Living in the Insect World

Everyone remembers the Aesop’s fable about the Grasshopper and the Ant.  All summer long the Grasshopper lives the good life, enjoying the tall grass and never thinking about tomorrow.  His neighbor, the Ant, has no time for such frivolity.  He keeps busy tending his crops, fortifying his house and saving up for the winter.  When the snows come, the Ant is warm and comfortable, with a refrigerator full of berries, and the Grasshopper is left out in the cold.  Hard-hearted Aesop ends his tale with the Grasshopper knocking on the Ant’s door and asking for a bite to eat.  The Ant, he tells us, “rebuked him for his idleness” and slammed the door in his face.

As I’ve watched the current budget debate in the US Congress, I’ve been struck by the degree to which the Republicans seem to view themselves as virtuous Ants and the Democrats as idle Grasshoppers… or maybe “Grasshopper enablers.”  The Republicans believe that they’re the responsible ones who worked hard and saved, and they resent the idea that they should share what they’ve accumulated with a bunch of Grasshoppers who weren’t as disciplined and diligent as themselves.

But we don’t live in a world of fairy tale insects.  In the human world, some people inherit money and some inherit debt.  Some kids go to good schools and are encouraged to go to college, and some go to awful schools and aren’t encouraged to do anything at all.  In the human world, a person can work hard all his life and watch his 401k disappear in a stock-market downturn.  Or he can succeed in a demanding job that’s made suddenly obsolete by new technology, or outsourced to cheaper labor in India or China.  In the human world, smart, hard-working people sometimes do everything “right” and still fail, while lazy people of dubious character make millions and live a life of luxury. 

The social safety net we’ve created is meant to help us grapple with the capriciousness of this human world.  It’s meant to help those who would otherwise be forgotten or left behind, and it’s meant to provide opportunity for those who would otherwise have none.  Head Start means that kids who come from poor backgrounds can start school on an equal footing with kids whose parents read to them at home.  Social Security means that old people won’t end up penniless as a new generation takes their place at the office, in the factory, or on the farm.  Medicaid means that the poor can receive basic medical care and treatment they could otherwise not afford in a world of skyrocketing healthcare costs.  And unemployment insurance means that those who have worked hard but lost their jobs will be able to pay their bills until the next job comes along.

There are plenty of hard-working, successful people who understand all of this, of course.  Prominent billionaires like Warren Buffett, for example, have repeatedly called for higher taxes on the rich so that our social safety net can be preserved.  And a growing number of America’s wealthy seem to appreciate the fact that a society harshly divided between haves and have-nots is ultimately not in the best interests of either. 

Further, and this is probably a topic deserving of another column, it’s worth pointing out that America has greatly benefited from some of its Grasshoppers.  Thomas Jefferson, to cite one example, died broke and deeply in debt.  The father of the Declaration of Independence might have appreciated Social Security. 

But if the current budget debate is any indication, the Republicans in Congress are having none of this.  Despite all evidence to the contrary, they appear to believe we’re living in a simple, binary world of Grasshoppers and Ants, the worthy and the unworthy.  And from what I can tell, they seem intent on eating every berry in the fridge.  Personally, I think it’s time for those of us living in the human world to close the book on this fairy tale.      

The Home Team

I wasn’t born a Red Sox fan. I adopted the Sox when I was in graduate school at Boston University. My classmates and I used to spend leisurely weekend afternoons at Fenway Park drinking beer in the bleachers and cheering on Red Sox legends like Carl Yastrzemski, Freddy Lynn, Jim Rice and Pudge Fisk. Specific “Fenway moments” – nail-biting pitchers’ duels, come-from-behind victories, home run balls just out of our reach in right field – cemented my love for the Boston Red Sox.

A couple of generations back, I think most sports fans cheered for the teams they grew up with. Americans moved less frequently in those days, and were less likely to relocate for school or work. So your allegiance to, say, the Philadelphia Phillies (the team I grew up with) was unlikely to be tested by a couple of seasons in Fenway. Before the age of mobility, you were born a Yankees fan or a Dodgers fan or a Cardinals fan, just as you were born right or left-handed. You rooted for the team your parents, friends and neighbors rooted for. The team the sports reporters wrote about in the local papers.

Today we get to pick our teams. We might stick with the team we were born with, or adopt a team we’ve come to love through a new experience in a new town, or through the fan allegiance of a husband or wife. And just as we’re less likely to marry a girlfriend or boyfriend from our hometown than we were a century ago, we’re probably less likely to “inherit” a favorite team.

