Because understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.
Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the
Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,
episode number 94 in chronological
order. I always have to say that, but eventually, we're gonna get
to, you know, episode number one hundred, and then I'll stop saying that, and then
you can go back and find those
archived episodes. With our
book today, an exploration of the challenges
that are inherent in living in a pre-civil rights
United States of America as a Black Man.
This is a book that engages readers around the
psychological question of how a black man can position
himself in a world, replete with racism and racial
injustice that the postmodern, post-civil
rights act leadership mind can barely
contemplate. And when it does seek to contemplate such
a world, usually, such contemplation
results in an existential shudder at best and
an attempt to grift off the past at worst.
This narrative, strangely enough, proposes a simple solution
to our current complicated cultural mess surrounding
gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, and even
how the facts of those identities are negotiated in the overall
social order. I'm gonna drop a clue here
a little bit In the beginning,
say my name, to paraphrase from
Breaking Bad. Today,
we will summarize, analyze,
and potentially even read selections
from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.
And today, we will be joined in this literary journey at the
start of Black History Month in the United States of America,
with our returning guest slash sparring partner,
from last year's episode number 49, where we covered
The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B Du Bois,
My good friend, and a good friend of the show, Dorollo
Nixon junior, and as usual, I have to put this on the end,
Esquire. How are you doing, Dorollo?
Great, sir. Good morning. Great to be here. This
is a great day
for us to begin, our exploration
of, The Invisible Man and
how that book has impacted us, not
only as black people in America, but also has
impacted a lot of how we think about, racial politics
in America. And we're going to talk a little bit about the literary
life of Ralph Ellison as well because he defied
easy categorization much to the chagrin
of people, writers who, who followed him, such as
it were. So today, we're gonna do
something a little bit different. We're gonna try a little bit of a different sort
of format. So normally, at this point, I would pick up and I
would read from Invisible Man directly. But today, we're gonna
summarize a little bit. We're going to gonna kinda go back and forth.
I would encourage you to pick up the pick up a copy
of Invisible Man. And as usual, as I always say,
yep. There's there's DiRollo's copy. As usual, I as I
always say, we will not be reading from the whole book because
we can't possibly do that. There's too much depth here.
There's too much content. There's too many things going on. It is a
quick read, and it is a deceptively
deep read once you get into it.
So I would like to point out, though, that
the the the prologue, which is where everything sort of begins
its setup, begins with the line,
I am an invisible man.
Then the narrator goes
on to tell you that
he is not someone that is like Edgar
Allan Poe or like some Hollywood fiction.
He's not made of ectoplasmic doc, right?
He's not someone that you can see through.
However, he is a Jesan. He is solid, but he is living in a
society where his presence is invisible.
He tells in the prologue a brief anecdote about running into a white
man, and this is where you first get the idea that he may not
necessarily be writers. Right, and assaulting
him. And that assault leaders him to hide in a basement, kinda like a
Hobbit hole. Right? A quote unquote wormhole
in Harlem, a place of incandescent light bulbs
and ripped off electricity from Con Ed.
From this, we are to conclude, obviously, like I said, that he is a
black man because all of the social signals have been provided by
Ellison, and we are to conclude also that he is
suffering from the impacts of societal wide discrimination
and Jim Crow. But
as is about to be revealed from Ellison,
all is not What it
seems. When we
think about Ralph Ellison and we think about the Invisible
Man, we have to kinda think about his life. And
so he was born on March 1, 1913,
and he died on April 16, 1994. So lived a
long, long life. He he, lived a life before
the civil rights movement, and was a man who
saw, 2 generations
out, the actual impacts of slavery
and the subsequent Jim Crow era in the
South, as well as all the impacts of the sharecropping
and the immense poverty that existed in the South
at the time. He was, of course, and this is
how he defined himself, fundamentally an American writer,
a literary critic, and a scholar. He was born in Oklahoma, and
was the 2nd of 3 sons. His, oldest brother died in
infancy. His father, Books Alfred Ellison, was
a small business owner and a construction foreman who died in
1916 when Ellison was just 3 years old after an Operation
to Cure Internal Wounds Suffered From Shards, Suffered
After Shards From A 100 pound, ice block penetrated his
abdomen failed, and he
died. Died from something that he probably would have lived
through if he had been born a little bit later.
Ellison's mother, Ida Milsap, remarried 3 times
after Lewis's death and encouraged
Ralph Waldo Ellison, to play the trumpet,
which later allowed him admittance to the Tuskegee Institute
in 1933 when he was 20 years
old. Ellison's experiences at Tuskegee
with class conscious black people, and I wanna talk a lot about this today,
caused him to sharpen his satirical lens according to writer and
theater critic, Hilton Alls. But the education he received there,
including being exposed to TS Eliot's The Wasteland,
lit the spark of writing in him. And he moved away from merely
playing music to beginning to
write. Now Invisible Man was his
only completed novel and was published in
1952 to endless critical acclaim.
And he did win the National Book Award, but subsequently,
Ellison never published another novel
To the Level of Invisible Man, ever again.
So there's a lot of stuff here, Right? From the book, from the
narrative, from Ellison himself.
And it leads us down this road, and we're gonna open up with DiRolo here.
It leads us down this road of having to really
place Ellison in a particular spot, having to
talk about, the pre civil rights African
American conception. And I don't really like that term African American, but we're going to
use it probably interchangeably with black American today,
but the pre civil rights black American perception of
themselves, versus the post civil rights black American
perception of themselves. And, of course, it
creates tensions for us. See Glenn book Libby
Glenn Mcwell McWhorter and, and, or not Glenn McWhorter.
Sorry. Glenn Libby and John McWhorter. McWhorter
4th. 4th. Right? writers, something like that. Yeah.
That's right. Oh, you gotta throw that 4th in there. Gotta throw the
4th in there. De Rolle is a big fan of the
numbering. It creates tensions that Lowery and McWhorter
have explored for the last over 10 years on their podcast as
well about what it actually means to be black in
America. And so Ellison touches on all of this. So let's
open up with Dorollo. He's the 5th. My
bad. He had to look. He had to look. Yes. He's the 5th. I
wanted to make sure I was correct, And I was incorrect.
Yes. Ciccarolo, tell me, tell me about
Ellison's Invisible Man. I know you've read this book before. I know you revisited it
for podcast no. Okay. I had read parts of
Juneteenth before, and it's a shame because, I mean, I have a degree in
English from Cornell. My concentration was the modern novel.
And so my focus I spent time focused on this. Exactly. I spent
time Tom and it's a it's an important question. I spent time focused
on Joyce. I spent time
focused on, some other works and not this one, and it's
interesting because I took an American novel course that went
through, like, the rise of Silas Lapham and and
Babbitt and these other, you know, great weighty works. And it's a
shame because this this is I think this is a masterwork.
There's a truly majestic flow to
what he presents, and it's worth struggling through
more than 500 pages. I don't have no idea why you called it an easy
read. I didn't find it, so but,
I I find it profound and his insights profound.
It is a disturbing snapshot of, you know, pre
civil rights America. And while
I'm excited by how New York, which is
where nameless, because that's what I call him, you
know, goes. I'm, you know, encouraged in certain
respects to Opportunities he found in New York,
and, you know, cultural
DNA that still plays out in that city today in in ways that
are both beautiful and disturbing, are there, you know,
from, from the the concentration
of black people in Harlem and Manhattan and nowhere else to the use
of taxis to get around, and then the Subtle
interplay between driver and passenger.
And I don't know how Uber changes that Or Lyft, but I assume it does,
because now there's not this it's it's it's a much larger subculture, and
there's less cultural dynamics, I think, with with
Uber and Lyft than there are with taxi drivers. A taxi driver is a thing,
you know. Mhmm. Anyway, but Certainly
of of the Jim Crow South, and of, you
know, nameless's forlorn
Little oasis, that literally comes apart at the
seams by turning down the wrong street.
And, literally, you go from pristine,
you know, neo classical architectured,
No. Give it away. Ones. Don't give it away too much. Don't give it away
too much because I I wanna focus on some of this in our in our
Sorrells of third section on on on doctor Bledsoe. Oh, okay. Good.
Yes. Yes. Yes. I do wanna I do wanna get into that a little bit
here. I mean, you could do this. We let's do the setup. Let's let's let's
let's let let let's Let's let folks know where we're going.
But that right there is, I think I think writers Bledsoe is the
critical linchpin character in this in this novel
for a whole lot of years. I got stuck on Lynch because here,
it has, you know, it has great resonance. It does.
It does. It does. It does. Yeah. It does. Yeah.
Okay. So you would not read this is interesting. I I
figured you had touched on Ellison, at least,
Ellison, Richard Writers, who we're gonna be covering this month. Richard Wright. I
Richard Writers, yes, but Richard Wright was actually high school. They were doing their
jobs. So Richard Wright was either then in middle school or beginning of high school.
Yeah. Okay. And then, of course I think it was middle school. I think it
was 8th grade. Okay. Yeah. And then, of course, the anti
the anti Richard Wright and the anti Ellison, my man, James
Baldwin. Yep. Definitely. We're also going to we're gonna be
bringing you back at the end of the month for for Baldwin, to
talk about to talk about notes,
from a native son.
Yep. I okay. So it's it's interesting to me that you
had not run into Ellison before. Oh, no. I run-in I I mean, I knew
who he was, certainly. Right. But this didn't read I didn't read
anything Juneteenth, and I didn't read Juneteenth until post
Cornell. I I don't remember where I was. I
don't remember if I was in the north or the south. I don't remember where
I was. Is it do you think that because
Ellison's and we have to kinda talk a little bit about this. Do you think
it's because Ellison's Politics
Suddenly Shifted. And and one of the things that I wanna
reference here is, Norman Podhertz', is an essential
link to this article as well. Norman Podhertz's article on what
happened whatever happened to to Ralph Ellison. Right? Mhmm.
