Politics in America

Deficient Development of Self-Types:
The Show Business Personality

Old-timers in show business used to talk about entertainers who were born in a trunk. It meant a person had parents in show business, usually vaudeville, and was raised around the show business atmosphere. They were often professional entertainers by the age of five or ten.

Since the mid-60s we have seen nearly entire generations of young adults who were born into and raised in show business. Thanks to five hours a day of TV and movies, these generations lived with show business--psychologically surrounded by the comedians, the plays, the stage personalities, the extravaganzas to which previous generations had only occasional access. The generational graduates of this environment are entertaining. They can act out a set of lines or a part on cue. They can act and charm their way out of responsibility. Many of them feel their acting and entertainment value should be accepted sufficient for qualification as adults. There is considerable social support for this view in a society that brings major focus and importance upon entertainment figures who are demonstrably incompetent beyond being able to look pretty, sing, or recite lines.

The situation is reminiscent of a conversation I had in 1978. While working on the deck of a boat I looked up and saw an old man watching me and we began to talk. In his late eighties, he still had a sound, perceptive and youthful mind. Eventually he began to talk about his grandson who was in his early twenties, saying, "My grandson's a handsome boy and he has personality plus." Then, with a pained expression on his face he said, "But, there's no substance to the boy. He's all personality without substance."

Actors Without Substance

That old man articulated what has been a characteristic of a large proportion of recent generations. They are attractive and engaging. They have meticulously-honed images. Their act is as believable as that of actors Jason Robards or E. G. Marshall when they portray presidents or distinguished attorneys on TV or in movies. They have good memories for lines. They look good. They sound good. They smell good because they use the perfume and colognes on TV commercials which you sprinkle on and each one "brings out the real you." And they act good. Many of them have acted their way through law school, through graduate school, through university departments, or through corporation executiveships. Their show business personalities have served them well.

But, beneath the surface there is a lack of substance, and often worse. While they look good and they are affable, like a number of people in the acting profession they have difficulty living a day-to-day life. They have no identity other than their act. They are dependent upon their act as their only way of existing and dealing with the world. It's an imitation of what is supposed to be a real person dealing with reality. They don't know what reality is. Beneath the cover-up, a number of them are highly pathological and destructive. Many of the benign among them are like eight-year-old mentalities who have graduated from charm school.

One facet of the phenomenon is illustrated by several recent TV science fiction programs. In these particular programs the actors were required to act out long conversations between beings from alien galaxies in alien languages. The actors had memorized the lines and recited the conversations perfectly. Temsop hnbjcoiu pszhjwds smorgeewidge. Mtyfguyng gqxxfmfp zoeih stporiu! Qtoifa xdihubwe niuap xewwyt. The actors couldn't know what they were saying because in the English language there is no meaning to the sounds they were making. However, they were able to memorize those lines almost instantly and repeat them accurately on command in front of the camera.

In the same way this country has an extensive population of people who are able to breeze through advanced degrees and certifications by the same process without understanding or being able to think or being able to function appropriately. The college Economics 101 final exam is Act One, Scene Three, and is delivered flawlessly. After obtaining a doctorate they don't understand what the lines meant and no feeling for, or competence in, their profession. Many of them then spend the remainder of their lives desperately hiding in the safety of a tenured, artificial, degree-based bureaucratic status system. The country is clogged up with them.

The show business personality is often plagued by a secondary effect of superficiality--insecurity. Underneath the act, these are people who lack realistic productive skill and ability. They put on a good show, but beneath it they are way over their head in anything serious they attempt requiring depth, real-world responsibility or productivity. The situation is roughly equivalent to putting actors from daytime general hospital soap operas in a real hospital to do neurosurgery. They would impress everyone up to the time they were at the operating table having to work on the patient. Then, everything would suddenly fall apart. However, after the patient died, they could dramatize elaborate explanations to avoid confronting the issue that they are not competent or real as far as day-to-day substance on the job. Time after time I have seen people, and whole university or government programs or businesses, which look impressive, which sound impressive, but don't produce substance beyond the glitter and words they use to describe themselves. There are too many people where the imagery and self-imagery is good, but day-to-day operation of their private and professional lives lacks substance and productivity. They are highly articulate in devising evasive explanations explaining why things go wrong.

