Stan Ridgley

by Stan Ridgley

I wonder at the source of inspiration.

And in this, I am not unlike every other person who presumes to compress a week’s worth of intellectual power into a scant 10 paragraphs. Or a year’s labor on a novel into three quick nights’ reading.

Why sometimes, the words tumble out faster than my keyboard can catch them, while at others, the yawning silence and my stiff aching fingers combine for a stunningly inactive interlude. Inactivity of the immediately forgettable sort.

But the peripherals of those sans inspirational interludes are sharply drawn. Everything is sharply drawn save what requires it. The ring-fingers ache from bones broken long ago in a well-remembered football game in 1983 and a rugby match in 1987. Both in Germany, and both on those typically wintry cold, frosty teutonic nights.

My cleats found uncertain purchase on the frozen ground, my hand stabbed out to fend off a block, and it was snapped sideways as I went down. I stood up, looked at it dumbly, my breath coming in labored puffs of white. I grasped the finger and snapped it back straight.

Yes, there was a snap.

Not quite straight. It still sits slightly askew. It ruined my salute.

The other finger, other hand. Snapped as well in like-fashion, caught in the terrible synthetic mesh of some unknown brute’s jersey in Frankfurt. Now, these wretched fingers ache when I least expect it.

We seem never to notice the absence of pain, you know. I appreciate that absence more and more as the pain comes more frequently. Those slightly crooked, slightly aching ring fingers serve to remind me of frigid German nights, back during the Cold War, when our enemies were clear-cut, ideologically despicable and yet rational. And they strutted about in the open, medals on their chests and stale ideology on their lips. Those were Francis Fukuyama days.

Fukuyama was the philosopher who famously proclaimed the “End of History” in his 1989 essay of the same title, positing that we’d reached the triumphal era of liberal democratic capitalism, and that all competing ideologies had been defeated.

He was wrong, of course, and it was Sam Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” model that more clearly defined the new era, predicting the rise of radical Islam and the increasing divide between the democracies of the West and the theocracies of the Middle East and Asia. Sam is a distinguished professor of politics at Harvard and the advisor to my own PhD Chairman/advisor, and so I am biased and the lineage is something I’m proud of, having not much else in which to exhibit pride. Save my kids.

And so I type with aching fingers, the fingers I used to slip comfortably into the handle of a mug of Guinness Stout in the Speakeasy pub in West Berlin, raising that dark brew to my lips more times on more nights than was prudent in the fall of 1983. But what does prudence have to do with a young soldier in a foreign land, given to profanity and fisticuffs borne of too much testosterone and not enough common sense?

The British did not like us, you know.

British soldiers were given to a drunkenness and brawling unlike any other people I’ve witnessed, surpassing even Russians. Perhaps they recruit their soldiers from the winners of the brawls at their famously violent soccer matches. Surely it is best to have them on our side in a fight against a common enemy. I just want them pointed in the right direction.

If I could crack the knuckles of these aching fingers, perhaps I could relieve some of the stiffness and I could eke out a few words of merit. I used to take a blade of grass in these same fingers, a proper sliver betwixt my thumbs.

The grass would act as a reed, and I could pipe a tune through the little gap formed by my love mounds pressed together and my fingers steepled. The blade had to be appropriately thick and long and the angle had to be exactly right . . . otherwise, how could the music possibly be sweet?

I could play auld lang syne, piped between my thumbs, and did so many times, but I recall a particular time at a UNC versus University of Virginia baseball game, lounging on the grass outside Boshamer Stadium, watching the game while lying in the hot sun, rays scorching my untannable body, empty beer cans scattered around the small coterie of fraternity brothers as we popped the tops on full ones. But that was years ago and years ago, when gasoline was still cheap, the girls’ smiles were genuine, and I worried not at all about tomorrow.

Years ago and years ago

We worried about nothing, except who was next on the basketball schedule and how to get tickets. Elvis was in the midst of his comeback, Earth, Wind and Fire was a young band on the rise, all of the Beatles were still alive, and Coors was a hard-to-find gourmet beer. My fingers certainly didn’t ache. And cholesterol wasn’t in my vocabulary. And life was ridden hard on the surface, a desperate race to prevent even the hint of a root taking hold.

Roots mean responsibility. Ties.

