Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the

Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,

episode number 94 in chronological

order. I always have to say that, but eventually, we're gonna get

to, you know, episode number one hundred, and then I'll stop saying that, and then

you can go back and find those

archived episodes. With our

book today, an exploration of the challenges

that are inherent in living in a pre-civil rights

United States of America as a Black Man.

This is a book that engages readers around the

psychological question of how a black man can position

himself in a world, replete with racism and racial

injustice that the postmodern, post-civil

rights act leadership mind can barely

contemplate. And when it does seek to contemplate such

a world, usually, such contemplation

results in an existential shudder at best and

an attempt to grift off the past at worst.

This narrative, strangely enough, proposes a simple solution

to our current complicated cultural mess surrounding

gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, and even

how the facts of those identities are negotiated in the overall

social order. I'm gonna drop a clue here

a little bit In the beginning,

say my name, to paraphrase from

Breaking Bad. Today,

we will summarize, analyze,

and potentially even read selections

from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

And today, we will be joined in this literary journey at the

start of Black History Month in the United States of America,

with our returning guest slash sparring partner,

from last year's episode number 49, where we covered

The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B Du Bois,

My good friend, and a good friend of the show, Dorollo

Nixon junior, and as usual, I have to put this on the end,

Esquire. How are you doing, Dorollo?

Great, sir. Good morning. Great to be here. This

is a great day

for us to begin, our exploration

of, The Invisible Man and

how that book has impacted us, not

only as black people in America, but also has

impacted a lot of how we think about, racial politics

in America. And we're going to talk a little bit about the literary

life of Ralph Ellison as well because he defied

easy categorization much to the chagrin

of people, writers who, who followed him, such as

it were. So today, we're gonna do

something a little bit different. We're gonna try a little bit of a different sort

of format. So normally, at this point, I would pick up and I

would read from Invisible Man directly. But today, we're gonna

summarize a little bit. We're going to gonna kinda go back and forth.

I would encourage you to pick up the pick up a copy

of Invisible Man. And as usual, as I always say,

yep. There's there's DiRollo's copy. As usual, I as I

always say, we will not be reading from the whole book because

we can't possibly do that. There's too much depth here.

There's too much content. There's too many things going on. It is a

quick read, and it is a deceptively

deep read once you get into it.

So I would like to point out, though, that

the the the prologue, which is where everything sort of begins

its setup, begins with the line,

I am an invisible man.

Then the narrator goes

on to tell you that

he is not someone that is like Edgar

Allan Poe or like some Hollywood fiction.

He's not made of ectoplasmic doc, right?

He's not someone that you can see through.

However, he is a Jesan. He is solid, but he is living in a

society where his presence is invisible.

He tells in the prologue a brief anecdote about running into a white

man, and this is where you first get the idea that he may not

necessarily be writers. Right, and assaulting

him. And that assault leaders him to hide in a basement, kinda like a

Hobbit hole. Right? A quote unquote wormhole

in Harlem, a place of incandescent light bulbs

and ripped off electricity from Con Ed.

From this, we are to conclude, obviously, like I said, that he is a

black man because all of the social signals have been provided by

Ellison, and we are to conclude also that he is

suffering from the impacts of societal wide discrimination

and Jim Crow. But

as is about to be revealed from Ellison,

all is not What it

seems. When we

think about Ralph Ellison and we think about the Invisible

Man, we have to kinda think about his life. And

so he was born on March 1, 1913,

and he died on April 16, 1994. So lived a

long, long life. He he, lived a life before

the civil rights movement, and was a man who

saw, 2 generations

out, the actual impacts of slavery

and the subsequent Jim Crow era in the

South, as well as all the impacts of the sharecropping

and the immense poverty that existed in the South

at the time. He was, of course, and this is

how he defined himself, fundamentally an American writer,

a literary critic, and a scholar. He was born in Oklahoma, and

was the 2nd of 3 sons. His, oldest brother died in

infancy. His father, Books Alfred Ellison, was

a small business owner and a construction foreman who died in

1916 when Ellison was just 3 years old after an Operation

to Cure Internal Wounds Suffered From Shards, Suffered

After Shards From A 100 pound, ice block penetrated his

abdomen failed, and he

died. Died from something that he probably would have lived

through if he had been born a little bit later.

Ellison's mother, Ida Milsap, remarried 3 times

after Lewis's death and encouraged

Ralph Waldo Ellison, to play the trumpet,

which later allowed him admittance to the Tuskegee Institute

in 1933 when he was 20 years

old. Ellison's experiences at Tuskegee

with class conscious black people, and I wanna talk a lot about this today,

caused him to sharpen his satirical lens according to writer and

theater critic, Hilton Alls. But the education he received there,

including being exposed to TS Eliot's The Wasteland,

lit the spark of writing in him. And he moved away from merely

playing music to beginning to

write. Now Invisible Man was his

only completed novel and was published in

1952 to endless critical acclaim.

And he did win the National Book Award, but subsequently,

Ellison never published another novel

To the Level of Invisible Man, ever again.

So there's a lot of stuff here, Right? From the book, from the

narrative, from Ellison himself.

And it leads us down this road, and we're gonna open up with DiRolo here.

It leads us down this road of having to really

place Ellison in a particular spot, having to

talk about, the pre civil rights African

American conception. And I don't really like that term African American, but we're going to

use it probably interchangeably with black American today,

but the pre civil rights black American perception of

themselves, versus the post civil rights black American

perception of themselves. And, of course, it

creates tensions for us. See Glenn book Libby

Glenn Mcwell McWhorter and, and, or not Glenn McWhorter.

Sorry. Glenn Libby and John McWhorter. McWhorter

4th. 4th. Right? writers, something like that. Yeah.

That's right. Oh, you gotta throw that 4th in there. Gotta throw the

4th in there. De Rolle is a big fan of the

numbering. It creates tensions that Lowery and McWhorter

have explored for the last over 10 years on their podcast as

well about what it actually means to be black in

America. And so Ellison touches on all of this. So let's

open up with Dorollo. He's the 5th. My

bad. He had to look. He had to look. Yes. He's the 5th. I

wanted to make sure I was correct, And I was incorrect.

Yes. Ciccarolo, tell me, tell me about

Ellison's Invisible Man. I know you've read this book before. I know you revisited it

for podcast no. Okay. I had read parts of

Juneteenth before, and it's a shame because, I mean, I have a degree in

English from Cornell. My concentration was the modern novel.

And so my focus I spent time focused on this. Exactly. I spent

time Tom and it's a it's an important question. I spent time focused

on Joyce. I spent time

focused on, some other works and not this one, and it's

interesting because I took an American novel course that went

through, like, the rise of Silas Lapham and and

Babbitt and these other, you know, great weighty works. And it's a

shame because this this is I think this is a masterwork.

There's a truly majestic flow to

what he presents, and it's worth struggling through

more than 500 pages. I don't have no idea why you called it an easy

read. I didn't find it, so but,

I I find it profound and his insights profound.

It is a disturbing snapshot of, you know, pre

civil rights America. And while

I'm excited by how New York, which is

where nameless, because that's what I call him, you

know, goes. I'm, you know, encouraged in certain

respects to Opportunities he found in New York,

and, you know, cultural

DNA that still plays out in that city today in in ways that

are both beautiful and disturbing, are there, you know,

from, from the the concentration

of black people in Harlem and Manhattan and nowhere else to the use

of taxis to get around, and then the Subtle

interplay between driver and passenger.

And I don't know how Uber changes that Or Lyft, but I assume it does,

because now there's not this it's it's it's a much larger subculture, and

there's less cultural dynamics, I think, with with

Uber and Lyft than there are with taxi drivers. A taxi driver is a thing,

you know. Mhmm. Anyway, but Certainly

of of the Jim Crow South, and of, you

know, nameless's forlorn

Little oasis, that literally comes apart at the

seams by turning down the wrong street.

And, literally, you go from pristine,

you know, neo classical architectured,

No. Give it away. Ones. Don't give it away too much. Don't give it away

too much because I I wanna focus on some of this in our in our

Sorrells of third section on on on doctor Bledsoe. Oh, okay. Good.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I do wanna I do wanna get into that a little bit

here. I mean, you could do this. We let's do the setup. Let's let's let's

let's let let let's Let's let folks know where we're going.

But that right there is, I think I think writers Bledsoe is the

critical linchpin character in this in this novel

for a whole lot of years. I got stuck on Lynch because here,

it has, you know, it has great resonance. It does.

It does. It does. It does. Yeah. It does. Yeah.

Okay. So you would not read this is interesting. I I

figured you had touched on Ellison, at least,

Ellison, Richard Writers, who we're gonna be covering this month. Richard Wright. I

Richard Writers, yes, but Richard Wright was actually high school. They were doing their

jobs. So Richard Wright was either then in middle school or beginning of high school.

Yeah. Okay. And then, of course I think it was middle school. I think it

was 8th grade. Okay. Yeah. And then, of course, the anti

the anti Richard Wright and the anti Ellison, my man, James

Baldwin. Yep. Definitely. We're also going to we're gonna be

bringing you back at the end of the month for for Baldwin, to

talk about to talk about notes,

from a native son.

Yep. I okay. So it's it's interesting to me that you

had not run into Ellison before. Oh, no. I run-in I I mean, I knew

who he was, certainly. Right. But this didn't read I didn't read

anything Juneteenth, and I didn't read Juneteenth until post

Cornell. I I don't remember where I was. I

don't remember if I was in the north or the south. I don't remember where

I was. Is it do you think that because

Ellison's and we have to kinda talk a little bit about this. Do you think

it's because Ellison's Politics

Suddenly Shifted. And and one of the things that I wanna

reference here is, Norman Podhertz', is an essential

link to this article as well. Norman Podhertz's article on what

happened whatever happened to to Ralph Ellison. Right? Mhmm.

