For me and folks of my generation, Maury Laws helped make Christmas. More on that shortly.

It’s just a shame more people don’t know about him.

He was part of the Greatest Generation himself, born in North Carolina in 1923. He served in the infantry during WWII, in General George S. Patton’s Third Army. A musician who taught himself the guitar when he was 16 years old, after the war he traveled the country playing and singing with a variety of different musical groups. Eventually he settled in New York and there received formal music training, which led him to his real career in composing, arranging, and conducting.

He appeared on television in the mid-20^th century with vocal groups on the Perry Como, Arthur Godfrey, Milton Berle, and Ed Sullivan shows.  He wrote arrangements for many of the top recording artists of the 1950s and ‘60s.  He also created and performed in commercials for big companies like General Electric, Eastman Kodak, Firestone, and Revlon. His music was performed by a litany of big names from a bygone era: Fred Astaire, Danny Kaye, Angela Lansbury, Burl Ives, Danny Thomas, Art Carney, Judy Collins, John Houston, and Ethel Merman.  He composed for off-Broadway theater and scored symphonic works for orchestras around the world.

Maury Laws was a man of tremendous accomplishment.

But I know him most for what I mentioned in my first line above. Because I grew up with one of the big challenges each and every Christmas season of making sure I was home and watching when the Christmas cartoons aired: Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Frosty the Snowman. The Little Drummer Boy. Santa Claus is Coming to Town. T’was the Night Before Christmas. And guess what? Maury Laws was responsible for the music in every one of those shows, writing a bunch of it and arranging it all.

(Note to youth: back in the day, shows like this aired one time only each year. There was no such thing as streaming or DVDs, and not even VCRs had come along yet! So you were either there when it showed on TV, or you had to wait another whole year to see it again.)

Those wonderful programs made by Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass were an integral part of Christmas when I was young. And my wife and I have watched them every year since we married (that’s a lot of Christmases), and now our teenage sons have watched them every year too. To say they’re firmly rooted in our Christmas traditions is a bit of an understatement.

And every year, we sing right along with those wonderful songs that Maury Laws put together. Except one…

I think the absolute pinnacle of his work is from The Little Drummer Boy. His “One Star in the Night” brings tears to my eyes every holiday season. His music, the words by Jules Bass, and the singing by the angelic Vienna Boys Choir are pure Christmas magic. (Give it a listen, and you’ll understand why we don’t even try to sing along.)

One Star in the Night

One Star in the Night
Singing silently,
You can hear the music,
if you listen with your heart.

One Star in The Night
Shone o’er Bethlehem,
Magic in the moment
when that lonely star
began its lovely song.

Angel’s lullaby
On that holy night,
Sung unto a Savior
who was born beneath its glow.

One Star in the Night
Rainbow in the dark,
One night to remember;
on that peaceful night
the King of Kings was born.

Most important, of course, is that this particular song is about what Christmas really is. That’s always an important reminder.

One Christmas not too many years ago, after being moved yet again when we watched that show, I tracked down Laws’s website and left a note on his contact form telling him how much I love that song. I received a very nice email reply from him saying how pleased he was that I liked that particular one, as it was one of his favorites too.

In the 1980s, Laws had moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where he became an active member of the arts community. He passed away there in March, 2019, leaving behind a wife, three children, and numerous grandchildren–heartbroken, I have no doubt.

He’s gone from this Earth. But it’s my fervent wish that his work, especially the part of it that made Christmas that much more enjoyable, will live on here forever.

It’s been over eight months since I’ve posted here? Wow.

Lots going on. The Forbes writing is going gangbusters, and I’ve got some things related to that I’ll be announcing soon. The cool factor of the work I get to do there is phenomenal.

I announced on LinkedIn recently that I’m launching a manufacturing webcast/podcast, Manufacturing Talks with Jim Vinoski. My first episodes are coming in mere weeks!

More to come!