I wonder if patriotism doesn’t operate on the same neural pathways as sports allegiance. Do our brains process love of the home team and love of America the same way? “Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, so maybe the answer is yes. And if that’s the case, is it possible that increased mobility – on an international scale – will start giving people the equivalent of Fenway Moments in countries far from home?

I thought about this as I sat down with a colleague from Bahrain and a French marketing director for a business meeting last month in Dubai. As we made small talk over Arabic coffee and juice, we compared notes on our lives as global citizens.

My co-worker wears a traditional abaya, but she was educated at Perdue and knows more about college and professional football than most American women I know. The marketing director told us that he’d been born in Paris, but had married a Tunisian wife and had lived for several years in Morocco. His children, he said with pride, were tri-lingual in French, Arabic and English. I explained that I was born in the US, but had married an Australian I met in London and that both of our daughters were born during our years in South Africa.

I have no idea whether our French colleague is less patriotic about France than the average Frenchman, and I’ve never asked my co-worker how she feels about Bahrain. I’m sure they both feel the same affection for their home countries that I feel for the United States. But I suspect that living and working abroad has changed the nature of our patriotism. When you come right down to it, it’s hard to chant “We’re number one!” when you’ve spent a lot of time in the other team’s dugout.

Rue Britannia?

I’ve been reading and watching the coverage of the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico these past six weeks and I’ve been struck by the fact that blame is being assigned to everyone from President Obama to BP executives to minor bureaucrats in obscure regulatory agencies. But no one, as far as I know, is blaming the Brits. And why should they? Even though the spill now spans the terms of two Prime Ministers, it’s clear that the spill isn’t Gordon Brown’s fault, or David Cameron’s fault, or the fault of the British people.

But BP is a British company – BP used to stand for British Petroleum, after all (before it stood for “Beyond Petroleum,” or more recently on the Internet, “Bad People”). Still, none of the ugly tar balls washing up on the Gulf Coast seem to be sticking to the Brits.

Now let’s imagine a different scenario. Let’s say that an American company, maybe Exxon Mobil or Chevron, had somehow tapped a gusher in the middle of the English Channel and had failed to contain the spill. We can only imagine the outrage that would have been directed toward the U.S. by now.

So why have we given the Brits a pass?

I think there are four reasons. The first is the fact that the sun set long ago on the British Empire. They are no longer a hegemonic superpower. The two world wars effectively ended their imperialistic ambitions by the middle of the last century, and as a consequence they’ve lost their position as the primary target for the world’s destitute and downtrodden. That bull’s eye is now on America’s back, even if most of us Yanks would argue that we don’t deserve it (we’ve never claimed an empire).

The second reason the British are not being blamed for the Gulf spill is because all of us know that BP was drilling for oil that was destined for our gas tanks. Someone, or some group of people, or some company, will eventually be held accountable for this spill, but all of us know in our hearts that we all share the blame for this gooey nightmare because of our collective inability to wean ourselves from our dependence on oil.

Another reason I think we’re reluctant to blame the British is because they’ve spent more than a century earning our trust, respect and admiration. American soldiers have fought shoulder to shoulder with British troops in several big wars and numerous small ones, in the last century and again in this one. They’ve been America’s ally even when they shouldn’t have been (see: Special Relationship, Blair–Bush chapter). And as a result, they’ve put some serious PR capital in the bank with the American people.

And finally, of course, there is America’s love affair with all things British. I think this is especially true for Baby Boomers like me who grew up reading Sherlock Holmes stories and studying Shakespeare and Dickens in high school English classes. (Do kids still read Dickens? They should.) Then of course there was James Bond… and the Beatles… and lovely Princess Diana. We Boomers may be angry about all that oil in the Gulf of Mexico, but we’re not about to blame a country that gave us John, Paul, George and Ringo. (And Mick). (And Keith).

In the end, BP’s bumbling CEO Tony Hayward may yet find a way to use up all of that precious British PR capital, and the American people – Anglophiles included – may start to ask what, exactly, Great Britain might do to help undo the damage that’s been done to our waters. But I don’t think we’ll get to that point. Pop music and Sherlock Holmes aside, the Special Relationship will endure, and will survive the crisis in the Gulf.

Postscript to this entry: I’m filing this column from Dubai, where I’m spending the better part of the summer on assignment. This will mean fewer posts to Borderless Communications in the weeks ahead but, I hope, some interesting new entries on business, politics and everyday life in Arabia. (Inshallah).

Misremembering Our Lives

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal looked like a shoo-in to take Chris Dodd’s place in the United States Senate until Ray Hernandez of the New York Times reported this week that the Attorney General had frequently “misrepresented” his military service in campaign speeches. Blumenthal served in the Marine Reserve – after receiving multiple military deferments – and never saw duty in Vietnam. But on a number of occasions, especially when addressing veterans groups, the Attorney General had presented himself as a Vietnam vet.