Mhmm. And Podcast makes the point. And Podherz was a

leftist sixties Jewish radical, right, who

believed fundamentally that Baldwin

was correct, though not a good writer, and

Ellison was a good writers, but not necessarily correct.

And writing in Commentary Magazine in 1999,

He kinda doubles down on this idea that

Ellison's attempt to be a humanist

And a modernist Mhmm. Put him at odds

with the black political structure of the middle 20th century

and thus deemed his writing, particularly at a August

institution like Cornell Mhmm. Deemed his

writing to be verboten. And you double

down on that by the fact that Ellison and I could talk about this,

we could talk about this early, you double down on that with the or that

analysis with the fact that Ellison never published

another novel, was never able to complete another novel while he was alive.

Juneteenth was completed after his death. And Podhertz calls

it basically a cobbled together mess. I'm being friendly, but

that's basically what he calls it. You know, 398

pages or something like that out of a potential 2,000 that were actually

written.

Why do you think Ellison didn't make the Cornell cut?

I mean, he may have. It it's I so My where

so it's weird. I remember myself. I remember some of my thinking, of course,

then, and it's distorted by age, it's distorted

forgetfulness, it's distorted by too much wine, etcetera.

But because of my

recollections of my state of mind And state of soul, let's

say. I will I will begin with myself. I assume

I'm more inclined to assume it was by my choice than by

something that wasn't offered at my, you know, longest institution,

our alma mater. So I assume it was

that. I didn't take, I

didn't take very many very many American literature courses. I, you

know, I in high school, in contrast, That's what I was reading,

and I ate that stuff for breakfast. It was magnificent. And

I remember, you know, feeling, not the

exact moment I think I can see where I was reading one

of Hemingway's works. The first time I come across Nigger, and I'm just

like, You know, here's this

betrayal where it's like amazing writing and getting

into his quirks and whatever, and then it's like, wait, but, you know,

This is so this is how you see us. This is what you believe about

me and about, you know, my race. Oh, this

isn't book. You know. And so, by the time I got

Cornell, I wasn't exactly done with Hemingway, but,

I think I was more focused in in European writers. And, of course, same time,

I ended up studying a lot of comparative literature and French literature at

the same Tom, And I would have frankly, I would have majored in

comparative literature if I knew what it was before I was a senior.

So, you know, I was just I was taking all this French lit

stuff and taking some comparative literature stuff and then learn, oh, this is what a

comparative literature major is like. And then, you know, if I'd realized that,

I probably would have majored in that. But, you know, who knows?

Again, hindsight about childhood and childhood quirks is far

better than 2020. Right? So you

talk about and I'm a I'm a fan of Hemingway. I'm also a fan

of Mark Twain. And and one of the challenges that we

have on this podcast is that or not challenges.

One of the opportunities that this podcast opens is the

opportunity to talk about hard word hard

words, hard ideas,

hard thoughts that writers,

particularly in an American, and you talk about European, an

American in the European context struggle with. So the European context,

European writers like Joyce, and,

and others, and I'm just gonna use Joyce because it's the one you mentioned,

They struggle with the European conception of self, not

necessarily based on race, but a European conception of self based on

geography and location in in in intention

with or against colonialism. Right? Think of Kipling's

writers man's burden. He's not really referencing race there, although

everybody tags him with that. He's actually referencing,

colonialism primarily and race secondarily.

Okay. Oh, don't worry. What? I know he's

mixed it all together, but his primary concern was colonialism with

Kipling. Yeah. But okay. So let me push back.

Chipman wasn't writing about British colonialism in in Ireland, you know,

where there's no racial element, And yet the same types of

hate and tropes, the same,

inability, And here relating it to Invisible Man, the same inability to

see the other. And I don't just mean as a mass of people not seeing

them and seeing them as animals, but, An

inability to see the other, that that

played out that played out in British colonialism of Ireland, but For sure.

Where Kipling was focused, of course, was India. Right? And

and and the the whole India under the Raj. And The thing

that really spoiled it, in my opinion, because

and this is, you know, a slightly contentious point, but if you you look

at Indian history, which I love and I study. You

know, the the podcasts I listen to the most, one of them

is is going through the history of India. It's absolutely fabulous. There's other books, more

than 1 that I'm reading right now on the history of

not just the subcontinent, but the regions surrounding it. You can see a series of

empires that Mhmm. Existed in India over time, sometimes

over centuries Mhmm. Each. And,

empires that foreigners started and Jesan.

And so when I see, you

know, and hear the animosity directed at the

British or at the Raj, I say to among the

questions that I have is, okay, so why is this different?

Because you got all these other, like, why are you not mad at the Mughals?

Okay. Right. You're mad at them British, but not the Mughals. The Mughals weren't Indians.

You know, they're from Central Asia. They came in. They conquered,

you know, Babur, the Tom, Mughal

emperor, right, was from a place called

Fergana, and it's just like, where the heck is that? You know, it's I think

it's in Uzbekistan. But anyway, point being, this guy's not Indian.

Why aren't you mad at the Mughal yoke the way you're mad

at the Raj? Right? And to me, one of the

the there's there's more than 1 answer.

One of the answers is because the the was the most

Jesan, and it's instilled in certain people's memories, and

there's things like photos and film that show problems. Got

it. Okay. And, I mean, I assume that there's at least

1 photograph of the last Mughal emperor because he was around

in the middle of 19th century, so there's I Zoom. There's at least 1

photograph of this guy. I forget his name too. But, anyway, but

that's that's not, to me, the most important piece. The most that

that's just Aesthetics. Mhmm.

In terms of the substance, the thing that I the the piece that

well, The chief piece the British got

wrong, in my opinion, is that,

they let The racism infects them

such that it then impacted how they did their colonialism.

And if they hadn't done that, They might still be there

today. There were many,

there are many ways that they helped bring,

benefits to the society of sub of South Asia.

But it's like the racism poison the whole thing. That's how I see it. And

so if They had bought that, I think, you

know, they would have had a fighting chance to still be there today. They wouldn't

have been, Ironically or not, it would have been

so alien, you know, but it it wasn't their

alienness itself because that's how it was with with the Kushans. That's how

it was the Bulldogs. And, you know, the the the Mughals

and Kushans that were Tom to the Mughals, certainly, you know, they did some intermarrying.

Okay. Fine. But They were still viewed, certainly, the

shot is still viewed as foreigners. And so it's like, okay. So

why are they Given a pass, Mughals obviously love,

you know, the architecture, all the rest of the stuff given a pass, but

it it so it let's be be even more specific. So the

Mughals, they were Muslim.

So you have this mass of Hindus And you have Muslim emperors,

yet they're given a pass, but then you have these British

far fewer Well, in terms of the administration, probably fewer

people, but, it just but there's there's no past, and I'm just

like, okay. So If you wanna hold them to the same standards as

did you hold Moogals and others, okay, fine. But if you're not gonna do that,

if you're gonna, you know, make these distinctions, like, I just, You know, to me,

it it it ruins the critique, but I digress. So

That was a hell of a dig a hell of a digression. But

but It's but it it it triggers a couple of other things

that relate to, Invisible Man and And you were

talking about Twain. What were you gonna say about Twain? Well, and here's what I

was gonna say about Twain. So Twain and

Hemingway are 2 of the largest pillars,

because the parallel I was drawing was was between

how, Joyce

and Faulkner I'm not sorry, not Faulkner. Kipling and

other European writers approached the tension

between being European and being colonialist. Mhmm. And

we, we could compare or contrast that with how Twain,

Faulkner as well was a Southern writers. We could throw him in there. What the

heck? But big the big the big tour Twain and

Hemingway. How they

dealt with and addressed the history

of, racism, either in

casual language, in casual,

commentary, or in casual culture, or in high

culture, quite frankly, in America,

and the- the- the comparison and the contrast between those

2 is this, and it gets to exactly what you said about

religion and the Moghuls and the Muslims versus the Indians in a, in a

European, and I'm Sorrells, European and Indian context.

The larger lesson here, I think, is that, a, human

beings will divide over anything. They will

divide over race, they will divide over religion, they will divide over class.

The biggest challenges come not from the division,

seeing the division in your own country, and, or in your own backyard, because, you

know, I I'm sure if we brought on somebody who was from India,

They will be able to tell us all of the things, all of the reasons

why the Sorrells, even though they were Muslim, were great,

and the British Tom your point, even though

they were maybe Christian, were terrible. Mhmm.

They would be able to tell us because human beings are going to divide along

those kinds of lines. Right? Mhmm. Whereas in America,

we struggle merely with the idea of division

because in an American context, we have

really, doubled and tripled and quadrupled down on the idea

that, at least until recently, and I would say recently within the

last 20 years. We really doubled and tripled down on this

idea of everyone melting together, and there would

be no divisions. Right? That was the dream. Right? Talk about Martin Luther

King Junior's I Have a Dream. Mhmm. But Twain's writing

and Hemingway's writing reveal the fault lines in those

dreams. They reveal the reality, behind

those dreams. And so it is

interesting when we are first confronted with those,

Humanities That Put Tension on the Myth of

America. A lot of people who read Twain,

read Hemingway, do exactly what you did. They run away from it because

attention's too much. Right?

And I was drawing and and and the other thing that I was going to

say In addition, was that I don't run away from those tensions.

I actually embrace them, because I think those tensions are worthwhile for

us to struggle with. It is, it is an irony above

ironies, not even irony, I wouldn't even say that, it is a

triumph of Twain's heart over

Twain's reality that a comedy

award that has his name on it

get has now been given to, like, I think, 3 or 4 black comics,

including most recently Dave Chappelle. Mhmm. I

think Mark Twain would love that. I think he would

love that. I I I think he would be fine with that.