One of the symptoms of this has been the emergence of a new breed of corporate leadership built upon imagery, showmanship and personality. Several recent examples come to mind. The Mary Cunningham/William Agee Bendix fiasco in the early 80s epitomizes recent trends. Cunningham, an attractive woman in her twenties, stepped into the vice-presidency of Bendix almost immediately out of school. I have never seen or heard of any of the concrete accomplishments at Bendix that propelled her into the vice-presidency. Nor has there been any credible explanation as to what made her more qualified to move into that position than the thousands of other people at Bendix who had equal educations, greater experience, and greater knowledge of the company.

She and the president of the company, Agee, were glamorous impressive presences, crisscrossing the country like corporate Barbie and Ken dolls as they engaged in wheeling and dealing corporate takeovers of what other people had built. They were charisma incorporated. They looked good. They sounded good. But there was no substance to what they were doing. When they tangled with the president of Martin Marietta in their attempted takeover of his company, they suddenly found themselves facing someone who was the real thing whereupon he broke their backs and sent them packing. It's as simple as that.

Cunningham gave fascinating alternative explanations to what happened. None of these explanations are very convincing. She became a cult figure and a symbol among the subculture of those practicing imagery without substance who instinctively recognized and supported her as one of their own. She became successful on the college lecture circuit where she bowled them over with her chatter, her image and her manner.

Cunningham seems to have a quality about her such that she seems to be the type of person who tends to become defended as a social or political cause. She had hysterical supporters who insisted she was a brilliant and successful woman. None of them have ever been able to explain what she's brilliant and successful at. They mistake style and some type of psychological identification with her and her life style for substance.

Dress for Success

There has been a social trend toward self-appraisal based upon substitution of empty image and style for real content. Commercials and magazine ads are fond of exhorting people to dress for success. They dress for success. They public image for success. They act success. One day they look in the mirror and evaluate their clothes, cologne, image and mannerisms and decide they are God's gift to the world. However, in reality they still haven't produced anything.

Would-be automobile maker DeLorean impressed me as a imagery-without-substance operation. He was a man of impressive appearance and manner. He was married to one of the world's most glamorous and fashionable women. He maintained an impressive and palatial set of corporate offices. Every aspect of the DeLorean image was very impressive. But, in my opinion, something critical was missing in DeLorean's psychological structure. The substance in terms of production of the DeLorean automobile never fully materialized.

Donald Trump is another grandiose operation built on some kind of manufactured public acclaim. He has sold himself to the public, but I need to ask whether there is any solid content to what he is selling or whether it will all fall apart for lack of realistic content.

Gary Hartpence, better known to the world as Senator Gary Hart, is a man for this age. He is reminiscent of people whose entire life in high school was the debate team. They never took any math or sciences. They were primarily uneducated showpieces--often self-infatuated showpieces. They could stand up before an audience and debate any subject endlessly with no knowledge or substance whatsoever. Very impressive and presentable, they were not the kind of people you would want to run anything because they could talk people into a disaster and make it sound good.

Hart is an engaging show business personality. Nothing about him is real. Somewhere along the road from jug-eared high-school nerd to the man who almost became president, he learned how to charm and how to present a public image. His entire career seems to have been a public relations manipulation. He changed his name. At one point there was confusion over whether he attempted to change his age to make himself appear younger and to fit in better with 1960s generational politics. To devise a military background, at the age of nearly fifty he wrangled a naval officer's commission at elevated rank. He created a public relations rubric of "new ideas" to represent some sort of hypothetical intellectual formulation or program. At best the new ideas were glossy reformulations of empty left-wing dialogue from the 1960s youth movements.

