You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right – at least if you have any experience – because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in. Sympathetic Vibrations
When I found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real, I wasn’t upset; rather, I was relieved that there was a much simpler phenomenon to explain how so many children all over the world got presents on the same night! The story had been getting pretty complicated. It was getting out of hand. What Do You Care What Other People Think?
We can’t define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers… one saying to the other: “You don’t know what you are talking about!”. The second one says: “What do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?” The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I, 8-2
Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry. The Character of Physical Law
Older Americans know the names Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings. They were the most famous news anchormen of the historically dominant television news broadcasters ABC, CBS and NBC. For generations they informed the American people at six o’clock in the evenings about national and world events.
Sunday morning political talkshows are also linked to household names such as Tim Russert, George Stephanopoulos, Bob Schieffer. In style and tone these news shows were tailored to those respective individuals. It was, and still is, a question of branding, with the networks seeking to establish an almost personal relationship between news moderator and the audience, with the hope that viewers would trust the moderator with supplying them with critical news in precise, objective and investigative way.
And it’s no different in American politics, where it is often less about substance and more about personality, character and values, such as marriage, family, love of country and faith. Question marks in those areas mean questionable credibility. Americans first size up the candidate as a person, then they consider his or her politics.
Ernest Hemingway, an American author and journalist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, once lost a suitcase containing all but two of his manuscripts. The incident occurred when Hemingway was in Switzerland in 1922, before any of his fiction had been published.
The author had met with journalist and editor Lincoln Steffens who wanted to see more of Hemingway’s work, so Hemingway asked his wife, who was in Paris, to bring him his manuscripts. She packed all of the papers that she could find, but while she was waiting for her train at the Gare de Lyon she left her suitcase unattended for a short time, during which it was stolen.
When Hemingway complained about his loss to American poet Ezra Pound, Pound referred to the incident as a stroke of luck. The poet said that when Hemingway rewrote the stories, he would remember all of the good material, but forget all of the bad material. In this way his so-called problem would actually perfect his work.
America is a nation of immigrants. Their forefathers and -mothers left everything they knew behind: country, language, customs, family, friends, traditions. Because they broke with the past – their own very personal past – they have less inhibition to further break away from traditions in order to plot a new course.
Between 1881 and 1920 two of the largest waves of immigration hit the United States. In those years more than 23 million immigrants arrived, the majority of them were from eastern and southern Europe. They were a long way from home.
There have been attempts in the U.S. to convince people to stop presenting only the good aspects of products and instead present both the good and bad. In 1974, Richard Feynman, a renowned physicist, gave the Caltech commencement address. In his speech, he spoke primarily about something which he called “cargo cult science“, which is something that looks like science, but is lacking scientific integrity. Feynman denounced this form of “science” wholeheartedly.
One of the examples he used to illustrate the point was an advertisement for Wesson cooking oil, which claimed that it doesn’t soak through food. Feynman said that although this was true, the advertisement failed to mention that no oil soaks through food at certain temperatures, and that any cooking oil, including Wesson’s, will soak food at other temperatures.
Another example Feynman used was one of his colleagues, a cosmologist/astronomer, who tried to explain the “everyday” applications of his work. When Feynman heard this, he told his colleague that there weren’t any everyday applications. Although the colleague readily agreed with Feynman, he said that he still had to make it look like there were applications, otherwise he wouldn’t get any more funding.
Feynman was very angry and said “If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing – and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.”
Despite Feynman’s warning in 1974 (and similar warnings from other scientists), cargo cult science has continued in the U.S. One of the more prominent examples of this was the cold fusion debacle. In 1989, at the University of Utah, chemists Stanley Pons (American) and Martin Fleishmann (British) made headlines.
They called a press conference proclaiming that they had produced fusion at room temperature – much colder than the high temperatures that were thought to be required for this process. At the conference, the chemists glossed over most of the details of how they had achieved cold fusion, and stated that their paper would not be available for several weeks.