Investment in people, places, things. Screw all of that and pass me another Old Milwaukee.

So I fret over inspiration and wonder at its source. What compels us to write and what propels our fingers across the keyboard in patterns of words that purport to mean what we think, what we imagine, what we dream?

You know, it’s never as good on the page as what’s in the mind. That, at least, is my experience. A tremendous energy is lost in the translation in spite of our best efforts to contain it, to bottle it, to keep its power on the page in all its blazing glory.

I cannot write fast enough to capture these ephemeral thoughts that blaze across the mind, crackle wonderfully, and then are gone before they can be corralled. And so, only a portion of the energy is bottled. Just a bit, if we are lucky.

And sometimes that is enough. Maybe not tonight, but sometimes.

Perhaps aspirin can help these fingers tonight, for the ache is about to win this round and cast me, mercifully, off the keyboard.

By Stan Ridgley 

             Quite often now – surely far more frequently than in early years when I dwelled in wiseass territory – I count my blessings.

            What blessings might those be?

            Immersion in a sparkling diversity every working day.  Tickled by the delights of a thousand different worldly combinations of cultures and milieus, served to me daily. 

           Others have it worse. 

           I sat passive in a car recently, precious minutes spent precisely as I chose to.  Slumped in the driver’s side, idly tapping the pearlized paint on the car door. Waiting in a parking lot.  A sunny day, shiny heat, but not unpleasant.  Nothing to recommend it either, save that the sun’s position along the horizon that day was marginally farther along than the day before . . . but not as far as ’twould be the next.

            A brief wait.  For a beautiful woman.  That self-same sun glinting off her blonde hair, the breeze catching her locks.

             Brief, indeed, but a wait long enough to peer at and ponder a law office up on the second floor of a ruddy brick building.  And I did ponder for a moment or two the fate of the person or persons in that office.  A lawyer “practicing” law.

             Locked into a life of repetition and ritual.

            Money, yes.

            Satisfaction?

            Perhaps.  Who knows? 

           But a day like every other.  Formulaic.  Familiar scenarios changing only in their mundane particulars.  Cramped.  The same people.  Cutouts.  Problems.  Role-playing.  Deadening.

           Maddeningly the same.

           A dulling, yet compelling psychological stimulus to act strangely.  Yearning to burst out, to shatter the golden shackles, to act . . . ignobly.

           But . . .

            A turn of the key, the engine rumbles low and smooth, and the formulas vanish, replaced with an insistent wind in the hair and a feeling of gratitude . . . even relief.  There but for the grace of God . . . 

            I toil in the second-largest metropolis on the east coast . . . a city of seven million, the home of Rocky and of Liberty.

            In the office next to mine is a fabulous marketing professor by the name of Masaaki.  Japanese, quite obviously.  In the offices on the other side are Arvind and Ram, colleagues of Indian descent, brilliant in their fields.

             I step out of my office to grab a bite at one of the many kiosks lining the main campus thoroughfare.  Walking out of the building, I hear strange-sounding, lyrical African tongues, Italian, Polish.  Students all.  Music pulsing on a spring day, echoing off the buildings, the contrapuntal rhythms of youth.  Do I fetch fruit from the Vietnamese kiosk . . . or a sandwich from the one run by Jon the Serb?  Or veggies from the Turks?

             There is always at least one Mohammed in each of my classes.

              This semester, I have two in one class.  One from Jordan, the other from Bangladesh.  Increasing numbers of students from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Bulgaria.  Two from Albania.  The Chinese, Japanese, and Indian cohorts are always large.  Closely followed by the Vietnamese and Thais.

               Jin is an interesting young man . . . Chinese, but grew up in South Africa and is a citizen of that country.  Speaks perfect English and has fantastic potential for a sharply defined personal comparative advantage.

               Ali is from Sudan.

               Muhammed from Mali.

               Asmaa from Morocco.

               And a smattering of Americans.

               This is diversity.

            This is true diversity of the kind the purveyors of the new appropriateness did not have in mind when the word became politically charged.  In fact, my university has been rated the nation’s Most Diverse Campus by the Princeton Review.  Only in such a place can someone fluently bilingual yet feel inadequate among the multilingual and talented.

            I testify to that diversity.  And to that talent.

            What does it mean for purposes of this space?

            Just this.