Mhmm. And Podcast makes the point. And Podherz was a
leftist sixties Jewish radical, right, who
believed fundamentally that Baldwin
was correct, though not a good writer, and
Ellison was a good writers, but not necessarily correct.
And writing in Commentary Magazine in 1999,
He kinda doubles down on this idea that
Ellison's attempt to be a humanist
And a modernist Mhmm. Put him at odds
with the black political structure of the middle 20th century
and thus deemed his writing, particularly at a August
institution like Cornell Mhmm. Deemed his
writing to be verboten. And you double
down on that by the fact that Ellison and I could talk about this,
we could talk about this early, you double down on that with the or that
analysis with the fact that Ellison never published
another novel, was never able to complete another novel while he was alive.
Juneteenth was completed after his death. And Podhertz calls
it basically a cobbled together mess. I'm being friendly, but
that's basically what he calls it. You know, 398
pages or something like that out of a potential 2,000 that were actually
written.
Why do you think Ellison didn't make the Cornell cut?
I mean, he may have. It it's I so My where
so it's weird. I remember myself. I remember some of my thinking, of course,
then, and it's distorted by age, it's distorted
forgetfulness, it's distorted by too much wine, etcetera.
But because of my
recollections of my state of mind And state of soul, let's
say. I will I will begin with myself. I assume
I'm more inclined to assume it was by my choice than by
something that wasn't offered at my, you know, longest institution,
our alma mater. So I assume it was
that. I didn't take, I
didn't take very many very many American literature courses. I, you
know, I in high school, in contrast, That's what I was reading,
and I ate that stuff for breakfast. It was magnificent. And
I remember, you know, feeling, not the
exact moment I think I can see where I was reading one
of Hemingway's works. The first time I come across Nigger, and I'm just
like, You know, here's this
betrayal where it's like amazing writing and getting
into his quirks and whatever, and then it's like, wait, but, you know,
This is so this is how you see us. This is what you believe about
me and about, you know, my race. Oh, this
isn't book. You know. And so, by the time I got
Cornell, I wasn't exactly done with Hemingway, but,
I think I was more focused in in European writers. And, of course, same time,
I ended up studying a lot of comparative literature and French literature at
the same Tom, And I would have frankly, I would have majored in
comparative literature if I knew what it was before I was a senior.
So, you know, I was just I was taking all this French lit
stuff and taking some comparative literature stuff and then learn, oh, this is what a
comparative literature major is like. And then, you know, if I'd realized that,
I probably would have majored in that. But, you know, who knows?
Again, hindsight about childhood and childhood quirks is far
better than 2020. Right? So you
talk about and I'm a I'm a fan of Hemingway. I'm also a fan
of Mark Twain. And and one of the challenges that we
have on this podcast is that or not challenges.
One of the opportunities that this podcast opens is the
opportunity to talk about hard word hard
words, hard ideas,
hard thoughts that writers,
particularly in an American, and you talk about European, an
American in the European context struggle with. So the European context,
European writers like Joyce, and,
and others, and I'm just gonna use Joyce because it's the one you mentioned,
They struggle with the European conception of self, not
necessarily based on race, but a European conception of self based on
geography and location in in in intention
with or against colonialism. Right? Think of Kipling's
writers man's burden. He's not really referencing race there, although
everybody tags him with that. He's actually referencing,
colonialism primarily and race secondarily.
Okay. Oh, don't worry. What? I know he's
mixed it all together, but his primary concern was colonialism with
Kipling. Yeah. But okay. So let me push back.
Chipman wasn't writing about British colonialism in in Ireland, you know,
where there's no racial element, And yet the same types of
hate and tropes, the same,
inability, And here relating it to Invisible Man, the same inability to
see the other. And I don't just mean as a mass of people not seeing
them and seeing them as animals, but, An
inability to see the other, that that
played out that played out in British colonialism of Ireland, but For sure.
Where Kipling was focused, of course, was India. Right? And
and and the the whole India under the Raj. And The thing
that really spoiled it, in my opinion, because
and this is, you know, a slightly contentious point, but if you you look
at Indian history, which I love and I study. You
know, the the podcasts I listen to the most, one of them
is is going through the history of India. It's absolutely fabulous. There's other books, more
than 1 that I'm reading right now on the history of
not just the subcontinent, but the regions surrounding it. You can see a series of
empires that Mhmm. Existed in India over time, sometimes
over centuries Mhmm. Each. And,
empires that foreigners started and Jesan.
And so when I see, you
know, and hear the animosity directed at the
British or at the Raj, I say to among the
questions that I have is, okay, so why is this different?
Because you got all these other, like, why are you not mad at the Mughals?
Okay. Right. You're mad at them British, but not the Mughals. The Mughals weren't Indians.
You know, they're from Central Asia. They came in. They conquered,
you know, Babur, the Tom, Mughal
emperor, right, was from a place called
Fergana, and it's just like, where the heck is that? You know, it's I think
it's in Uzbekistan. But anyway, point being, this guy's not Indian.
Why aren't you mad at the Mughal yoke the way you're mad
at the Raj? Right? And to me, one of the
the there's there's more than 1 answer.
One of the answers is because the the was the most
Jesan, and it's instilled in certain people's memories, and
there's things like photos and film that show problems. Got
it. Okay. And, I mean, I assume that there's at least
1 photograph of the last Mughal emperor because he was around
in the middle of 19th century, so there's I Zoom. There's at least 1
photograph of this guy. I forget his name too. But, anyway, but
that's that's not, to me, the most important piece. The most that
that's just Aesthetics. Mhmm.
In terms of the substance, the thing that I the the piece that
well, The chief piece the British got
wrong, in my opinion, is that,
they let The racism infects them
such that it then impacted how they did their colonialism.
And if they hadn't done that, They might still be there
today. There were many,
there are many ways that they helped bring,
benefits to the society of sub of South Asia.
But it's like the racism poison the whole thing. That's how I see it. And
so if They had bought that, I think, you
know, they would have had a fighting chance to still be there today. They wouldn't
have been, Ironically or not, it would have been
so alien, you know, but it it wasn't their
alienness itself because that's how it was with with the Kushans. That's how
it was the Bulldogs. And, you know, the the the Mughals
and Kushans that were Tom to the Mughals, certainly, you know, they did some intermarrying.
Okay. Fine. But They were still viewed, certainly, the
shot is still viewed as foreigners. And so it's like, okay. So
why are they Given a pass, Mughals obviously love,
you know, the architecture, all the rest of the stuff given a pass, but
it it so it let's be be even more specific. So the
Mughals, they were Muslim.
So you have this mass of Hindus And you have Muslim emperors,
yet they're given a pass, but then you have these British
far fewer Well, in terms of the administration, probably fewer
people, but, it just but there's there's no past, and I'm just
like, okay. So If you wanna hold them to the same standards as
did you hold Moogals and others, okay, fine. But if you're not gonna do that,
if you're gonna, you know, make these distinctions, like, I just, You know, to me,
it it it ruins the critique, but I digress. So
That was a hell of a dig a hell of a digression. But
but It's but it it it triggers a couple of other things
that relate to, Invisible Man and And you were
talking about Twain. What were you gonna say about Twain? Well, and here's what I
was gonna say about Twain. So Twain and
Hemingway are 2 of the largest pillars,
because the parallel I was drawing was was between
how, Joyce
and Faulkner I'm not sorry, not Faulkner. Kipling and
other European writers approached the tension
between being European and being colonialist. Mhmm. And
we, we could compare or contrast that with how Twain,
Faulkner as well was a Southern writers. We could throw him in there. What the
heck? But big the big the big tour Twain and
Hemingway. How they
dealt with and addressed the history
of, racism, either in
casual language, in casual,
commentary, or in casual culture, or in high
culture, quite frankly, in America,
and the- the- the comparison and the contrast between those
2 is this, and it gets to exactly what you said about
religion and the Moghuls and the Muslims versus the Indians in a, in a
European, and I'm Sorrells, European and Indian context.
The larger lesson here, I think, is that, a, human
beings will divide over anything. They will
divide over race, they will divide over religion, they will divide over class.
The biggest challenges come not from the division,
seeing the division in your own country, and, or in your own backyard, because, you
know, I I'm sure if we brought on somebody who was from India,
They will be able to tell us all of the things, all of the reasons
why the Sorrells, even though they were Muslim, were great,
and the British Tom your point, even though
they were maybe Christian, were terrible. Mhmm.
They would be able to tell us because human beings are going to divide along
those kinds of lines. Right? Mhmm. Whereas in America,
we struggle merely with the idea of division
because in an American context, we have
really, doubled and tripled and quadrupled down on the idea
that, at least until recently, and I would say recently within the
last 20 years. We really doubled and tripled down on this
idea of everyone melting together, and there would
be no divisions. Right? That was the dream. Right? Talk about Martin Luther
King Junior's I Have a Dream. Mhmm. But Twain's writing
and Hemingway's writing reveal the fault lines in those
dreams. They reveal the reality, behind
those dreams. And so it is
interesting when we are first confronted with those,
Humanities That Put Tension on the Myth of
America. A lot of people who read Twain,
read Hemingway, do exactly what you did. They run away from it because
attention's too much. Right?
And I was drawing and and and the other thing that I was going to
say In addition, was that I don't run away from those tensions.
I actually embrace them, because I think those tensions are worthwhile for
us to struggle with. It is, it is an irony above
ironies, not even irony, I wouldn't even say that, it is a
triumph of Twain's heart over
Twain's reality that a comedy
award that has his name on it
get has now been given to, like, I think, 3 or 4 black comics,
including most recently Dave Chappelle. Mhmm. I
think Mark Twain would love that. I think he would
love that. I I I think he would be fine with that.