Because of their conference the two chemists were granted a high amount of extra funding. However, even before their paper became available, several scientists managed to find unauthorized copies of their work. Most of these scientists quickly denounced it as full of errors, and both Pons’ and Fleishmann’s reputations were ruined.
The Germans often consider Americans as a people to be either uninformed or uninterested in their own history, and equally uninformed about the recent history of given situations, allowing them to make decisions only based on the present. Americans appear to not think things through, not thoroughly. They can appear to Germans as Dünnbrettbohrer, literally people who only drill through the thinnest of boards.
From the German perspective their perception is not false. It’s what is behind the German cliché that Die Amerikaner gehen mit dem Kopf durch die Wand, that Americans try to go through the wall with their heads, meaning forcing solutions in situations which they have not fully understood.
But are Americans really so un- or a-historical? Partly, yes. I think of the region in which I grew up and the people there, me included. Philadelphia. Many of the most dramatic events of the American Revolutionary War against England took place in and around Philadelphia. Independence Hall in downtown Philadelphia is very well known and visited every summer by countless Americans and guests from other countries.
It is where the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution were drafted, debated, passed and signed. Philadelphia was the capital of the insurrection, Independence Hall the meeting point of the conspirators.
Several critical battles took place in the area. On September 11, 1777 British troops defeated the colonists under George Washington at the Battle of Brandywine. Two weeks later, on September 26, Philadelphia was conceded to the British under General Charles Cornwallis.
On that day Washington and his troops counterattacked in Germantown, roughly five miles north of Philadelphia, against just under ten thousand British soldiers. It was an attack by night, from four different directions, with the hope of forcing a quick surrender. Because communications among four groups broke down, and due to shortages of munitions, the attack failed. Washington and his men were pushed back to White Marsh.
There, between December 5th and 8th, British troops pursued and attacked the revolutionaries several times. General Howe had hoped to end the war before the winter had set in. Washington‘s men held, though. The redcoats pulled back into Philadelphia. Washington and his troops moved into nearby Valley Forge.
But how many natives of the Philadelphia area are familiar with these events? I certainly did not hear of them during grammar and high school. I don’t recall any school trips to the battlegrounds or to a museum. Nor did my parents interest us six children in them. Nor have I ever seen a documentary film on television about those battles in and around Philadelphia, my home region.
Why? Perhaps because the United States and England (UK) have been close allies in two world wars. Perhaps we Americans don‘t like reliving bad old times. Perhaps because the events, regardless of how momentous, go back to the 18th century, long before any of my ancestors immigrated to the U.S. from Ireland, Scotland and primarily from Germany. That part of American history was not a part of their history.
If Americans indeed have a less developed sense of history than the Germans, maybe because change in American history and culture is so ever-present. Maybe Americans, in comparison to Germans, are more tolerant of – open and willing – to embrace change, to drive change.
The momentous decision in and of itself to immigrate to America, to leave the homeland behind, makes almost every other decision in life seem far less dramatic. Change is less intimidating to Americans. On the contrary, the more change is accepted as a fact of life, the less relevant are the past and continuity with the past, and all that much more important it is to be able and willing to adapt to new situations.
The past, especially the recent past, helps us to understand the present. But it is only from the present, from the current starting point, that we can go down new paths, move in a different, perhaps even radically different, direction. All Americans are immigrants or descendents of immigrants. The historical consciousness of the American people is greatly influenced by the immigrant experience. Imagine what it was like for those millions upon millions of families to take that step, to leave their home and to risk the unknown.
For most of them not freely. For many it was a question of survival. For others it was about freedom. They wanted to decide their own fates, and wanted the same for their children. Nonetheless, the decision was very difficult. It meant leaving everything they knew, everything that gave them security. Once they left, however, the present and past of their native country would no longer be relevant. But what do human beings have other than their past and present? The unknown, insecurity and risk? Or do they have opportunity?
In such situations people have to make hard, tough decisions, about what they take with them from the past and the present. Of course all immigrant groups, including the waves of Germans who came to America, brought their language, customs and traditions. The older generations continued to speak their mother tongue. Foreign-language newspapers were published in all of the major American cities. All that they knew and brought over lasted, however, only for a certain period of time.
