Today’s the day we remember our fathers. But don’t we remember them with every breath we take? They are multi-sensory reality templates: the way they look, move, sound, act, talk, walk, think, and even smell brands us to the bone. We can’t forget them: we are them. Aside from shaping my body, my father’s existence informs everything I do. I say my work-o-holism is from being born and raised in Silicon Valley. It’s really from my dad’s ceaseless activity.

This is one of my long articles. It contains a newspaper interview of my dad from the 1960s. I’m including it in toto as an expression of love and gratitude to a man I loved. It’s also a glimpse of the history of the San Francisco Bay Area before Silicon Valley existed. It’s a glimpse of a man raised in the Great Depression who rose from nothing. A smart man. In the post below, my dad discusses economics. I didn’t know he knew all this stuff. I majored in economics, but didn’t get to discuss it with him. He died before I could.

Was my father’s death the most traumatic thing that’s happened to me? No, but it set a record in 1964 when a drunk driver slammed into him head on. I didn’t know a man like Andy Oddstad could die: scholar, football player, war hero, super successful businessman, weight lifter, AAU champion wrestler, unbelievable water skier, supporter of all sorts of charities and causes, husband, dad, terrible horseman, and the center of my family’s life. How could he die?

Just like anyone else.

I was looking through old family albums recently and came upon the following article about my father. It contained information that I thought worth sharing––some of it was new to me. Father’s Day is a good time to acknowledge what he did.

For all his accomplishments, some of which are laid out below, my dad died at age 45. No, he didn’t die of a heart attack. He was in perfect health. Someone who turned the wrong way onto a freeway off-ramp killed him. The old guy might have been drunk––he did have an opened bottle of wine on the seat next to him–-or he might have been confused. He could have been trying to end his own life. He did end his life, along with my father’s.

Here’s the article from an old newspaper. I’m going to post it in its entirety.

From the DAILY COMMERCIAL NEWS, “OLDEST BUSINESS NEWSPAPER ON THE PACIFIC COAST––SINCE 1875,” Thursday, January 15, 1959, by Hugh Russell Fraser

Today’s Bay Area Profile of Andy Oddstad is another in a DAILY COMMERCIAL NEWS series which appears each Thursday to give you an intimate portrayal of prominent Bay Area executives. The author, Hugh Russell Fraser, is recognized as among the top book reviewers and biographical writers of our time. ––Editor.

When I heard that down in Redwood City there is a man, only 40 years old, who has built 10,000 houses in the Bay Area in the last 10 years, I decided to go down and see what he was like.

They call him Andy Oddstad, but his real name is Icelandic in origin––Andres Fjeldsted Oddstad.

He is a stocky, blond type, built like a wrestler (which he was at college, and still is), decidedly affable and friendly in his manner.

There is nothing ostentatious about his office a 1718 Broadway. There he presides over the destinies of 10 construction and building companies, the best known of which is Oddstad Homes.

With a signal to his secretary to cut off the phone, so as to give me his uninterrupted attention (How I hate these tycoons who take a dozen calls while pretending to talk to a visitor!), he talked in a low-pitched, well-modulated voice.

Naturally, I wanted to find out what made the man tick; I first questioned him about how he got into the home-building business.

Born in British Columbia, Oddstad’s forbearers were all from Iceland. He was 9 years old when his father, a carpenter and builder, moved to San Francisco. Here he worked for his brothers-in-law, the famous builders Ellis and Henry Stoneson. Young Andy went to Sunnyside Grammar School.

At the age of 10 he knew he was going into the building business. Never was there any doubt of it.

FASCINATED

Not because his uncles were builders in a big way, the founders of Stonestown, but because everything about building, from sweeping out the floors of new houses to constructing walls and roofs, fascinated him.

Every daylight hour that he did not have to spend in school, he spent around building projects; in fact, he worked after school cleaning up trash on building sites, sweeping floors, helping make repairs. He discovered he would rather do that than play.

Meanwhile, Andy kept on going to school––first to Aptos Junior High, then two years at San Francisco college and finally two years at the University of California [at Berkeley] from which he graduated with honors and an engineering degree in 1941.