Right? I think Hemingway's
challenges with black people or his
conception of how race existed in America Didn't
really here's the, here's the, here's the dirty little secret. I don't think it meant
anything to him. I don't think he fought any more
about it that we think about where our cats
or our dogs are in our house. I don't think you thought about it in
any of that kind of level. Right. And to me I I agree.
To me, it's well, that's it because he was a racist. So there you go.
Well, and and by the way I wish you. The way by the way, you
could tag him as a racist What do my cat eat today? Don't
know. Don't care. Don't know. Don't care. Right. When I went with my wife, you
know. Well, and here's and here's the thing here's the thing that we have struggle
with Ralph Ellison as well. Okay? Mhmm.
Mhmm. Ellison, I think,
was as a writer rejected because
he didn't he recognized the racism. Mhmm.
And he recognized its impact. Mhmm. But I
think he thought, and and we're moving in this direction on a podcast this year,
I think he thought that the solutions to it were worse than the disease.
And I think that Hemingway, if you went back in time and Showed him the
solutions to the disease, would probably agree. I
don't know. To me, where
he's best,
Yeah. So I mean, among the challenges with with
Ernest Hemingway, Well,
no. I don't like how that sentence began.
When I look at Hemingway's perspective on
black people there we go.
One of the only place one of the only bright lights I see, no pun
intended, well, the only bright lights I see is
there's certain ways in which he did like in the Green Hills of Africa, there's
certain ways in which he describes, natives with
whom, you know, hunting is going on. There's certain ways in which he
describes them where you can see some
understanding and respect. And, of course, the problem
that it creates is the problem it creates for me as a black
American is that that's not my milieu. Okay. I'm not running
around in the savannahs of East Africa
hunting, half naked,
or clothed helping white men go kill things. Okay? That's
Right. Not how I that's not I hunt. That's not how I hunt,
but the milieu, the cultural milieu in which I'm in
is one of the shared language, shared history, and shared institutions.
And so when in that context, New York, for
example, and when in that context, the same respect isn't accorded
where I have to get to the back of the line or just won't be
addressed at a party. That's what's infuriating.
And so, and, you know, I didn't shy away from his works. I still read
them. He's a phenomenal writer, and I still think they should be read and taught,
you know. Yep. I would do a disclaimer So to any
teachers listening to the podcast, give a disclaimer and then teach the works. And when
you give the disclaimer, don't you dare think of looking at the black students. Just
you give the disclaimer. You may hear things that offend
you. We understand that. You're reading these works
because these are foundational to American literature,
And then you go on, and you do it. And then they can, you know,
thrill with, you know,
Some of the best writing in the language that, you know,
is most likely their native language in America,
and yet, you know, recognize that, hey. Some of these
concepts, aren't good. Some of them are
evil, and you're gonna read them, and you've gotta you're gonna have to learn as
you pointed out. You have to learn to deal with them. You have to learn
to wrestle with those things. And if you're not exposed to them, you'll never learn
to wrestle with And you certainly won't solve problems in a
society where you're uncomfortable confronting
an uncomfortable reality, you know. And so,
but I thought I thought Ellison and this were I thought he did, absolutely
magisterial job with Presenting,
the problems and continuing through,
you know, with his tropes and his symbols And things like that
that are part of how you've structured how a
well structured novel, is written includes things like that. And
so and you can see them, you know, like and and and and detect
them, like cabbage.
The smell of cabbage in New
York and what it meant for nameless. And it's just to me, that that
was beautifully done. That wasn't as beautifully
done as the physical remnants
of actual slavery that keep cropping
up and that somehow, at some point in this novel, basically find
themselves as it were in the same container. And thus, like the Ark of the
Covenant, You've got the tablets, you've got Aaron's
rod, and you got a pot of mana. And here, he's got his
shackle. He's got that doll, Like,
it's broken with the coin. And literally, it's just like that was really
well constructed. That was really well constructed. This this novel is
excellent. Well and and let me let me throw
in one other thing there, and then we'll go back to the book here.
When Ellison initially,
did his writers.
He was writing from the perspective, or not
perspective, his first initial efforts at writing,
copied the voice of, ironically enough, Ernest Hemingway.
Mhmm. And that's where he started.
And so The Sun Also Rises was published in the
1920s. Ellison didn't publish,
Invisible Man until 1952. He was a notoriously
slow writer, so it's 7 years writing it. And of course,
he didn't attend Tuskegee until he was 20 in 1933 where
he was first exposed to, not only TS Eliot,
but also, would have been exposed to Hemingway and all of those
other writers of the modernist
era. Back to the book,
back to The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. So
we're gonna skip ahead a little bit, and we're going to
go to chapter 5. Now again, we're
doing a little bit of a different thing here. If you wanna pick up the
book, go ahead and get it. We're not reading directly from the book today.
We're gonna do we're doing a little more as you could tell from what we
did during that that first sort of piece there. A little more of a deep
dive at the literary level, and at the leadership
level on Invisible Man. So, in
chapter 5, chapter 5 is an interesting chapter. So this
chapter, begins following Invisible Man
Sorrells de Rolo has put on him Nameless. This
follows on Nameless's journey,
through, well, actually, a disastrous trip, to
town, the town outside of the university in
this unnamed southern state. And the
town, during in the town, the
the the invisible man, was
chauffeuring around, a white trustee named
mister Norton. And mister Norton and the
Invisible Man wind up in a,
lower class sharecropper's cabin. And they
hear a shocking story of incest and the
result of that incest. And
as a result of the shock from that story, The
Invisible Man Chauffeurs, mister
Norton, to a bar known as the Golden Day, a bar
filled with mental patients. I think that was I thought that was a
whorehouse filled with veterans who have
mental disease, but okay. But that's what I thought it was. I mean, they
got a bar, but they got it upstairs. You know? Yeah. Right. I think it
was I think it was a combo. You talk about the arc Covenant Combo. I
think it was a combo situation. Yes. Some of those people
were veterans. Yes. Some of the individuals in there, were definitely
ladies of the night, And In the middle of the
day. In the middle of the day. Golden day. The middle of the golden day.
Exactly. And so Ellison is playing with some tropes
here in this chapter or in the chapter previous to chapter
5. So in chapter 5, Invisible man is
shaken Tom say the least, and he's a young student.
He's class conscious. You can see that in the engagement with the lower
class sharecropper. You could see that in his engagement with mister Norton.
He's almost painfully class conscious, but not
as painfully race conscious. And this is
something that is an important distinction with a difference that is about
to hit him Upside the Head. Mhmm.
Now after that terrible journey in
chapter 4, We get to chapter 5, and,
Invisible Man winds up in a chapel listening
to a speech delivered, in the
tune of an old Baptist or to the cadence of an old Baptist preacher,
delivered by a fellow named Homer
a Barbee.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but
Homer, just like
the Homer in Greek
myth.
Homer well,
Homer's gonna tell you a tale. Homer's going to tell you a tale of an
odyssey, an odyssey of the founder. He's
going to lay the foundations of the
institution that the Invisible Man is attending, and he's
doing this in order to raise the spirits of the
students there and to let them know what exactly it
is that they are going there for.
Barbery relates the founder's story, and the narrative of that
story bridges the confusion the Invisible Man is feeling as a student
following his experiences, his his
his very, very class conscious experiences with mister
Norton in a
chauffeured vehicle. Now the irony of all of this
is that the founder who is being, I
won't say lampooned. I I I wouldn't go that far with Ellison.
But who is being narratively identified is indeed
Booker t Washington and the institution that's being talked about by
Homer Barbee, is the Tuskegee Institute.
And, I will be honest, I didn't really realize that that was what was
happening until about halfway through Homer's speech,
and I went, oh, That's what Ellison's doing here. He's
talking about Tuskegee. And then,
and then it was like a little, a little, A
little gap began to open in my understanding, and I
began to see something that de Rolo and I
talked about when we talked about W. E. B. Du Bois's
Sorrells of Black Folk. And we talked about, back in episode number
49, we discussed how There Was A Split in
Black Culture. And it exists even a year later,
between the upper class Black intellectuals, folks who went
to Pacie de Rolo Jesan, but folks who went to Cornell,
books who are going to Harvard currently. And we could talk a
little bit about if we wanna, if we wanna more contemporize
this, we could talk about Claudine Gay if we would like, but the Claudine
Gay, Ibrahim X, Kendi, Tahaa Nazi
coats, tied to folks who run the intellectual
bought life or think they do of of African Americans, black
people in this country. Mhmm. There's a split in that
culture between those folks and the folks who,
as I framed it last year on the podcast, and I will continue to frame
it this year, the folks who actually do the chauffeuring and
drive the buses, the folks who do the sharecropping and the
folks who have to go and work with people of all
races, At Work and Have to Make Nice.
Mhmm. And by the way, make nice is probably a terrible term, it's not really
making nice. It's called social negotiation. It's what we all have to
do. There is a split in black culture between
those two perspectives, and Ellison understood that this
split was evident. And by the way, it's going to become even more sharper
when we get to chapter 6. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are critical
chapters in Invisible Man. And if you don't read any of the other parts of
that book, I would encourage you to read those 4, those 3 chapters in a
row because they define very much
what is happening right now in
2024, I will probably be continuing
into 2025 and 2026 in black culture in
America. Now, Homer
Barbee is named after the writer, as I said before, of The Odyssey and The
Iliad. And interestingly enough,
not to give too much away, but he's blind.
He's blind like the cyclops in Greek myth. I don't think
Ellison did that accidentally either.