This is a post entirely inspired by David Fredericksen, Assistant Manager of Production Engineering at NVIC, a foundry in central Indiana. He and I got a back-and-forth debate going on LinkedIn over the weekend, focused on the topic of unionization that was raised in a video I’d posted.

He raised some excellent points in his last couple comments, which I thought it might be easier to reply to here.

He began:

Jim, based on a report published by the Economic Policy Institute in 2019 CEO pay has increased 940% since 1978 while the wages of the typical worker have increased by only 12%. That indicates to me that something in our US system doesn’t work, or only works for a few. It is interesting to me that the 1978/1979 timing has marked both the decline of union membership and such a stark increase in inequality regarding pay. I do not for a minute believe it was ever fair for a worker to be forced to join a union but it is just shocking the ties that can be made to the change point in 1978/1979.

I’m personally of a mixed mind on this point. I had to do a bit of homework (gee, thanks, David!), but it looks like the biggest driver after the late ‘70s of falling union membership was the sharp decline in manufacturing employment, from almost 20 million in 1979 to under 12 million by 2010. That to me explains the lack of progress in worker compensation, since manufacturing jobs pay significantly better than service-sector work. All that being said, though, I agree that the rise in CEO and other executive pay is absurd. What additional value are they providing now that they didn’t in 1980 that would explain earning hundreds of times more money? The rise of company stock as compensation is part of the picture, and was supposed to have the laudable goal of orienting leaders’ focus toward the long term. But I think that’s largely failed thanks to Wall Street, and it still doesn’t explain the explosion in total executive compensation. I’ve seen some work recently that show the huge increase in companies buying back their own shares of stock is feeding that situation. That to me is a failure of appropriate board oversight, not a failure of government. Activist shareholders, anyone?

David continued:

I’ll ask this question of Right to Work as well. If in Right to Work no-one is forced to join the union why is any percent of the workforce required for organization? If 100% wants to organize they should be allowed to. If 10% wants to organize they should be allowed to. Either way, no worker is in a situation that is forced.

Here I agree wholeheartedly. Workers should be completely free to enter into contracts of their choosing, whether that’s by accepting employment or by joining together for collective bargaining. And they should be equally free not to. I’m have no interest in digging into where the rule that 30% of employees have to sign up to have a union election, but I suspect all that mess is from the National Labor Relations Board, which I think is a disaster from top to bottom. In fact, the NLRB to me represents a mighty find example of why the government has absolutely no business inserting itself in any way in between workers and employers.

David closed with this:

Jim, for the record I’m not advocating the unionization of the American workforce or a minimum wage. I’m just cognizant of the apparent correlation between de-unionizing the workforce and the increase in disparity of earnings between the most highly compensated employees and the average worker. There are many ways this could be corrected, unionizing the workforce is only one of them and arguably not the best way – however, I believe it is the most common way.

And I’m not in any way philosophically opposed to unions. They didn’t arise for no reason, right? Only a fool would say that companies haven’t many times abused and taken advantage of workers. Eventually those workers saw the power in coming together to present a unified front. I’d hope that abuse is far less common today. But the fact that we’re all human hasn’t changed, so unfortunately the possibility of a company’s leader(s) mistreating those who work there still exists. I do, however, agree with Milton Friedman that if we’re to have unions, they ought not receive government assistance or advantages not available to other organizations. In fact, they ought not receive anything from government at all. But then, neither should companies.

It’s nice to see the points of agreement David and I share. I’m certain there are other points on which we’ll continue to disagree. But I appreciate his joining the discussion with logic and respect, which I hope I’ve returned to him here.

One beauty of a concise book is that you can get smarter in one sitting.

That’s definitely the case with The Conclusion Trap: Four Steps to Better Decisions by Dan Markovitz. It comes in at just shy of 60 pages, but it packs a heckuva punch in one thin volume. His whole point is that we’re all prone to jumping to the wrong conclusions when we’re trying to solve problems, with the result that we waste time, energy, and money.