Right? I think Hemingway's

challenges with black people or his

conception of how race existed in America Didn't

really here's the, here's the, here's the dirty little secret. I don't think it meant

anything to him. I don't think he fought any more

about it that we think about where our cats

or our dogs are in our house. I don't think you thought about it in

any of that kind of level. Right. And to me I I agree.

To me, it's well, that's it because he was a racist. So there you go.

Well, and and by the way I wish you. The way by the way, you

could tag him as a racist What do my cat eat today? Don't

know. Don't care. Don't know. Don't care. Right. When I went with my wife, you

know. Well, and here's and here's the thing here's the thing that we have struggle

with Ralph Ellison as well. Okay? Mhmm.

Mhmm. Ellison, I think,

was as a writer rejected because

he didn't he recognized the racism. Mhmm.

And he recognized its impact. Mhmm. But I

think he thought, and and we're moving in this direction on a podcast this year,

I think he thought that the solutions to it were worse than the disease.

And I think that Hemingway, if you went back in time and Showed him the

solutions to the disease, would probably agree. I

don't know. To me, where

he's best,

Yeah. So I mean, among the challenges with with

Ernest Hemingway, Well,

no. I don't like how that sentence began.

When I look at Hemingway's perspective on

black people there we go.

One of the only place one of the only bright lights I see, no pun

intended, well, the only bright lights I see is

there's certain ways in which he did like in the Green Hills of Africa, there's

certain ways in which he describes, natives with

whom, you know, hunting is going on. There's certain ways in which he

describes them where you can see some

understanding and respect. And, of course, the problem

that it creates is the problem it creates for me as a black

American is that that's not my milieu. Okay. I'm not running

around in the savannahs of East Africa

hunting, half naked,

or clothed helping white men go kill things. Okay? That's

Right. Not how I that's not I hunt. That's not how I hunt,

but the milieu, the cultural milieu in which I'm in

is one of the shared language, shared history, and shared institutions.

And so when in that context, New York, for

example, and when in that context, the same respect isn't accorded

where I have to get to the back of the line or just won't be

addressed at a party. That's what's infuriating.

And so, and, you know, I didn't shy away from his works. I still read

them. He's a phenomenal writer, and I still think they should be read and taught,

you know. Yep. I would do a disclaimer So to any

teachers listening to the podcast, give a disclaimer and then teach the works. And when

you give the disclaimer, don't you dare think of looking at the black students. Just

you give the disclaimer. You may hear things that offend

you. We understand that. You're reading these works

because these are foundational to American literature,

And then you go on, and you do it. And then they can, you know,

thrill with, you know,

Some of the best writing in the language that, you know,

is most likely their native language in America,

and yet, you know, recognize that, hey. Some of these

concepts, aren't good. Some of them are

evil, and you're gonna read them, and you've gotta you're gonna have to learn as

you pointed out. You have to learn to deal with them. You have to learn

to wrestle with those things. And if you're not exposed to them, you'll never learn

to wrestle with And you certainly won't solve problems in a

society where you're uncomfortable confronting

an uncomfortable reality, you know. And so,

but I thought I thought Ellison and this were I thought he did, absolutely

magisterial job with Presenting,

the problems and continuing through,

you know, with his tropes and his symbols And things like that

that are part of how you've structured how a

well structured novel, is written includes things like that. And

so and you can see them, you know, like and and and and detect

them, like cabbage.

The smell of cabbage in New

York and what it meant for nameless. And it's just to me, that that

was beautifully done. That wasn't as beautifully

done as the physical remnants

of actual slavery that keep cropping

up and that somehow, at some point in this novel, basically find

themselves as it were in the same container. And thus, like the Ark of the

Covenant, You've got the tablets, you've got Aaron's

rod, and you got a pot of mana. And here, he's got his

shackle. He's got that doll, Like,

it's broken with the coin. And literally, it's just like that was really

well constructed. That was really well constructed. This this novel is

excellent. Well and and let me let me throw

in one other thing there, and then we'll go back to the book here.

When Ellison initially,

did his writers.

He was writing from the perspective, or not

perspective, his first initial efforts at writing,

copied the voice of, ironically enough, Ernest Hemingway.

Mhmm. And that's where he started.

And so The Sun Also Rises was published in the

1920s. Ellison didn't publish,

Invisible Man until 1952. He was a notoriously

slow writer, so it's 7 years writing it. And of course,

he didn't attend Tuskegee until he was 20 in 1933 where

he was first exposed to, not only TS Eliot,

but also, would have been exposed to Hemingway and all of those

other writers of the modernist

era. Back to the book,

back to The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. So

we're gonna skip ahead a little bit, and we're going to

go to chapter 5. Now again, we're

doing a little bit of a different thing here. If you wanna pick up the

book, go ahead and get it. We're not reading directly from the book today.

We're gonna do we're doing a little more as you could tell from what we

did during that that first sort of piece there. A little more of a deep

dive at the literary level, and at the leadership

level on Invisible Man. So, in

chapter 5, chapter 5 is an interesting chapter. So this

chapter, begins following Invisible Man

Sorrells de Rolo has put on him Nameless. This

follows on Nameless's journey,

through, well, actually, a disastrous trip, to

town, the town outside of the university in

this unnamed southern state. And the

town, during in the town, the

the the invisible man, was

chauffeuring around, a white trustee named

mister Norton. And mister Norton and the

Invisible Man wind up in a,

lower class sharecropper's cabin. And they

hear a shocking story of incest and the

result of that incest. And

as a result of the shock from that story, The

Invisible Man Chauffeurs, mister

Norton, to a bar known as the Golden Day, a bar

filled with mental patients. I think that was I thought that was a

whorehouse filled with veterans who have

mental disease, but okay. But that's what I thought it was. I mean, they

got a bar, but they got it upstairs. You know? Yeah. Right. I think it

was I think it was a combo. You talk about the arc Covenant Combo. I

think it was a combo situation. Yes. Some of those people

were veterans. Yes. Some of the individuals in there, were definitely

ladies of the night, And In the middle of the

day. In the middle of the day. Golden day. The middle of the golden day.

Exactly. And so Ellison is playing with some tropes

here in this chapter or in the chapter previous to chapter

5. So in chapter 5, Invisible man is

shaken Tom say the least, and he's a young student.

He's class conscious. You can see that in the engagement with the lower

class sharecropper. You could see that in his engagement with mister Norton.

He's almost painfully class conscious, but not

as painfully race conscious. And this is

something that is an important distinction with a difference that is about

to hit him Upside the Head. Mhmm.

Now after that terrible journey in

chapter 4, We get to chapter 5, and,

Invisible Man winds up in a chapel listening

to a speech delivered, in the

tune of an old Baptist or to the cadence of an old Baptist preacher,

delivered by a fellow named Homer

a Barbee.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but

Homer, just like

the Homer in Greek

myth.

Homer well,

Homer's gonna tell you a tale. Homer's going to tell you a tale of an

odyssey, an odyssey of the founder. He's

going to lay the foundations of the

institution that the Invisible Man is attending, and he's

doing this in order to raise the spirits of the

students there and to let them know what exactly it

is that they are going there for.

Barbery relates the founder's story, and the narrative of that

story bridges the confusion the Invisible Man is feeling as a student

following his experiences, his his

his very, very class conscious experiences with mister

Norton in a

chauffeured vehicle. Now the irony of all of this

is that the founder who is being, I

won't say lampooned. I I I wouldn't go that far with Ellison.

But who is being narratively identified is indeed

Booker t Washington and the institution that's being talked about by

Homer Barbee, is the Tuskegee Institute.

And, I will be honest, I didn't really realize that that was what was

happening until about halfway through Homer's speech,

and I went, oh, That's what Ellison's doing here. He's

talking about Tuskegee. And then,

and then it was like a little, a little, A

little gap began to open in my understanding, and I

began to see something that de Rolo and I

talked about when we talked about W. E. B. Du Bois's

Sorrells of Black Folk. And we talked about, back in episode number

49, we discussed how There Was A Split in

Black Culture. And it exists even a year later,

between the upper class Black intellectuals, folks who went

to Pacie de Rolo Jesan, but folks who went to Cornell,

books who are going to Harvard currently. And we could talk a

little bit about if we wanna, if we wanna more contemporize

this, we could talk about Claudine Gay if we would like, but the Claudine

Gay, Ibrahim X, Kendi, Tahaa Nazi

coats, tied to folks who run the intellectual

bought life or think they do of of African Americans, black

people in this country. Mhmm. There's a split in that

culture between those folks and the folks who,

as I framed it last year on the podcast, and I will continue to frame

it this year, the folks who actually do the chauffeuring and

drive the buses, the folks who do the sharecropping and the

folks who have to go and work with people of all

races, At Work and Have to Make Nice.

Mhmm. And by the way, make nice is probably a terrible term, it's not really

making nice. It's called social negotiation. It's what we all have to

do. There is a split in black culture between

those two perspectives, and Ellison understood that this

split was evident. And by the way, it's going to become even more sharper

when we get to chapter 6. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are critical

chapters in Invisible Man. And if you don't read any of the other parts of

that book, I would encourage you to read those 4, those 3 chapters in a

row because they define very much

what is happening right now in

2024, I will probably be continuing

into 2025 and 2026 in black culture in

America. Now, Homer

Barbee is named after the writer, as I said before, of The Odyssey and The

Iliad. And interestingly enough,

not to give too much away, but he's blind.

He's blind like the cyclops in Greek myth. I don't think

Ellison did that accidentally either.

