A homeless man killed the trees in the pictures. I saw him carving on them with a pocket knife a couple years back. He moved on when I asked him about it, but he came back. The police can’t do anything about these kinds of incidents and they discourage citizens from even giving the miscreants a hard time. I have not seen the guy around since I have been back from Iraq. I hope he is gone for good, but maybe he is taking the winter off. How many trees he killed all together I don’t know, nor do I have any clues on the motivation. Maybe he was just bored. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop. There are dozens of dead trees about the right age in the neighborhood, but there are other possible causes.
There are a lot fewer homeless around here than there used to be when I first moved to Washington. I don’t know if they are gone or just gone someplace else. There used to be a guy called Mitch Snyder, who ran a local homeless shelter. He deployed the homeless around the Washington area with the expressed purpose of making a kind of political statement. I moved to Washington during the heyday of his activities, so I suppose some of my impression of the time was part of his street theater.
I think it was back in 1999 when I was running near the Lincoln Memorial and noticed an unusual number of street people. As I turned toward the Korean Memorial, I ran into a television production crew. They were filming for a TV show called “West Wing,” with Martin Sheen playing President Jed Bartlet. The guys lying around on the ground were ersatz homeless – i.e. actors. I watched the episode they were filming later in the season. It was about the homeless in Washington. It was ironic that they had to hire their own homeless TV props to create the visual image they wanted. Homelessness dropped a lot, and we have better responses than we did before, but it doesn’t take very many homeless to make a problem.
There is a legitimate argument about rights. All citizens have the right to use public spaces, but the public has the right to expect each individual to behave in a reasonable way. A homeless man is both a victim and a perpetrator. As the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan commented, we defined deviancy down and learned to accept that people either w/o the ability or motivation to control their weird behavior could dominate our public spaces. Bad behavior feeds on itself and engenders worse behavior. During the height of the homeless epidemic during the 1980s, many public parks were rendered unusable for ordinary citizens. Kids couldn’t use the playgrounds. A stroll in the park was like running a gauntlet of beggars. When you lose public space, you lose public spirit and weaken the community.
It is better now. The homeless are fewer, but it is frustrating when one guy is responsible for thousands of dollars of slow release vandalism that deprives future generations of shade on hot summer days. Sometimes we tolerate too much.
A guy on the radio today was complaining that he lost all his money invested with Bernie Madoff. He made his money with many years of hard work in the NY garment industry and Madoff took it all, according to the report I know we are all supposed to feel sympathy or even outrage. He was the victim of a crook you could understand how he lost SOME of his money. But this guy claimed to have a couple million dollars invested, all of it with Madoff. When you money like that, you have the capacity to diversify. If you diversify you don’t lose ALL your money. Although what the newly poor old guy describes might be a personal tragedy for him and from his point of view, it is not a random outcome and it was not beyond his control.
You have to ask yourself why somebody might have so much invested in one place, why they insisted on putting all their eggs into one basket. The answer is never flattering. The least offensive is that the basket keeper is just ignorant. More likely are elements of sloth, greed & a flexible definition of honesty.
This is certainly not the first time people have been caught up in this sort of scheme and it won’t be the last. Many financial histories begin with the South Sea Bubble or the Dutch tulip mania, which was the first recorded speculative bubble way back in 1637. The patterns are clear. Somebody offers the prospect of unusually high returns with minimal risk doing something that is difficult to understand. They often are also exclusive and have the slight odor of something skating near the edge of the regulations. That is ostensibly why they can make the big bucks. Ironically, they also sell the schemes by implying that the investment is safe because it will be protected by regulators. The regulations provide a kind of cover that encourages credulous investors to take greater risk. They think they are clever, cleverer than the average people with their pedestrian investments.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There is nothing wrong with making risky investments. Risk is how you make high returns, but you need to understand what risk means. Risk means that you are trading a greater chance of losing part or all your investment in return for the chance of making more money. You can manage risk by diversifying your investments. A good number of investments that are individually very risky can be low risk when they are put together. You might lose all your money in one investment, but you gain enough on others to make up for it. Nobody can predict the future, so the only way to protect yourself is to spread your assets.