Despite the financial status of his uncles, he worked his way through college, always in building and construction work.

It was while at college that he stumbled onto something that made him think of business in more precise terms. He took as his graduate thesis a study of low-cost housing in California!

ALMOST HALF

He went all over the state, and in San Diego he ran into an eye opener. Mind you, this was in 1941 when government construction of low-cost housing was at its high point. He discovered to his amazement that Uncle Sam was putting out $9000 for a unit that was little more than a three-room apartment, while in San Francisco, private enterprise was building five-room houses with a garage underneath, definitely superior to the San Diego Government-subsidized project, for about $4250! In other words, for less than half the subsidized amount!

That was his first acquaintance with the waste inherent in bureaucracy. He could hardly believe his eyes, but slowly he came to realize that he was looking at a simple and inescapable fact.

His interesting and carefully documented thesis went to waste, however, although the University of California gave him a pat on the back for it.

Hardly had he completed this study when the approach of World War II brought him into the Navy. There he became a “frogman,” an undersea demolition expert. He saw combat duty in Okinawa, winning a raft of medals, including the Bronze Star Medal, a Presidential Unit Citation, and the Pacific Theater Ribbon with five battle stars.

On getting out of the Navy, with the rank of Lieutenant [Actually, Ensign  SN], he returned to the Bay Area. Then he decided to go into business for himself. [The initial business was funded with $500 or thereabouts that my mother, Clara Oddstad, saved from her wartime wages. SN] He teamed up with another Icelander, Chris Finson, who hailed from Seattle, and together they formed the Sterling Building Company.

GREAT TRIO

It was at this point that his famous uncles, Henry and Ellis Stoneson, came in with help and guidance. A third man, to whom Oddstad gives great credit, was Parker Maddux, one-time president of the San Francisco Bank. This great trio, all three of whom helped Andres Oddstad on the road to a spectacular success, have all passed on, Henry Stoneson only recently.

Andres Oddstad doesn’t think much of the co-called “self-made men” who insist they did it all, that nobody helped them.

“When you come to analyze it,” he said, “that is nonsense. Nobody makes it alone. Sooner or later, they get cooperation and/or assistance. I am proud of the help and expert guidance that I got from my uncles and from Parker Maddux, and if you writing anything about me, don’t forget to mention their names!”

I like this about the man. No boasting, no phony claims. In fact, I think he underestimated, rather than overestimated, his own ability, which I soon recognized was considerable. It is plain he is a hard and unremitting worker; that he thinks problems through and believes in doing a through and careful job.

But he also has imagination! This was apparent in his keen interest in economics and architecture. Perhaps a better word is enthusiasm, although I do not usually associated the word “enthusiasm” with a man who always talks in a low-pitched voice, never once raising it to an excited pitch.

It was obvious he has been fascinated by two men, the great architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and J. Kenneth Galbraith, author of The Affluent Society. Wright he regards as a great architect, the like of which American has never known. “He thinks and designs in three dimensions,” says Oddstad. “In addition, he is a showman and super salesman. Take this training ground he operates for young architects on the desert near Phoenix, Arizona. [Taliesin West] There he takes young men out of college, puts them to work drafting––carrying out his ideas, and the result is he has a far-reaching influence on the rising generation of architects.

“Wright sees things in their relation to their environment. Many orthodox architects––and Wright is anything but orthodox––remind me of the fellow who polishes a pebble in a mosaic. Write has helped me think in depth––you have to do it in any kind of business, but especially in the building business.”

But it was the imaginative Galbraith I wanted to question him about. The Affluent Society has dynamite in it, and I was curious our the third largest builder in the San Francisco area reacted to the top U.S. economist.

“Let me say one thing,” said Oddstad, “I like to solve any problem by reducing the variables––in other words, simplifying the assumptions. But by no means do I disregard the variables. Some economists––in fact all of them but Galbraith, disregard factors they don’t understand.”

“Meaning what?” I demanded. “Let’s get specific.”

