1. OUR STORY: Each of us has a cluster of stories, personal vocabulary, quirky, idiosyncratic habits and sayings that in totality constitute what might be called “our narrative.” Often, but not always, our characteristic gruntings most aptly define and characterize who we really are. To be sure, we should recognize that there are times when we can give the impression that we are espousing a particular notion by using some particular piece of vocabulary when we, in fact, believe quite otherwise. Yet, we should also be aware that the impression that others form after dealing with us often come from small - even unitary - words, gestures, or phrases. When we hear someone using a word like “karma” in a conversation, our minds automatically pigeonhole the speaker as one familiar with Hindu philosophy, even when doing so might well be a mistake. After all, the speaker’s usage may reflect only a passing familiarity with the word rather than a settled philosophical conviction.
If we had sufficient time and opportunity to observe and listen to an individual, we would begin to assemble an accurate picture of that person’s narrative. We might recognize then that “karma” was a word our narrator used whenever he wanted to give the impression of sophistication, even though he may have thought that the concept of karma itself was silly beyond comprehension. Only long exposure to his narrative would reveal the true beliefs of the narrator.
2. INCOMPETENT NARRATION: There are those who reveal their uttermost characteristics in a chaotic and incompetent manner. Such people are, as the saying would have it, their own worst enemies. It is not that they actively seek to deceive their auditors. Rather, they are incapable of delivering a coherent message to others, or of expressing themselves in a way that can readily be understood (cf. “A fool’s narration is like a burden on a journey, but delight will be found in the speech of the intelligent” [Sir. 21:16]). They are inadvertently ambiguous communicators. Sometimes we refer to this phenomenon in a particular situation by saying that “he cannot tell a joke.” In a similar manner, others cannot tell their personal narrative without creating a great deal of confusion in their listeners. Often the reaction of others is perplexity and confusion. “What the hell did he mean by that?” is a typical follow-up question to his narrative. So, all I can say is: Hey, you people know who you are.
3. MISLEADING NARRATION: At other times, circumstances force us to make assessments of others based largely upon a single word, gesture or phrase. The fleeting burst of information that comes our way is often insufficient to make an honest and realistic appraisal of the other person. Thus, a misunderstood word here and there can take our minds off and running in inappropriate directions, when a more faithful transmission of information would never allow us to misinterpret what we are hearing in such a way. A smiling person may convince us that he is warmhearted; when he may be, in fact, a simpering idiot who grins at the wind and every passing car just because he doesn’t know any better. Or, conversely, the unsmiling man we meet may appear grim and forbidding, when he may have just forgotten “to look pleasant,” as his wife told him earlier in the day, just before he slammed his fingers in the car door. We can be seriously misled by these momentary bursts of narration (or looks) and we should always be open to the possibility that our “first impressions” are just that: they are first - and not necessarily correct - impressions.
4. OPINION-FORMING NARRATION: I once met a man at a wedding reception. He was standing outside the reception hall and he was “watching the sky,” as he explained to me. I wondered very greatly what it meant to “watch the sky.” I asked him why he was doing that. He seemed to notice that I was perplexed by his intense scrutiny of the skies, and I think he anticipated my question. He suggested darkly that “they were spraying here last week, and now everybody was going to get sick.” I was surprised by his remarks and I asked him who was spraying what. He said the 910th Airlift Wing was flying those C130 aircraft on those lowpass missions over the village again, and that they were spraying biological agents on the people. “I could see the liquid shooting out of the nozzles at the rear of the planes. You watch and see,” he said. “Everybody is going to get the flu or whatever it was that they were pumping into the air.”
Well, yes. I had seen the very same airplanes from time to time myself. They were flying very low, just above the treetops. The noise from their turboprops created a huge rumble over the village. But I never suspected that they were spraying anything from the rear of the fuselage. And since I had no other source of information about airplanes spraying pestilence or other apocalyptic substances into the air, I could only conclude that my sky-watcher was a disturbed individual suffering from some ill-defined paranoia. The narration I heard from him did not move me from indifference to concern about the spraying per se; rather, it made me think I was dealing with a garden-variety, certifiable nut. And his “narration” made me think that he was bonkers.
5. CIVIC NARRATION: Any definable group of people (tribe, city, state or country; organization, etc.) will possess what might be called a civic narrative that describes the hopes, dreams, pride, regrets, shameful nostalgia and other items of interest to that community.
a. LOST PAST NARRATIVES: For example, I saw an obituary in my local newspaper several months ago for a man who had been the president of the labor union in a shop where I had once worked. He had retired some months before I actually began working there. As a result, I cannot really say that I knew him. But I did hear quite a bit about him because he was one of those legendary, fire-breathing union presidents.
He was a person who “pioneers” a spate of radicalness in a company just before the bottom falls out. And, at the end of the day, that man’s grandsons must move away from the area because the grandfather had created the very conditions that sent jobs elsewhere.