You can still lose big money, as almost everybody has in the recent hard times, but you won’t get wiped out. You get problems when you try to identify the ONE winning thing. Never do that. This is Investment 101.
If you went back in time before the crashes and told investors in Madoff/Enron/Keating/etc that they should be getting money out of these things and spreading their risk, most would have turned you down. They were making the big bucks and wanted to keep on making them. How stupid would you have to be to take money out of such winning investments?
A couple years ago, I watched a program about a bunch of the victims of Charles Keating. I saw one angry old man who actually tried to spit on Keating. I think it was the same guy who sat with his son for an interview. His son was a financial planner and he asked why his father didn’t ask for advice before sinking all his savings into this investment. The old man answered honestly, “Because I knew you would tell me not to do it.” He wanted the returns and figured he could get it risk free. A fool and his money …
Anyone who promises very high returns w/o risk, is lying and/or doing something dishonest and anybody who still chooses to invest is stupid or dishonest or both. With the freedom to choose comes the responsibly to choose responsibly.
It is too bad that the old guy on NPR Radio will have to find a job at Wal-Mart or Seven-Eleven, but according to what he said himself, he gradually liquated all his other investments so that all his money was left with Madoff. You don’t do that even when investing with someone who is perfectly honest because shit happens. I guess some people have to learn that for themselves and something we have to learn as a society every couple of years.
People make the right choices when they have the right incentives and they can do what they say they cannot. According to articles I read, Americans drove 112 billion FEWER miles over the past thirteen months. This is way higher than the previous biggest drop of 49.9 billion miles in the 1970s. The drops in driving are across the U.S., with Rhode Island, Utah and Vermont the top three. Wide open Utah has little in common with compact Rhode Island. The drop is rural and urban.
Below is a picture I took in Germany. English is not their native language, but I don’t think this is coincidence.
Gas consumption drops when the price rises. All the rules, CAFÉ standards and exhortations are mostly just feel good palliatives, analogous to all those fad diets beloved by fat people and largely ineffective. Solutions are simple, just not easy. Higher gas prices lead to less driving. Traffic and parking problems help in the long run. People make logical decisions. When driving in cheap and easy, they drive more. When conditions change, they do too. Bad economic conditions are evidently extending the demand drop for gasoline. Simple, but not easy – there is no painless way to achieve change.
And we do need to change. The environmental effects of carbon consumption are bad enough, but we also have the geopolitical considerations. Most of the easily exported oil is under or near countries that are unstable or run by despots and tyrants.
Anyway, the continuing drop in driving and related drop in oil consumption is a bit of good news, but we have been in this place before. This time we should do the right thing and get the incentives right. The time to raise taxes on oil is when prices are low. I have written about these things many times before. When gas prices were high, I wrote that they would drop again and that we should raise taxes on oil when they did. The time is now.
The good news is that cable television has resulted in a proliferation of good programs about science, history and politics. If a picture is worth a thousand words, lots of moving pictures must be worth millions of words, but the pictures may be out of context and if you count up the total number of actual words in an hour on History Channel, you could probably fill only a couple of pages. (Re pictures – I watched “the Real Abraham Lincoln.” It featured a reenactment of the young Abe. But the guy has a beard. Lincoln didn’t grow the beard until 1860.) TV spends a lot of time repeating scenes of collapsing buildings, burning fires or horsemen galloping, w/o explaining the significance. The shallowness of the medium is the bad news.
This extends beyond the series of gripping but unenlightening images. I also notice a general decline in rigor. Maybe it is a general phenomenon, but you notice it clearly on TV. Instead of trying to evaluate evidence and sources, the programs sort of throw it all out there with equal credibility. This would be okay with a written source or among scholars, but the television images don’t provide enough background or references for the viewers to evaluate veracity, even assuming most audience members had the background or inclination to do so.
It is bad enough when we have dueling “experts” but it gets worse when many programs seem to put oral histories on par with real ones. All histories are subject to interpretation and just because something is written down does not mean that it is true. But oral history must be even more carefully evaluated because it is literally subject to change w/o notice.