“Well, just this: The usual run of economists pay no attention to such factors as human greed, the ego, etc. Because they do not understand these, they ignore what they can’t understand. Galbraith does not. He tries to reckon with all the variables. In other words, he sets the whole problem of economics against against a background of common sense. Do I make myself clear?”

“Exactly, ” I said. “In fact, you have converted me, as never before, to the value of Galbraith. My previous acquaintance with him was wholly superficial. In other words, if I may add, it is your view that most economists are lacking in fundamental common sense?”

ALL BUSINESS

“Right!” he said in that low, even voice of his. Then he added slowly: “Of course, you can ask how all this helps me in my business? Well, an understanding of economics helps toward an understanding of the reference frame of all business, not just the building business.”

“And speaking of business,” I said, “what do you think of the future of the building business in California?”

“Just this:” he replied, “first, our population is going to double by 1975. They are coming in here at a great rate now. It is becoming a trend. And it will accelerate. Not only that, we will double our production units. I mean––and let me make myself clear––for every apartment house or building you see now, there will be another apartment house or building by 1975. For every home you see now, there will be another home in 16 years.

“You mean,” I said, “for every house and building we see know, we are going to see double that by 1975?”

“Yes. This is one part of the country where values are going to be on the increase, steadily and persistently. In fact, right now California has the only semi-permanent wealth in the nation.”

When I left this rather extraordinary man, whose profession is building and whose hobby is economics, I suspected he was telling me the truth. The surprising thing is that 1975 is only a relatively short time off!”

End

Andy Oddstad getting ready to water ski in the SF Bay, early 1960s

AFTERWORD: Well, we all know that 1975 came and went. I’m sure my father’s predictions were far lower than actual levels of development in California. I’m also certain that he could not comprehend the explosion in housing prices from the 1970s on. For a guy born in 1918, contemporary housing prices would sound like fantasy.

Before the Great Recession, some of his most modest homes that sold for about $9,000 in the 1950s were going for $1 million. (I wish he hadn’t sold them!) They’re down to a mere $800K due to the recession.

Andy Oddstad was a guy who came up in the Great Depression. The article above mentions him working for his uncles after school. He did it because he needed to work if his family was to eat––and the rest of the Oddstad family worked, too. Sweeping out jobs after school wasn’t a hobby. Nor were his two paper routes before school just for fun. He constructed the bicycle he rode to deliver those papers out of scrap from the junkyard. And raised rabbits behind the family home for meat for the table.

Those were hard times.

Oddstad Homes had built over 14,000 homes at the time of my father’s death. Oddstad Homes was the #1 builder of residential housing in Northern California by a wide margin, and #10 in the US at its hey-day.

What was it like having a dad like that? Like growing up in the Marines. Tough, and fair. He really did read Galbraith. He had––and read–-volumes by the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Baruch Spinoza on his bedside table. When he helped me with my homework, I had to have razor sharp pencils, several pens, a pad of scratch paper, good paper for the answers, a straight edge, and a compass at the table before he would sit down with me. I got one explanation, that was it. [Pocket calculators didn't exist.]

Brisk.

I majored in economics for my first two college degrees, due in part to his influence. I’m glad I have that knowledge, though it’s taken me a lifetime to start “listening to my heart” as the New Agers say. I still feel guilty about being a writer and author, though I know it’s what I was born to do. (My dad could not have fathomed the New Age, either. Or free love or the 1960s.)

I owe Andy Oddstad a very great deal. I’ve never seen a person who lived at 100% and demanded that those around him do the same. He shaped me and my life.

What are some of the most important words my father said to me?

First off, he said, “Sandy, there’s no reason a girl can’t do everything a boy can do.” So I took physics and calculus in high school. “And I know how smart you are, so don’t try and tell me you can’t get good grades.” I got good grades.

He held me to a high standard, and I’ve kept it. That’s the most valuable thing I got from my dad. He was the most disciplined person I’ve met. He moved through life at hyper-speed, like he was skating on the edge of a razor blade.

It’s a shame he’s been all but forgotten. He gave a great deal to the San Francisco Bay Area.

