"The Great Disruptor - Part II"

It has been more than two weeks since my last TOTD. We have a new Pope and, it would appear, a trade deal with England. The Bank of England cut rates by a quarter of a point, while the Fed stood pat. U.S. 1^st quarter GDP contracted by 0.3% and the DJIA has recovered over 1,000 points of the 2,000 points it lost. I bought a new iPhone and was told there had been no increase in price, because it had been shipped from India. Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and the Palestinians are still at odds. Iran inches closer to a nuclear weapon, while her neighbor Pakistan and India – two nuclear powers – are exchanging blows. At the risk of sounding sexist, I wish we could put Marjorie Taylor Greene in a ring with Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. One against two should offer even odds. Better yet, maybe they would wear one another out!

It is not for a paucity of news that I have been silent, but because I have been working on other projects.

 

In any event, I hope you enjoy this offering.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“The Great Disruptor – Part II”[1]

May 12, 2025

 

“Influential people are never satisfied with the status quo. They’re the ones who constantly

ask, “What if?’ and ‘Why not?’ They’re not afraid to challenge conventional wisdom and 

they don’t disrupt things for the sake of being disruptive; they do it to make things better.”

                                                                                                                                Travis Bradberry, PhD.

                                                                                                                                World Economic Forum

                                                                                                                                April 3, 2017

 

Creative destruction is a school in economics, popularized by Joseph Schumpeter[2], that explains the process by which innovation obsoletes older processes, equipment and products. While disruptive in the short term, it is the driving force for long term economic growth and progress. In Scenes from American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction (1973), Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “It is only through disruption and confusion that we grow, jarred by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own.” On November 5, 2011 in an op-ed in London’s The Guardian, Naomi Wolf noted: “Democracy is disruptive…there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption.”

 

Disruption is the antidote to complacency, the enemy of innovation, and it is challenging to those of the status quo – those whom we call the “establishment.” However, disruption is not always good. We can think of dozens of instances – a child throwing food at the table; protestors shutting down university classes; strikers blocking the entrance to a grocery store. But throughout history, progress has thrived on disruption. We see the beginnings of such positive disruption in Washington today: addressing the border crisis, eliminating fraud and waste embedded in federal bureaucracies and confronting anti-Semitism on college campuses. On the other hand, we are also witness to negative disruption: the, seemingly random, use of tariffs by President Trump and belittling comments about allies by Vice President Vance. 

 

That President Trump is a disruptive force is a fact universally accepted. The question we and the world face: Is President Trump a disruptive force for good or bad? “There are times,” Karl Zinsmeister, White House chief domestic policy director 2006-2009, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, “when some messy political demolition and noisy rebuilding are necessary.” Is this such a time? I believe it is.

 

To many there is much that needs to change: The porous southern border, which has recently been tightened. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability put the number of illegal migrant crossings at 8 million during the Biden years, with 6.7 million crossing along the southwestern border. And those migrants brought in an estimated 50,000 lbs. of fentanyl. Air Traffic Control (ATC), under the purview of Congress, obviously needs fixing. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has promised to revamp the technology. Culturally, a preference for DEI came to dominate schools and colleges; it is divisive in that it emphasizes identity politics, Wokeness, racial discrimination and transgenderism, while de-emphasizing family, church, community, and school choice. Banning books is despicable, no matter one’s politics. Yet books like Gender Queer,prohibited by the Right, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, forbidden by the Left, have been banned by schools and libraries. Federal debt has spiraled from $5.7 trillion in 2000 to $35.5 trillion in 2024. Interest expense last year exceeded defense spending and will continue to do so. Excessive regulation inhibits innovation and productivity. In 2024, the Biden Administration finalized 3,248 new rules, 124 of which will each have an estimated impact on the economy of at least $200 million, a record according to a study by George Washington University. Excluding the military, the federal workforce is approximately three million, a third larger than it was twenty-five years ago, with increased costs and diminished accountability. Our military needs revamping. The U.S. Navy lost more than a third of its fleet between 2000 and 2024, a loss of 172 naval vessels. Today, China’s 370 naval vessels compare to our 296 naval ships. China dominates the western Pacific. That situation needs to change. 