The strength of written sources is that they freeze impressions and the facts at the point of writing. Facts don’t improve with age. An earlier recollection is more factual than a later one and a primary account is better than a secondary one. An investigator can compare a written record against subsequent ones to detect enhancements or omissions. It makes it harder to change the story. It is also possible to nail down the assertion, so that you can check them against other evidence.
Oral histories do not suffer these constraints. When confronted with disconfirming evidence, an oral history can just change. The danger to the integrity of the story comes not only from deception, but also from innocent rationalization. People tend to want to fit their stories into current realities. They smooth the edges to make them conform to the present needs.
This story changing is most often a social process. Stories change in the telling and retelling and in a short time they come to reflect the aspirations, interests, prejudices & desires of the group more than reality. Oral history has great value because it tells you a lot about the people telling the story; it tells you less about the actual historical events on which is it ostensibly based. It has to be handled carefully.
Of course all history starts off as oral. It is the raw material. Beer starts off as barley and hops, but it requires some processing before you drink it. The same goes for oral history. If you take oral history from those who actually experienced an event, you can check facts. It is helpful to compare stories of individuals who have not communicated with each other much since the events in question. It gets harder when you get into the second or third generation of the story. At that point it has probably become myth. It may be based on the truth but it is not truth.
Myth is usually more interesting and plausible than actual historical events. Heroes are stronger and braver. Villains are scarier. Causes are more just. Events make more sense and often presage big developments of the future. They make better narratives precisely because they have been edited and enhanced by the people who have told and retold the stories.
The compelling nature of oral history and the resulting myths makes them especially dangerous on history television. They are almost always more interesting and more easily recreated in dramatic reenactments. It gets worse in our PC world. Many historical programs these days portray the confrontation between literate and pre-literate societies. The literate societies have historical records that can be critically evaluated and parsed. You get the warts and all portraits. Given the critical nature of this inquiry, we often end up with a mostly warts portrait. On the other side, we have the myths property altered in light of subsequent events.
Below are Alex and Chrissy at “America’s Stonehenge” in New Hampshire. We visited it when we lived nearby in Londonderry. It is worth seeing but not worth going to see. The History Channel featured it as a “mystery”. It is a mystery – a mystery why some clown would pile those rocks, but otherwise it is clearly not ancient. But a TV show with lots of cool angles and suppositions can make it seem so.
Modern historians are understandably frustrated. They want to write about pre-literate societies and they want to write about conditions of the common people in all past worlds. Unfortunately, pre-literate people don’t write at all and the common people didn’t write much until recently. I don’t know a precise number, but I doubt that more than 5% of all the ancient Roman texts still exist, so we start out with a small sample. None of the authors are representative of their societies, in that most people couldn’t write, so you already have an elite enterprise. There are no significant female historians from the Roman period and the Romans were unenthusiastic about letting their subject people write critical accounts of their rule. Beyond all that, most the writers were not interested in the doings of the common people, male or female, Roman or not. When the sturdy yeomen are featured, it is usually just a didactic example. Victor Davis Hanson wrote a good book on people working the land, who always made up the vast majority of the population, called “The Other Greeks,” but there just are not many good sources. You can learn a lot about physical conditions from archeology, but you still don’t have the narrative. The stones and bones don’t tell you much about the people’s motivations, imagination or aspiration. That is unsatisfying. Imagine if a future archeologist could reconstruct your television set but had no record of any of the programs. So historians extrapolate and move the historical narrative into the realm of conjecture, as with other forms of oral history telling us as much about the extrapolator than about the subject itself.
All the specialty cable channels (history, discovery, military, science etc) are spreading information wider than ever before. That is good … I guess.
Particular parts of the programming that I think is very good are some of the “current” history features. I have seen several good programs on Iraq. They tell the story and interview the people involved. My belief is that the U.S. public currently has a very biased view of the events in Iraq and the news media is unlikely to clear it up, since they have largely moved on. Fortunately, a lot of lessons learned type programs are being made now. These are essentially primary sources and when historians get around to addressing events in Iraq more dispassionately, I believe these will be the key sources.