But that’s what happens when you die. You get forgotten, your legacy is muddied and claimed by others, and your family can fall apart. Dads: If you want to give your families a great Father’s Day present, don’t die.

About my dad’s building: I know that housing tracts built by one of his competitors, Joseph Eichler, have been named Historical Neighborhoods. There’s an very glossy, slick magazine put out for owners and fans of Eichler homes. I think that’s great. Eichler’s designs were spectacular examples of low cost, good design.

They are not spectacular examples of low cost, good construction. I’ve lived in an Eichler. I know all about huge single-paned windows that leak all the heat in the room and radiant (pipes carrying heated water under the concrete floor) heating that that doesn’t keep rooms warm and can lead to big repair bills when it breaks. My cousin worked as a carpenter building Eichlers. I will not repeat what he said about the quality of their construction. I don’t know if the old saw about how fast they burn down is true. Do Eichlers really burn down in three minutes?

Enough carping. I expect that Frank Lloyd Wright would approve more of Eichler’s work than my father’s. I do wish that some of the folks living in Farm Hill, Linda Mar, Crestmont, Rollingwood and the rest of the communities built by Oddstad Homes might throw together a blog or something.

My dad was an engineer. He was interested in straight lines and economy and that’s what he built. He wanted everyone to have a good, well-built house over his or her head. He was a political liberal, a strong Kennedy man, a man who cared about everyone, not just the rich.

Now is the time to remember our fathers, whoever they were and whatever they did, even if they weren’t perfect and contributed to our personal difficulties. We’re here because of them, whoever they were or are.

My best wishes, fathers. And all the best to you, Andy Oddstad, whom I knew as Daddy. There’s so much you didn’t get to see, Daddy. You have five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. You missed the Beatles. And we missed you.

Sandy

Ray Stern and Andy Oddstad getting ready to water ski in the SF Bay, early 1960s.
Ray was a great buddy of my dad’s. He was a professional wrestler and entrepreneur. The caption my dad wrote  next to this photo is, “Ray floats at last.” The caption refers to the fact that Ray was a block of solid muscle. He had so little fat mass that he couldn’t float at all without his wet suit. I think he was the hardest to teach of the many people my dad taught to ski. By-gone times: The Bay is too polluted for skiing now. Ray and my dad are gone.

I’m still alive, though! Alive and writing, Daddy, wherever you are! My father never got to read my books. That’s painful. My dad would have liked them; he taught me how to write and how to be. I write for smart people who demand more than pablum. That’s the fruit of my dad’s influence. He would have liked my work.

Happy Father’s Day, Dads of the World!

Sandy Oddstad Nathan

Sandy’s Amazon Author Page. Click here of on image.

HERE ARE LINKS TO AND DESCRIPTIONS OF SANDY’S SIX BOOKS!
They range from wild sci-fi to adorable children’s nonfiction. You’ll find something you’ll like in the list below:

I had a brief but interesting email conversation with Rick Mora recently. Rick is a Native American model, actor, producer, you name it. In addition  to his other modeling, he’s been on two book covers in the Romance genre. I loved the most recent one and told him so.

I learned from Rick that Fabio is the most successful Romance genre cover model. This morning, I discovered Fabio has more than 93,000 images on Google and 3,300 book cover images. Here’s a HuffPost slide show of his covers.

I found this very disturbing. I am not a Fabio fan, though I’m sure he’s a very nice person.  My previous blog article, Judgment Day, was about the insidious decline of our culture into a judging and blaming mill. I could easily drop into major judging right now, but I won’t. I will say only that Fabio isn’t my cup of tea.

Who is? This is a surprisingly important question. I expect most of those reading this are authors/writers. If you can’t name what turns you on, how can you write it? And–if it turns you on, will it turn others on? We’re talking market appeal here. Can you successfully project your own sensual tastes on a larger population and have them love what you’ve done?

Join this valuable research project: Ask yourself the questions I ask below, and drop me a comment to express what makes men sexy to you.

What makes a guy sexy? What makes a character sexy?

Seeking the answer, I asked my husband, “Who do you think is the sexiest man in the world?”