For this area where I live, that is a rather common story. In fact, it is the defining story of this region: a nostalgia for the very things that unionism has destroyed. Much of the city looks like Warsaw after WWII. Hundreds of hulking, empty brick buildings stand in testimony to the thoroughness of the unions’ destructiveness.
The one thing a visitor to this area will notice immediately is that none of the locals ever see a connection between the rabid unionism of the past and the dearth of jobs now. Somehow, in their minds, the two events are disconnected, unhappy co-incidences and really have nothing to do one with the other. Instead, what the visitor sees is nothing but an obstinate blindness about the region’s unionized past.
The city has lost 50,000 residents since I moved into this area thirty-some years ago. It is now of such a small size that it cannot effectively counter the Republican votes of the other parts of the state. That is significant because presidential elections are lost without this counterbalance. But more importantly, the loss of population is a reflection of past union”triumphs” which resulted in chasing manufacturing concerns to the American South or overseas.
Almost everyone around here remembers the heyday of manufacturing when General Motors, Delphi Automotive, General Electric, Republic Steel, Youngstown Sheet &Tube and others employed tens of thousands of people. In their minds they couple a prosperous middle class with strong unions and imply a casualty that does not really exist. They forget the heady machinations of mere co-incidence. Yes, strong unions existed then, along with a prosperous middle class. But then, strong unions co-existed as well with, say, an imperial Soviet Union. One could hardly suppose unions “caused” that imperialism or vice versa. The two existed on the same planet at the same time without any connection between the two.
It is important to remember that a union at it most basic level is a coercive, collusive, and adversarial party in a labor negotiation. It does not exist to con-celebrate prosperity or indulge in feel-good sentiments about shared success. Instead, it seeks to sequester some of that prosperity for benefit of its members at the expense of the owner/investor class. Unions, when they are most effective, take so much away from the owner/investor that they destroy the host much like an incompetent parasite.
The loss of 50,000 residents from the city is proof positive that the union efforts have been successful in destroying every employment opportunity in this area. Rational owner/investors who sink large sums of money into facilities and equipment (think of a steel mill, for example) do not just walk away from those investments unless it becomes uneconomic to continue in the business.
b. PESSIMISM OF USELESS MYTHS: In the United States, the “Lost Cause” narrative of the American South is prototypical of such a narrative. It describes in endless detail the reasons why the South should have won the American Civil War (1861-1865).
c. IMPROBABLE DREAM OF RECAPTURING THE PAST: So often a narrative of this type will center on the rebuilding of an amusement park or downtown theater that now lies in a state of utter disrepair. The thinking seems to be that the lost glories of the area will be reestablished by the incidental restoration of a particular form of architecture from that lost past. It is the silly dream of nostalgia clouding the judgment of an otherwise rational people.
If we had sufficient time and opportunity to observe and listen to an individual, we would begin to assemble an accurate picture of that person’s narrative. We might recognize then that “karma” was a word our narrator used whenever he wanted to give the impression of sophistication, even though he may have thought that the concept of karma itself was silly beyond comprehension. Only long exposure to his narrative would reveal the true beliefs of the narrator.
2. INCOMPETENT NARRATION: There are those who reveal their uttermost characteristics in a chaotic and incompetent manner. Such people are, as the saying would have it, their own worst enemies. It is not that they actively seek to deceive their auditors. Rather, they are incapable of delivering a coherent message to others, or of expressing themselves in a way that can readily be understood (cf. “A fool’s narration is like a burden on a journey, but delight will be found in the speech of the intelligent” [Sir. 21:16]). They are inadvertently ambiguous communicators. Sometimes we refer to this phenomenon in a particular situation by saying that “he cannot tell a joke.” In a similar manner, others cannot tell their personal narrative without creating a great deal of confusion in their listeners. Often the reaction of others is perplexity and confusion. “What the hell did he mean by that?” is a typical follow-up question to his narrative. So, all I can say is: Hey, you people know who you are.
3. MISLEADING NARRATION: At other times, circumstances force us to make assessments of others based largely upon a single word, gesture or phrase. The fleeting burst of information that comes our way is often insufficient to make an honest and realistic appraisal of the other person. Thus, a misunderstood word here and there can take our minds off and running in inappropriate directions, when a more faithful transmission of information would never allow us to misinterpret what we are hearing in such a way. A smiling person may convince us that he is warmhearted; when he may be, in fact, a simpering idiot who grins at the wind and every passing car just because he doesn’t know any better. Or, conversely, the unsmiling man we meet may appear grim and forbidding, when he may have just forgotten “to look pleasant,” as his wife told him earlier in the day, just before he slammed his fingers in the car door. We can be seriously misled by these momentary bursts of narration (or looks) and we should always be open to the possibility that our “first impressions” are just that: they are first - and not necessarily correct - impressions.