He can only remember, Barbie, like the blinded

patriarch of King Lear. He can only remember

the story and provide soaring rhetoric, but he cannot

provide genuine wisdom, which is what the invisible man or

nameless is looking for. With

this speech, and this is the other thing that Ellison does, this genius,

with this speech begins Nameless's descent

into the black Americanized version of Dante's Inferno,

mashed up with Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, replete with a

job that winds him up in a hellish manufacturing

basement where he's monitoring valves

underneath watchful eye of a union busting

elderly African American gentleman Mhmm.

Somewhere in New York City. Now to put this

in a historical context, Ellison It's on Long Island. It's on Long Island. It's on

Long Island. It's on Long Island. Okay. It's on Long Island. Alright. Yep. Now to

put this in a historical context, Ellison, at the time, is writing

this as a Marxist

radical. He he was a radicalized Marxist,

and he later softened his rhetoric

in a fashion similar to the writer Albert Murray, who we haven't read on the

podcast, but we will. I'm fascinated by Albert Murray, and we're gonna There's

leadership lessons we can pull from Murray as well. And

Ellison, of course, wound up disillusioned with ideological

posing and posturing, and he wanted real change

for Black people in America.

But at the time of this writing, he was captured by Marxist ideals.

Because in 1919 33, when he went into

Tuskegee and on to the other side of 1950 Tom

when you finally published A Visible Man. Marxist

socialism was considered to be the ideology that was doing

the best for the most people on the face of the planet.

Of course, at the time, due to the writing of the New York Times

of Walter Duranty and many others, Most people did not

know that Stalin was purging, and

there were gulags, and there was massive repression,

and the ideology of the state. The

totalizing ideology of the state was locking up guys like

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and torturing people

and killing them, because in order to

publish Pravda, sometimes gotta break a few eggs.

Mhmm. By the

way, just as a side note, I don't fault anybody in the early 20th

century up until about 1950, 1950,

1945, 1950. I don't fault any people for

having Marxist views in the 1st part of 20th century. I

really don't. I do? I don't. Because they didn't they didn't really know.

They didn't really know, and the truth wasn't built know what? What

didn't they know? Here's what they didn't know. And and by the way, thank you

for challenging me on this because people often push back on me on this.

Mhmm. I don't hold people responsible

because, number 1, People didn't

know the things about Lennon that we know now. They just didn't.

Lennon was a great propagandist who managed

to make his own image, last

quite strongly through a good chunk of the 20th century. That's number 1.

Number 2, Marxism actually at that

point, and people say this now and people born after

1952, I fault them for saying this, but Marxism actually at that

point was an ideology that had not wound up in its

logical spot. It hadn't wound up in its clearing at the end of the path.

It hadn't actually been fully tried. Now

anybody born after 1950 when they say, well, Marxism hasn't been fully tried,

not even Marxist, Communism hasn't been fully tried. I laugh at those

people out of the room because communism has been fully tried, Marxism has been

fully tried, and it has been found wanting. By the way, it's

the the fully tried part of Marxism is where you wind up with gulags and

concentration camps. That's the fully tried part.

Mhmm. Mhmm. But at the time, pre

1952, we didn't we didn't in the west, anyway, we

didn't realize all of that. Then number 3, the third

reason why I don't hold anybody responsible for following Marxism or

believing in the value of a Marxist worldview

is because the people

who had the courage to write about it, who were in opposition to

that, we're being actively repressed by intellectuals in the

West. Mhmm. Because the intellectual class,

just like with any other luxury belief that they have in the 21st century, The

1st century wanted desperately for Marxism to

book. Mhmm. And they were not willing to kill it in its

in its cradle. They weren't willing to strangle it in its cradle. And

then World War 2 came along, and everybody had to make sort of some some

some decisions intellectually, morally, psychologically,

spiritually. And

book, say what you want, and we do say

a lot, but I think World War 2

went the best it possibly could have gone.

And I'll just leave it at that. Book have always been

better, but it was the best out of a series of bad choices.

So those are that's my reasoning. That's my reasoning. I called them because

Human nature and human experience provide

enough of an education to know from the beginning that

there's something fundamentally wrong with

It's why you can read the brilliant

allegory of that brilliant, You

know, socialist yet realist George Sorrells.

Mhmm. Read Animal Farm, which I'm sure you've done in your podcast, but when you

read Animal Farm,

you get angry. And as you're reading this allegory

Mhmm. You can feel the emotion building because

you're reading about these acts of injustice, and you're seeing the

blindness of Certain animals to what's going on and what's being done to them and

what they're acquiescing in, and it's infuriating.

And so, and, of course, the very first time I read it in

middle school, I was able because of my love of history

and my reading, I recognized What the parallels were Tom,

so I could then begin to predict what was gonna happen. Because it just it

tracks with, you know, Bolshevik history. So,

Anyway, so why I fault them is that

human nature and human experience Tells them

enough. Tells the the viewer

of or the consumer of Marxist ideology

that This is fundamentally unsound at best

and evil at worst. And so,

That but that's one of the reasons that it's it's a cop

out from having to make harder choices.

And we're human. We don't like making hard choices. Okay?

In fact, that's part of human nature, not to want to to

shirk Making hard choices is part of human nature. And so,

you know, Marxism offers a compromise

to a more just and fair society, but because it

requires injustice to get there, Therefore,

fundamentally, axiomatically, it can't lead to a more just

and fair society that In order to get

a more just and fair society, you have to somehow produce

more just and fair people. And

we only produce people One way. They all come

from a woman who's an actual woman and not

anybody masturbating as a woman. Okay.

And then you've got to raise this creature

these creatures knowing that it

is not only what you tell them, but what you show

them That helps direct their paths,

that helps expose them to how they ought to

behave, and thus, It it presupposes

that we be more just and fair people

and thus produce more just and fair people to get to a more just and

fair society. Nobody's got time for that. It takes multiple generations. And

so we're all looking for shortcuts, and Marxism offers a

shortcut. It also offers a scapegoat. It offers a

way for the privileged to ask to

wage their guilt. And if it happens

to cost a few Dozen or a few 1000000 lives, so

be it. Now I can be at peace in my

castle with my things because This is what we've done out

there, and now you can no longer tell me that

you haven't been given this opportunity. You haven't been provided this

book that you need. Not realizing that, of

course, as soon as you turn on the end the NV machine, there's it doesn't

go off. It doesn't need gasoline. It just keeps running. So,

eventually, they're gonna turn on you just because you're there with something

they don't have. And to me, all of

this, it's it's in there. It's in there. Okay. So the question then

becomes so the question Jesan becomes The DNA of it. Okay. So then the

question becomes, and by the way, I don't argue. I don't argue against

all of that being in the DNA of Marxism. You're absolutely correct.

My only assertion is that, and by the way, Orwell published Animal

Farm in 1945. Okay? Just wanted to grab, I

wanted to grab that date. I don't think it

was fully or widely disseminated until the

1950s or so, and And I do think the 1950s is a

critical time in the middle 20th century when the

tide begins to turn, in the West anyway,

against Marxism because of the things you stated now are

fundamentally being realized because, again,

Marxism up until the 19 fifties. And

again, Marxism only had, what, a 25 year long lifespan, something

like that, at least political Marxism. Cultural Marxism has

a seemingly endless lifespan.

But political Marxism, had a 25 year,

at least in, in, in the context of the, of, of the Soviet

Union versus the West, a 25 year long lifespan of

being tried. Now, anything that happens after 1950 happens

because of exactly what you have stated, becomes because now people become

aware of this and they become aware of the sharpness of this in the west

because the thing wound up at its logical conclusion. Just

like Short circuiting the French Revolution didn't lead

to less revolution. It just led to more of it

because the French revolutionary

Jacobean sort of

perspective was not fully allowed to

play out.

And this now becomes the question. So

for all of us born after 1950,

which is the vast majority of folks who listen to this podcast,

who know all of this. The question becomes,

particularly for those of us who may have more melanin in

our skin, Why are we captured by

the cultural version of Marxism? Because the cultural version of Marxism,

and this drives me absolutely crazy. I have my own ideas on why, but why

are we captured by the cultural version of Marxism? Because it's going to

produce it's the same envy machine just turned on in culture,

and it's going to wind up in the same place, and we know where we

know what the clearing at the end of the path is.

We are no we can no longer claim that we are disillusioned. We can no

longer claim that we do not know. We can no longer claim that Marxism has

not been fully tried. It has been fully tried. We know where it ends

up. DiRollo just said it. DiRollo, why are black

intellectuals captured by cultural Marxism? Why? Why was

Ellison captured by cultural Marxism?

I have an answer. Okay.

Bear with me a sec. Sure.

I think that and I just you know, even even, you

know, Dare we say it, you know, the reverend doctor Martin Luther King Junior.

Right? Mhmm. I think when you reach a point

in the struggle for More equality

and justice in America. I think when you reach a point

of recognition That despite your best

efforts, the mass of society is not changing

podcast enough, perhaps, but just not changing.

Disillusionment can set in when one has

assumed that through one's efforts, A

more just and fair society on a wide scale can be

produced quickly. And

so then one looks for the shortcut. And that's

to me, that's when one has the best motives.

That's that, in my opinion, is what happens. When someone

in contrast is disposed to hating the society,

hating this magnificent scheme of constitutional rights that's supposed to

work In a color blind fashion that was set up to

work in a color blind fashion. And, you know, was it hijacked

by White Power Freaks, yes. But, you know,

it was supposed to function in a way that

It didn't matter what you looked like. This is these are the rights you

had as a man. These are the rights you had as a woman. These institutions

are supposed Tom force them. Great. Now go live your Libby. You know?