“Me,” he said, not missing a beat. “And I’m not looking at any other men.”

There you go: what testosterone does. Complete surety. No false modesty. No need to compare himself to anyone.

This is sexy––very masculine. I agree with him. He’s certainly the sexiest man in my universe. He has an additional compelling advantage: He rides. Nothing is sexier than a good looking man who can really ride a horse. All that sensitivity and restraint. Perfect balance. Split second awareness. Fearlessness. The animal vitality and sweat. Control of a powerful creature with a fingertip. Whoa. Here’s a picture:

Answering the questions making up the title to this post is a surprisingly difficult exercise, but part of the answer came easily. What men have I known who have stuck in my brain/soul/psyche for, oh, 35 years, give or take? What are their characteristics? I have not been physically intimate with any of these men, yet I can’t forget them.

Priests, monks,  professors, and bosses: Big, big impact from these mentor-type people.  I’ve known a number of priests (Catholic) and monks (Sarasvati order of Hinduism) that captivated me. And there were a few PhDs who caught my eye.

• I remember one of the priests who was a professor of philosophy when I was at Santa Clara University. A towering intellect, and towering man, he had a huge head of white hair that flew heavenward. Completely oblivious to what he looked like, the black bathrobe thing that the Jesuits wore in those days often gaped at his considerable middle, revealing a white T shirt. His “bathrobe” was covered with chalk dust. Every inch was a mass of wrinkles. He taught Modern Philosophical Issues. When he lectured, you felt the hand of God. The hand was good, but didn’t mind smacking you around a bit. When he preached, students would walk out of the Mission shaken. They didn’t really understand what he said, but he sure SAID it. Whatever he was talking about was so avant that it barely fit in English. I’ll never forget him.
• His counterpart, who was chairman of the philosophy department, was the exact opposite of the professor above. This priest was spare, with not an ounce of extra fat, upright in his posture and very strict in his thought. You could understand what he was talking about. His clothes were immaculate; not a fleck of chalk dust remained on him. He was close to ancient when I took courses from him. Didn’t matter. He had impact.
• Monks. I spent twenty five years associated with a meditation group based in India. I’ve known a number of  Hindu monks who have impressed me greatly. These people practiced what they preached. They had attained something spiritually. I can remember standing in a hallway next to one of them and getting a contact high.  What was it that attracted me to them? Their purity. Their recitation of scriptures, their meditation, their spiritual practice had changed their souls and made them very attractive.
• Spiritual masters. I’ve known two meditation masters and a tai chi master. These people had the qualities of the priests and monks to the nth power. The contact high began when you decided to sign up for something they were leading. I could not think within ten feet of my first meditation master. My mind shut down. The energy he gave off was an explosion. Bliss, ecstasy (the state,not the substance), healing of everything radiates from these people. You don’t think that’s attractive?
• Guys I’ve worked for. I’ve been very fortunate in that all my bosses have been very cool. One stands out. At the top tier of his field, he started out being a White House Fellow, then got a PhD at the most prestigious university in the country. Taught at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. Wrote I don’t know how many major books on business theory. He was the best classroom teacher I have experienced. Was he tough? Mean? Did he yell at people? No, the opposite. He was very clear and mega intelligent, as well as a Zen scholar and practitioner. This showed up in his teaching. Brilliant but soft, innovative but kind. As able to hone in on students’ social and psychological states as he was to read what he’d written on the blackboard. And watching him debrief a negotiation was like watching a surgeon doing a heart transplant. Wow.

Notice that most of the people above were in holy orders. I had no physical or sexual contact with any of them. What made me remember them all these years? A few, primarily spiritual, things:

• Intelligence. These men were sharp.
• Passion. These men were passionate about what they did.
• Vocation. They did what mattered to them and what would impact the world.
• Energy. We all throw off energy. Spiritual practice intensifies it and purifies it. It makes us attractive to others. It’s fun, no, wonderful, to be around a spiritual powerhouse.
• Integrity. They walked the walk.
• Commitment. These dudes were in the game, playing as hard as they could. They were committed for the duration.