And we waste them needlessly, he thinks, because of our flawed ways of of reaching those conclusions. In his first chapter, he offers concrete examples of the failed problem-solving, as well as some of the typical patterns that lead to them. In chapter two, he expands on the specifics of those patterns and how things go so spectacularly wrong. And in the last section, he gives us ways to avoid the failures, with specific tools to employ in the real world so we get better at coming to the right conclusions about the causes of our problems, so we can then find the right solutions to eliminate them.

Along the way, Markovitz shares some illuminating stories. Here’s one of my favorites:

[General Motors CEO Roger Smith] would have seen plant managers telling workers to skip quality checks, eliminate planned tool changes, and ignore machining processes that were clearly deteriorating. That’s obviously not a recipe for producing the high-quality cars that customers wanted, and were buying from Japanese companies–but when the performance evaluation system you’ve designed prioritizes meeting production quotas at all costs, well, you can understand why the plant managers kept the lines running. Never mind what that meant for quality…

GM’s problem wasn’t the workers. It was the managers. Or more accurately, it was the management system set up by Smith and other executives…

You can spend $90 billion, but unless you look in the mirror and activate your inner Analyst first, you probably won’t solve the real problem.

And here’s another:

Many executives think they’re going to the crime scene to learn the facts. In actuality, they’re more like a king visiting the serfs.

A leading global financial services company that boasts of its focus on customer service requires executives to visit its call centers so that they can see the customer interactions first-hand. That sounds good in concept, but it doesn’t really work that way. The executives leave their marble-floored, mahogany-lined offices in NY, take the corporate jet to the inexpensive, second-tier locations around the world, and sit through a series of PowerPoint presentations. Then they listen in on a few calls with the best customer service rep, write an obligatory “lessons learned” email, and fly back in time to make dinner in Manhattan.

This is not visiting the crime scene.

Visiting the crime scene is: the former credit card company MBNA requiring all executives to spend four hours a month listening to customer calls. Not only that, they were forbidden to have unlisted home phone numbers–the CEO wanted to make sure executives received the same dinner-time telemarketing phone calls that the company made to ordinary people.

The Conclusion Trap is full of such stories, and equally full of great practical advice on how to avoid the problems it calls out. And it’s not just a quick read, but a good read as well. What’s not to like?

I’ve been a lifelong fan of the movie A Bridge Too Far, which tells the story of Operation Market Garden, an Allied attack on Germany through the Netherlands during the Second World War. I first saw it when I was rather a young lad, and it stood apart from the many triumphant WWII movies as an honest look at one battle our side didn’t win. And the film’s musical score mesmerized me. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched it.

Years later I found that Cornelius Ryan’s eponymous book the movie was based on is an awfully good read, too.

Both the book and the movie present the reason for the Allies’ loss as mostly a combination of bad luck and poor intelligence. But in his recent book The Devil’s Bridge: The German Victory at Arnhem, 1944, British historian and former intelligence officer Anthony Tucker-Jones shows that, in fact, the Germans mounted a brilliant–and brilliantly-constructed–defense that was the overriding element of their victory.

For the uninitiated, it was mid-September 1944. The German army had essentially been on the run ever since the Allied breakout from the invasion beaches in Normandy early that summer. US General George Patton’s 3^rd Army, in particular, had chased the Nazis across the entirety of France and was now threatening their homeland.

British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery concocted a plan he felt would end the war quickly: a combined infantry, armor and airborne assault to capture a series of bridges northeast from his lines through occupied Holland, with the goal of opening a path to Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr. He felt it would cause the collapse of Nazi munitions production and bring hostilities to an end. While the plan meant opening a very long and narrow salient through German lines, and stretching supply lines to the extreme, Montgomery counted on the Germans being the spent and nearly-defeated force he believed them to be.

They weren’t. As Tucker-Jones puts it in a mid-book summary, “Model, Student and Bittrich [the German Generals in charge of local forces], or more precisely their men, had performed miracles during the hard-fought battle for Arnhnem. Deserters, stragglers, teenagers, trainees, old men and Luftwaffe staff somehow stopped three airborne, three infantry and one armoured division. Forming ad hoc battle groups, they literally fought Operation Market Garden to a standstill. This was a quite remarkable achievement and represented a major blot on Field Marshal Montgomery’s reputation that he could never quite escape.”