He can only remember, Barbie, like the blinded
patriarch of King Lear. He can only remember
the story and provide soaring rhetoric, but he cannot
provide genuine wisdom, which is what the invisible man or
nameless is looking for. With
this speech, and this is the other thing that Ellison does, this genius,
with this speech begins Nameless's descent
into the black Americanized version of Dante's Inferno,
mashed up with Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, replete with a
job that winds him up in a hellish manufacturing
basement where he's monitoring valves
underneath watchful eye of a union busting
elderly African American gentleman Mhmm.
Somewhere in New York City. Now to put this
in a historical context, Ellison It's on Long Island. It's on Long Island. It's on
Long Island. It's on Long Island. Okay. It's on Long Island. Alright. Yep. Now to
put this in a historical context, Ellison, at the time, is writing
this as a Marxist
radical. He he was a radicalized Marxist,
and he later softened his rhetoric
in a fashion similar to the writer Albert Murray, who we haven't read on the
podcast, but we will. I'm fascinated by Albert Murray, and we're gonna There's
leadership lessons we can pull from Murray as well. And
Ellison, of course, wound up disillusioned with ideological
posing and posturing, and he wanted real change
for Black people in America.
But at the time of this writing, he was captured by Marxist ideals.
Because in 1919 33, when he went into
Tuskegee and on to the other side of 1950 Tom
when you finally published A Visible Man. Marxist
socialism was considered to be the ideology that was doing
the best for the most people on the face of the planet.
Of course, at the time, due to the writing of the New York Times
of Walter Duranty and many others, Most people did not
know that Stalin was purging, and
there were gulags, and there was massive repression,
and the ideology of the state. The
totalizing ideology of the state was locking up guys like
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and torturing people
and killing them, because in order to
publish Pravda, sometimes gotta break a few eggs.
Mhmm. By the
way, just as a side note, I don't fault anybody in the early 20th
century up until about 1950, 1950,
1945, 1950. I don't fault any people for
having Marxist views in the 1st part of 20th century. I
really don't. I do? I don't. Because they didn't they didn't really know.
They didn't really know, and the truth wasn't built know what? What
didn't they know? Here's what they didn't know. And and by the way, thank you
for challenging me on this because people often push back on me on this.
Mhmm. I don't hold people responsible
because, number 1, People didn't
know the things about Lennon that we know now. They just didn't.
Lennon was a great propagandist who managed
to make his own image, last
quite strongly through a good chunk of the 20th century. That's number 1.
Number 2, Marxism actually at that
point, and people say this now and people born after
1952, I fault them for saying this, but Marxism actually at that
point was an ideology that had not wound up in its
logical spot. It hadn't wound up in its clearing at the end of the path.
It hadn't actually been fully tried. Now
anybody born after 1950 when they say, well, Marxism hasn't been fully tried,
not even Marxist, Communism hasn't been fully tried. I laugh at those
people out of the room because communism has been fully tried, Marxism has been
fully tried, and it has been found wanting. By the way, it's
the the fully tried part of Marxism is where you wind up with gulags and
concentration camps. That's the fully tried part.
Mhmm. Mhmm. But at the time, pre
1952, we didn't we didn't in the west, anyway, we
didn't realize all of that. Then number 3, the third
reason why I don't hold anybody responsible for following Marxism or
believing in the value of a Marxist worldview
is because the people
who had the courage to write about it, who were in opposition to
that, we're being actively repressed by intellectuals in the
West. Mhmm. Because the intellectual class,
just like with any other luxury belief that they have in the 21st century, The
1st century wanted desperately for Marxism to
book. Mhmm. And they were not willing to kill it in its
in its cradle. They weren't willing to strangle it in its cradle. And
then World War 2 came along, and everybody had to make sort of some some
some decisions intellectually, morally, psychologically,
spiritually. And
book, say what you want, and we do say
a lot, but I think World War 2
went the best it possibly could have gone.
And I'll just leave it at that. Book have always been
better, but it was the best out of a series of bad choices.
So those are that's my reasoning. That's my reasoning. I called them because
Human nature and human experience provide
enough of an education to know from the beginning that
there's something fundamentally wrong with
It's why you can read the brilliant
allegory of that brilliant, You
know, socialist yet realist George Sorrells.
Mhmm. Read Animal Farm, which I'm sure you've done in your podcast, but when you
read Animal Farm,
you get angry. And as you're reading this allegory
Mhmm. You can feel the emotion building because
you're reading about these acts of injustice, and you're seeing the
blindness of Certain animals to what's going on and what's being done to them and
what they're acquiescing in, and it's infuriating.
And so, and, of course, the very first time I read it in
middle school, I was able because of my love of history
and my reading, I recognized What the parallels were Tom,
so I could then begin to predict what was gonna happen. Because it just it
tracks with, you know, Bolshevik history. So,
Anyway, so why I fault them is that
human nature and human experience Tells them
enough. Tells the the viewer
of or the consumer of Marxist ideology
that This is fundamentally unsound at best
and evil at worst. And so,
That but that's one of the reasons that it's it's a cop
out from having to make harder choices.
And we're human. We don't like making hard choices. Okay?
In fact, that's part of human nature, not to want to to
shirk Making hard choices is part of human nature. And so,
you know, Marxism offers a compromise
to a more just and fair society, but because it
requires injustice to get there, Therefore,
fundamentally, axiomatically, it can't lead to a more just
and fair society that In order to get
a more just and fair society, you have to somehow produce
more just and fair people. And
we only produce people One way. They all come
from a woman who's an actual woman and not
anybody masturbating as a woman. Okay.
And then you've got to raise this creature
these creatures knowing that it
is not only what you tell them, but what you show
them That helps direct their paths,
that helps expose them to how they ought to
behave, and thus, It it presupposes
that we be more just and fair people
and thus produce more just and fair people to get to a more just and
fair society. Nobody's got time for that. It takes multiple generations. And
so we're all looking for shortcuts, and Marxism offers a
shortcut. It also offers a scapegoat. It offers a
way for the privileged to ask to
wage their guilt. And if it happens
to cost a few Dozen or a few 1000000 lives, so
be it. Now I can be at peace in my
castle with my things because This is what we've done out
there, and now you can no longer tell me that
you haven't been given this opportunity. You haven't been provided this
book that you need. Not realizing that, of
course, as soon as you turn on the end the NV machine, there's it doesn't
go off. It doesn't need gasoline. It just keeps running. So,
eventually, they're gonna turn on you just because you're there with something
they don't have. And to me, all of
this, it's it's in there. It's in there. Okay. So the question then
becomes so the question Jesan becomes The DNA of it. Okay. So then the
question becomes, and by the way, I don't argue. I don't argue against
all of that being in the DNA of Marxism. You're absolutely correct.
My only assertion is that, and by the way, Orwell published Animal
Farm in 1945. Okay? Just wanted to grab, I
wanted to grab that date. I don't think it
was fully or widely disseminated until the
1950s or so, and And I do think the 1950s is a
critical time in the middle 20th century when the
tide begins to turn, in the West anyway,
against Marxism because of the things you stated now are
fundamentally being realized because, again,
Marxism up until the 19 fifties. And
again, Marxism only had, what, a 25 year long lifespan, something
like that, at least political Marxism. Cultural Marxism has
a seemingly endless lifespan.
But political Marxism, had a 25 year,
at least in, in, in the context of the, of, of the Soviet
Union versus the West, a 25 year long lifespan of
being tried. Now, anything that happens after 1950 happens
because of exactly what you have stated, becomes because now people become
aware of this and they become aware of the sharpness of this in the west
because the thing wound up at its logical conclusion. Just
like Short circuiting the French Revolution didn't lead
to less revolution. It just led to more of it
because the French revolutionary
Jacobean sort of
perspective was not fully allowed to
play out.
And this now becomes the question. So
for all of us born after 1950,
which is the vast majority of folks who listen to this podcast,
who know all of this. The question becomes,
particularly for those of us who may have more melanin in
our skin, Why are we captured by
the cultural version of Marxism? Because the cultural version of Marxism,
and this drives me absolutely crazy. I have my own ideas on why, but why
are we captured by the cultural version of Marxism? Because it's going to
produce it's the same envy machine just turned on in culture,
and it's going to wind up in the same place, and we know where we
know what the clearing at the end of the path is.
We are no we can no longer claim that we are disillusioned. We can no
longer claim that we do not know. We can no longer claim that Marxism has
not been fully tried. It has been fully tried. We know where it ends
up. DiRollo just said it. DiRollo, why are black
intellectuals captured by cultural Marxism? Why? Why was
Ellison captured by cultural Marxism?
I have an answer. Okay.
Bear with me a sec. Sure.
I think that and I just you know, even even, you
know, Dare we say it, you know, the reverend doctor Martin Luther King Junior.
Right? Mhmm. I think when you reach a point
in the struggle for More equality
and justice in America. I think when you reach a point
of recognition That despite your best
efforts, the mass of society is not changing
podcast enough, perhaps, but just not changing.
Disillusionment can set in when one has
assumed that through one's efforts, A
more just and fair society on a wide scale can be
produced quickly. And
so then one looks for the shortcut. And that's
to me, that's when one has the best motives.
That's that, in my opinion, is what happens. When someone
in contrast is disposed to hating the society,
hating this magnificent scheme of constitutional rights that's supposed to
work In a color blind fashion that was set up to
work in a color blind fashion. And, you know, was it hijacked
by White Power Freaks, yes. But, you know,
it was supposed to function in a way that
It didn't matter what you looked like. This is these are the rights you
had as a man. These are the rights you had as a woman. These institutions
are supposed Tom force them. Great. Now go live your Libby. You know?