Hart was transparently lacking in substance and character. For years, the media had helped cover up his extramarital affairs the same as they had covered up the activities of John Kennedy in the 1950s and 1960s. The difference between Hart and Kennedy was that Kennedy continued to charm the media while Hart arrogantly came to assume a right to demand that they cover for him. In their anti-establishment attitude the media would be willing participants in helping to put one over on the folks in Peoria, but they didn't want to be dictated to and insulted. They didn't want to be the ones made into suckers. This betrayal of the press by Hart produced a resentment and indignation among the press that they acted upon, culminating in Hart's downfall. But for that, he would have won the Democratic nomination.

Tragically, John Glenn, who was among the finest the country could produce, never received any significant support for the presidency among Democrats. In recent decades, the Right Stuff is the wrong stuff. Personal substance did not strike a chord of consonance in Democrats. They were looking for a slick character to express both a diffuse anger and their trendy attitude toward life.

Lack of substance coupled with fear that lack of substance will be discovered has produced a class of people who live a type of constant suspicion, fear, and an adversarial relationship with a world around them which threatens to expose them. They are forced to reject reality as well as reject American culture representing reality or responsibility because they are unequipped to deal with it.

Word Shrouds

Symptomatic of deficient substance are clever phrases or concepts that are defensive cover-ups or forms of denial which periodically tend to circulate around, and sometimes inundate, the country. One of the recent cover-ups is a diagnosis, either by one's self, or by a mental health professional, that a person is "perfectionistic." Usually there is an attempted psychological tie-in back to parents, saying, "Your parents put pressure on you to be perfectionistic as a teen and this instilled desire is causing you to be perfectionistic, nervous, and fatigued now." The argument has been adopted as an explanation for many problems, especially nervousness, feelings of being overwhelmed, and fatigue. I have particularly heard a large number of women calling in to radio psychologists with complaints and being given that interpretation of their problem.

However, under close analysis, there are three elements in the concept of perfectionistic. First, there is a person's performance or capacity for performance of a task or tasks. Second, there are the standards a person is required to meet in performing a task. Third, there is a person's level of aspiration. Now suppose there is a gap between a person's performance level and the standards to which he or she is expected to accomplish. Is this failure of a person to meet those standards because of a deficiency in the person's performance, or is it because the standards are too high or too perfectionistic?

The condition is roughly as follows. In the 1960s and 1970s the same standards were applied to teen-agers as were applied to previous generations. Because of softness in childrearing, deficiencies in education, and a debilitating social atmosphere, generations escaped attaining the most minimal standards or responsibilities. Kids who graduated from endless hours per day of TV pap and who were deficient in scholastic development, deficient in social development, deficient in self-discipline, deficient in capacity to accept responsibility or discomfort were suddenly confronted with responsibilities for which they were unprepared and which, as a defense, were labeled perfectionistic. The same levels of development and responsibility were being prepared for and were being met ten years earlier by previous generations. The level of performance was not perfectionistic, but new generations unable to meet the most minimal standards saw them as beyond reach and felt severely pressured. In the deficiency of early development, minimal standards were impossible to meet.

Concurrently, these same generations expected high levels of achievement and aspiration. They were encouraged by parents who vowed their children would never need to work like their parents did. The media constantly whip people into a frenzy with achievement and high-status exhortation or imagery while magazine ads picture people none of whom look as though they make less than $300,000 per year. There's a local Washington, D.C. radio commercial which starts out with a series of images something like, "The Washington Woman! Affluent! Committed! Active! Dynamic! On the move!" Again, there is a pattern of images without content. Nobody is supposed to be average.

While nobody is supposed to be average, it's a grim fact that most people are nearly average and half the population is below average. Nobody has been prepared to accept this.

More than two generations, now, have been surrounded and programmed with belief in their specialness. They have internalized it, and they believe that is the way their lives are supposed to be. They were raised to be special. They were encouraged in the fantasy that they would be something special--in a developmental atmosphere which did not train them, which did not cause them to test their capacities and fantasies against reality, and which did not harden them enough to face the rigors of achievement and the real world. In many cases they aspire to high levels of achievement or status, whether as executive officers, sales executives and other high positions in which a person is under stress to produce and in which a person is not allowed to make very many mistakes then survive or remain on top. Perfectionism is part of the territory. They are committed over their capacity and endurance.

