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Sunday, July 23, 2017

The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects of a Sunday morning:

The New Reality that has Everyone Flummoxed!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 23, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Monday, July 10, 2017

The Peripatetic Philosopher is complimented by a reader:

A READER COMMENTS ON-- 
TEN CREATIVE STAGES TO CONFIDENT THINKING!

THE READER WRITES:

Dear Dr. Fisher,

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

Tom T

DR. FISHER REPLIES:

Dear Tom T,

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

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

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

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

Thank you for your interest.





James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. 

Wednesday, July 05, 2017

The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects:


Nancy Isenberg’s WHITE TRASH –
The 400-Year Untold History of CLASS in AMERICA

A Retrospective

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 6, 2017


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The author concludes:

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


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

   



  

Tuesday, July 04, 2017

The Peripatetic Philosopher introduces his new book:

LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO YOURSELF!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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



DESCRIPTION OF “TEN CREATIVE STAGES TO CONFIDENT THINKING”

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


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

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