 

Will President Trump and his team shake up Washington in a positive way? Certainly, the opportunity is there for “creative destruction.” But alienating allies, praising dictators and randomly imposing tariffs, and what Karl Zinsmeister called the “flaming hubris and overreach” of the Trump era may prevent that from happening. 

 

While disruption may be the right prescription to our current polarized political state, any reform should be guided by principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence and in the words of our Constitution. It should take into consideration the inviolable bases for our Republic: the rule of law, the separation of powers, and government that is “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

 

Only history will answer the question as to whether President Trump’s disruptive ways will prove good or bad. There are no Pythia’s on the slopes of a modern day Parnassus. Regardless and in my opinion our government, with its ever-expanding bureaucracy, has strayed from our Founders desire for limited government and a belief in the fundamental rights of the individual. A disruptor is what Washington needs. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                

 

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[1] This TOTD is titled “The Great Disruptor – Part II” because it follows a January 20, 2019 TOTD titled “The Great Disruptor.” In that essay, I began with a re-cap of Hans Christian Anderson’s tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” which tells of how a credulous people can be taken in by a false narrative, until truth is revealed in a disruptive manner.

[2] Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, Thomas McCraw, 2010

"The Writing of Memoirs"

Sydney M. Williams

swtotd.blogspot.com

Essays from Essex

“The Writing of Memoirs”

February 27, 2018

“A memoir isn’t a summary of a life; it’s a window into a life.”

                                                                                                William Zinsser (1922-2015)

                                                                                                On Writing Well, 1976

Not long ago, I was asked to speak on the subject of memoir writing. I complied, but it was a little like asking President Trump to speak on diplomacy – inexperience did not affect a willingness to express opinions. Nevertheless, memoirs have always interested me. I enjoy reading them and have had two books published, which could loosely be described as memoirs – assuming one accepts my belief that everything we write exposes something about us.[1] I believe everyone profits in writing memoirs.

As we age, the past is more with us. Old age summons memories of youth – a time when the future was filled with prospects of playing for the Yankees, skiing the Matterhorn, or living in a castle. We think of people, places and experiences that formed us – parents, grandparents, teachers, siblings, cousins, friends, neighbors, home, school, college, sports, first jobs, marriage and children. We think of the role chance plays in our lives, mistakes we made, losses we endured and of victories and successes we had. Getting older makes us consider a time when we will no longer be here. How will we be remembered? What will be our legacy? Memoirs are one answer.

A memoir serves as a bridge, between the past we knew and the future we won’t. There is no better way for the young to understand the past than to learn from those who lived it. A reading of history provides facts and chronology, but memoirs provide the details that makes history live. They are, as Mr. Zinsser wrote in the rubric quoted above, the “window into a life.” They are not the magical door to C.S. Lewis’ “Narnia.” They make a past we have known become real to future generations. A memoir provides a sense of time and place. Two sentences in Donald Hall’s Essays Over Eighty say a lot in twenty-one words: “Even more, I loved the slow plod back to the barn. My grandfather told story after story with affection and humor.” Think what we learn about him, his grandfather, where he lived and their relationship in those two simple sentences! I began an essay, written ten years ago, titled “The Death of my Father, Some Forty Years On:” “Sitting at the dining room table is where I remember him best. In my mind’s eye my brother Frank is there; we are between the ages of ten and fourteen. Dishes have been cleared. One of us is sitting atop the wood stove, which heated the dining and living rooms, the warmest spot on cold winter days. It is our conversations that stay with me.”[2]