One aspect of the situation is exemplified by a successful woman who receives a salary more than twice the average in the Washington, D. C. area. She complains of the striving for "perfectionism" in her life. When asked to explain what she means by perfectionism: As an assistant manager who receives commissions on not only her own sales, but also commission on the sales by those she directs, she is expected to set an example by having one of the highest consistent overall sales records in the branch. She is expected to have one of the highest proportions of sales closings in the branch, implying few mistakes in presentations. She is expected to instruct her staff. She is expected to study and take tests each week on new sales strategies. It represents many hours a week and she doesn't have what she considers to be enough time for herself. She's pushed and under constant stress. It doesn't feel as good as the imagery in the ads or the radio commercials look.

In fact, that's not perfectionism. It's reality. It is minimally doing the job. That is what came with that salary of more than twice the area average. She applied for a high-achievement position and she found it. It's taking a toll on her.

Many products of recent generations have a high aspiration level and a fantasy about what performance is expected, about what commitment is expected, and about what their own capabilities are. The term perfectionism is a way of rationalizing excuses when hard reality fails to conform to fantasy and when they are asked to deliver substance instead of just imagery.

Hit and Run

In both their professional and personal lives, show business personalities are often people who are hit-and-run operations. They enter dramatically. They impress people on an image level and then move on before they become involved with concrete substance. In corporations and organizations they often enjoy a meteoric rise and moving upward and back and forth among various positions. Close examination behind the image of the attractive dynamic winner reveals they haven't produced very much. Somewhere there is something missing. If they remain in a responsible position for more than two years, things start to go wrong unless there are other talented people of substance who can cover for them.

Their romantic relationships are similar and have a superficial dynamic quality. They have an engaging line of patter. They know the best night clubs or restaurants and can interpret the best wine lists. The men cook impressive meals, which become a fad for a while. They know the right music to set a romantic mood. They run through a series of perfect performances at high speed which fill or constitute the relationship. When the repertoire is completed, they must either find a way to re-perform it, or must move on. It is as if they are playing a programmed recording tape which runs through a series of carefully set up superficial romantic performances at high speed. When the tape comes to an end the relationship stops because the tape is all there is and there is nothing else to the relationship. Sometimes, they will be in a panic to rewind the tape and replay it in order to continue the relationship. These are people who can't live day to day in a one-to-one relationship with somebody because the relationship would fall to pieces for lack of substance. They are very promising people. They will promise you anything, but they can't deliver.

There are large numbers of women, some of whom are national figures, who fall into this pattern. They walk into a room, are very striking, and men will say, "Hey, who is that?" Having a certain glitter or dazzle or image or sweep and enough beauty to put it over, they can intrigue men on the basis of their image. They have no trouble getting men on this basis and they have the image of being super-women and men-conquerors who do not form permanent relationships because of what is glamorized as independence or liberation.

In fact, what is mislabeled independence is basically an incapacity. For lack of substance they are not the kind of people with whom someone could live day to day and hence they cannot participate in day-to-day permanent relationships. They can tease or parcel out evenings of engaging superficial image, including in bed, but they can't stick around. If they do stick around, the relationship doesn't work and the man leaves. They can only conduct hit-and-run operations. They are like attractively-wrapped packages which can hold interest only until opened and found to be empty.

This is a basic problem for too large a proportion of several generations. They are empty. Even many of those who are financially successful have not developed to any extent in terms of character, depth of emotion, conviction, sense of honor, or much of anything else. They may have temper tantrums, but temper tantrums are not the same as substance. Their list of desires and superficial image have developed, but little else has. They aren't anything. They have no definition or structure.

In summation, American culture has a great number of people who have superficially attractive personalities and who look good and sound good and may even be quite impressive on the surface, but haven't substantial mentality or maturity. While they are attractive and engaging, they are impossible to live with in a day-to-day situation as they have no substance or sense of responsibility. They are destructive in the business world. They are catastrophically successful in the political world. Two of them made it to the White House as Bill and Hillary Clinton.