4. OPINION-FORMING NARRATION: I once met a man at a wedding reception. He was standing outside the reception hall and he was “watching the sky,” as he explained to me. I wondered very greatly what it meant to “watch the sky.” I asked him why he was doing that. He seemed to notice that I was perplexed by his intense scrutiny of the skies, and I think he anticipated my question. He suggested darkly that “they were spraying here last week, and now everybody was going to get sick.” I was surprised by his remarks and I asked him who was spraying what. He said the 910th Airlift Wing was flying those C130 aircraft on those lowpass missions over the village again, and that they were spraying biological agents on the people. “I could see the liquid shooting out of the nozzles at the rear of the planes. You watch and see,” he said. “Everybody is going to get the flu or whatever it was that they were pumping into the air.”
Well, yes. I had seen the very same airplanes from time to time myself. They were flying very low, just above the treetops. The noise from their turboprops created a huge rumble over the village. But I never suspected that they were spraying anything from the rear of the fuselage. And since I had no other source of information about airplanes spraying pestilence or other apocalyptic substances into the air, I could only conclude that my sky-watcher was a disturbed individual suffering from some ill-defined paranoia. The narration I heard from him did not move me from indifference to concern about the spraying per se; rather, it made me think I was dealing with a garden-variety, certifiable nut. And his “narration” made me think that he was bonkers.
5. CIVIC NARRATION: Any definable group of people (tribe, city, state or country; organization, etc.) will possess what might be called a civic narrative that describes the hopes, dreams, pride, regrets, shameful nostalgia and other items of interest to that community.
a. LOST PAST NARRATIVES: For example, I saw an obituary in my local newspaper several months ago for a man who had been the president of the labor union in a shop where I had once worked. He had retired some months before I actually began working there. As a result, I cannot really say that I knew him. But I did hear quite a bit about him because he was one of those legendary, fire-breathing union presidents.
He was a person who “pioneers” a spate of radicalness in a company just before the bottom falls out. And, at the end of the day, that man’s grandsons must move away from the area because the grandfather had created the very conditions that sent jobs elsewhere.
For this area where I live, that is a rather common story. In fact, it is the defining story of this region: a nostalgia for the very things that unionism has destroyed. Much of the city looks like Warsaw after WWII. Hundreds of hulking, empty brick buildings stand in testimony to the thoroughness of the unions’ destructiveness.
The one thing a visitor to this area will notice immediately is that none of the locals ever see a connection between the rabid unionism of the past and the dearth of jobs now. Somehow, in their minds, the two events are disconnected, unhappy co-incidences and really have nothing to do one with the other. Instead, what the visitor sees is nothing but an obstinate blindness about the region’s unionized past.
The city has lost 50,000 residents since I moved into this area thirty-some years ago. It is now of such a small size that it cannot effectively counter the Republican votes of the other parts of the state. That is significant because presidential elections are lost without this counterbalance. But more importantly, the loss of population is a reflection of past union”triumphs” which resulted in chasing manufacturing concerns to the American South or overseas.
Almost everyone around here remembers the heyday of manufacturing when General Motors, Delphi Automotive, General Electric, Republic Steel, Youngstown Sheet &Tube and others employed tens of thousands of people. In their minds they couple a prosperous middle class with strong unions and imply a casualty that does not really exist. They forget the heady machinations of mere co-incidence. Yes, strong unions existed then, along with a prosperous middle class. But then, strong unions co-existed as well with, say, an imperial Soviet Union. One could hardly suppose unions “caused” that imperialism or vice versa. The two existed on the same planet at the same time without any connection between the two.
It is important to remember that a union at it most basic level is a coercive, collusive, and adversarial party in a labor negotiation. It does not exist to con-celebrate prosperity or indulge in feel-good sentiments about shared success. Instead, it seeks to sequester some of that prosperity for benefit of its members at the expense of the owner/investor class. Unions, when they are most effective, take so much away from the owner/investor that they destroy the host much like an incompetent parasite.
The loss of 50,000 residents from the city is proof positive that the union efforts have been successful in destroying every employment opportunity in this area. Rational owner/investors who sink large sums of money into facilities and equipment (think of a steel mill, for example) do not just walk away from those investments unless it becomes uneconomic to continue in the business.
b. PESSIMISM OF USELESS MYTHS: In the United States, the “Lost Cause” narrative of the American South is prototypical of such a narrative. It describes in endless detail the reasons why the South should have won the American Civil War (1861-1865).
c. IMPROBABLE DREAM OF RECAPTURING THE PAST: So often a narrative of this type will center on the rebuilding of an amusement park or downtown theater that now lies in a state of utter disrepair. The thinking seems to be that the lost glories of the area will be reestablished by the incidental restoration of a particular form of architecture from that lost past. It is the silly dream of nostalgia clouding the judgment of an otherwise rational people.
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