On the left is the meteor crater near Winslow, Arizona. Nature can make big footprints on its own.
I read an interesting article re environmental footprints. The author makes a good point that has long concerned me. The idea of an environmental (or carbon) footprint strongly implies that humans are fundamentally bad and that the best we can do limit the damage we create. Environmentalism has become a religion for some people and this “footprint” idea is the equivalent of original sin. Unfortunately, in this new religion there is no way to salvation. It is a pernicious & narcissistic viewpoint, in that it paralyses action. Those espousing it get to feel superior and in their narrow minds the notion that people are just a blight on the environment removes the responsibility any proactive duties.
Humans are in nature; humans are of nature and humans are part of nature. This is THE truth, not merely a truth and we should just acknowledge it because the silly pretense that we can make a clear separation between man and nature is destructive to both the environment and the humans that live in it. On the other hand, if we recognize the reality of the situation, we can make things better all around.
Below is a secondary growth forest near the Milwaukee airport
Ignoring environmental progress is irresponsible and all those ticking doomsday clocks are dishonest. Making good choices requires an accurate assessment of conditions, not one that is too optimistic, but also not one that is unjustifiably gloomy. The American environment is cleaner now than it was ten years ago. It is a lot cleaner than it was a generation ago and it will be cleaner still in the future. It is fashionable to focus on the failures and ignore the massive success. This is an example of the pseudo-religious aspects of environmentalism.
Below is a traditional Navajo lodge. Pre-industrial life was no picnic … maybe it was – all the time.
No matter how much some peculiar people claim to speak for or to Animals, trees, rocks etc, they are speaking to and as humans. The earth is not sentient. If it were, it would be hopelessly cruel. There was no life on earth at all for most of the planet’s existence and after that life suffered several mass extinctions well before the advent of humans. The dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Mesozoic era. The Paleozoic extinction wiped out 90% of the species on earth and there were many others. And none of them mattered because there was nobody around who knew or cared. The current health of the earth matters a lot to us but all the judgments depend on human emotions and intelligence. There will come a time when the earth no longer supports human life. The earth will be no better or worse off. Nature doesn’t have a plan. Natural communities are complex and beautiful to US. They matter to US. I love nature but I know that my love is unrequited.
Below is Austin St in Milwaukee. The ash trees were planted in the middle of the 1970s.
Below same street in 1949. The little trees are elms that died in the early 1970s, so this is now the second growth. The guys standing there, BTW, are my father and my grandpa Haase.
That is what leads me to blasphemy against the environmental religion that I am about to voice. Man can improve on nature. I am not saying that we usually do. There are plenty of examples of human greed and rapaciousness. But sustainable development is indeed possible. We can simultaneously make conditions better for humans and do so in an environmentally responsible way. The good news is that the bad news is wrong.
Tree farming is an excellent example of a human activity that produces useful products while sustaining and improving the environment. It wasn’t always like that. Timbering used to be very destructive and it still is in many parts of the world. But here in Virginia, it is now sustainable and if fact improves the environment in terms of making the water cleaner, removing pollution from the air and providing wildlife habitat. This is a tremendously hopeful development. What is possible in forestry is possible in other industries.
Below is a Colorado pasture, very beautiful, sustainable & natural looking but very much the result of human intervention and domestic animals.
In the long run, we cannot address our environmental challenges by turning down thermostats, doing w/o things we need or by not allowing economic development. And we certainly cannot make progress if we stupidly deny that progress is possible. We have to be smarter and we can be. A working forest in Virginia today is nearly twice as productive as it was 100 years ago in terms of the wood it produces per year, but it goes much beyond that. It is also better for the soil than it was, better for the wildlife, kinder to the water resources and in the course of production more attractive. It is a win all around, by everything we can measure. We can use forest land to absorb municipal waste in an environmentally sustainable fashion.
Below is Albert Einstein statue at National Academy of Sciences.