It it was wonderful. But anyway, there are people who are disposed to hate

that system Anyway and so for them, I

think jumping on the bandwagon

of a political movement whose Stated

goal is to overturn that system

just is a more natural choice, and and one more easily

made. But it's the, you know, the idealists who then are

disillusioned, like nameless. Right? Nameless is disillusioned,

several times in this, book. And

they're beautiful moments where there's even foreshadowing,

you know. Mhmm. Again, like, I approach this, reading this,

as someone who I have a degree in English literature. So I I and, again,

I concentrated in the modern novel. I know how to approach this. And this this

is extremely well written. But just, you know, beautiful moments of

foreshadowing, like when brother Jack

tells nameless, you are right not to trust me.

That's what he says in the beginning. It's right there. It's just like

and I circled it then because I realized not knowing what's coming, I said to

myself, oh, this this is wise insight. You're absolutely

right. Whoever you are, whatever you're gonna do, that that is true.

And so later on, it's like, hey. Wait. Does he he told you.

He told you. And you, naive

young man, now you're getting it. And it's it's a

shame because, Oh, I just saw it. I

just literally, another insight just came. I was about to say it's a

shame that, you know, it actually didn't

caught his invisibility Libby which he in which he finds himself at the

end didn't podcast him his eyes. Thinking of

Oedipus and thinking of Jesan. And then it's like, wait a minute. But but it

did. But, ding. It's just like, oh, but I just saw that. I

literally just saw, No pun intended. I just saw that. And it's just like,

yep. This this this is this is

excellent. Like, This needs to be taught, Chuo.

You could spend quarter of a year on this book, and it would be worth

it in in in a high school literature class. Like,

what are you gonna do this year? We're gonna do 4 books, 1 per marking

period, and we're gonna spend real time in them. We're gonna read them more than

once, and you're going to understand when we're done. This is

what a great American novel is like. Such that, when

you're then trying to find the next one or write the next one, you'll know

how to construct. You know, a a a a beautiful masterpiece,

you know, because that's this is what it is. It's it's literally

phenomenal. And you see the young man on his journey. Oh, you

mean you see the odyssey? Yes. You see the

odyssey. Oh, so maybe we should teach those

old gray dust covered yes. We

should. Absolutely. In fact, and you

should probably read at least 2 versions because,

what the heck is her last name? Professor Emily Wilson

just did she just her Iliad just came out, her translation of it, and the

Odyssey came out, I think, like, 5, 6 years ago. And so I

would read reading her

versions, I think, makes sense, and then reading at least one other, I think, sense.

But, I think what she's doing with classics is amazing, which is, of

course, why I'm talking about her right now. So Of course. Yeah. Okay.

So Homer Homer Barbee. Let's let's I wanna go I wanna

wind back to here because around that cultural Marxism,

there is a tension, and we're going to explore this in sort of the next

section here. We're gonna talk about the molding

of the white underclass by doctor Bledsoe.

The dynamic

that is on the other side of this is the dynamic

that Homer represents. Now, Homer is blind. Yes.

Homer Libby can only deliver soaring rhetoric, but

not wisdom. Yes. But Homer

Barbee represents the founder, the Booker T

Washington, the institution of Tuskegee,

an institution that Ellison himself found to be, as

was mentioned earlier, class conscious.

And you get this sense, reading chapters 4, 5,

and 6 of Invisible Man, that

Ellison could not resolve this tension. He could merely expose it, which

is I think there's something else that great literature does. It exposes the

tension, it does not necessarily seek to resolve it all

the time. And the tension that exists is between

institutions that are class consciousness and dare class conscious, and dare

I say, bourgeois, to use a Marxist framing,

versus institutions that are not class

conscious or at least claim to not be class conscious and came

to be culturally, free or Sorrells

free, and and and make a and lay a claim to the

Marxist definition of freedom where

Everyone has everything shared equally. Okay.

Homer represents that institution Jushin and Ellison has Homer being

blind. And by the way, nameless doesn't realize that

Homer is blind until Homer stumbles, which also is

interesting. Stumbles while

going to sit after delivering his speech, stumbles

while going back Tom sit down next to doctor Bledsoe.

We talked about this last year with Booker t Washington versus W. E. B

Dubois. We kind of have developed it, delved into a little bit here. But to

me, this is this is the representative tension

in black American, culture. This

is the representative tension. It's between the Book two Washington

folks and the W. E. B. Du Bois folks. It it's no

more It's no more complicated than that. And the Booker 2

Washington folks, the black middle class,

seek to raise up, Oh, not secretarial. Number 1, they are

embarrassed by the Black lower class, which was represented

in Invisible Man by the Incest

Driven Sharecropper.

So there's an embarrassment there. There's a realization

that the only way to bring yourself up

to sort of beyond parallel with the white

man, such as it were, is through education.

And and by the way, I always mention this every single time we do these

podcasts, but I went to a state school. I didn't go to Cornell, but I

read a lot of books. DeRolla went to Sorrells,

comparatively in in in in black

American culture in the early 21st century. We are considered to

be privileged by other black people who also went

to the same institutions that we went that we went to,

which is ironic and interesting. And we, of course, are tagged

as Black men in America with this

invisible duty, and I'm going to write about this in my upcoming book. I'm

writing a series of cultural commentary essays, which this is the 1st

public announcement of that, and so they are going to be coming out

later on this year, but I'm writing about, I'm writing a particular essay about this

tension between what I quote unquote

'owe the race' versus

just because there should be some, some sense of racial solidarity, because I happen to

share melanin with you versus what I don't owe

a society where the majority may not share my melanin with

me. There's a tension there. And I have always, this is why part

of the reason why I've run back to Hemingway, I've always rejected that tension

because I think that's a false dichotomy. Mhmm. And I

think it's pretend, and I think that it allows

cynical race hustling to exist, which

Doctor. Bledsoe represents the cynical part of that, and we're gonna visit

him in just a Jesan, but the disillusioned part, the part

that seeks to keep, individuals like

Nameless in naivete Mhmm. Is

represented by the Baptist ramblings

of Homer Barbee. And if you go and read Homer Barbee's recitation

of what the founder did, there's actually nothing

there. Now that's Ellison's critique of

Booker t Washington, but, again, it's a critique from the political, if we're gonna

go there, political left. It's not a critique

from the political right. A critique from the

political right would have had Homer speaking

in actual practical terms of how many people

that institution actually raised up out of the

dust of sharecropping and put them on a

road to being middle class. An actual recitation

of the actual story of the founder would have involved,

not how the founder,

fooled white people into giving him money to start the

school and had a statue built well of him.

It wouldn't have included that or or or how the founder

pretended to be subservient and yet had victory over

Whitey, it wouldn't have included any of that, which, by the way, the the distribution

did include that. It would have instead, as a critique from the right,

would have included how many people

of a particular melanin were led to a greater conception

of liberty through their own through the use of their

own skills and ability regardless of whether or

not the society was racially opposed to them.

It would have been a story of victory from the right. It would have been

a critique of the potential of that person

from the right. And this is why there's only 1 doctor Martin

Luther King, but why there are many,

many, many progeny after Malcolm X.

Many, many, many. Okay. Okay?

My main pushback book Ellison in this chapter, after my main pushback

on Homer Barbee, is that it sets up

the

It sets up the manipulation of nameless as

a person with no agency, and so it's

not, it's, it's the, the, the logical conclusion of that is, of course, you will

become invisible. You have no agency.

Now Sorrells, to your point, will not become invisible.

You'll still be able to see, but you'll have no agency.

And I think that was Ellison's frustration, was that

these tensions don't lead to a greater either tensions from the left or tensions from

the right don't lead to a greater understanding or a greater agency

of the individual. And by the way, Ellison Podhertz makes this point

in and his critique of Ellison. Every time he ran into Ellison, Ellison

always spoke from the position of black people being individuals.

That was Ellison's main critique against Baldwin. Baldwin wanna put everybody in a

group. It's like, get the hell out of town. We're actually

individuals. Mhmm. Who are you to put me

in a group? I don't know you. Just because we happen

to share the same skin tone doesn't mean I share anything else with

you. And by the way, I'm gonna double down and bring it up to the

front of 2024. Just because I happen to

share the same melanin as a Glenn Lau

as a Glenn, a Lowry, or a John McWhorter, or

Atani Nhasi Coats or Nicole Hannah Jones, she

of the 16/19 project, does not mean they speak for me.

Doesn't mean that they know the solution to the problem. We just happen to

be the same skin tone. That's the absence of

genetics. Well, here is some pushback. I have pushback.

Yeah. Pushback. Yeah. No. No. I wasn't asking. I'm I'm saying here

is some pushback. Yeah. Pushback. Yeah. So one of the

values of this novel, and it's a strange thing to say, but one of the

values of this novel is how it serves as a cultural artifact.

Because in his time, there was

still a lot of internal unity within,

broadly, African Americans as a social group.

Okay? And Okay. There were certain powerful

dynamics that played out, and certain

shared cultural traits, shared cultural experiences

that created An instantaneous feeling of,

dare we say it, brotherhood. Okay. Even at

a remove of 800 miles or a 1000 Miles, however

far it is, from the middle of Alabama to Manhattan. Right.

And he did a good job of showing that. For example, How

many for we're talking he is

Ellison, and nameless is who I'm now talking about. Nameless met

meets in the book or met in the book. Many

individuals who knew as soon as he started talking, oh, you're from the South. Right.

Yep. Or saw how he dressed or whatever it was and started immediately

talking to him As Northerners would talk to Southerners,

meaning By the way, I wanna drop unsophisticated, you know

I wanna drop in another name just to sort of help you with where you're

going with this with Push book, Thomas Sowell

came from this time. Right. Right.