Memoirs are a window into a life – a collection of anecdotes about people, events, ideas and reflections. Aggregated, they allow the reader to learn something of the author. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Barton Swaim wrote of the late Justice Antonin Scalia: “A memoirist needs to interrupt his chronicle with topical discussions or reflective diversions.” I thought of that sentiment, when I read in The Financial Times what Lucy Scholes wrote about the interplay between life and literature – a genre Joyce Carol Oates called “bibliomemoirs.” Ms. Oates refers to such books as “a sub-species of literature, combining criticism and biography, with the intimate confessional tone of autobiography.” But biographies based on books written are not memoirs. Books we have read, however, say a lot about us. I have written essays about books – those I enjoyed, those I learned from and those I collected. Write of a character that reminded you of someone you knew. Write of the books you loved as a child, of those which you kept as a reminder of long-ago days. Write of the look, smell and feel of books on your shelves. A sketch is better than a mural.

There is a temptation to fictionalize our lives. Our minds are molded to remember pleasurable moments and to erase bad ones. But, we do a disservice to ourselves if we leave out the challenges we encountered, the mistakes we made and the losses we suffered. A memoir should be honest, in the sense it portrays. Memories play tricks. We sometimes claim to remember events and people we could not have known, or we remember things differently, as we age. It must have been with humor that Gore Vidal titled his memoir Palimpsest. He wrote that a memoir “is not history. It is how we remember one’s own life.” The comedian Will Rogers once wrote, half-jokingly: “When you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad things you did well, that’s memoirs.” No, it isn’t. Memoirs are reminders of the difference between egoism and egotism – the first, a preoccupation with one’s self; the second, a narcissistic sense of conceit. A memoir demands the first but should shun the second.

As in all aspects of life, writers must pay attention to details. Writing is both creative and mechanical. In terms of the latter, focus on spelling, grammar and syntax. Heed E.B. White’s Rule 17 in Elements of Style: “Omit needless words.” Eliminate any that consume space, without relevance. Use Anglo-Saxon verbs, whose definitions are never in doubt. Be merciless with adjectives and adverbs. Use short words, sentences and paragraphs. Winston Churchill once wrote that writers should get straight to the point and aim for readers at the primary school level. Re-writing is as critical as writing. Does the essay say what you mean it to say? Will the reader be certain as to your meaning? Look for the errant comma, the misplaced word, or the statement that has not been verified. Avoid repeating words. How many words, sentences or paragraphs can be eliminated, because they detract from the point being made?

For whom are memoirs written? Unless one is famous, they are written for ourselves, our children and grandchildren and for those who love history. They aid in self-understanding. They provide descendants a glance of their heritage. And they help those who wish to understand that, while time changes venues, speech and dress, human nature remains the same.

Memoirs provide a worm’s eye view of the history of mankind, which sluices across time on a never-ending conveyor belt. We are part of that history. In that long history, our lives represent but a speck. We ride the conveyor belt for a brief period and then fall off. Knowing she is about to die, Charlotte (in E. B. White’s eponymous novel) speaks to Wilbur, “After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die.” A sad but true statement. But each life has meaning. It is a link, between people and between the past we know and a future we won’t. We know life goes on. In an essay titled “Another Birthday,” I wrote, “I…look out at the snow accumulating in the fields, sense the cold of the ground underneath, but derive comfort from the knowledge that beneath that frozen soil lives the promise of spring and the resurrection of life.”[3] It is why we write. Consider how different ages think of the present. To people my age, the present is the future; to my children, the present is the present. But, to my grandchildren, the present is the past. For readers, memoirs enliven the past…for authors, they allow us to be the child we once were.   

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[1] One Man’s Family: Growing up in Peterborough and Other Stories was published in 2014. Notes from Old Lyme: Life on the Marsh and Other Essays was published in 2016. Both were published by Bauhan Publishing in Peterborough, N.H.

[2] One Man’s Family, page 45.

[3] Notes from Old Lyme, page 176.