Does it really make any sense to talk about “footprints?” That assumes a one-way relationship, which is just not reflective of reality. All of us consume wealth & resources but most of us also create them. Humans come into the world with mouths to feed and various needs to meet. But they also come with hands to work and – more importantly – brains to think. Sometimes they figure out how to make things better.
About a week ago, somebody sent a couple blank email messages to a large number of State Department recipients, me included. I supposed it was a mistake and deleted them. Most people did the same, but not everybody. Dozens of our cognitively challenged colleagues insist on sending “reply to all” messages complaining about getting messages. I suspect there is more than just stupidity at work. My latest is from an ambassador who evidently is affronted that he cannot turn off the flow with a wave of his mighty hand. It goes to show that high intelligence and high position do not always correspond perfectly.
A couple messages created dozens more and are still creating them. Some fool always wants to get in the last word. Maybe some sociologists can understand this. I can’t. I just keep on deleting them.
I want to write back on email to these idiots and explain the situation to them, but then I would just be among them. I just have to get this frustration over with, so I am putting it here on the blog. If anybody who responded to all in this recent email chain is reading this (and you know who you are) please understand that you are too stupid to be allowed to use Internet. Turn off your computer and go away. I know that it is unlikely that any of my readers are in this group, but I am sure we have all suffered from this sort of thing.
The New Year season is a time for reflection. I have been thinking a lot about the new communication technologies and my job. I know this is boring to some/most of the people reading this, and I know that I am being repetitive, but I still don’t have this sorted out in my own mind.
Decisions are easy when values and priorities are clear. The hard part is figuring them out.
I got along well with Internet in its early incarnations. It fulfilled dreams of my youth. They were nerdy dreams, I admit. I dreamed of a comprehensive searchable data base that could answer all my questions if I posed them correctly. We got it. I wanted easy access to the accumulated knowledge of mankind. We got that too. I dreamed of instant communications networks to pass new ideas. Got it.
My dreams were myopic, just projections and amplifications of what I already knew. But the world doesn’t stop and innovations spawn unexpected changes. The Internet shot clean past my slow moving dreams.
Internet revolutionized the pursuit of knowledge in mostly good ways. You can find out almost anything you want to know and connectedness of the web is increasing scientific and practical knowledge immensely. Knowledge and politics, however, don’t always intersect. Metastasizing politics on the Internet has been less a good thing. Let me clarify with an example.
Blogs made it possible to write about your opinions and experience and easily publish it for others to read and comment. This is just an old technique adapted to new technologies. It is kind of the Federalist Papers on steroids; a quicker marketplace of ideas, this I like. But it didn’t stay on that high plane very long. The messages slid downhill and became shorter and more vitriolic.
The blogosphere and cyberspace in general experienced a kind of evolution, where selection favored the nastiest and the most extreme. Rather than a universe of ideas, it debauched into a multiverse of pseudo-intellectual hostility. Many of the online communities became intolerantly self-policing, driving out anybody with divergent views and in the process increasingly coarsening the rhetoric. Too many online communities became autoerotic circles of hatred, where participants confirmed each other’s prejudices, sharpened their collective teeth, and pulled their groups farther out of the mainstream. We often cannot persuade or be persuaded by others because we occupy completely different dimensions.
There used to be a saying that you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. The new media has developed different fact-universes, each with its own specific sets. This is a challenge and it gets worse.
Now we have all the interactive systems, the Facebooks etc, Twitter as well as interactive gaming. I just don’t know what to do with them. I am not sure it is possible for government based public affairs (i.e. someone in my job) to use these technologies because they are so labor intensive and the messages so often intensely idiosyncratic.
Consider the strengths and weaknesses of a government information operation. My job is to explain the U.S. and U.S. policies to people in other countries. In what we see in retrospect as the golden age (it didn’t seem that back then), we had certain advantages. Most important was that government had a monopoly over some sorts of information, but there were other structural advantages. The technologies favored the one speaker to many listeners paradigm, so a relatively small number of writers could reach a large number of readers/listeners/viewers. Beyond that, our enemies were easy to identify and possible to count. The Soviets produced a lot of deceitful propaganda, but we could usually find the return address if we looked hard enough.