It it was wonderful. But anyway, there are people who are disposed to hate
that system Anyway and so for them, I
think jumping on the bandwagon
of a political movement whose Stated
goal is to overturn that system
just is a more natural choice, and and one more easily
made. But it's the, you know, the idealists who then are
disillusioned, like nameless. Right? Nameless is disillusioned,
several times in this, book. And
they're beautiful moments where there's even foreshadowing,
you know. Mhmm. Again, like, I approach this, reading this,
as someone who I have a degree in English literature. So I I and, again,
I concentrated in the modern novel. I know how to approach this. And this this
is extremely well written. But just, you know, beautiful moments of
foreshadowing, like when brother Jack
tells nameless, you are right not to trust me.
That's what he says in the beginning. It's right there. It's just like
and I circled it then because I realized not knowing what's coming, I said to
myself, oh, this this is wise insight. You're absolutely
right. Whoever you are, whatever you're gonna do, that that is true.
And so later on, it's like, hey. Wait. Does he he told you.
He told you. And you, naive
young man, now you're getting it. And it's it's a
shame because, Oh, I just saw it. I
just literally, another insight just came. I was about to say it's a
shame that, you know, it actually didn't
caught his invisibility Libby which he in which he finds himself at the
end didn't podcast him his eyes. Thinking of
Oedipus and thinking of Jesan. And then it's like, wait a minute. But but it
did. But, ding. It's just like, oh, but I just saw that. I
literally just saw, No pun intended. I just saw that. And it's just like,
yep. This this this is this is
excellent. Like, This needs to be taught, Chuo.
You could spend quarter of a year on this book, and it would be worth
it in in in a high school literature class. Like,
what are you gonna do this year? We're gonna do 4 books, 1 per marking
period, and we're gonna spend real time in them. We're gonna read them more than
once, and you're going to understand when we're done. This is
what a great American novel is like. Such that, when
you're then trying to find the next one or write the next one, you'll know
how to construct. You know, a a a a beautiful masterpiece,
you know, because that's this is what it is. It's it's literally
phenomenal. And you see the young man on his journey. Oh, you
mean you see the odyssey? Yes. You see the
odyssey. Oh, so maybe we should teach those
old gray dust covered yes. We
should. Absolutely. In fact, and you
should probably read at least 2 versions because,
what the heck is her last name? Professor Emily Wilson
just did she just her Iliad just came out, her translation of it, and the
Odyssey came out, I think, like, 5, 6 years ago. And so I
would read reading her
versions, I think, makes sense, and then reading at least one other, I think, sense.
But, I think what she's doing with classics is amazing, which is, of
course, why I'm talking about her right now. So Of course. Yeah. Okay.
So Homer Homer Barbee. Let's let's I wanna go I wanna
wind back to here because around that cultural Marxism,
there is a tension, and we're going to explore this in sort of the next
section here. We're gonna talk about the molding
of the white underclass by doctor Bledsoe.
The dynamic
that is on the other side of this is the dynamic
that Homer represents. Now, Homer is blind. Yes.
Homer Libby can only deliver soaring rhetoric, but
not wisdom. Yes. But Homer
Barbee represents the founder, the Booker T
Washington, the institution of Tuskegee,
an institution that Ellison himself found to be, as
was mentioned earlier, class conscious.
And you get this sense, reading chapters 4, 5,
and 6 of Invisible Man, that
Ellison could not resolve this tension. He could merely expose it, which
is I think there's something else that great literature does. It exposes the
tension, it does not necessarily seek to resolve it all
the time. And the tension that exists is between
institutions that are class consciousness and dare class conscious, and dare
I say, bourgeois, to use a Marxist framing,
versus institutions that are not class
conscious or at least claim to not be class conscious and came
to be culturally, free or Sorrells
free, and and and make a and lay a claim to the
Marxist definition of freedom where
Everyone has everything shared equally. Okay.
Homer represents that institution Jushin and Ellison has Homer being
blind. And by the way, nameless doesn't realize that
Homer is blind until Homer stumbles, which also is
interesting. Stumbles while
going to sit after delivering his speech, stumbles
while going back Tom sit down next to doctor Bledsoe.
We talked about this last year with Booker t Washington versus W. E. B
Dubois. We kind of have developed it, delved into a little bit here. But to
me, this is this is the representative tension
in black American, culture. This
is the representative tension. It's between the Book two Washington
folks and the W. E. B. Du Bois folks. It it's no
more It's no more complicated than that. And the Booker 2
Washington folks, the black middle class,
seek to raise up, Oh, not secretarial. Number 1, they are
embarrassed by the Black lower class, which was represented
in Invisible Man by the Incest
Driven Sharecropper.
So there's an embarrassment there. There's a realization
that the only way to bring yourself up
to sort of beyond parallel with the white
man, such as it were, is through education.
And and by the way, I always mention this every single time we do these
podcasts, but I went to a state school. I didn't go to Cornell, but I
read a lot of books. DeRolla went to Sorrells,
comparatively in in in in black
American culture in the early 21st century. We are considered to
be privileged by other black people who also went
to the same institutions that we went that we went to,
which is ironic and interesting. And we, of course, are tagged
as Black men in America with this
invisible duty, and I'm going to write about this in my upcoming book. I'm
writing a series of cultural commentary essays, which this is the 1st
public announcement of that, and so they are going to be coming out
later on this year, but I'm writing about, I'm writing a particular essay about this
tension between what I quote unquote
'owe the race' versus
just because there should be some, some sense of racial solidarity, because I happen to
share melanin with you versus what I don't owe
a society where the majority may not share my melanin with
me. There's a tension there. And I have always, this is why part
of the reason why I've run back to Hemingway, I've always rejected that tension
because I think that's a false dichotomy. Mhmm. And I
think it's pretend, and I think that it allows
cynical race hustling to exist, which
Doctor. Bledsoe represents the cynical part of that, and we're gonna visit
him in just a Jesan, but the disillusioned part, the part
that seeks to keep, individuals like
Nameless in naivete Mhmm. Is
represented by the Baptist ramblings
of Homer Barbee. And if you go and read Homer Barbee's recitation
of what the founder did, there's actually nothing
there. Now that's Ellison's critique of
Booker t Washington, but, again, it's a critique from the political, if we're gonna
go there, political left. It's not a critique
from the political right. A critique from the
political right would have had Homer speaking
in actual practical terms of how many people
that institution actually raised up out of the
dust of sharecropping and put them on a
road to being middle class. An actual recitation
of the actual story of the founder would have involved,
not how the founder,
fooled white people into giving him money to start the
school and had a statue built well of him.
It wouldn't have included that or or or how the founder
pretended to be subservient and yet had victory over
Whitey, it wouldn't have included any of that, which, by the way, the the distribution
did include that. It would have instead, as a critique from the right,
would have included how many people
of a particular melanin were led to a greater conception
of liberty through their own through the use of their
own skills and ability regardless of whether or
not the society was racially opposed to them.
It would have been a story of victory from the right. It would have been
a critique of the potential of that person
from the right. And this is why there's only 1 doctor Martin
Luther King, but why there are many,
many, many progeny after Malcolm X.
Many, many, many. Okay. Okay?
My main pushback book Ellison in this chapter, after my main pushback
on Homer Barbee, is that it sets up
the
It sets up the manipulation of nameless as
a person with no agency, and so it's
not, it's, it's the, the, the logical conclusion of that is, of course, you will
become invisible. You have no agency.
Now Sorrells, to your point, will not become invisible.
You'll still be able to see, but you'll have no agency.
And I think that was Ellison's frustration, was that
these tensions don't lead to a greater either tensions from the left or tensions from
the right don't lead to a greater understanding or a greater agency
of the individual. And by the way, Ellison Podhertz makes this point
in and his critique of Ellison. Every time he ran into Ellison, Ellison
always spoke from the position of black people being individuals.
That was Ellison's main critique against Baldwin. Baldwin wanna put everybody in a
group. It's like, get the hell out of town. We're actually
individuals. Mhmm. Who are you to put me
in a group? I don't know you. Just because we happen
to share the same skin tone doesn't mean I share anything else with
you. And by the way, I'm gonna double down and bring it up to the
front of 2024. Just because I happen to
share the same melanin as a Glenn Lau
as a Glenn, a Lowry, or a John McWhorter, or
Atani Nhasi Coats or Nicole Hannah Jones, she
of the 16/19 project, does not mean they speak for me.
Doesn't mean that they know the solution to the problem. We just happen to
be the same skin tone. That's the absence of
genetics. Well, here is some pushback. I have pushback.
Yeah. Pushback. Yeah. No. No. I wasn't asking. I'm I'm saying here
is some pushback. Yeah. Pushback. Yeah. So one of the
values of this novel, and it's a strange thing to say, but one of the
values of this novel is how it serves as a cultural artifact.
Because in his time, there was
still a lot of internal unity within,
broadly, African Americans as a social group.
Okay? And Okay. There were certain powerful
dynamics that played out, and certain
shared cultural traits, shared cultural experiences
that created An instantaneous feeling of,
dare we say it, brotherhood. Okay. Even at
a remove of 800 miles or a 1000 Miles, however
far it is, from the middle of Alabama to Manhattan. Right.
And he did a good job of showing that. For example, How
many for we're talking he is
Ellison, and nameless is who I'm now talking about. Nameless met
meets in the book or met in the book. Many
individuals who knew as soon as he started talking, oh, you're from the South. Right.
Yep. Or saw how he dressed or whatever it was and started immediately
talking to him As Northerners would talk to Southerners,
meaning By the way, I wanna drop unsophisticated, you know
I wanna drop in another name just to sort of help you with where you're
going with this with Push book, Thomas Sowell
came from this time. Right. Right.