This contrast between attractive superficiality and deficient substance is often a source of confusion--and entrapment. People will often remark how somebody divorced a well-known actress or actor or a glamorous movie star and wonder how it is possible to leave such an attractive and engaging person. They think whoever was married to such a person was the luckiest man or woman in the world.

Whoever it was did have luck and it was all bad. Beneath the attractive exterior and the engaging public personality was a lack of real content and a personal mess. They are not the kind of person who can be lived with. This has been a characteristic of a large proportion of at least a generation.

The Decline of Productivity

People in America who inhabit and graduate from the culture of attractiveness and image without substance lack either the capability or motivation to examine each other, or anything else, for substance or content beneath the surface.

A spin-off from lack of individual substance is the decline in productivity and the incompetence crisis in this country. Having become incapable of participation in the substance of necessary industrial production, Americans have Orientals do it for them. Either Asians do it over there, to the tune of what is becoming a $250,000,000,000 or more trade deficit--we import more than the gross national product of many countries to make up for the lack of productivity here. Or we have them come over here to do it.

We have become dependent upon Orientals and the imported self-discipline and personal substance of other cultures for domestic engineering expertise. Sitting in front of me is a set of statistics from an engineering college of a major university indicating out of 794 engineering graduate students, 293 are foreign and 67 are naturalized, mostly Asians. The best students are usually Asians. In the best schools, forty percent of the students in engineering and the sciences are Asian. Thank God. But for Orientals and other foreign cultures, America would be technologically and industrially bankrupt. In a shameful act of discrimination and resentment, it is now being claimed that Asians are racially over-represented in schools and professions. The disgraceful assumption in this is that achievement and success are to be based on vended demographic representation rather than industriousness.

One of the benefits of the Viet Nam war is that it has furnished America with a major proportion of its necessary engineering and industrial talent for the 40 years as the hardy, intelligent, educated, self-disciplined Vietnamese have filled the ranks of American engineering colleges.

It is rationalized that we are becoming a service economy. That assertion is a verbal manipulation attempting to obscure the fact we are becoming a nation of incompetent hot-house-plants producing no substance. What a service economy means is that Japanese, Koreans, Chinese and Germans are supposed to produce the industrial goods used in America while Americans strut around with fancy clothes and fancy titles, charging each other for passing those goods back and forth among themselves, calling it productivity. A spring 1991 60 Minutes segment stated that only four percent of consumer electronics sold in the United States were manufactured in the United States. That's not productivity. It's industrial bankruptcy.

On December 6th and 7th of 1991 a special Ted Koppel Nightline dealt with the economic competition between the U. S. and the Japanese. When Koppel asked three Japanese leaders why America was failing economically, one of the Japanese mentioned the permissiveness in U.S. society in the last forty years as a factor. Nobody in an American guest audience of hundreds of people acted as though what he said was important or that they had even heard it. It was the most important things that was said in two nights of discussion.

His observation can be put in plainer language that will be more difficult to ignore. For decades our educational system and our social value system has been oriented toward producing hippies, fops, "social activists" and pathological personalities. During that same period the Japanese produced engineers and scientists. There's no way American generations that were incompetent graduates of the 60s and 70s can compete economically with the competence of Japanese scientists and engineers who are now many years ahead of Americans. We're paying the economic price for the mindless, borderline psychotic, incompetent liberalism of decades.

For more than 25 years America country has become progressively top-heavy with people who believe they are special--too special to participate in the production of basic goods and services. You can barely pay all these special people enough money to get the necessary work done. There is nobody left to do the work. Your money is no good. The American inflation of the 70s was in truth an incompetence tax which has been reduced my importing massive amounts of foreign goods at cumulative trade deficits of trillions of dollars.