None of this is true anymore. The government no longer has information dominance and is often not the first or the best source even of things about its own activities. The information market has splintered into millions of pieces and our adversaries are harder to identify. Essentially, we went from a situation with one big and dangerous bad guy (or a couple of them) to a world where there are thousands of little ones. The dragon has been replaced by insects, each one inconsequential, but collectively heavier and more intractable. And they are more quickly adaptive to changing circumstances. You could always expect the Soviets to be slow and ponderous, not so our new adversaries.
When it was one-to-many communications, we happy few at State or USIA had a chance to move the communication needle. In the one-to-dozens communication environment, we just don’t have enough people and never will. We can get the occasional “viral” hit, but not with any predictability.
I think we still have a chance. The Internet is starved for content. We can produce content and/or pictures. We can also build relationships that might leverage to larger populations. We can succeed, but I am worried that we will not. I am also worried that I cannot go along on this ride. I have been in this business for a quarter century, but I am afraid I might have reached a river I cannot cross. I have always believed that with the proper tools and permission, I could make a difference and sometimes I have succeeded. I have not always had the means, but I always had the vision, at least I thought I did.
My vision is now failing with the newest technologies. I can understand how something like Twitter can be used to organize a demonstration, communicate sports scores or stock averages, or help maintain an existing social network, but I cannot figure out how we can pass the nuanced explanation of policy over these sorts of networks, nor can I see a way that government officials like me and my colleagues make ourselves trusted participants in enough social networks to make a significant impact. I can understand the theoretical potential for online communities, but cannot stand the profound lameness of “worlds” like Second Life and I cannot figure out its wider impact. It is a big world out there and our efforts may just be a p*ss in the ocean.
This worries me. I don’t know whether it cannot be done in general or if it is just ME that cannot do it. I have a responsibility to add value and I always promised myself that I would not hang around after I outlived my usefulness. I don’t want to try to apply yesterday’s solutions to tomorrow’s problems. It is funny how things come in circles. I am having the equivalent of adolescent angst at my age.
I guess I will figure it out, or more correctly I will find people who have figured it out to work with me. I really don’t understand much of anything, but I have always had the good fortune to find people who do and I have been able to bring out their talents. I add value the old fashioned way – through good people. Maybe the old tricks still work for the old dog. When I cannot do that anymore I will go quietly into that good night – someday, but probably not today. I still have a lot of thinking to do.
We will never again be as united as we were in 1965. It was a time of an unusual confluence of factors. The older generations had the unifying experiences of the Great Depression, New Deal and World War II. Think of what those things did. Millions of young men and women came together in a common cause such as the CCC in the 1930s and the military in the 1940s. Never before and never since have so many people shared such intimate similar life-changing experiences.
They and the younger generation were further tied together (homogenized) by the miracle of television. The limited choice among TV channels ensured that large percentages of the population watched the same things at the same times. (Not many baby boomers know words to the “Star Spangled Banner” but most can sing the theme song to “Gilligan’s Island.”) America had also had successfully digested the waves of immigrations that hit our shores in the early 20th Century. Immigration restrictions and the Great Depression had limited new immigration and so America has a smaller percentage of immigrants among its population than at any other time in its history. Other “unity” things were also strong. Church attendance was very high. Most adult males had connections to the VFW. Membership in industrial and trade unions has never been higher. It seemed a golden age for the “ordinary guy.”American dominance of the world was unique. We bounced out of the Depression after WWII at a time when most of the other world economies were in ruins. At some points, the U.S. produced around half of ALL the world’s production. Nothing like like that had ever been possible before and is unlikely to ever happen again anywhere. It resulted from the perfect storm of industrialization, depression and war. Communist domination of large parts of the world ensured that many places remained uncompetitive and backward for longer than necessary. Speaking of communism, we cannot forget the Cold War. The threat of nuclear annihilation focused the minds of those generations and facing a benighted, yet dangerous enemy together leads to shared identify.