Okay. So Thomas Sowell, fundamentally, looks
at everything that happens in the post civil rights era
Uh-huh. And goes, what the hell?
Because I mean, he's he's a much more polite man with who's much more errored
with much more erudition than myself, but he goes, what the hell?
But okay. So I'm gonna get back to my point. So Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
You have this great internal cultural unity. He
does a great job of showing, that within the
southern context, regardless of
social class. Right? Mhmm. And thus,
Nameless is in his milieu that is not really.
Okay? I have so part of my notes that
I have on reading this, which, of course, is what you do when you're studying
a novel. I have questions. And the very first question I wrote was, Why
are the campus fountains broken?
Everything is perfect, but the campus fountains
are broken. So what does
freely flowing controlled water represent?
Where is that? Where do we see,
rivers? Where do we see, you know, that which
gives life? Okay. And so my interpretation of why the
fountains are broken is because this is a little artifact,
and they're just keeping it going, keeping it going. And and you'll you'll notice
Nameless's original ambition was to stay in that
pseudo Eden forever Tom
become like doctor Bledsoe, to stay there and then teach there. And so it's like,
well, what is he actually doing? Nothing. He's literally running on a treadmill.
He got introduced to a treadmill, and then he's running on a treadmill. And the
problem he has is that he fell off the treadmill, But the
point I'm sure well, the problem is he the not the problem he had.
The first event that happened to him that got him on the
road To actual clarity at some point. What was that he fell off the
treadmill? Right? He he fell out of his Eden, but the point I was trying
to raise is that whether he's talking to True Blood, The
sharecropper with his significant family
issues, living in slave cabins, okay, or
It doesn't matter who it was in the golden day.
The bartender knew who he was. People knew where he came
from. There was this tremendous internal
cultural unity. Now you shift up north, and one of the
critiques I have of of the writing of this Is
that Nameless wouldn't have known or shouldn't have known what a West
Indian sounded like. And so there was an introduction
Tom, this person sounds funny. I can't figure out
where they're from. Right. Because in New York, you would have had West
Indians West Indians like the parents of general
Colin Powell. Mhmm. Right? In New
Book, Very normal. Not in the middle of Alabama. Not even
close. And so how how
The way in which the author identified that the person was a West Indian, I
didn't like that because there should have been something
that forced nameless to learn this black person is not a
black person like us. This black person is from this island over here,
but is now in our midst and sharing in this
struggle and suffering some of the same abuses and
perfectly willing to use violence on Irish American
policemen because they happen to be
evicting a woman in the middle of winter. You know? And the policeman wasn't.
He was just there. It was they they're just there. Guys. They they they they
they told me. But, anyway so against that
background, I understand how someone whom
I don't know can see me. We share melanin, and we may share some
experience, etcetera, and we can establish a rapport very easily.
For me, I started in the position you were in, and I
literally, this is what I articulate to my father. Like, I don't know these people.
Like, why am I saying I don't know who these people are. I don't know
who these people are. They don't know me. They don't know my middle name. That's
a joke. If you know me, you'll get it. They don't know my middle name.
They don't know The first thing about de Rolo Nixon
junior, what do I share in common with him? And then you can fast forward
in a very few amount of years. I was probably Well, you can fast forward
to when I was 20, abroad, a French speaker, and then I'd
see black people, and, of course, we'd nod and say hello. It's Totally by that
point, it was totally at that point, I got it. So it's totally normal to
me. And I remember foreign white friends of
mine being baffled by that experience.
It'd be like, do you know him? And it's like, no. I don't know him.
But it it did and they just couldn't grasp
How both he and I could just there we go. They
couldn't get it. Fine. So the so the seduction so
the seduction of a
racially no. Let me let me let me
Let me push back on this idea of, of of Eden.
Ellison brings nameless out of Eden
because you eventually have to get kicked out of the garden.
That's just how it works. Writers? And we can, we as Christians
can argue about or could talk about the
nature of sin and evil and choices and separating life
from dark and all of that. Ellison doesn't get into any of that. It would
have been interesting if he did, but he wasn't going in that direction, and that
wasn't what he was writing. He was doing something
that every great adventure novel does, which
Invisible man is a great adventure novel. You, you
push the hero out into the world so that the hero kills
snakes or, or fights dragons.
The dragons of 1940s
1950s American society were, of course,
Jim Crow, and
particularly for a black American in, during those times
were was were that was the biggest dragon. That was the biggest thing to slay.
And so pushing Oh, it wasn't the sound. Right? It wasn't
Right. It wasn't the issue in the north. In the north, I would say Well,
everybody everybody said everybody everybody says that, but the knock on
effects from Jim Crow were in the north.
There's there's no there's no geographic distancing of
this, you know? Well, I think there is. I think there is. I think
there is. I think there is. I think I think Ellison
got that point and thus put it into his,
into his novel. There were ways in which Norton was
out of place in the middle of Alabama, knew he was out of place,
but was committed to what they were doing, and he was thus
contrasted easily to those men in the
first scenes in the novel, you know, that
random freaking blind prize
fight. Right? We're at the end well, here's your, you know, here's your
little token we give you. Oh, by the way, we're actually gonna give you this.
Oh, yes, sir. You're all bloodied, and you can you can speak to us.
Yeah. Yay. Those men, that that was a
different milieu. Okay? And and and I don't wanna talk
about like that in the North Shore. Not a doubt in my mind. But
the way the society approached the issues and the
history of, The way
the limiting of opportunities for black people took place
in a place like New York. It they their their
Differences that, in my opinion, matter.
I don't think they matter for the narrow thing we're talking I mean,
I do think they matter for the overall novel for sure. But for the
narrow thing I'm I'm I'm trying to get to here, they don't matter. And the
narrow thing I'm trying to get to here is
I think that the reason a novel like
this doesn't get talked about nearly
as much as it should be talked about in Black
culture, particularly
now is because of 2 things that have
happened simultaneously that have impacted all of American culture,
but most notably have impacted black culture.
Okay. What are those 2 things? So the 2 things that have happened are
atomization due to the Internet
Jesan
social media that has impacted that has impacted
overall American culture ridiculously, it has impacted black culture,
quite notoriously. And then the second thing that
has happened is, and we've already, again, we've already talked about
this, is the prevalence
of the power of
intellectual cultural Marxism being gust
being gussied up and sold as institutional
as as battles against institutionalized white racism.
Uh-huh. And from there, I go directly to Claudine Gay's
problems. I don't know Claudine Gay.
Now just so we can give some background to folks who may not know, Just
let me give a little background here. Claudine Gay was,
the president of Harvard for about 5 minutes. She is most
notorious for being in the public eye as a
person who went to Congress, could not robustly,
how could I say this, repudiate antisemitism in a Harvard,
in her Harvard, in the Harvard culture over which she presides,
was then hoisted by her own petard, by a sub
stacker named Christopher Rufo who went to
Harvard Extension, not Harvard,
and discovered that she had, plagiarized. And the
level to which she had plagiarized, we can argue about, but had discovered that she
had plagiarized. And, by the way, On The Ground had a thin
actually, shall I essays, nonexistent CV of publication.
That was strike 1 and 2. Strike 3 was that
the Harvard hedge fund managers who actually run the money of
that institution decided that they were going to get up on their high
horse and run her out of town, and they did.
They ran her out of the Harvard presidency, and so she
has been demoted not from,
just not from the Harvard institution as a whole, just been demoted
from Harvard president and gets to hold on to her faculty position to the
tune of $900,000 a year in salary
with benefits. By the way, Ms. Gay
comes from a Ivy League background, which is the only way you
get that get to be considered from that kind of role. And her background
is Tom the point about the role we just made about being about West,
West Indians. She's Haitian.
That's some background on Claudine Gett. So to go back to what I was
saying, Those 2 factors, the atomization
that has been provided by the Internet and social media,
that breaking apart of people from the solidarity of groups
and internal solidarity that you were talking about, that inter that Eden of
internal cohesion is now being busted apart everywhere. We are all being
turned into atomized individual units. I I read something the other
day where it made the analogy, to some things that are happening in our
culture of 1,000,000 ants all being on the march.
1,000,000 ants have finally turned in in in a in a collective direction,
that it's really hard for a mass
to stop 1,000,000 ants. It it it it's really hard.
My point is this has happened to black culture. That's the 1 step, and then
the 2 step is that cultural Marxism that has infected our intellectual
elites. Our intellectual elites have not been infected by the
by the pull your rope by your bootstraps, a
matter
ideas of a Booker T Washington. Those have been
abandoned, and I don't think either one of those
writers, allows for
a modern Black Jesan. You talk about this book being a cultural
artifact, allows for a modern Black person to even understand what
Ellison is talking about. I think if I put this book in
front of, let's say you you talked
about reading it in high school. I I think if I put this in front
of 10th graders in a Chicago high school,
they wouldn't be able to read it, but they know
how to do TikTok.
Mhmm. They wouldn't be able to read it, much less comprehending.
Fundamental educational problem. Yes. It's possible that a
good number of That would not be I I agree a 100%.
Okay. I don't think so I I I I
think what is more of a driver of the
atomization, are 2
cultural Effects that
precede one of your points. Okay? Go ahead.
Namely, I I think the two effects
are the overwhelming success of the
civil rights movement in the sixties Okay. And the suburbanization
of America. Okay. And because of those factors,
we can have an atomization. Well, 1, we're spread across the country in ways we
weren't before. To Mhmm. We can have an atomization that leaves
us marooned as individuals in, in in these
isolated islands of loneliness or whatever.
But that wouldn't be possible if we were all
shoved in urban ghettos or in this mass called the South
with its dominating culture and,
and institutional racism. I don't think it it it it could be
possible without, The civil rights movement
being, you know, very successful and the suburbanization of
of of American culture, you know. And so now, Power centers,
etcetera, they're not urban based the same way they were before. Mhmm. You
know, culture happened. American culture and the the the
seat of American culture Became a couch. Okay?