None of this says one thing about hair length or color, size of pectoral muscles or other body parts, six-packs, facial construction, or the beauty of a torso or thigh. It’s about what’s attractive to me, and that’s intelligence, intensity, energy and personal power.

As an aside, I think that one of the reasons that so much sexual wrongdoing occurs with the clergy is that what their jobs and spiritual practices make them sexy. People are sexy, but the spiritual lifestyle I’m describing intensifies it  and personal energy. If there’s no outlet, look out choir boys.

Before leaving the area of spirituality to leap into the sweaty physical realm, we need to investigate the relationship between sexuality and spirituality. Is there one? Oh, yes. Have you heard of Tantric yoga? Sex and spirituality embrace in all sorts of ways  Tantric sex is very, very real. You don’t have to follow any particular practice to set it off, either. Combine disciplined sexuality, ignited spiritual energy, and  spiritual practice–you can get yowser-wowser sex of which the Romance industry could not conceive. You can achieve over-the-top spiritual and sexual experience at the same time. Experience that lasts a really long time. Days, even.

Why isn’t more written about sexuality and spirituality? Probably because most writers haven’t experienced it. An interlude in my upcoming book, Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem, that reads like an over the-top, absolutely impossible, sexual fantasy. It’s not. It’s a write up of one of my experiences.  Maybe we’ll get more people writing about the really good stuff if they realize that meditating for twenty-five years will buy them more than the ability to remember their mantra.

How do we go from my spiritual/intellectual description of qualities in men I find attractive to the grunt and groan sex that people write about? Where’s the hot and steamy?

EASY: ADD A BODY.

There’s a sexy male body. A stallion. My husband and I operated a horse breeding farm for twenty years, providing us with a wealth of information better kept to ourselves and other horse breeders. (Tends to be raunchy and explicit.) I’ve always wanted to share this wealth. Now’s my chance. Having watched stallions in action, I can say that nothing on the cover of any romance novel or anything else can compare to a stallion in any dimension. You name it: length, width, reload time. Passion, power, pure male force. Duration, number of partners in one session. They don’t call them studs for nothing.

I’m going to quit now, because this is a super long post. I’ll delve into our topic more and be back in a few days. In the meantime, think about what attracts you in a person and what attracts you sexually. Are they the same?

NEWS FLASH – I JUST DISCOVERED THIS: What makes a man sexy? If I am falling off my horse and a man catches me, he is sexy. That just happened to me. My husband caught me, with our horse trainer right behind him.

Catching me creates a deep and abiding affection, verging on idolization. It doesn’t matter what the guy looks like. He doesn’t have to have six pack abs or anything. If he keeps me off the dirt, he’s a god.

There you go, guys, Sexy 101.

Sandy Nathan

Sandy’s Amazon Author Page. Click here of on image.

HERE ARE LINKS TO AND DESCRIPTIONS OF SANDY’S SIX BOOKS!
They range from wild sci-fi to adorable children’s nonfiction. You’ll find something you’ll like in the list below:

 

 

YIPES! IT’S JUDGMENT  DAY!

Yes, in the modern age, every day is judgment day. We are surrounded by reviews, ratings, rankings, and evaluations––most of which were created anonymous people judging their fellow human beings.  We’re asked to review everything imaginable. We have Amazon reviews, Goodreads reviews, reviews on blogs and everywhere else. We’re asked to “Friend” me, “Like me.” Give a thumbs up or thumbs down to everything.

This trend is accelerating. Social media multiply faster than the ground squirrels in my pasture. Numbers are everything. We brag on-line: “I have 59,000,000 friends.” “People downloaded 100,000 copies of my book last week.” Who has the power? Who has the status? The one with the biggest numbers. Quality is secondary, if considered at all.

We swim in a sea of judgment, much of it performed by people with no qualifications and suspect motives.

The new world is characterized by anonymity and false identity. When I was getting my MA in counseling, we strove for transparency––not hiding behind roles. We strove for real personal connection, knowing what our feelings and motivations were and stating them honestly.