When we look back at the two decades after WWII, we sometimes see stifling conformity and we unavoidably cast our glance forward to the divisive and challenging times to come. But we still look l back to the lost feelings of comfort and community and imagine how we could recreate it along with today’s diversity and options for individual expression. This is an impossible dream.
Above is Union Station in Washington DC. Such self-conscious permanence in public building is less common now.
First of all, the conditions that created the post-war unity were unique. They cannot be recreated and nobody would advocate going through the suffering of depression, war and totalitarian threats to try to foster the preconditions. Periods of growth following challenging ordeals are often pleasant, but you might not want to throw yourself into a pool of ice water just to feel the pleasure of warming up again.
But most important is that we don’t want it. Unity and diversity are both good things, but they are in tension. As in those economics curves, there is a point where you can maximize both, but you do have to trade them off against each other. We have chosen less unity than we used to want back in 1965. This has implications.
More choice creates more innovation and economic growth. But making reasonable predictions about the future becomes harder. It also complicates provision of insurance & welfare benefits, as diversity lessens trust. In a homogeneous community, people understand each other. Homogeneous communities are also usually relatively small, so people can monitor and balance abuses. They are reasonably certain that their social outlays are, if not well spent, at least decently targeted. It is no coincidence that the most successful welfare states are/were in homogeneous Scandinavian countries and that they have begun to breakdown in the face of globalization and immigration of new and different people.
Talking about a “caring” (i.e. one that takes care of you as an individual) government in a place as big and diverse as the U.S. is an oxymoron. We gave that possibility up long ago and we should stop pretending that is what we want. Our choices have made that impossible. What we have demonstrated we want through the choices we have made is a government that ensures reasonable justice and the rule of law, provides for the common defense and provides options. If you want to put this into more beautiful language you might say, “… in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity …” it is astonishing how long that formula has remained viable.
So in this new year when it looks like we will be asking a lot from our government, we should pause to remember that we should not ask too much, and it is not only because we should ask not what our country can do for us, but ask what we can do for our country. Let’s not grab for that remembered unity that we never can recreate or ask for guarantees of prosperity that nobody can provide. If you give government the power to grant all your wishes, you also give it the power to take them away. It is tempting to trade liberty for security, but w/o liberty sustained security is impossible.
Respect is a complicated and apparently internally inconsistent concept, with tinges of love, hate, fear and admiration all at the same time. It is precisely because of those complications that respect is a key element in human relations.
Niccolo Machiavelli, the father of realpolitik, reasoned that it was better to be feared than loved based on his assessment of human nature that, “… they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you.” I am not quite as cynical as Machiavelli, but you can see this pattern over and over in politics and foreign affairs. The colloquial American phrase is “What have you done for me lately?”
Machiavelli avers that it is indeed better to be BOTH loved and feared when possible. This describes being respected. You earn respect by being consistent over the long term. If people know you will be consistent and will act with integrity, they will often accept what you do, even if they don’t like the things you are doing. And I have been repeatedly surprised how quickly acceptance can turn to support. Success matters.
That is why you cannot give up when you hit opposition or try to run your affairs like a popularity contest. Public opinion is indeed fickle and despite what people tell pollsters it is usually based more on impressions than on facts.
People who don’t respect themselves have trouble respecting others. That is why we have some much trouble with some people and places. The proper response is not to lower the bar for these guys, but rather demand more from them.
How much more insulting is it to imply or say outright that some people are unable to reach the higher standards we set for ourselves, so we will create a kind of ethical junior varsity for them.
I was moved to think about this by the guilty verdicts for the five immigrants who planned to attack Fort Dix and murder American soldiers. Actually, it was not the verdict itself, but the subsequent gnashing of teeth about what this would mean to the “Muslim community.” When you read carefully, however, you see that most of the teeth gnashing is done by the professional victims, who don’t speak for the community they purport to represent. Actual people involved want to be treated with respect AS Americans. One Albanian immigrant said, “I don’t know what they were thinking. They were just out of their mind and they should be put away for life. The Albanian community is nothing like this. We come from a country that has a reputation for religious diversity and tolerance. To go against the American government _ that’s unacceptable to our community.” Got it – respect.