The everyday challenges of life in America rubbed and pulled away, layer for layer, the recent present and the past of the homeland. The immigrants took on, layer for layer, the realities of the current present in the United States, like having old skin replaced by new. It was painful. The time came in every immigrant family when the children no longer wanted, or no longer could, speak the language of the old world.
Many parents who immigrated demanded of their children that they assimilate as quickly as possible, that they forget the old language, customs and traditions. They had decided to leave their homes, towns and homelands. They refused to get stuck between two realities. To move forward demanded that they leave behind what they had known. It was time to go down a new path. The cares, worries and chores of the day left them no other choice.
That path to and in America was difficult, hard, rough. Many did not make, did not succeed. Every wave of immigrants had to fight for their future in America. Everything which weighed them down, every form of ballast, had to go. And that meant much that was associated with the homeland. For many, even for most, however, throwing overboard the ballast of the past set them free.
Door-to-door salesmen have existed for many years. Although it’s difficult to determine when the first door-to-door salesman made his first pitch, door-to-door salesmen gained a lot of their popularity following the release of Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller in 1949, and by 1952, two percent of the entire American workforce was comprised of door-to-door salesmen.
Many American children’s organizations encourage children to sell products door-to-door in order to allow the children to gain important sales experience. The Boy Scouts of America, an organization aimed at teaching young boys certain values, skills, and self-reliance, encourages its members to sell popcorn, and the Girl Scouts of America, the equivalent of the Boy Scouts, but aimed at young girls, encourages its members to sell cookies.
In the time following the advent of telemarketing and emailed advertisements, door-to-door sales declined considerably. However, these days, with strong anti-telemarketing bans and better-designed spam filters for email, many American companies are returning to using door-to-door salespeople to sell their products.
Many telecommunications companies prefer to use door-to-door salespeople to sell their products. Some modern companies that use door-to-door salespeople include AT&T, Schwan’s Food Company, and ADT Security. In 2010 door-to-door sales was a $28.6 billion industry – a rise from $28.3 billion the previous year.
Despite its name, the Current War is not happening now, but took place primarily in the late 1800s. It was a war fought between Serbian-born, American-immigrant Nikola Tesla and the American Thomas Edison.
Tesla had difficulty convincing the American public to use his alternating electric current to power their homes and businesses. Alternating current (AC) had the ability to provide electricity over long distances much better than Edison’s direct current (DC), which required power stations to be built close together.
Nevertheless, despite the demonstrable superiority of AC to the spread-out American public, Tesla had great difficulty convincing people to use his system of AC over Edison’s DC. This is because Edison was much better at marketing to the American public. He sold himself as well as his product, and also attempted to discredit AC by incorrectly claiming that it was more dangerous, which he demonstrated by publicly electrocuting stray animals using AC.
As a result of Edison’s marketing campaign DC was the standard electric current for many years. However, this began to change after George Westinghouse, an American engineer and entrepreneur, acquired Tesla’s patents for AC and the induction motor.
Westinghouse was much better at selling AC to Americans than Tesla had been, and the first major victory for Tesla’s current occurred during the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, in which General Electric, using DC, bid to electrify the fair for $554,000, but lost to Westinghouse, who bid $399,000 using AC.
Shortly after this, Niagara Falls Power Company awarded Westinghouse a contract to begin harnessing the power of the waterfall for use, and on 16 Nov 1896 Buffalo, New York began to be powered by AC from Niagara Falls. General Electric also switched to AC, and it wasn’t long before AC destroyed DC. Even Edison eventually switched to the more productive AC.
A persuasive curriculum vitae (resumé) in the American context stresses achievements, awards and areas of special competence. It is not an official document produced by a neutral party such as a government agency or an educational institution, but rather a testament to how what was learned has been applied in the real world.
Resumés in the U.S. are in a way (self-)marketing documents. Americans highlight not only their subject area expertise, but also their character strengths, such as persistence, discipline, teamwork and, of course, leadership. Every American reader of an American resumé knows that they are carefully written subjective statements aimed at a specific effect.