            The percussive effect on the soul of such a rich mix of cultures and peoples, all bright and inquisitive, all ambitious and energized, all intense and poised to hurl themselves onto a world that has no clue of what’s in store . . . well, how to measure it?  How to describe the pressure, the charge, the unharnessed and unruly dynamism?  How to measure it as compared to what would have been had a different environment prevailed in the similar time period.

            And, of course, there is the issue that every person forms a distinct portion of every other person’s environment.  So when we talk about a diverse environment’s impact on students, we are essentially talking of the students’ endless interactive impacts on each other individually and on themselves in the aggregate.

           What does it mean to learn in such an environment as opposed to one where, say, a brown face makes only an occasional appearance and a foreign accent is an aberration?  Or in an environment where there is homogeneity of one type or another, where white faces, yellow faces, brown faces . . . where beautiful lilting accents are a rarity? 

           To meticulously mix metaphors, this yeasty, electrical atmosphere is apparent to me, but strangely not to many of the students themselves.  This congeries of cultures is just the way it is.  It is not viewed overtly as an advantage or disadvantage, I think, but just a reality.

            For me – and for anyone who seeks engagement with life – it is a nirvana of sights, smells, exotic delights, and meshing of intrigues.  It is a seething, almost alive feeling of anticipation.  You cannot underestimate the potential intellectual energies of 34,000 college students massed in one place, dedicated (presumably) to learning, and unbearably optimistic about what they will do with themselves in the coming days, months, years.

            Such an atmosphere is enlivening to the inquisitive mind.  It is the antithesis to ritual and routine, formula and fatuousness.  It is the wellspring of creativity, the beating heart of innovation.

            The problem, for young people, is to reckon up their luck.  Their incredible luck at all of this. 

            I’ve reckoned up my own, and my cup runneth over. 

           A hundred story ideas beam out at me every workday.  I see a hundred stories in the faces of students, gathered together by a self-selection process that yields a sublime combination of careful selection by major, age, and interest . . . but random according to who actually shows up in the group I face each day.  I gain inspiration from the lifeforce of a hundred, and yet additional hundreds.

            Another day begins in several hours.

            I’ll drive into Philadelphia, but I’ll not complain at the cost of the gas. 

           I’ll celebrate life’s bargain that conveys me, personally, across an urban expanse to enjoy the delights the world has to offer, concentrated within the confines and shelter of a great university. 

           And when I get a moment to catch my breath . . . I’ll chronicle one of those stories.

                For me, one of the finest moments of writing comes when crashing through the wall.

                Or cracking open a Faberge egg to find what’s inside is far more valuable than what is glittery and sweet on the outside.

                Or . . . after a long spell of grappling with nothingness, of putting down laborious word after laborious phrase . . . finally bursting into the open with passage after passage of stuff that we think is grand and sweeping and mind-changing.  Like a dam breaking, if only for a spell.  Like the allies breaking out of hedgerow country.

                Okay, no one is breaking Faberge eggs . . . just notional eggs.  The point being, of course, that writer’s block is not real.  It is a conscious decision not to write what we think is good stuff.  I love that feeling of hitting that gusher, that well of black gold that bubbles up and froths, when you can’t get the words down fast enough.   But . . .

                . . .there are those other times, far more frequent times.  Those times when pulling the words out is excruciating.  But to carry one of these horrid little metaphors forward, if I do not hit a gusher, then I certainly do not a hit dry well.  There’s always something down there.

                Try this.

                Type a quote.  It doesn’t have to be an enduring quote, a quotable quote.  Something you heard on the street.

                “It was so loud, it made my ears itch.”

                “All those people up in New York on the streets . . . like maggots.  I couldn’t stand it.”

                And go from there.

                One of my favorite quotes is this one that follows.  I use it in speeches and I cite the author often, although he is not its originator.

                “Conan, what is best in life?”

                “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women.”

                I love that snippet of dialogue.  Now I know that it wasn’t the author Robert E. Howard who came up with it, nor was it Oliver Stone and John Milius, two outstanding screenwriters.   It was Ghengis Khan  . . . or according to some unknown chronicler, it was.

                But what description, attitude, power.

                And what a vehicle for launching into a speech, providing a metaphor for . . . well, for most anything.  It’s an attention-grabber, and it serves to introduce people to Robert E. Howard.  I can vouch that people sit up for it, whether the topic is human resource management or stamp-collecting.