Okay. So Thomas Sowell, fundamentally, looks

at everything that happens in the post civil rights era

Uh-huh. And goes, what the hell?

Because I mean, he's he's a much more polite man with who's much more errored

with much more erudition than myself, but he goes, what the hell?

But okay. So I'm gonna get back to my point. So Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You have this great internal cultural unity. He

does a great job of showing, that within the

southern context, regardless of

social class. Right? Mhmm. And thus,

Nameless is in his milieu that is not really.

Okay? I have so part of my notes that

I have on reading this, which, of course, is what you do when you're studying

a novel. I have questions. And the very first question I wrote was, Why

are the campus fountains broken?

Everything is perfect, but the campus fountains

are broken. So what does

freely flowing controlled water represent?

Where is that? Where do we see,

rivers? Where do we see, you know, that which

gives life? Okay. And so my interpretation of why the

fountains are broken is because this is a little artifact,

and they're just keeping it going, keeping it going. And and you'll you'll notice

Nameless's original ambition was to stay in that

pseudo Eden forever Tom

become like doctor Bledsoe, to stay there and then teach there. And so it's like,

well, what is he actually doing? Nothing. He's literally running on a treadmill.

He got introduced to a treadmill, and then he's running on a treadmill. And the

problem he has is that he fell off the treadmill, But the

point I'm sure well, the problem is he the not the problem he had.

The first event that happened to him that got him on the

road To actual clarity at some point. What was that he fell off the

treadmill? Right? He he fell out of his Eden, but the point I was trying

to raise is that whether he's talking to True Blood, The

sharecropper with his significant family

issues, living in slave cabins, okay, or

It doesn't matter who it was in the golden day.

The bartender knew who he was. People knew where he came

from. There was this tremendous internal

cultural unity. Now you shift up north, and one of the

critiques I have of of the writing of this Is

that Nameless wouldn't have known or shouldn't have known what a West

Indian sounded like. And so there was an introduction

Tom, this person sounds funny. I can't figure out

where they're from. Right. Because in New York, you would have had West

Indians West Indians like the parents of general

Colin Powell. Mhmm. Right? In New

Book, Very normal. Not in the middle of Alabama. Not even

close. And so how how

The way in which the author identified that the person was a West Indian, I

didn't like that because there should have been something

that forced nameless to learn this black person is not a

black person like us. This black person is from this island over here,

but is now in our midst and sharing in this

struggle and suffering some of the same abuses and

perfectly willing to use violence on Irish American

policemen because they happen to be

evicting a woman in the middle of winter. You know? And the policeman wasn't.

He was just there. It was they they're just there. Guys. They they they they

they told me. But, anyway so against that

background, I understand how someone whom

I don't know can see me. We share melanin, and we may share some

experience, etcetera, and we can establish a rapport very easily.

For me, I started in the position you were in, and I

literally, this is what I articulate to my father. Like, I don't know these people.

Like, why am I saying I don't know who these people are. I don't know

who these people are. They don't know me. They don't know my middle name. That's

a joke. If you know me, you'll get it. They don't know my middle name.

They don't know The first thing about de Rolo Nixon

junior, what do I share in common with him? And then you can fast forward

in a very few amount of years. I was probably Well, you can fast forward

to when I was 20, abroad, a French speaker, and then I'd

see black people, and, of course, we'd nod and say hello. It's Totally by that

point, it was totally at that point, I got it. So it's totally normal to

me. And I remember foreign white friends of

mine being baffled by that experience.

It'd be like, do you know him? And it's like, no. I don't know him.

But it it did and they just couldn't grasp

How both he and I could just there we go. They

couldn't get it. Fine. So the so the seduction so

the seduction of a

racially no. Let me let me let me

Let me push back on this idea of, of of Eden.

Ellison brings nameless out of Eden

because you eventually have to get kicked out of the garden.

That's just how it works. Writers? And we can, we as Christians

can argue about or could talk about the

nature of sin and evil and choices and separating life

from dark and all of that. Ellison doesn't get into any of that. It would

have been interesting if he did, but he wasn't going in that direction, and that

wasn't what he was writing. He was doing something

that every great adventure novel does, which

Invisible man is a great adventure novel. You, you

push the hero out into the world so that the hero kills

snakes or, or fights dragons.

The dragons of 1940s

1950s American society were, of course,

Jim Crow, and

particularly for a black American in, during those times

were was were that was the biggest dragon. That was the biggest thing to slay.

And so pushing Oh, it wasn't the sound. Right? It wasn't

Right. It wasn't the issue in the north. In the north, I would say Well,

everybody everybody said everybody everybody says that, but the knock on

effects from Jim Crow were in the north.

There's there's no there's no geographic distancing of

this, you know? Well, I think there is. I think there is. I think

there is. I think there is. I think I think Ellison

got that point and thus put it into his,

into his novel. There were ways in which Norton was

out of place in the middle of Alabama, knew he was out of place,

but was committed to what they were doing, and he was thus

contrasted easily to those men in the

first scenes in the novel, you know, that

random freaking blind prize

fight. Right? We're at the end well, here's your, you know, here's your

little token we give you. Oh, by the way, we're actually gonna give you this.

Oh, yes, sir. You're all bloodied, and you can you can speak to us.

Yeah. Yay. Those men, that that was a

different milieu. Okay? And and and I don't wanna talk

about like that in the North Shore. Not a doubt in my mind. But

the way the society approached the issues and the

history of, The way

the limiting of opportunities for black people took place

in a place like New York. It they their their

Differences that, in my opinion, matter.

I don't think they matter for the narrow thing we're talking I mean,

I do think they matter for the overall novel for sure. But for the

narrow thing I'm I'm I'm trying to get to here, they don't matter. And the

narrow thing I'm trying to get to here is

I think that the reason a novel like

this doesn't get talked about nearly

as much as it should be talked about in Black

culture, particularly

now is because of 2 things that have

happened simultaneously that have impacted all of American culture,

but most notably have impacted black culture.

Okay. What are those 2 things? So the 2 things that have happened are

atomization due to the Internet

Jesan

social media that has impacted that has impacted

overall American culture ridiculously, it has impacted black culture,

quite notoriously. And then the second thing that

has happened is, and we've already, again, we've already talked about

this, is the prevalence

of the power of

intellectual cultural Marxism being gust

being gussied up and sold as institutional

as as battles against institutionalized white racism.

Uh-huh. And from there, I go directly to Claudine Gay's

problems. I don't know Claudine Gay.

Now just so we can give some background to folks who may not know, Just

let me give a little background here. Claudine Gay was,

the president of Harvard for about 5 minutes. She is most

notorious for being in the public eye as a

person who went to Congress, could not robustly,

how could I say this, repudiate antisemitism in a Harvard,

in her Harvard, in the Harvard culture over which she presides,

was then hoisted by her own petard, by a sub

stacker named Christopher Rufo who went to

Harvard Extension, not Harvard,

and discovered that she had, plagiarized. And the

level to which she had plagiarized, we can argue about, but had discovered that she

had plagiarized. And, by the way, On The Ground had a thin

actually, shall I essays, nonexistent CV of publication.

That was strike 1 and 2. Strike 3 was that

the Harvard hedge fund managers who actually run the money of

that institution decided that they were going to get up on their high

horse and run her out of town, and they did.

They ran her out of the Harvard presidency, and so she

has been demoted not from,

just not from the Harvard institution as a whole, just been demoted

from Harvard president and gets to hold on to her faculty position to the

tune of $900,000 a year in salary

with benefits. By the way, Ms. Gay

comes from a Ivy League background, which is the only way you

get that get to be considered from that kind of role. And her background

is Tom the point about the role we just made about being about West,

West Indians. She's Haitian.

That's some background on Claudine Gett. So to go back to what I was

saying, Those 2 factors, the atomization

that has been provided by the Internet and social media,

that breaking apart of people from the solidarity of groups

and internal solidarity that you were talking about, that inter that Eden of

internal cohesion is now being busted apart everywhere. We are all being

turned into atomized individual units. I I read something the other

day where it made the analogy, to some things that are happening in our

culture of 1,000,000 ants all being on the march.

1,000,000 ants have finally turned in in in a in a collective direction,

that it's really hard for a mass

to stop 1,000,000 ants. It it it it's really hard.

My point is this has happened to black culture. That's the 1 step, and then

the 2 step is that cultural Marxism that has infected our intellectual

elites. Our intellectual elites have not been infected by the

by the pull your rope by your bootstraps, a

matter

ideas of a Booker T Washington. Those have been

abandoned, and I don't think either one of those

writers, allows for

a modern Black Jesan. You talk about this book being a cultural

artifact, allows for a modern Black person to even understand what

Ellison is talking about. I think if I put this book in

front of, let's say you you talked

about reading it in high school. I I think if I put this in front

of 10th graders in a Chicago high school,

they wouldn't be able to read it, but they know

how to do TikTok.

Mhmm. They wouldn't be able to read it, much less comprehending.

Fundamental educational problem. Yes. It's possible that a

good number of That would not be I I agree a 100%.

Okay. I don't think so I I I I

think what is more of a driver of the

atomization, are 2

cultural Effects that

precede one of your points. Okay? Go ahead.

Namely, I I think the two effects

are the overwhelming success of the

civil rights movement in the sixties Okay. And the suburbanization

of America. Okay. And because of those factors,

we can have an atomization. Well, 1, we're spread across the country in ways we

weren't before. To Mhmm. We can have an atomization that leaves

us marooned as individuals in, in in these

isolated islands of loneliness or whatever.

But that wouldn't be possible if we were all

shoved in urban ghettos or in this mass called the South

with its dominating culture and,

and institutional racism. I don't think it it it it could be

possible without, The civil rights movement

being, you know, very successful and the suburbanization of

of of American culture, you know. And so now, Power centers,

etcetera, they're not urban based the same way they were before. Mhmm. You

know, culture happened. American culture and the the the

seat of American culture Became a couch. Okay?