That’s precisely the view Tucker-Jones presents throughout the book: how the Germans were able to summon the wherewithal to finally turn back an Allied assault. With superb storytelling and impeccably researched facts, Tucker-Jones shows how Germany’s victory here went far beyond Montgomery’s fatal underestimation of the Nazis’ will to fight. He shows how Allied errors piled up: their failure to capture the Scheldt approaches that left the prime port of Antwerp worthless; the failure of the Americans to land forces at the north end of the Nijmegen bridge; the similar failure by the British to land forces at the south end of the Arnhem bridge; and repeated ignoring of intelligence showing what German forces were in the area and how well they could respond to the attacks. Most notable of all in that failure was the high-handed dismissal of clear intelligence of Bittrich’s Panzer divisions being deployed right in the area of the attacks.

And throughout he demonstrates how those tattered groups he mentioned above were able to quickly refit, assemble themselves into fighting units, and put up effective resistance to the Allied push.

The failure of Operation Market Garden wasn’t bad luck, and it certainly wasn’t poor intelligence. Tucker-Jones does a masterful job of telling us exactly how.

I’ll still enjoy A Bridge Too Far – both the movie and the book. Perhaps I’ll enjoy them even more now, with my more complete understanding of what exactly went so terribly wrong for our side. My thanks to Anthony Tucker-Jones for his masterful effort to further educate me.

I had the best road bike ride tonight that I’ve done in a good ten years. And I put that down mostly to my new saddle.

Okay, so I bought my Ridley Fenix road bike four years ago. I hadn’t been riding consistently for several years before that and wanted to get back to it, and my old Eddy Merckx just wasn’t cutting it any more.

I loved the Ridley from the get-go… except the saddle. It came with a Fizik Twin Flex, while I’d been a die-hard Selle Italia Turbo guy for the better part of two decades. But I’d read somewhere that Fizik just didn’t make an uncomfortable saddle, so I went with it.

Well, unfortunately that first summer I suffered a serious episode of sciatica before I ever really got riding, so bad that I literally lost some function in my left leg. (Sciatica is nerve damage originating in the lower back, but with referred effects all the way down the sciatic nerve – through the hip and all the way down the leg). What little riding I did that year was all-seated and of rather short duration, so the saddle soreness I had seemed normal.

The next two summers I didn’t make too much progress, with my time split between running and biking. I did a longer ride here and there, but never consistently. So again, the fact that I was sore wasn’t a big worry.

Last summer I buckled down and started getting back to it for real, including adding a new Marin B17 2 mountain bike to the mix. I did more long road rides, but between stuff like Scouts summer camp keeping me from any real consistency, plus starting back to real trail riding, I again figured my saddle soreness was par for the course.

But then there’s this year. I quit running once the weather got warm, hit both bikes hard, and have done more close-to-50 milers on the road than any year since 2008. (That’s when I swung pretty heavily to running, completing three marathons between 2009 and 2014.) But I quickly realized that with consistent miles, my saddle soreness wasn’t getting better like it always had in heavy-mile early seasons in the past – it was getting worse. Like, bloody worse, and I’m not using British vulgarity there. I realized that even on short rides, I was hurting so bad it was affecting my performance.

What’s more, as I also ramped up with more trail rides, I realized I didn’t have the saddle soreness on the Marin.

So I finally decided to go back to what used to work. I ordered a Selle Italia Turbo SLR, exactly what my old Merckx had, and put it on before today’s ride. And headed up the short hill I start on in my neighborhood, I could already tell the difference.