It used to be a seat in a theater. Okay? Or a seat
in some kind of performance hall in a large city. It Shifted
to being a freaking couch or a seat in a movie
theater that is still in a suburb. That's what happens. Okay.
Everybody moved to Long Island, keeping the trope
alive. Well, it is not a trope he used,
but because of Because the factory is found on Long Island and this guy was
and nameless was living in New York City, I'm gonna keep the trope that way.
So and it it's a trope that my family went through. So there you go.
Meaning My father's mother took him and 2 of his
siblings, the 2 alive at the time, and moved them from
rural, segregated East Carolina,
where the family had lived literally for 100 of years
Tom New York and then quickly to Long Island. So
Everybody moved to Long Island, and now this suburbanization,
you know, could begin. And so,
The culture shift, the cultural seat shifted. The throne as it were of our
cult, they shifted. They were then found in different places. And so,
arguably, it's that's actually far more efficient, of a model
than the one, before in terms of no. Not not
efficient. It's it's it's It's evidence of scale.
Okay? Okay. That when it went from urban to suburban, it
scaled. Okay? That's that's that's an example of scale. In an urban
setting, you You gotta every you gotta be there, get in the halls, you gotta
travel there, be able to survive there, it's more expensive there, blah blah blah.
When it reach the couch phase. Okay?
Okay. This is affordable. Mass market, all of
those, you know, Trends coming out of the, you know, post World War 2
fifties, big corporate era. Right? And so here here they are playing out in
culture in in many ways. Alright. Well, back to the book. This is a good
spot Tom go back to the book, back to the book, back to
Invisible Man by Ralph Allison. So again, the 3 most
important chapters probably in the 1st part of this book are chapter 4, 5, and
6, and so we turn to a summary of chapter
6. Following Horary
Barbee's, rousing speech that
re deifies the founder.
The the Invisible Man or Nameless is still
confused. He's still in the space of naivete. He's not yet been
kicked out of Eden quite just yet, but it's coming. And it's coming
in the form of a gentleman named doctor Bledsoe. So chapter
6 opens up with the Invisible
Man being full of hope from Barbie's speech, but also full
of trepidation because he doesn't wanna leave Eaton. He doesn't wanna leave
his comfortable spot and go someplace else,
and he does not know what will happen when he goes and
talks to the estimable doctor Bledsoe.
First thing he does is he goes and checks to see if mister Norton, is
okay. The, the, white man he was chauffeuring
around town, who unfortunately wound up in unfortunate
circumstances. And then he goes to
see the head of the school, like I said, the aforementioned doctor Bledsoe.
The doctor Bledsoe character is a,
attempt by Ellison
to,
preserve the institutional
value of, to DiRollo's point, Eden.
And Bledsoe lays out very cynically, or the invisible
man, exactly what he's doing,
in Alabama. And what he's doing is he's
manipulating white people to get them to give him
money for the cynical the most cynical of reasons
and the most cynical of outcomes, and that everything that the
Invisible Man did with mister Norton, who was a white trust who is a white
trustee in the book, everything that he did,
threatened everything that doctor Bledsoe had. Doctor
Bledsoe was set up as a
character that is sitting on top of
a hierarchy, is ruling that hierarchy,
and is not looking to be replaced nor be removed,
Even how he is described as being,
fat, as being, as being,
full of, not jolliness, but full of
sort of cynical cheer. All of these are
symbols, literary symbols that Ellison is using to move the
reader towards this idea that Bledsoe is an
early proto,
prototype of individuals that would come
later in the civil rights movement, and he is an early prototype of those
individuals. He's an early version of Jesse Jackson or
a chubbier version of Al Sharpton.
Doctor Bledsoe says to the Invisible Man that basically he's
manipulating these white people. Everything that the Invisible Man did with mister
Dorton threatens his manipulation and that he has to leave the
institution, but He will be allowed to return
if he just takes 7 letters of introduction. And so he
takes those 7 letters because the invisible man is still naive at the
time. Nameless is still naive. Mhmm. Takes those 7 letters,
gets on a bus, which ironically enough has a
A former a former veteran veterinarian
on it who helped him out with mister Norton,
and takes his bus out of Eden to go to
Harlem. The most interesting thing for me
about chapter 6 is that
doctor Bledsoe's efforts keep the narrator away from
his school, and they are reflective of a multiplicity of
various psychosocial dynamics within the Black community in America for at
least the last 100 years. I see doctor Bledsoe's everywhere.
Everywhere in the black community. They're like whack a
mole. And the fundamental point, I think, to remember
about Ellison's book is that it is not primarily about the racism of
white people. That's just background fodder. That's,
table stakes, such as it were. That was the thing he expected everybody to
know because this is, as de Rolo already said, a cultural artifact of its time.
He expected everybody in 1952 to know that this is
what he's writing about. So he wasn't really writing about that because he didn't need
to say it out loud. Instead, he is writing, I
think I think Ellison's book is primarily about the
about black people being kept down by other black people and about the
cynical grifting of white people by black people who
claimed to possess loftier goals.
By the way, we see this cynical grifting even in our own era from
Barack Obama and the Black Lives Matter movement all the way to the race
hustling. I already mentioned Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, all the way to the
cultural cache or the former cultural cache of folks
like Oprah and Bill Cosby.
By the way, I was never a fan of Oprah, and Eddie Murphy got a
call allegedly from Bill Cosby back in the day to tell him not to be
so dirty. And Richard Pryor when he when Eddie Murphy told Richard
Pryor what Bill Cosby said, Richard Pryor allegedly
said, tell Bill Tom have another puddin'
pop or maybe have another Coke and shut up.
The Invisible Man's invisibility didn't start with his
relations with the dominant culture. It started with his relations with his own
culture. Very good point. Yeah. Essays
Ellison was a Marxist or Marxist, but Ellison was also a
humanist. Mhmm. He wanted people
he wanted black people to stand up as individuals on their
own 2 feet, I think. Mhmm.
And he also didn't think, I don't believe, that grifting the whites
was going to get Black people much of anywhere.
The fountains are all broken.
Yeah. And they remain broken, by the way. There is
no Eden to go back to. Correct. Now that now
there no longer is. And I think that's good, personally, because
that means that Jim Crow's done. That means that that whole milieu that created
this strange insulated state of things is done.
But As somebody who, you know, loves,
I I mean, I've lived abroad more than once. I speak more than one
language. I love people and love different types of people,
and so I cheer that
American society is far more complex, And it's no longer, you know,
biracial, monolingual, monocultural,
and that, you know, that that's part
of the normal way of doing things in America. You know, there there are as
you know, there are black leaders who decry the end of segregation because the end
Because the end of segregation, over time and I
don't think it's cause and effect. It's just it Sorrells. But over time,
you know, the the the decrease in
black lawyers, Black architects, black engineers, black
doctors, the black professionals,
owning and running their own firms. The numbers have collapsed,
basically. And so there are black leaders who decry the
end of of that era because, you had those
great institutions within our race here. I'm not
somebody who shares that position, for the reason I already gave.
And so, you know, I agree with you that
What what Ellison most likely wanted to
see, we see in the struggles of nameless, okay,
To get the people in Harlem to actually then respond,
that he can get them to a certain point, And
then outside forces keep pulling him back down.
Keep pulling him away, and we're gonna send you down here so
you can be distracted. Oh, dude. But on that
line, there's a line when he meets that woman, and I
just laughed my head off.
It's about the class struggle and the ass struggle. Oh, yeah.
That's absolutely the funniest line in the whole book. Oh, man. And
there's some beautiful lines in this book. That wasn't a beautiful line. It was just
hilarious line, but it's just you know, that that was classic. That was
well Put and well located, and and it just sounds
like exactly what would happen, you know. But,
yeah, it, the so the people in
Harlem never rose up. They never rose up as individuals. They never rose up as
an organized unit to be able to essays, this is what we want,
and here's what we're going to do until we get it. And by the way,
here's how we're building. Here's how we're trying to
Using the Skills We Have, A Better Tomorrow for Ourselves and Our Children,
on a scale where it was, You know, can that's I mean, that Harlem's a
neighborhood. Right? Or it's a neighborhood and a community
within Manhattan within Northern Manhattan. But, anyway, point being,
you know, as a unit, that's not what happened. There was
always something, and it's you know, Nameless came to that, you know,
realization that, you know, he could have these
great concentrated moments of breakthrough
like his first podcast. Well, not his 1st podcast.
When he first spoke in Harlem, you know, at an eviction that was
happening in the winter, and then, it morphed into
a protest briefly, and it morphed into a riot.
And he literally had to flee, but, you know, That he could
have successes like that, because arguably, there was some success in
that. Obviously, not the latter bits, but you see the point. But
It didn't translate into a community wide
organized movement for a
better tomorrow. And, of course, you know, because this novel is
so well constructed, there's both an internal dynamic that
sabotaged it, Right? And an external dynamic
that betrayed it. Now one of the pieces I find interesting,
you know, Well, it's one of your questions.
Right? What are the processes used to keep people in their place among black Americans?
And they they exist. They're there. And you you don't even have to be
in high school before you experience them. You know? They exist in middle school.
These pressures, these, These
fears that are, you know, sometimes
lobbed, sometimes just slide across the table,
other times it's right in your face, and someone's at you, but just,
you know, the notion that, hey, we're this massive labor
union. You've gotta get in line, take your number, show up and vote
accordingly. And, of course, men like you and I hate that, and
we'll never do that. And so it's just, you know but they're out there, you
know. So more
specifically, you know,
the The employ employing
fear, fear of,
loss of economic opportunity, fear of Physical violence
by nameless Mhmm. Ubiquitous white
racists, you know, rather than
fear violence from actually can be found in black neighborhood,
black thugs. You know, That one's not deployed as much,
but they're there. And in this novel, of course, they are deployed and they are
there, which is which is, again, well done on his part. Very well done.
They know it's funny. I I I don't know why it took me this long
into the podcast to mention I used to live in Harlem, so it's it's
interesting because he's talking about places I've Right.
And I can relate to some of what he's talking about from, you know, having
lived there, even down to the, oh, when when they moved him to what was
probably, it's the upper part of the upper east
side, but, their streets were, before it gets to
Spanish Harlem where it's a little bit mixed. And so I lived in Spanish Harlem
when I lived in So it's just like I can relate to when the authors
talk about this mix Spanish Irish neighborhood. I was like, underline them. Like, oh, okay.
Yeah. I can relate to this. There's also a little Italian in the corner
I was in, but, anyway, I digress.
It's a lot of, it's a lot of fear and
social pressure, besides much economic, but,
there's a whole lot of Use of signals. Right? The things
that signal something else, like political
party affiliation signals something So the people who
then are gonna start engaging and using these processes,
to try to get you to move somewhere else, you know, in terms of
your behavior, if not your thought. Because they they they don't really care about what
you think. It's are you going to do what I'm telling you to do? Right?
Just like, you know, the power structure of this brotherhood in this book, you
know. I don't care what you think. Let let us do the strategizing, you know,
Not let us. We do the strategizing. You do what you're told. Oh,
okay. Okay. You sound like, an organization that I wanna be part of. Like,
I have zero More interested in that. And
it just took nameless hundreds of pages
to get to a point where he might be willing to challenge that in any
real way. And, of course, pun intended, and I won't
say exactly why, so it doesn't ruin it, but pun intended, it was eye opening.
So it's It was. Yeah. Yeah. There it is. Yeah. Okay.
So so the thing that we are approaching, I think, in the 21st
century, and we have to wrap up our podcast and episode today, and I'd like
to thank DeRollo for coming on and talking about this great book Sure.
And exploring the vagaries and the intricacies of this as we,
again, Use this episode as our kickoff to this year's black
history month. And we'll have de
Rolo on a little bit later on this month, talking about James
Baldwin, and notes from a native
Jesan, Baldwin, who was the antithesis,
of Ellison.
I think we're approaching a space in our culture now, and
I think that the intellectual
cavalcade of folks that I've mentioned on this podcast in the black community.
And by the way, this is, this is part of the reason why there's no
black leader anymore, but the intellectual cavalcade of
folks that I've mentioned on this podcast, are
flopping around, particularly in a post 2020
context, are flopping around waiting for the next crisis or the next
riot to pop up where they can coalesce people around.
And the reason why this is happening is because the atomization
that has negatively impacted black Americans has also
had positive impacts, and the positive impact of atomization is this. When
I move to the suburbs, I get to be my own man. Mhmm.
I Get Tom Be My Own Man When I Move TO Harlem. Mhmm.
I get to be me as Hayzad or me as de
Rolo. Racial reconciliation comes from individuals
relating to and intermarrying with
individuals. That's where it comes from.
It doesn't come from the Edenic sort of ideal
we will all be in solidarity with each other and push
a culture towards something that happens only once, and
it happened in the middle of 20th century, and now we're done. We're never gonna
go back to that. As NWA infamously They said
back in the day, or it might not have been NWA. It might have been
doctor Dre. I can't remember. But one of the rappers
back in the nineties said, Malcolm and Martin are Gone, and I
Gotta Live Out Here. Mhmm.
Yeah. Yep. It sounds like West a West Coast statement.
It does. This does not sound like Somebody in Harl.
Sounds like somebody in Los Angeles. Yes. Well, Malcolm and
Martin are gone. And what are we gonna do? Right?
And and and Malcolm and Martin weren't gonna come down to the ghetto and come
get me. They don't know me, and I don't know them, and I gotta
live out here with these people. There's there's a lot of truth in that.
Mhmm. And Snoop Dogg now hangs around with Martha Stewart. I think
it's awesome. Which I think is incredible. I really get a huge
kick out of that. They're like b f BFFs. I get a kick out of
that. It is ridiculous. His real name Calvin. Right? Calvin
Brodus junior. Yes. Junior.
Yep. Deuces.
At what point do you think and by the way, there are now pressures being
put on the African American, the black community in America,
by Hispanics Mhmm. And by Asians. Massive
pressures. Mhmm. And
I guess I'd like to wrap up this podcast today with the end with with
maybe this question. If you're a leader who
happens by genetic Accident Tom be
Black, in an organization, and you are leading a
multiethnic, multiracial organization,
And this month comes upon you when you are asked by
virtue of silence to comment on it,
because the silence always becomes deafening right around this month if you happen to be
black in an organization, you happen to be in leadership. Mhmm.
What do you say after reading
Invisible Man?
What do you say to your people about this month?
Well, It it's interesting because the
first point of departure I I have is, I follow
the the the premise of the question. Mhmm. I just I I don't
think it extends to well, when the firm is actually owned and run by black
people, because then it might be different. You
know? You could have black history 12 months of the year
Mhmm. Or you could have it none. It depends. Or you could have it
still in February. It depends on the culture and the values of the
of the leaders and the owners of the entity, you know, versus a leader
within an entity that is really just a typical American,
you know, normal mainline American culture
creation, and thus, one can
Pretty reasonably anticipate that, it wasn't founded and run by black people.
Anyway, you know, the the position, the perspective might be
different. And so for me, who owns and runs
a multiethnic organization.
What I focus on coming out of this, is I mean,
I pushed the novel. That's a no brainer. Like, read the Sorrells awesome.
But, What what got to me,
because it's one of his themes. Right? And again, I have no because, as
a guy with a degree in English, what? Like, How to
approach this? This is how you study a novel Yep. Anyway.
One of the themes is that everyone wants to use you for some purpose of
their own. And so for people I lead,
I wanna make sure. And then, you know, the last time I onboarded someone was
literally last week, and so it's like, you know, I told her. Hi. I told
her, you know, one of the things that we will go
through are your goals for your career. And
Immediately that that is said, there's some tension. I am telling someone who works for
me, I'm gonna help you Chief your goals. We're
gonna work on your career goals. That may mean that I help her get out
of the seat. She's gonna go work for somebody else, whether herself or somebody else.
I may end up helping her do that. Why am I willing to do
that? Because the type of values that we were
read about in this novel Libby the power structures
represented by the doctor Bledsoe and the Brother Books are
anathema to me. I hate them. I want them burnt down. And so I
don't want to run an institution where I'm effectively co
opting people's best years and efforts for my good
over their good, For my benefit over their benefit, I don't
ever wanna do that. And so, therefore,
my whole leadership model is about,
Okay? I am trying to help
you get to where you're trying to go, and together, what we're
trying to do is achieve the goals that I have
set out in line with my values. And as long as that
shared, it works. And when it's not shared, Then
not only is the person probably in the wrong seat, they're probably gonna want you
to depart, and so that that can work. You know, one of the best people
I had working for me Told me in the beginning exactly how long she was
gonna work for me, and she kept it just about to a tee. Okay?
And there was an external reason in part why, but there are, obviously, there were
also reason, but she was able to tell me in the beginning, this is how
long I'm gonna work for you. That's that that that was it. It it played
out. It's great. It helped her meet her goals. It also
helped me meet my goals. Now she's a very strong leader, and so she
knew to do things like that. Okay. Great. So back to me.
Okay. So how do I Help my people
achieve their goals. My people I'm talking about people working for my firm. I'm not
talking about my people in a king x, etcetera
way. But how do I help my people achieve their
individual goals? You know?
Because if I lead them and help them in that process, they're gonna do great.
They're gonna do exceedingly well helping me achieve my
goals. And if I don't do that, they still may do well,
you know, they even may do exceedingly well, but there's a cost. You know, there's
a cost in terms of trust. There's a
cost in terms of, like, an an actual
physical podcast on their bodies over Tom, on their minds, you
know, like, The hourglass those sands are going, and
so it's just like, you know, at the end of the day,
if they've worked for me and they've been compensated fairly And,
hopefully, well, but certainly fairly. And, you know, we've been able to achieve some
good and help other people. That's great. And if they can walk away from that
and they were choosing well, I'm good. You know, I'm
good. I'd rather have that than I managed to
cobble together some motley crew, and I
Cajoled, threatened, bribed, and assaulted them
so that they'd book for me for, like, 30 years, and then I bounced on,
you know, I'm retiring them out, and then they just collapsed. And then they have
no retirement, no pension. They don't know what's going like, that's not a success. K.
That's a tragedy. But the real tragedy is that they
didn't see it, that they couldn't perceive what was being done
to them. And this novel shows At
least 1 unnamed man's journey to realize what
the heck was going on with him. Just one little brief
point. Don't understand why he didn't say there's 7 letters. I'm gonna assume the
contents are the same. I'm gonna sacrifice 1 and open it up, and then I'll
have the other 6. If he had just done that if he had just done
that Mhmm. Maybe we would've got back on a bus with an
ax. Hi,
doctor Bledsoe. Bam. You know? And then there would have been
no novel. Right? But there would have
been, on some level, Some measure of
justice, I think, we could live with.
And would it have cost him his life in
See what? You know it. It lit him up.
Lit him up Like a like like
a a funeral pyre. Man,
but yeah. Great great work. Great book. Happy to be here. Thank
you. And with that, I'd like
to thank once again to Rollo Nixon Junior for coming on our podcast today,
and we're out.