It used to be a seat in a theater. Okay? Or a seat

in some kind of performance hall in a large city. It Shifted

to being a freaking couch or a seat in a movie

theater that is still in a suburb. That's what happens. Okay.

Everybody moved to Long Island, keeping the trope

alive. Well, it is not a trope he used,

but because of Because the factory is found on Long Island and this guy was

and nameless was living in New York City, I'm gonna keep the trope that way.

So and it it's a trope that my family went through. So there you go.

Meaning My father's mother took him and 2 of his

siblings, the 2 alive at the time, and moved them from

rural, segregated East Carolina,

where the family had lived literally for 100 of years

Tom New York and then quickly to Long Island. So

Everybody moved to Long Island, and now this suburbanization,

you know, could begin. And so,

The culture shift, the cultural seat shifted. The throne as it were of our

cult, they shifted. They were then found in different places. And so,

arguably, it's that's actually far more efficient, of a model

than the one, before in terms of no. Not not

efficient. It's it's it's It's evidence of scale.

Okay? Okay. That when it went from urban to suburban, it

scaled. Okay? That's that's that's an example of scale. In an urban

setting, you You gotta every you gotta be there, get in the halls, you gotta

travel there, be able to survive there, it's more expensive there, blah blah blah.

When it reach the couch phase. Okay?

Okay. This is affordable. Mass market, all of

those, you know, Trends coming out of the, you know, post World War 2

fifties, big corporate era. Right? And so here here they are playing out in

culture in in many ways. Alright. Well, back to the book. This is a good

spot Tom go back to the book, back to the book, back to

Invisible Man by Ralph Allison. So again, the 3 most

important chapters probably in the 1st part of this book are chapter 4, 5, and

6, and so we turn to a summary of chapter

6. Following Horary

Barbee's, rousing speech that

re deifies the founder.

The the Invisible Man or Nameless is still

confused. He's still in the space of naivete. He's not yet been

kicked out of Eden quite just yet, but it's coming. And it's coming

in the form of a gentleman named doctor Bledsoe. So chapter

6 opens up with the Invisible

Man being full of hope from Barbie's speech, but also full

of trepidation because he doesn't wanna leave Eaton. He doesn't wanna leave

his comfortable spot and go someplace else,

and he does not know what will happen when he goes and

talks to the estimable doctor Bledsoe.

First thing he does is he goes and checks to see if mister Norton, is

okay. The, the, white man he was chauffeuring

around town, who unfortunately wound up in unfortunate

circumstances. And then he goes to

see the head of the school, like I said, the aforementioned doctor Bledsoe.

The doctor Bledsoe character is a,

attempt by Ellison

to,

preserve the institutional

value of, to DiRollo's point, Eden.

And Bledsoe lays out very cynically, or the invisible

man, exactly what he's doing,

in Alabama. And what he's doing is he's

manipulating white people to get them to give him

money for the cynical the most cynical of reasons

and the most cynical of outcomes, and that everything that the

Invisible Man did with mister Norton, who was a white trust who is a white

trustee in the book, everything that he did,

threatened everything that doctor Bledsoe had. Doctor

Bledsoe was set up as a

character that is sitting on top of

a hierarchy, is ruling that hierarchy,

and is not looking to be replaced nor be removed,

Even how he is described as being,

fat, as being, as being,

full of, not jolliness, but full of

sort of cynical cheer. All of these are

symbols, literary symbols that Ellison is using to move the

reader towards this idea that Bledsoe is an

early proto,

prototype of individuals that would come

later in the civil rights movement, and he is an early prototype of those

individuals. He's an early version of Jesse Jackson or

a chubbier version of Al Sharpton.

Doctor Bledsoe says to the Invisible Man that basically he's

manipulating these white people. Everything that the Invisible Man did with mister

Dorton threatens his manipulation and that he has to leave the

institution, but He will be allowed to return

if he just takes 7 letters of introduction. And so he

takes those 7 letters because the invisible man is still naive at the

time. Nameless is still naive. Mhmm. Takes those 7 letters,

gets on a bus, which ironically enough has a

A former a former veteran veterinarian

on it who helped him out with mister Norton,

and takes his bus out of Eden to go to

Harlem. The most interesting thing for me

about chapter 6 is that

doctor Bledsoe's efforts keep the narrator away from

his school, and they are reflective of a multiplicity of

various psychosocial dynamics within the Black community in America for at

least the last 100 years. I see doctor Bledsoe's everywhere.

Everywhere in the black community. They're like whack a

mole. And the fundamental point, I think, to remember

about Ellison's book is that it is not primarily about the racism of

white people. That's just background fodder. That's,

table stakes, such as it were. That was the thing he expected everybody to

know because this is, as de Rolo already said, a cultural artifact of its time.

He expected everybody in 1952 to know that this is

what he's writing about. So he wasn't really writing about that because he didn't need

to say it out loud. Instead, he is writing, I

think I think Ellison's book is primarily about the

about black people being kept down by other black people and about the

cynical grifting of white people by black people who

claimed to possess loftier goals.

By the way, we see this cynical grifting even in our own era from

Barack Obama and the Black Lives Matter movement all the way to the race

hustling. I already mentioned Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, all the way to the

cultural cache or the former cultural cache of folks

like Oprah and Bill Cosby.

By the way, I was never a fan of Oprah, and Eddie Murphy got a

call allegedly from Bill Cosby back in the day to tell him not to be

so dirty. And Richard Pryor when he when Eddie Murphy told Richard

Pryor what Bill Cosby said, Richard Pryor allegedly

said, tell Bill Tom have another puddin'

pop or maybe have another Coke and shut up.

The Invisible Man's invisibility didn't start with his

relations with the dominant culture. It started with his relations with his own

culture. Very good point. Yeah. Essays

Ellison was a Marxist or Marxist, but Ellison was also a

humanist. Mhmm. He wanted people

he wanted black people to stand up as individuals on their

own 2 feet, I think. Mhmm.

And he also didn't think, I don't believe, that grifting the whites

was going to get Black people much of anywhere.

The fountains are all broken.

Yeah. And they remain broken, by the way. There is

no Eden to go back to. Correct. Now that now

there no longer is. And I think that's good, personally, because

that means that Jim Crow's done. That means that that whole milieu that created

this strange insulated state of things is done.

But As somebody who, you know, loves,

I I mean, I've lived abroad more than once. I speak more than one

language. I love people and love different types of people,

and so I cheer that

American society is far more complex, And it's no longer, you know,

biracial, monolingual, monocultural,

and that, you know, that that's part

of the normal way of doing things in America. You know, there there are as

you know, there are black leaders who decry the end of segregation because the end

Because the end of segregation, over time and I

don't think it's cause and effect. It's just it Sorrells. But over time,

you know, the the the decrease in

black lawyers, Black architects, black engineers, black

doctors, the black professionals,

owning and running their own firms. The numbers have collapsed,

basically. And so there are black leaders who decry the

end of of that era because, you had those

great institutions within our race here. I'm not

somebody who shares that position, for the reason I already gave.

And so, you know, I agree with you that

What what Ellison most likely wanted to

see, we see in the struggles of nameless, okay,

To get the people in Harlem to actually then respond,

that he can get them to a certain point, And

then outside forces keep pulling him back down.

Keep pulling him away, and we're gonna send you down here so

you can be distracted. Oh, dude. But on that

line, there's a line when he meets that woman, and I

just laughed my head off.

It's about the class struggle and the ass struggle. Oh, yeah.

That's absolutely the funniest line in the whole book. Oh, man. And

there's some beautiful lines in this book. That wasn't a beautiful line. It was just

hilarious line, but it's just you know, that that was classic. That was

well Put and well located, and and it just sounds

like exactly what would happen, you know. But,

yeah, it, the so the people in

Harlem never rose up. They never rose up as individuals. They never rose up as

an organized unit to be able to essays, this is what we want,

and here's what we're going to do until we get it. And by the way,

here's how we're building. Here's how we're trying to

Using the Skills We Have, A Better Tomorrow for Ourselves and Our Children,

on a scale where it was, You know, can that's I mean, that Harlem's a

neighborhood. Right? Or it's a neighborhood and a community

within Manhattan within Northern Manhattan. But, anyway, point being,

you know, as a unit, that's not what happened. There was

always something, and it's you know, Nameless came to that, you know,

realization that, you know, he could have these

great concentrated moments of breakthrough

like his first podcast. Well, not his 1st podcast.

When he first spoke in Harlem, you know, at an eviction that was

happening in the winter, and then, it morphed into

a protest briefly, and it morphed into a riot.

And he literally had to flee, but, you know, That he could

have successes like that, because arguably, there was some success in

that. Obviously, not the latter bits, but you see the point. But

It didn't translate into a community wide

organized movement for a

better tomorrow. And, of course, you know, because this novel is

so well constructed, there's both an internal dynamic that

sabotaged it, Right? And an external dynamic

that betrayed it. Now one of the pieces I find interesting,

you know, Well, it's one of your questions.

Right? What are the processes used to keep people in their place among black Americans?

And they they exist. They're there. And you you don't even have to be

in high school before you experience them. You know? They exist in middle school.

These pressures, these, These

fears that are, you know, sometimes

lobbed, sometimes just slide across the table,

other times it's right in your face, and someone's at you, but just,

you know, the notion that, hey, we're this massive labor

union. You've gotta get in line, take your number, show up and vote

accordingly. And, of course, men like you and I hate that, and

we'll never do that. And so it's just, you know but they're out there, you

know. So more

specifically, you know,

the The employ employing

fear, fear of,

loss of economic opportunity, fear of Physical violence

by nameless Mhmm. Ubiquitous white

racists, you know, rather than

fear violence from actually can be found in black neighborhood,

black thugs. You know, That one's not deployed as much,

but they're there. And in this novel, of course, they are deployed and they are

there, which is which is, again, well done on his part. Very well done.