It was amazing. I hadn’t even realized how much I was hurting… until I wasn’t. And what a difference it made. Right away I was more comfortable because I was sitting on my sit-bones, not on my flesh. I was a few millimeters higher, because the Selle is a flat saddle, where the Fizik has.. well, a saddle to the saddle, a slight negative arch in the middle. With the Selle, I was able to change positions more frequently, which meant my hands didn’t go numb and my neck wasn’t as tight. I climbed better, because I could stay seated and power through without it hurting my tail. And I just stayed fresher, even though I was on a new route for a weekday ride that’s four miles longer then what I’d been doing. I averaged 17.5 mph, where I’d been averaging mid-16-ish ever since I got over the first slow rides of the year.

By the end, I was a bit sore. After all, I’m sitting on parts I haven’t sat on in years. But I was never SORE-sore, if you know what I mean. No blood!! I felt great. What a lesson it’s all been.

Photograph of Flag Raising on Iwo Jima. Photo by Joe Rosenthal.

The US Marines in the photo above are, from left to right:

Pfc. Franklin Sousley

Pfc. Ira Hayes

Sgt. Michael Strank

Cpl. Harold Schultz

Cpl. Harold Keller

Cpl. Harlon Block

I’ve memorized their names. I first did that years ago, when I was reading James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers, which was about his father being in that iconic photo. But he wasn’t – that was Pfc. Schultz where they originally thought PhM2C John Bradley was. They also thought Pfc. Rene Gagnon was there, but no – that was Cpl. Keller.

James Bradley himself spoke out to get his father “demoted,” after seeing the evidence that he wasn’t in the photo. (He likely took part in an earlier flag-raising.) That’s an indication of how reverent many people are about this picture. It was an iconic image from the very moment of its release to a war-weary US public in early 1945, for whom it became an inspiration to carry through to August of that year, and the war’s end.

If you haven’t read of the horrors of Iwo Jima, I suggest you do. None of us can begin to imagine the burst of morale that arose in the American boys down below when the red, white, and blue unfurled atop Mt. Suribachi. For them, too, it was an inspiration.

For half of those boys in the photo above, it was the waning days of their time here on earth. Pfc. Sousley was the last of the six to fall there on the black volcanic sand, shot in the back by a Japanese sniper as the days of battle drew to a close. Sgt. Strank and Cpl Block both fell in the thick of the fight.

Ira Hayes survived the battle and the war, but not its effects. He fell into alcoholism after the hoopla of the war bond tours they put the surviving identified flag-raisers through came to an end, and after appearing with John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima. He died of exposure and alcohol poisoning on an early winter morning outside an abandoned adobe hut in his native Arizona.

Over 7,000 US Marines died in that one battle.

Gettysburg National Cemetery, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Photographer unknown.

The desperate Battle of Gettysburg in America’s Civil War marked the “high water mark” of the Confederacy. For three days the forces, neither of which wanted to fight on that ground – they were forced to after a chance encounter – fought to gain the upper hand. Had General Stonewall Jackson, General Robert E. Lee’s right-hand man, not made the fatal error of scouting in front of his own lines after the Battle of Chancellorsville, where he was shot by his own men, his genius might have changed the outcome in Pennsylvania. But instead the Union forces prevailed, winning final victory in the savage slaughter of the Confederates who launched Pickett’s Charge across an open field on the battle’s third day, right into the teeth of the dug-in Northern ranks. The loss broke the back of the Confederate forces. While the war would drag on for almost two more years, Gettysburg marked the turning point of the North’s fight to end slavery in the USA.

3,155 Union soldiers died on what President Abraham Lincoln, dedicating a portion of that battlefield for the very cemetery pictured above, said was ground consecrated by the brave men who fought there. In the whole war, 7,058 Union soldiers gave their lives that others might be free.

Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, Colleville-sur-Mer, France. Photographer unknown.

Before I close, here’s one final bit about WWII. That hallowed ground above sits just inland from the surf of northern France. There to the right is a stretch of beach that was once designated “Omaha.” If you don’t know the harrowing story of D-Day, there’s another bit of research you really ought to do. That particular beach was the scene of the bloodiest fighting (watch the opening of Saving Private Ryan to get a sense for it) in the landings that began the liberation of Europe from the fascist nightmare.