All immigrants have revealed by their actions that they prefer the U.S. to wherever else they came from. America is the land of their choice. Many of us have forgotten this simple truth so we let the malcontents speak for “the communities” and don’t give or demand the proper respect from everybody else. Treat each individual as a human being, not a member of a group, and we will all be better off. It is the principled choice.
As for those five clowns who betrayed the country that welcomed them, they seem to be getting the justice they deserve. These were stupid young men who were misled by all that holy war BS. It is a pattern we see too often. I always felt sad when I saw detainees in Iraq. The pattern was you would see around ten stupid young men, who really didn’t think clearly about what they were doing and one hard eyed bad guy who had led them to hell with his hatred. The purveyors of that poison are complicit, but the young men evidently were determined to kill innocent for no reason we can ethically accept, so let’s not waste too much sympathy on them.
The old Jimmy Stewart classic was on today. I suppose that it was scheduled well in advance, but the movie is particularly appropriate these days given the Senate seat sale apparently underway in the great state of Illinois. “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” was made in 1939, so I guess it shows that political corruption is nothing new. But I fear that we seem to have lost the capacity for shame. Now we see things in terms of political maneuvering and tend to treat it more like a game. It should not be. Politicians do not own their offices. They just are holding them for the people.
That film made an impression on me. I saw it on TV for the first time on the day before my mother died. That whole day is strongly pressed into my memory. We didn’t handle it well. My father was trying to protect my sister and me, but I think it ended up isolating us. I figured if I just didn’t believe it was possible, it wouldn’t be true. My sister was only fifteen. My time would have been better spent being with her than watching television by myself. Sorry. Seeing that movie brings back those memories. Thirty-six years later it still stings. But that’s not all.
As with all real classics, the impressions from the movie grew beyond it with the outside experience. When I joined the FS and came to Washington for the first time, I walked around the Capitol Mall, as Jefferson Smith does in the movie and I had a similar reaction. I still do. Even after all these years and daily familiarity with the monuments, they still move me.
Of course, it is painful that Jeff Smith is such a complete rube. We have a kind of fetish of the outsider in the U.S. that innocence and inexperience are the keys to successful political leadership. I think that is wishful thinking and a caricature of the valid argument that not all expertise and intelligence resides with experts and professionals. We need and benefit from a constant influx of new people and new ideas. It is too easy for people within the beltway and the political class generally to think they have cornered the market on knowledge. But like anything else, there are skills and experience that are useful in government and they are not always self evident or easily acquired.
My view on the movie is more nuanced than when I saw it when I was seventeen. Then I just saw the good little guy against the big corrupt machine. I used to think that politics was about right and wrong, that there was a RIGHT answer. Now I understand that we have politics because we disagree about what is the right thing to do. When we all agree, we don’t have politics; we just have laws or customs. Politics is about compromise in all the connotations of that word. I don’t believe that a politician as a person must or should abandon principles or values, but the TOOL of politics is at best amoral. That is why it is best to keep as much out of politics as possible. Reserve politics for the real disagreements.
As I watched the movie again today, I thought of how Jeff Smith should have gone about his work in the Senate. He could have built that boys’ camp, but maybe not at that exact location. In fact, the dam the Taylor machine wanted to build might have improved the setting. They could have a nice lake and get to watch the nearby construction. If all parties to negotiations have positions they cannot or will not compromise, it is unlikely they can come to any kind of mutually beneficial deal. The idea is that everybody gives and gets. When one of the parties takes a “my way or highway” stand, as Jeff Smith does, nothing moves.
There are sacred principles that cannot be compromised. There are things we will fight for and die for, things we will impose on others. If you cannot think of any, you are soul-dead. If you can think of too many, you are a self-indulgent narcissist. Given a few more years of experience, Mr. Smith would have been more effective, if less certain of his righteousness. It probably would not make a very interesting movie, however.
