More Welders, Less Philosophers? Or More Philosophers, Less Welders?

As far as I know, this choice was actually first offered up by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida during the campaign of 2016, another chapter in the perpetual campaign strategists celebrate if not voters, philosophers, and welders.

I took it upon myself to answer the question as I am neither qualified to philosophize professionally (no degree above high school diploma) nor able to join two pieces of anything together unless I have a dollop of Krazy Glue.

Back story:

In the Spring of 1962, Robert Giannetti gave a talk in a speech contest called Father Flood’s Burse and the burse was $25 to the winner back when $25 could get you maybe 20 six packs of cool, clear Utica Club beer.

I was in the audience, a couple of years behind Bob in school. He couldn’t have given a speech with more courage to me and that crowd: he argued for the importance of poetry, of its enduring value to him and to us and all of humanity. He spoke of its beauty and its healing effect on the human soul and brain and body.

Front story:

Bob went on to get a degree at the school, Niagara University, and two more degrees from Duquesne University, the last being Doctor of Philosophy, Ph.D. Along the way, he became a Captain in the United States Army; spent time as a garbage man; taught a bit at a couple of universities; ran a profitable business in the South; opened a couple of book stores in Georgia; and then started a rare book emporium in Lewiston, New York, which he recently closed. It was just a few miles from where he won over the audience decades before in the Father Flood Burse.

The three books he published in the 21^st Century are available on Amazon. But if you are a Trump acolyte, Barnes & Noble or a Yahoo-Google search will find for you perhaps a more comfortable seller than Bezos of "Drawn by the Creek," "Winter Vision," and "The Frontier."

In the most recent collection, "The Frontier," Giannetti writes lines of universal interest or at least in the universe of people who have run an enterprise and closed it down and saw its end.

"The Closing of the Bookshop":

The closing was not entropy,

senescene settling and sighing

into soundless loss and lament-

but a big bang, with

a sonorous crash of cymbals

…

The other book I commend to your attention is by a philosopher with no pretension to the higher calling of welding. Stephen Pinker makes, the jacket tells us, the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress.

He does it well as he sold me on all four of them. His genius is that he writes so simply and clearly that I understood it or presume to think I do.

The book has been reviewed all over the place, but I think he deserves an in-depth review of each chapter. It was his chapter titled “Happiness” that made me feel really good, not that it added to my happiness but I was glad to know that the rest of the country should be, by the measures of the enlightenment, happy as well.

His book and Bob Giannetti’s poems serve as a fine escape from the monologues and talking points and the segments on Bee, Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel, Maher, Meyers, Noah, O’Brien, Oliver, and Wolf replayed the next day and next week all over creation. These books are, in fact, a better escapist fare than movies, romance novels, Marvel comics, or jumping off a cliff.

Pinker’s book is available for sale everywhere, but if you’d like, I’ll lend you my copy.

Oh, yes, back to Marco Rubio’s conundrum:

I was at one time a fan of Karl Hess, a welder for hire as well as a philosopher of libertarian bent who is credited with writing Barry Goldwater’s immortal line, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Karl was, to the extent anyone can be, an autodidact, avoiding even finishing grade school as I avoided finishing college. He was lucky, though, to have had an independent-minded single mother to guide him toward his ethereal pursuit: The quintessential philosopher-welder. Sad to report, he passed away too soon to be a Rubio constituent or a speechwriter in his ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign.

Tom Messner worked forever in advertising. In politics, he avoided the predictable negative bent and did positive ads for Reagan in 1984 and for Bush in 1988 along with Bush’s convention film. The agency he co-founded created NASDAQ’s first branding, Volvo’s comeback, and Fox News’s "We Report. You Decide." Then learning from the pols he partnered with (Roger Ailes in particular), they brought attack ads to such formerly benign areas such as telecom (MCI). At 73, he’s doing two things he never did before: Blogging here on wildly unconnected subjects coming on the heels of last year’s adventure: the writing of his first play, a musical "Dogs" destined now for either Broadway or The Pound. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.