9,385 American dead lie buried there in that stark reminder of the colossal sacrifices made by American men and women. 416,800 American died in that war.

Every American now living has the right to disrespect the flag that all the soldiers I’ve mentioned above fought and died for. It’s one of the liberties they won for you with their “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” Shouldn’t that very reality, however, indicate to you how very wrong it is to do so? You’re protesting, you say? That just doesn’t cut it. Our soldiers didn’t put on a show, which is all you’re doing; they went and did. They did things most of us can’t even begin to imagine, just to preserve that flag. I don’t care what your grievance is. If you’re an American, they fought, and oh so many died, for you and your freedom. The very least you can do is to show the minimum respect that’s asked for that standard under which they marched, all too often to the bitter end.

Pfc. Franklin Sousley

Pfc. Ira Hayes

Sgt. Michael Strank

Cpl. Harold Schultz

Cpl. Harold Keller

Cpl. Harlon Block

Forever honor the banner they raised. Forever remember all those who gave their last full measure of devotion.

Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave

O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?

Happy Independence Day, one and all.

A postscript:

I’m pleased as can be to present my review of one of the finest WWII history books I’ve ever read.

Sand & Steel: The D-Day Invasion and the Liberation of France by Professor Peter Caddick-Adams is a triumph.

It’s a dense book, and perhaps will seem a daunting one to many people, at nearly 900 pages, plus notes. There’s good reason for that length, as the thorough coverage of both sides of the conflict and the level of detail are extraordinary. Plus, this is no mere “day of” recounting, but an exhaustive account of the entire affair, from the earliest plans through the buildup of forces, training, preparation, the day itself, and the aftermath, including key events involving the places and participants over the subsequent decades.

That Caddick-Adams has spent years walking those very locations he writes about, and speaking with those who were there for the real event, on both sides of the English Channel, is evident from early on. Whether in the personal accounts of bomber ground crews or a British schoolgirl describing her emotional attachment to the American airmen, or in the incredibly detailed descriptions of the many critical places during the battle, that legwork brings a wonderful (if all too often heartbreaking) vividness to the history.

The author points out quite correctly that D-Day in the popular mind now is largely seen as an American affair, while the reality is that it was actually an all-Allies effort. For me, an American, that brings some new learning, as Caddick-Adams takes pains to cover the efforts of our Allied partners. I was unaware, for example, of the extent to which Englishmen were ordered to leave their properties during the war. That was a brutal reality that cut across class levels; the wealthy had their country estates taken over to provide headquarters accommodations to the Allies’ top brass, and both townspeople and those with vacation properties along the coast were forced to give up their homes to clear areas for seamen and soldiers to practice the landings. Many of those houses were destroyed in the process, a level of sacrifice that adds greatly to respect for the British “stiff upper lip” I already felt from my knowledge of their losses during the Blitz.

Another element about which I received fresh education was on the subject of training mishaps. I’d previously heard of Operation Tiger, an April 1944 practice landing at Slapton Sands in which German E-boats attacked US LSTs (Landing Ships, Tank), resulting in 749 Americans killed or missing. That may have been one of the worst, but there were many others – drownings, accidental shootings and mishaps with live ammunition exercise, parachute training accidents, and so on. The scope of the training undertaken for D-Day was colossal, and an unfortunate side-effect was a tremendous toll in deaths and injuries before the battle ever began.

As total aside: who knew of all the famous (or else soon-to-be-famous) people who were there when the battle did begin? Bill Golding, Cornelius Ryan, Woody Guthrie, JD Salinger, and James Doohan, to name but a few, all played a part.

Caddick-Adams’s account of the battle goes in order of the beaches, beginning with Utah at the western end of the landing zones, and moving east one by one. The level of detail he presents of what happened at each one is astonishing. The author upends some long-standing errors of history, such as the notion that Gold Beach was a cakewalk, or that the Canadians digging in at the end of the day on Juno was a tactical error.