A secondary crisis resulting from the rampant stagflation of the 1970s due to incompetence and reluctance of the Bill Clinton hip generation was the collapse of the retirement and social security system in this country. People who put money away when five dollars or ten dollars was worth something suddenly found their retirement savings became worthless. If they were clever, they might have been fortunate enough to buy CDs (certificates of deposit) paying more than 20 percent interest in the late 1970s, but even those weren't sufficient to keep up with economic decline.

Trickle-Up Stupidity

The assertion by left-wing and counter-cultural hacks is that the 1980s was the Reagan Supply Side Economics (re-labeled Trickle-Down Economics) Decade of Greed. That, it is asserted, was the cause of subsequent economic difficulties. This assertion has not been questioned on TV and elsewhere because the TV network mentalities are characteristic of the mentalities making the initial assertion. It should be questioned. We were experiencing serious economic difficulties before Reagan. The problem was not, and is not, supply-side economics. The problem is trickle-up softness, trickle-up disinterest in economic productivity, trickle-up self-indulgence, trickle-up degeneracy and trickle-up stupidity. In the last 25 years there have not been enough quality people in recent generations to take the place of the previous generations who built America on the concrete real level and made it work.

Trickle-up economics, trickle-down, trickle-sideways, torrential downpours from all directions, supply side, socialism, free enterprise--no economic concept or no economic system of any kind will function with the numbers of people showing the type of personal characteristics and large scale deficient level of competence which have been seen in America during recent decades.

The problem was not Reagan's decade of greed, but three or more decades of degeneracy culminated by the election of a president, Bill Clinton, who never worked an outside real job or at anything else beyond pursuit of political ambitions. Neither Bill or Hillary has ever produced anything in their lifetimes. A generation of Bill and Hillary Clintons lacked the characteristics necessary to replace the productivity of previous generations.

We are now facing an economic crisis of disastrous proportions. Since the 1960s we have had a series of cyclic economic recessions which have become progressively severe and of progressively longer duration. There has been more American unemployment in this country as the substantive industrial work has been done elsewhere. Given the incompetence levels in America, the Japanese and Chinese are charging us for doing the substantive work in this culture. They were using the money to buy property in this country and at one time owned more than thirty percent of the prime commercial real estate in major American cities although they have been bailing out under pressure. In the early 1990s, America went through what can only be called a depression. America is in a state of temporarily hidden economic and technological collapse. There was a cry for the President to do something in 1991 and 1992. If everyone in America had been given an outright gift of $10,000 to "prime the economic pump" there would have been a party that would have lasted for a month with massive purchase of Japanese electronics and automobiles, and Chinese and Korean clothes without creating one new job over here--and inadvertent passage of an additional entire state into foreign ownership.

A special NBC Brokaw Report: Families in Crisis on March 20, 1992 unwittingly explained aspects of the situation very well. The hour was dedicated to examining the crisis in deterioration of families in the U.S. and the affect upon mothers, children and whatever. In reality the concept of family had little to do with much of the show. In many cases it was a matter of unmarried people having children with the level of commitment of a quick shot in a back alley--some of them by multiple partners at various times. Family had nothing to do with it. In other cases there were marriages which lasted until somebody bumped into somebody else they liked better for a while or found something more interesting they wanted to do.

The revealing part was a brief discussion toward the end of the show by several people who, unfortunately, were members of a presidential commission. With characteristic indignation, one of the members said it should be made the responsibility of American business to finance rehabilitation of the people involved in the problems and life styles indicated in the show. This view is alarming from several aspects.

In the first place it contains assertion of an act of criminality against a free society in the assumption that anyone requires permission or is required to meet outside preconditions to start a business or that there should be a right to impose unwanted impositions upon businesses. In a free society any individual or group has a right to offer a product of manufacture, or a service, to other individuals or other groups. If other individuals or other groups want to buy that product or service, it is their decision and freedom to do so. Third parties or groups have no standing or right to intervene in that agreement. Agreeing parties do not need to justify their right to make that agreement by benefiting, or engaging in social work, with third parties. The only limitations should be that all parties are acting within the agreed upon scope of the agreement. Outside interests have no right to impose the rule that two people solve their drug problems or shack-job problems before entering into private agreement to manufacture items or exchange services.