                Of all the quotes I might have reached for, that one always circles back around to me for some reason.  Its barbarism, tinged with fantasy, has tickled my fancy for more than two decades since big Arnold played the Sumerian.  His best role, in my opinion.  He was born to it.

                Now, I admit that the quote itself does not give rise to anything in the mind, perhaps, other than a visceral negative reaction, a sneered quip: “anti-intellectualism of the worst sort.”  For me, it gains what power it might have from the mental remembrance of that evening long ago when I finally saw the barbarian sitting stolid and cross-legged – simple in his thinking, eager for bloodlust, a killing machine, and a showman for the masses.

                The smell of sour sweat, well-worn leather from animals unmentionable, a gourd filled with viscous foul-smelling liquid, obscene “trophies” from conquered opponents, feathers and bones and rotting flesh.  Shiny oiled bodies.  Steel glinting in firelight.

                Tales of conquest.

                Words to quicken the blood of even the most staid of human resource managers.

                Perhaps not the most uplifting of words and phrases, but words to lead the mind and fire the imagination.  Words leading to better words . . . and still better words.   And so I type a quote, and I think of that quote, and I ponder the source and the circumstance.  And I let the words flow.  And soon, the dam breaks, and I have something of worth if not worthy.

                Hmm, perhaps not today.   But usually.

                Try it, and let me know how it works for you.  Here’s one:

                “And in the morning, I’ll be sober.”

By Stan Ridgley

Words are the stuff of power.

Anyone who works with words for a living knows their power.

Well, let me issue a caveat. Anyone who works with words ought to know their power.

But of course, ensembles of words in various stages of undress are not necessarily created equal.

Pause

You choked on that for a moment, didn’t you? Maybe reread it to give it a chance, and then rightfully scoffed. It has a sort of squinty-eyed surface profundity that dissipates within seconds. Hot air. Such is the power of words, a power that is amorphous, deceptive, difficult to master, if it is at all possible to master.

One man who understands words and their majesty and their subtlety, certainly far more than do I, is our own Rick Steinberg.

Rick’s work is tremendous. To steal a line from Leonard Bishop, his sentences “stink with power.” Sometimes raw, sometimes untamed, always alluring, never dull – Rick’s graces us with his fine-edged scalpel each month, and the emotions cascade from the screen.

It is a beautiful thing to be moved by words. And it is a high compliment, indeed, to hear such praise. I never do. Rick hears it often, I am certain. Rick creates moving passages, assemblages of words describing scenes in such a high-toned style that I could never attain.

And so I learn. I learn from all of my compatriots here at Storytellers.

I fervently believe that it is necessary to respect words and their function. To understand the visceral strength in well-structured phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that hang together seamlessly in such a tight formation that a reader cannot imagine them written in any other way.

While teaching writing is not my primary function, I do provide fundamental instruction of a Strunk and White nature so as to raise the bar to an acceptable level. Before you eye-roll at me for such a rudimentary approach, let me assure you that today’s undergraduate students desperately need the salving coolness of William Strunk and E.B. White. If only for clarity, concision, and pith.

And for the pleasure of the book, for it is a minor joy to read. And to reread.

Many young people – not all, but enough to take note of – want to be creative and innovative, to think outside of that box we always hear about. I note that they must first understand the box and what it contains before they might profitably “think outside” of it. Because likely what they consider fresh and new and sparkling has been done before.

They must understand how words fit together to convey ideas, notions, fact and fiction. They must understand the communicative function of words as well as their evocative power. They must recognize tendentiousness masquerading as neutrality, entire social, political, cultural arguments embodied in single phrases – sometimes single words. They must recognize sloganeering in their own writing and arguments or face being caught short when challenged on their own lack of depth or understanding.

Example?

At the risk of agitation, or perhaps guaranteeing it, let me take a detour into the realm of the classroom, where words that characterize well-hashed issues can come freighted with all kinds of baggage.

Certain phrases can embody entire arguments.

“Widening gap between rich and poor” has become a kneejerk pejorative. Regrettably used more frequently by young people these days, supposedly identifying a “problem” that must be corrected, and never pausing in their feverish idealism to recognize that the gap between rich and poor is always getting wider, regardless of whether an economy is strong or weak.