Now, we’ve got anonymity. The person we’ve just given the lousy rating doesn’t know us, never will, and can’t do anything about what we said anyway. This allows nastiness that no one would perpetrate on someone face to face. Screen names insure the impossibility of finding out who we are.

Want to know about the psychology of our age? Check out Dr. Kimberley S. Young’s work.  Caught in the Net: How to Recognize the Signs of Internet Addiction–and a Winning Strategy for Recovery is a great book to start with. She talks about “flaming”–on-line flareups of rage–and the vicious pack behavior you see in some blogs.   Here’s Dr. Young’s test to determine if you have an on-line addiction.

ONE OF MY PROFESSORS NAILED IT WHEN HE SAID:

The only legitimate reviewer is a producing artist whose work is better than the work being critiqued. The critique should be communicated to the artist who produced the work––only.
Philip B. Welch, AIA

This post was motivated by a couple of reviews. I levitated with joy over a terrific review  Glenda A. Bixler of Book Reader’s Heaven gave my book The Angel & the Brown-Eyed Boy. Life was wonderful. Writing was a great profession.

Two days later, I was checking a fact about one of my other books on Amazon, I discovered that it had a new review, too. Except that this one was an extremely negative review written in a particularly nasty way.

Whoa. Those words smarted. Worse than that, they’re posted in public where there they will continue to influence others forever. My mood shifted: Writing became the worst profession in the world, offering no rewards, but endless opportunities for pain.

Everything I have read about dealing with bad reviews says: Don’t respond. If you blow up on line, what you say can go viral and destroy your career. Suck it up. Shut up.  Take it. That’s similar to: relax and enjoy being raped.

That approach doesn’t sit well with me. Taking my professional future in my hands, I’m going to respond, but not to the bad review or the reviewer who bestowed it. I’m going to talk about our society and its current mania for evaluation. I’m going to start out with a survey of changes in our culture that I’ve observed during my lifetime.

This post is so long that even I was embarrassed by its length. I’ve cut it into sections and will present them a few days apart. Keep reading. It’s entertaining, and you might find it funny. And valuable.

1. Changes in Our Culture and Social Values During my Lifetime: Or How Our Collective Psyche Lurched Forward––and Backward.

I’m old. One of the nice things about being old is that I’ve lived a long time. I was alive during the 1950s and 60s and remember them clearly. In my world, until the Beatles erupted in 1964, life was exactly as portrayed in MadMen, except way more uptight and without all the sex.

I’m amazed at how much society has changed. Take the quote about reviews and reviewers above. Who’s this Welch dude? Philip B. Welch was the chair of the Department of Creative Arts at Santa Clara University during the mid-1960s. He was an architect of consummate taste and aesthetic development who had studied at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. I was his student. Mr. Welch had a huge impact on my life. He said the words above in class.

I interpret his words as, “If you can’t do a better piece of art than the one you’re reviewing, shut the **** up. If you can do better and have some feedback about the piece that would be useful, have a personal conversation with the artist involved aimed at helping him or her make better art.”

What is unusual about this point of view?

You’d never hear it after 1979.

In 1964, The Beatles blasted us out of the booze-soaked, up-tight fifties, setting off an explosion of consciousness with a simple song called “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” That revolution was probably fueled with liberal doses of LSD and marijuana, but people changed. They wanted to create a society in which personal worth, kindness, altruistic feelings, and love ruled.

The 60s were an amazing, exciting time that I will never forget. We really believed we could change the world. Life had a freshness and palpable expectation that good would triumph that are gone now.

The revolution of consciousness kept on rolling during the 1970s, when the big personal growth/human potential movement/train-yourself-into-enlightenment wave hit. We had (and did) est, Rebirthing, Lifespring and many other seminars and trainings aimed at cleaning up the nasty bits in our souls and letting the true Self shine through. The big meditation programs arrived from India in the 70s: TM, Siddha Yoga, and others. They really stressed love and lack of judgment. [Post a comment below if you participated in any of these. I did est and Rebirthing in the 1970s. Found both very valuable. I was involved with Siddha Yoga for almost thirty years.]