The individuals or groups offering their products or services and the individuals or groups agreeing to purchase those goods or services have a responsibility to each other and none other. In a free society or free enterprise system, no government or outside group has a right to restrict or impose conditions upon that agreement for their own purposes. That means individuals or groups are not required to solve the personal problems of outside parties in the community as a precondition for being allowed to conduct their own business or personal affairs.

Other people were not put on this planet to be forced to be made responsible for personal excesses or personal irresponsibility of the people involved, or for anybody else. Out of respect for people, they are not to be forced to do it. This basic lack of respect for anything or anybody is what got the people involved in the situation they were in.

Secondly, there is little indication of desire for rehabilitation. There was not the most remote sign of receptiveness toward self-examining the morality, the behavior, or the values which produced the conditions about which the people were complaining. One thing that would have been nice to be heard, just once, in more than 30 years of analysis and debate over personal and "social" conditions in this country, would have been the sincerely asked question, "Is it possible I am doing something wrong?" Not once in 30 years has anyone sincerely asked what self-improvements they might make in terms of personal morality, personal responsibility, truthfulness, or diligence. Many of the behaviors in question were engaged in as militantly asserted statements of personal choice or freedom with arrogant indifference toward consequences. What is being demanded is support for those actions within no intentions to change the activity or the underwriting value system. That is not asking for rehabilitation. That is not change.

Somewhere there has grown a serious misconception and an inversion of responsibility. It is the responsibility of individuals in this society to seriously manage their lives and develop their capabilities so that they are able and ready to make a contribution to business, to industry, and to the economic needs of the community. Starting at an early age. It is not the obligation of other people, including the business community, to constantly pick up after people who have shown little such seriousness or responsibility.

Personal Responsibility

What is being displayed is precious little humility, precious little realistic interest in rehabilitation, precious little admission of personal responsibility, endless demands upon other people, and great amounts of arrogance.

What has not been heard in all the assertion of demands to make choices among various life styles and value systems is the willingness to live with the consequences.

How Americans supposed to compete with the Japanese and Germans while adding the cost of unreasoned sex lives and inability to form serious human relationships on to the cost of goods and services is never discussed.

Similarly, the person attempting to start a business or maintain a business is faced with, or is to be made responsible for, underwriting the cost of a recalcitrant and indignant social pathology and a social activism attempting to divert responsibility for actions away from those committing the acts. As a prerequisite for being allowed to start a business, someone cannot, and in a free society, should not, be billed for the drug excesses, the sexual excesses, and the pathological life styles throughout the country. Both the levels of pathology and irrational demands for others to pay the bills are escalating faster than anyone or any group can keep up with it. Then there is complaint about the loss of jobs or the lack of new business creating jobs.

Buying and selling each other junk bonds isn't the answer.

Neither is selling junk relationships in our personal lives going to work.

The economic problems and the interpersonal relationships problems in America have the same root cause--deficient personal substance, deficient sense of reality and deficient self-discipline. More will be said about economics later.

Would-be experts and analysts point out that Japan and other economic competitors are also experiencing economic difficulties. There is an important difference between any economic adjustments being experienced by Japan and similar countries versus the years of decline which have occurred here. The problems of Japan and similar countries are economic--and probably transitory adjustments. America is ridden by problems of a far more profound nature which have economic consequences.

If other countries are smart, they will avoid economic linkages with America that will make them vulnerable to American problems.

As far as negotiations with other nations are concerned, there is nothing to negotiate for. What we are demanding in our negotiations is that serious Asians become less disciplined, less diligent, less intelligent, less well educated, and more childish so that weakling American generations can compete with them. America is a morally, psychologically, and economically decaying society. Other countries know it. Americans have no leverage. America has the same leverage in negotiations of any kind with any other developed country that a dying man has in negotiating with the circling vultures.

Robert L. Kocher is the author of "The American Mind in Denial," as well as many other articles. He is an engineer working in the area of solid-state physics, and has done graduate study in clinical psychology. His email address is steiner@access.mountain.net.