The proper question to ask, I think, is “is everyone getting richer and better off than before in a dynamic and thriving economy?” or is the situation one in which the poor are getting poorer with no chance or even hope of improvement? These are two quite different situations, conflated by the slogan “widening gap between rich and poor” trope.

Single words sometimes embody entire arguments, relieving the user of the burden to make the point of the begged question – in my own bailiwick, “sweatshop” is one such politically and socially freighted word. As in the “debate over sweatshops.” In my classes on Globalization this “debate” is addressed forthrightly.

But in its proper terms and in its proper context.

I must tell you that the preening certitude of a young person posturing against “sweatshops” is a sight to behold. No gray area, no moral conundrums, as clear-cut an issue as anyone could imagine that puts one on the side of the angels, because who other than an evil exploiter could possibly take stand for “sweatshops?”

A part of me envies that kind of hard-boned simplicity borne of shallow naivete.

Hand in hand with “sweatshops” is usually a mention of something called “cultural imperialism,” which is merely a pejorative reaction against the introduction of goods and services and ideas into modernizing societies. Such “cultural imperialism” involves an attack on the “traditional way of life” and local culture. In my lectures to Russian students in Izhevsk and in Ufa, Bashkortostan, I meet this kind of attitude quite frequently, as if someone is compelling locals to drink Coca-Cola, smoke Marlboros, wear Italian shoes, or dine at Chinese restaurants.

The call for preserving “traditional” ways of life smacks of condescension of the worst type – it is, for example, an attitude that suggests that locking subsistence farmers in their pristine “traditional” circumstances as delightful subjects for picture postcards from exotic places is a positive.

Some students are angry and somewhat confused when it is noted that all that is being offered is a choice – to work as one’s ancestors did, ankle-deep in dung-filled water of rice paddies, or to work in a new factory, earning more money in one day than the traditional villager might ever seen in a year.

A choice, that’s all. An alternative. “Exploitation.”

Some people, professional activists among them, just don’t like the choice being offered, even as earlier there was no choice, no chance for improvement.

And rather than offer their own range of additional choices, they harass those companies that provide economic opportunity, a chance for a better life. The chance for newly empowered local workers to earn beyond subsistence wages, to then spend money at the kiosks that quickly spring up courtesy of entrepreneurs who instinctively know how the market works. The chance to utilize the new roads built by the foreign company as part of infrastructure improvement.

And so, in my classes, I refer to Nike and other firms that manufacture abroad as establishing Economic Opportunity Centers throughout the developing world, enlarging the range of economic choices open to local workers.

Some students express a kind of confused wonderment that local factories contracted by Nike (Nike does not own them) could in any sense of the phrase be called Economic Opportunity Centers. But, in fact, that phrase is more accurately descriptive as to what is actually happening when it is compared in many cases to a subsistence farming economy that it augments. Nonetheless, the point made, we shift to compromise language of a more neutral cast – Nike and many other companies that contract manufacturing with local producers are engaged in Economic Activity Abroad.

Whether that activity is in some abstract sense “good” or “bad” depends upon whom you ask – an activist sitting in an air conditioned Washington office, hands steepled, giving an interview to National Public Radio on the evils of Globalization . . . or a young foreign worker, who now has a choice and a chance to work indoors, to earn more money than before, to better his lot and that of his family.

A choice that earlier was not available.

If we then proceed from less politically charged (or at least less tendentious) premises, we can then begin to understand the actual dynamics at work, building from the ground-up. Usually, at the end of the discussion – which is usually vigorous give and take among my students—there emerges an understanding that economic activity abroad in the form of contract manufacturing has both positive and negative aspects.

Now, I have dipped into the hot, turbid political waters of Globalization only because that happens to be the topic at hand for me now, daily. And I have roamed a bit in this essay, but the theme that runs through this essay, I think, is the power of words – to persuade, to deceive, to communicate, to obfuscate.

Regardless of one’s opinion of the issues I surfaced here to illustrate the theme, I believe that those in this forum recognize more-so than most this incredible power of the medium in which they work. And whatever conclusions my students arrive at with regard to the debates at hand, they will have at least been exposed to the power of expression and the subtlety of language.

Words are the stuff of power.