Caddick-Adams is a generous but unstinting historian. Here are just two examples: His admiration for American prowess is constantly evident, but he spares no criticism of the appalling racial segregation of our forces at the time. He – an Englishman himself, mind you – is brutally honest about the shortcomings of British Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery, but lavishes praise on his unparalleled planning and training acumen.

I could go on and on, but I’ve written enough. I recommend Sand & Steel to everybody. For aficionados of WWII history like me, it’s a must.

Someone I really respect and admire threw out this quote from Brené Brown today: “Empathy drives connection. Sympathy drives disconnection… Empathy is I’m feeling with you. Sympathy, I’m feeling for you.”

That raised my hackles. Because I’ve studied this extensively, over and over. And I’m sorry to inform the Zeitgeist, but you’ve got this one just about exactly backwards. For some reason, for the last thirty years or so our society has adopted a smarmy new connotation for the word empathy that just ain’t so.

I think this passage from the “emotional intelligence” website 6 Seconds captures the popular sentiment very well: “What’s the difference between empathy and sympathy? Basically, emotion. Empathy means experiencing someone else’s feelings. It comes from the German Einfühlung, or ‘feeling into.’ It requires an emotional component of really feeling what the other person is feeling. Sympathy, on the other hand, means understanding someone else’s suffering. It’s more cognitive in nature and keeps a certain distance.” (Emphases in the original.)

Let’s start by looking at the textbook definitions. Now, I occasionally point out that when I really want to know what a word means, I look it up in my trusty 1970 printing of Webster’s New World Dictionary. Why? Because I believe many modern dictionaries, particularly the online ones, are too quick to adopt neologisms and trendy re-definitions, making our language not fluid as it’s supposed to be, but dangerously ungrounded, which creates nonsense.

Webster has the following to say about the two words in question (focused solely on the definition senses most applicable to our discussion; both words have other senses that are only tangentially related or are unrelated):

Empathy – the projection of one’s own personality into the personality of another in order to understand him better; ability to share in another’s emotions or feelings.

Sympathy – an entering into, or the ability to enter into, another person’s mental state, feelings, emotions, etc.; esp., [often pl.] pity or compassion felt for another’s trouble, suffering, etc.

Some of you probably disagree with my opinion above about dictionaries, so I think it’s only fair to include one such online source’s current definitions – in this case, from Dictionary.com:

Empathy – the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

Sympathy – the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, especially in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration.

Finally, let’s look at etymology – where the words come from (thanks to Etymonline.com):

Empathy – 1908, modeled on German Einfühlung (from ein “in” + Fühlung “feeling”), which was coined 1858 by German philosopher Rudolf Lotze (1817-1881) as a translation of Greek empatheia “passion, state of emotion,” from assimilated form of en “in” + pathos “feeling.” A term from a theory of art appreciation that maintains appreciation depends on the viewer’s ability to project his personality into the viewed object.

Sympathy – 1570s, “affinity between certain things,” from Middle French sympathie (16c.) and directly from Late Latin sympathia “community of feeling, sympathy,” from Greek sympatheia “fellow-feeling, community of feeling,” from sympathes “having a fellow feeling, affected by like feelings,” from assimilated form of syn– “together.”

Okay, so let’s analyze all this. In my reading, with the Webster definitions I’m right, hands-down. Empathy is about projecting oneself into another’s situation, about sharing in the feelings of another, while sympathy is actual entering into the other’s mental state. It’s empathy that’s at arm’s length, and sympathy that’s about direct experience.

The new dictionary muddies the water a bit, but I’m surprised that there’s still the basic core left to each word. Empathy is about “psychological identification” or ”vicarious experiencing,” still showing it’s an exercise in projection. Sympathy has been recast in the sense of “sharing,” (note that was originally part of the empathy definition) and worse, “commiseration” – yet still retains its root of “fellow feeling.”