You have to have lived through those times to realize how different the world is today. You have to have walked down those streets and listened to what people talked about and cared about and did. Folks flocked into the Peace Corps, heading into the developing world in an attempt to make things better. We had the Model Cities Program, Head Start, and the myriad social programs that––guess what, critics––were shown to have measurably improved the lives of participants. And many of us protested the war in Vietnam, putting our lives on the line to create the world we wanted. Conversely, many of us served in the armed forces in Vietnam, putting our lives on the line to create a world we believed in.

All that went south in the 1980s.

The 80s ushered in the era of greed, me, gimme, and gimme more. When I think of the 80s, I think of massive shoulder pads, dresses with glitter all over them, granite kitchen counter tops, miles of crown molding, and monster houses with absolutely NO architectural merit. We tricked ourselves out with no guilt. At all. None.

It’s kept on going, right through the Enron collapse in 2001 and the financial meltdown of 2008 and surrounding years. Untrammeled greed piled on more greed.  I lived in one of the exclusive towns in Silicon Valley. I didn’t have to watch Inside Job, the Academy Award winning documentary about what happened to our financial institutions in 2008, to know about this. I could go to breakfast at the local cafe, a hangout for the high tech elite. The conversations I overheard  substantiated everything I’m talking about.

People who did not live through contemporary society’s evolution from the 1960s until now DO NOT KNOW how much the collective psyche has changed. Large hunks of the population seem to have lost any sense of fellowship, righteousness, and fair play. Kindness. The desire to help others. Love of humanity.

“He who dies with the most toys, wins.” A bumper sticker defining the modern age. I Googled that phrase and learned a lot. The slogan hails from the 1980s, of course. My search showed that I am not the only person to have a negative reaction to it. I also discovered that there’s a web site advising people about dangerous-to-display bumper stickers.  It was created in recent years, the Great Recession years, when everyone was losing jobs and was financially stressed. Conspicuous displays of materialism on the freeway might get you killed. “Most toys” is on the most dangerous list. Here’s a counter opinion:

There’s a dose of reality. Here’s more: Not everyone is a greedy, judgmental SOB today.  Some people want to live in a peaceful world where people are kind. Members of clergy, psychotherapists, mystics, and those on a spiritual path all try to live without judging their fellow human beings. They try to see the other person’s point of view and temper their words so they can be heard without causing pain.  Lots of just regular folks are like that, too. My friends and family and lots of others are good people.

I try to live without harming others. I’ve worked hard to create a me that I can live with. For instance, aside from doing the 70s as hard as I could, I have an MA in Marriage, Family, and Child Counseling, also from Santa Clara University. I went into that program because of the values the program it embodied. My soul drew me there. I wanted to imbibe the attitudes and skills of the people in that program. And I did.

But for  mass society, the days when all that stuff mattered are gone.

The clearest demonstration I see of the Real New Age shows up in contemporary politics. People in Congress can’t agree about anything. And that applies to people in the same party.  If those on the same side can’t say nice things about each other or get along, how will they run the country?

Where is The Great Soul? Was it squashed with the tragedy of 9/11/2001? No. People pulled together then. Did it die in the financial crash of 2000 through 2008 and beyond? Maybe. Was it the technological revolution of the iPod, iPad, iPhone, and iEverything else that did it in?  Or is the social climate the result of the recreational drug of choice changing from marijuana to meth and coke?

2.  What Does This Have to Do with Book Reviews and Reviewing?

Reviews and reviewing are symptoms of the ills of our society. Everything I say above applies to book reviews. As a matter of fact, I wrote all this because of a book review.

3. What to do? Well, you could hope for the 60s to come back or join an order of monks, but those are pretty extreme.

Knowledge is power. In the next article of this series, I’m going to talk about the psychological transactions and states involved in judgment. And I’m going to talk about skilled communication. About being skilled people.

Until then,

Sandy Nathan

Sandy’s Amazon Author Page.

HERE ARE LINKS TO AND DESCRIPTIONS OF SANDY’S SIX BOOKS!
They range from wild sci-fi to adorable children’s nonfiction. You’ll find something you’ll like in the list below: