, Shaymus. Mine is full of danger.”

“The world is a dangerous place.”

“Now, you’re doing it again. You’re saying something that has no meaning to me and saddens me when you talk that way. I pick fruit, Shaymus, and have since I was a little girl. My mother is an exotic dancer and we have a house now, but only until she has to find another job. Then we move on and I pick fruit with the seasons.”

“How old is your mother?”

“Thirty three. She had me when she was fourteen.” She smiles. “We’re practically sisters.”

“And your father?”

“Never met him. Have had a lot of uncles over the years that have bunked down with us, but never a father.”

“Any siblings, any brother or sisters?”

“No, why do you ask?” She puckered her lips.

“No reason.”

“You're married!”

“Yes.”

“Any children?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“More than one.”

“What do you do? You’re here practically every day.”

“Nothing much.”

“Nothing much? How can you afford that?”

“I used to work. I’m vegetating now. I mean, I’m a bit of a bum now.”

“You don’t look like a bum, don't apeak or dress like a bum. You look like somebody important. Shaymus are you important?”

“Alas, no!”

“Were you important?”

“No, never, Bonnie, I’m just an ordinary person.”

“When you talk like that staring at me, you make me nervous.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need to be. It is just that your deep blue eyes are a bit fierce sometimes. How do you explain that?”

Silence.

“Do you have that poem with you that sounded like a song.” He looked puzzled. “The one where you describe me as Angel Hair.”

“I read that last time and you cried. I don’t want to make you cry.”

“Do you know why I was crying?”

“Because I upset you?”

“Because Shaymus you touched my heart. Please, read it again."

And so Devlin did.

* * *

Angel hair, spirit of steel, christened to this restless night,
Boil with beauty, flash with anger, live my love til dawn’s daylight.

Bonnie over the bounty, Bonnie over the sea, Bonnie restless Bonnie never stop fighting with glee.

Angel hair, spirit of steel, christened to this restless night,
Dance what moves you, glance where would you, live my love and claim thy right.

Bonnie over the bounty, Bonnie over the sea, Bonnie precious Bonnie, never stop living so free.

You, old as time, young as night, me, ever mindful, never time full, watching whence there looms thy light,

Born worn, girl woman of mind, nature naturing ever so kind, taste me with scent’s magic eyes, let us caress lest we surmise, be daring as the hour’s dim, thank God for love for nature’s whim,

Bonnie is as Bonnie was, the moment, restless moment, twas, the cause of joy, a new found heart, a love of birds, of sea, of wind and art,

Blessed be these merry atoms of eternity, a fool nigh old, a golden lass, locked in thought, the moments pass,

Bonnie over the bounty, Bonnie over the sea, Bonnie, lovely Bonnie, never stop flying to me.

* * *

She cried again, excused herself and went to the restroom. When she came back, Devlin could smell cigarettes in her hair and whiskey on her breath. She was however more composed.

“You are a strange man.”

“Yes, I suppose I am.”

“But a strange beautiful man. What do you want of me, Shaymus?”

The question shattered his composure yet he could not find his voice. She studied him.

“Life is such a puzzle to you, isn’t it Shaymus.”

He looked away.

“My world is not the answer. My world could kill you. The answer is in your world if it is anywhere. There is no love in my world, Shaymus, and you are in love with love. I can’t help you and it saddens me. I don’t know if love exists. I only know it doesn’t in my world, perhaps not in yours either but I still hope you find it.”

“We always end this way,” he managed finally, “have you noticed that? Here I am twice your age and you try to comfort me.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because we live in different worlds and you refuse to see that.”

“Can I come by again?”

“I’ll think about it.”

* * *