I say root, because when we go to the etymology of each, “fellow feeling” is directly from not just one but two of the Greek source words for sympathy. Meanwhile, we learn that empathy was coined for art appreciation, and therefore has its root in looking at something as an object and projecting one’s own feelings into it. Talk about arm’s length!

Why do the modern-day, popular uses of the words, as exemplified by Brown’s quote and the passage from the 6 Seconds website, have things so backwards? I’m not sure, but my suspicion is that it’s all because of the partial original definition of sympathy that involved “pity or compassion,” which can be construed to imply superiority. For that particular sense of the word, it should, since its connotation implies that the other person’s feelings that we’re engaged in experiencing for ourselves are ones of trouble or pain, such that our own personal feelings beforehand rightly ought to be viewed as better. In our therapeutic culture that first sprang from the 1960s, which cast everything that involved any form of superiority (except the new bosses’ unshakeable belief in their own overwhelming virtue) as evil, however, sympathy had to be overthrown. (Now, that’s particularly stupid given that more broadly, the word means simply feeling what another person is feeling. And there’s another sense of sympathy, one that I haven’t covered here before now, that means merely similarity of thinking: “I’m in sympathy with your deep appreciation of lasagna,” for example. So making the word pejorative because of implied superiority rests on a deplorable ignorance of all the senses of the word.)

Anyway, it was indeed overthrown – in favor of the now misunderstood and miscast word empathy. If I’m right about why, then it’s rank idiocy, but there you go. So was a lot of other stuff that came out of that era.

I for one am sticking with the perfectly good sympathy.

After I posted an article on LinkedIn yesterday about the current virus-driven obsession with hygiene being a threat to our cherished American freedoms, my LI pal Phil Rink commented that we should dial back the extreme language (though later saying he agreed some of what’s going on looks like fascism, but that it wasn’t helpful to call it that). He’s right that there’s just too much labeling going on to no good end, simply driving people to nonproductive rage at both extremes. (As a complete aside, his reference along the way to the “need to get the knobs off 11,” and a later comment from our fellow online buddy Jim Rossi featuring a Spinal Tap “Put it up to 11” meme, were a complete joy. It’s high time to watch that movie again!)

Still, Phil got me wondering whether, academically, what we’re seeing truly is fascism. So let’s explore.

First I looked to my trusty 1970 edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary. (I use such an old one because today’s dictionaries change the meaning of words far too quickly and often just to suit the whims of political correctness, which is idiotic.) It defines fascism as “a system of government characterized by rigid one-party dictatorship, forcible suppression of opposition, private economic enterprise under centralized governmental control, belligerent nationalism, racism, and militarism…”

You can argue we have some elements of some of those things. But we have none of those things for real, not in any significant way.

I write that last line with a bit of surprise on my part. Emotionally, I would have guessed before I looked the word up that I could confidently write here that we’ve been flirting with real elements of fascism in our lockdown world. How could we not be, what with the extra-legal executive orders by some governors, the absurd policing actions, and the blatant censoring of opinions unpopular with the statist crowd?

Don’t get me wrong–all that stuff sucks big-time. And some of it has a passing acquaintance with certain elements of fascism. But in reality, all our officials (or their bosses, anyway) are subject to regular recall by election. There has been no significant forcible closing down of protests. No real centralized government control, even; indeed, most of the sad exercise has been a model of federalism. And what the craptastic Twitter or Facebook censor, the blogosphere and alternative media trumpet.

I continue to think that the time for serious push-back against arrogant, smirking, abusive fools like my own governor is long overdue. I think it’s time for courage and common sense to prevail over abject cravenness. And that’s all happening, both in the legal realm and with good old-fashioned civil disobedience.

But Phil’s right. The best way to build that movement up is to dial back the rhetoric, and to appeal to as many people as possible with uniting ideas. Most people are good and sick and tired of what we’ve been doing anyway. It shouldn’t be too difficult to convince a majority that that aforementioned courage and common sense live inside each of them, and that they should let it all hang out.