They know it's funny. I I I don't know why it took me this long

into the podcast to mention I used to live in Harlem, so it's it's

interesting because he's talking about places I've Right.

And I can relate to some of what he's talking about from, you know, having

lived there, even down to the, oh, when when they moved him to what was

probably, it's the upper part of the upper east

side, but, their streets were, before it gets to

Spanish Harlem where it's a little bit mixed. And so I lived in Spanish Harlem

when I lived in So it's just like I can relate to when the authors

talk about this mix Spanish Irish neighborhood. I was like, underline them. Like, oh, okay.

Yeah. I can relate to this. There's also a little Italian in the corner

I was in, but, anyway, I digress.

It's a lot of, it's a lot of fear and

social pressure, besides much economic, but,

there's a whole lot of Use of signals. Right? The things

that signal something else, like political

party affiliation signals something So the people who

then are gonna start engaging and using these processes,

to try to get you to move somewhere else, you know, in terms of

your behavior, if not your thought. Because they they they don't really care about what

you think. It's are you going to do what I'm telling you to do? Right?

Just like, you know, the power structure of this brotherhood in this book, you

know. I don't care what you think. Let let us do the strategizing, you know,

Not let us. We do the strategizing. You do what you're told. Oh,

okay. Okay. You sound like, an organization that I wanna be part of. Like,

I have zero More interested in that. And

it just took nameless hundreds of pages

to get to a point where he might be willing to challenge that in any

real way. And, of course, pun intended, and I won't

say exactly why, so it doesn't ruin it, but pun intended, it was eye opening.

So it's It was. Yeah. Yeah. There it is. Yeah. Okay.

So so the thing that we are approaching, I think, in the 21st

century, and we have to wrap up our podcast and episode today, and I'd like

to thank DeRollo for coming on and talking about this great book Sure.

And exploring the vagaries and the intricacies of this as we,

again, Use this episode as our kickoff to this year's black

history month. And we'll have de

Rolo on a little bit later on this month, talking about James

Baldwin, and notes from a native

Jesan, Baldwin, who was the antithesis,

of Ellison.

I think we're approaching a space in our culture now, and

I think that the intellectual

cavalcade of folks that I've mentioned on this podcast in the black community.

And by the way, this is, this is part of the reason why there's no

black leader anymore, but the intellectual cavalcade of

folks that I've mentioned on this podcast, are

flopping around, particularly in a post 2020

context, are flopping around waiting for the next crisis or the next

riot to pop up where they can coalesce people around.

And the reason why this is happening is because the atomization

that has negatively impacted black Americans has also

had positive impacts, and the positive impact of atomization is this. When

I move to the suburbs, I get to be my own man. Mhmm.

I Get Tom Be My Own Man When I Move TO Harlem. Mhmm.

I get to be me as Hayzad or me as de

Rolo. Racial reconciliation comes from individuals

relating to and intermarrying with

individuals. That's where it comes from.

It doesn't come from the Edenic sort of ideal

we will all be in solidarity with each other and push

a culture towards something that happens only once, and

it happened in the middle of 20th century, and now we're done. We're never gonna

go back to that. As NWA infamously They said

back in the day, or it might not have been NWA. It might have been

doctor Dre. I can't remember. But one of the rappers

back in the nineties said, Malcolm and Martin are Gone, and I

Gotta Live Out Here. Mhmm.

Yeah. Yep. It sounds like West a West Coast statement.

It does. This does not sound like Somebody in Harl.

Sounds like somebody in Los Angeles. Yes. Well, Malcolm and

Martin are gone. And what are we gonna do? Right?

And and and Malcolm and Martin weren't gonna come down to the ghetto and come

get me. They don't know me, and I don't know them, and I gotta

live out here with these people. There's there's a lot of truth in that.

Mhmm. And Snoop Dogg now hangs around with Martha Stewart. I think

it's awesome. Which I think is incredible. I really get a huge

kick out of that. They're like b f BFFs. I get a kick out of

that. It is ridiculous. His real name Calvin. Right? Calvin

Brodus junior. Yes. Junior.

Yep. Deuces.

At what point do you think and by the way, there are now pressures being

put on the African American, the black community in America,

by Hispanics Mhmm. And by Asians. Massive

pressures. Mhmm. And

I guess I'd like to wrap up this podcast today with the end with with

maybe this question. If you're a leader who

happens by genetic Accident Tom be

Black, in an organization, and you are leading a

multiethnic, multiracial organization,

And this month comes upon you when you are asked by

virtue of silence to comment on it,

because the silence always becomes deafening right around this month if you happen to be

black in an organization, you happen to be in leadership. Mhmm.

What do you say after reading

Invisible Man?

What do you say to your people about this month?

Well, It it's interesting because the

first point of departure I I have is, I follow

the the the premise of the question. Mhmm. I just I I don't

think it extends to well, when the firm is actually owned and run by black

people, because then it might be different. You

know? You could have black history 12 months of the year

Mhmm. Or you could have it none. It depends. Or you could have it

still in February. It depends on the culture and the values of the

of the leaders and the owners of the entity, you know, versus a leader

within an entity that is really just a typical American,

you know, normal mainline American culture

creation, and thus, one can

Pretty reasonably anticipate that, it wasn't founded and run by black people.

Anyway, you know, the the position, the perspective might be

different. And so for me, who owns and runs

a multiethnic organization.

What I focus on coming out of this, is I mean,

I pushed the novel. That's a no brainer. Like, read the Sorrells awesome.

But, What what got to me,

because it's one of his themes. Right? And again, I have no because, as

a guy with a degree in English, what? Like, How to

approach this? This is how you study a novel Yep. Anyway.

One of the themes is that everyone wants to use you for some purpose of

their own. And so for people I lead,

I wanna make sure. And then, you know, the last time I onboarded someone was

literally last week, and so it's like, you know, I told her. Hi. I told

her, you know, one of the things that we will go

through are your goals for your career. And

Immediately that that is said, there's some tension. I am telling someone who works for

me, I'm gonna help you Chief your goals. We're

gonna work on your career goals. That may mean that I help her get out

of the seat. She's gonna go work for somebody else, whether herself or somebody else.

I may end up helping her do that. Why am I willing to do

that? Because the type of values that we were

read about in this novel Libby the power structures

represented by the doctor Bledsoe and the Brother Books are

anathema to me. I hate them. I want them burnt down. And so I

don't want to run an institution where I'm effectively co

opting people's best years and efforts for my good

over their good, For my benefit over their benefit, I don't

ever wanna do that. And so, therefore,

my whole leadership model is about,

Okay? I am trying to help

you get to where you're trying to go, and together, what we're

trying to do is achieve the goals that I have

set out in line with my values. And as long as that

shared, it works. And when it's not shared, Then

not only is the person probably in the wrong seat, they're probably gonna want you

to depart, and so that that can work. You know, one of the best people

I had working for me Told me in the beginning exactly how long she was

gonna work for me, and she kept it just about to a tee. Okay?

And there was an external reason in part why, but there are, obviously, there were

also reason, but she was able to tell me in the beginning, this is how

long I'm gonna work for you. That's that that that was it. It it played

out. It's great. It helped her meet her goals. It also

helped me meet my goals. Now she's a very strong leader, and so she

knew to do things like that. Okay. Great. So back to me.

Okay. So how do I Help my people

achieve their goals. My people I'm talking about people working for my firm. I'm not

talking about my people in a king x, etcetera

way. But how do I help my people achieve their

individual goals? You know?

Because if I lead them and help them in that process, they're gonna do great.

They're gonna do exceedingly well helping me achieve my

goals. And if I don't do that, they still may do well,

you know, they even may do exceedingly well, but there's a cost. You know, there's

a cost in terms of trust. There's a

cost in terms of, like, an an actual

physical podcast on their bodies over Tom, on their minds, you

know, like, The hourglass those sands are going, and

so it's just like, you know, at the end of the day,

if they've worked for me and they've been compensated fairly And,

hopefully, well, but certainly fairly. And, you know, we've been able to achieve some

good and help other people. That's great. And if they can walk away from that

and they were choosing well, I'm good. You know, I'm

good. I'd rather have that than I managed to

cobble together some motley crew, and I

Cajoled, threatened, bribed, and assaulted them

so that they'd book for me for, like, 30 years, and then I bounced on,

you know, I'm retiring them out, and then they just collapsed. And then they have

no retirement, no pension. They don't know what's going like, that's not a success. K.

That's a tragedy. But the real tragedy is that they

didn't see it, that they couldn't perceive what was being done

to them. And this novel shows At

least 1 unnamed man's journey to realize what

the heck was going on with him. Just one little brief

point. Don't understand why he didn't say there's 7 letters. I'm gonna assume the

contents are the same. I'm gonna sacrifice 1 and open it up, and then I'll

have the other 6. If he had just done that if he had just done

that Mhmm. Maybe we would've got back on a bus with an

ax. Hi,

doctor Bledsoe. Bam. You know? And then there would have been

no novel. Right? But there would have

been, on some level, Some measure of

justice, I think, we could live with.

And would it have cost him his life in

See what? You know it. It lit him up.

Lit him up Like a like like

a a funeral pyre. Man,

but yeah. Great great work. Great book. Happy to be here. Thank

you. And with that, I'd like

to thank once again to Rollo Nixon Junior for coming on our podcast today,

and we're out.