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal told a gathering of veterans and senior citizens in Norwalk in March of 2008. “And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”

It’s not clear that Blumenthal’s fibs about his service record will be fatal to his candidacy – he’s a widely respected Democrat in this Blue state and has an impressive record as Attorney General. But it’s still surprising that a man of Blumenthal’s stature and integrity would lie about his past in order to win some votes.

Or is that what happened?

As Michael Barbaro and David Halbfinger reported in a follow-up story in the Times, Blumenthal’s misrepresentations of his military service grew over time. Former Connecticut Congressman Chris Shays noticed the change during years of listening to Blumenthal’s speeches. “He just kept adding to the story, the more he told it,” Shays told the Times.

Brian McAllister Linn, a professor from Texas A&M who specializes in military history, told the reporters, “There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon of exaggerating military service by people who feel nostalgic because they missed their war.”

But I think it’s more than that. I think it’s about the way our memories remodel our life histories.

I thought about this recently when I was researching a column about my experiences during the Gulf War (see “Field Notes of a Hotel Warrior, Part III” on February 26). I remembered a great story about General Schwarzkopf that I wanted to tell to illustrate his exceptional skills as a communications strategist. It involved a question I’d asked at a press conference and his clever answer. I’d told the story a hundred times, but I looked up clips of the news conference to confirm the quote. It turned out that I had the quote right, but I had “misremembered” the question that had provoked the General’s reply. It didn’t alter the point of the story at all, but I was stunned by the fact that I had so clearly remembered something that wasn’t in fact, a fact. And I think this happens to all of us a lot more often than we realize.

Terry Gross, the brilliant host of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, interviewed the British comedian Russell Brand about a year ago and they talked about how Brand had landed his breakout role as Aldous Snow in the 2008 movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Gross played a clip from a previous interview she’d done with the movie’s writer, Jason Segel, who described how Brand had arrived for his audition completely unprepared.

As Segel described it, Brand walked onstage and said, “You’ll have to forgive me, mate, I’ve only had a chance to take a cursory look at your script. Perhaps you could tell me what you require?”

Brand said that the first time he heard Segel tell that story, he told him, “I would never have said that! That’s really, really rude and I would never say that. I’m an Englishman. I’m a gentleman. It’s unforgivable, and I would never, ever say that.”

But, as Brand told Terry Gross, “Of course, it was all on film – it’s an audition – and I DID say that! I can’t believe it!”

“Makes you wonder about the rest of your life,” Gross commented, “what you think you’re doing... what you’re really doing…”

I liked Brand’s reply. “I’m an unreliable witness of my own existence,” he said, “so perhaps my autobiography should be dramatically re-edited by people who were actually there.”

Dick Blumenthal probably feels the same. We live in the Google/Facebook/You Tube age, and so many of our “misrememberings,” like Brand’s audition, end up on the electronic record, for all to read and see and hear.

I’m not trying to give Blumenthal a pass, just like I wasn’t willing to give Hillary Clinton a pass when she misremembered coming under sniper fire at that Bosnian airport in 1996, or the many professional athletes who have misremembered their use of steroids, or Richard Nixon’s many misrememberings of his role in the Watergate cover-up. Sometimes it is just a matter of telling a lie to win some votes or avoid responsibility for past transgressions. But to some degree, I think we’re all victims of our imperfect memories. We’re all unreliable witnesses to our own lives. And, like Russell Brand, we sometimes need to have our facts checked by people who were actually there.

Arizona

My father was a flight instructor at Luke Field, west of Phoenix, during the Second World War and in 1943, while he was still a cadet, my mother made the journey cross-country on a Greyhound bus to marry him there. That would have been just another romantic war story but for the fact that my father had grown up with terrible allergies that were almost magically relieved by the pollen-free environment of the Arizona desert. So years after they were married, he persuaded my mother to revisit Arizona to explore the idea of relocating there, and we packed ourselves into our un-air-conditioned 1960 Plymouth Valiant to check it out.

I don’t remember a lot about the trip (except the heat in the backseat of the Valiant), but I do remember the thrill of being in cowboy country. Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona – it was an All-American landscape any boy could love. Mesa was our target city, and my mom and sister and I spent a few days enjoying the sights around town while my dad researched his professional opportunities there. Mesa was a small town then, probably no more than 50,000 people, and in the end my father had to agree that his prospects were probably better back home in Allentown. So, to my mother’s relief, we packed up and headed back east.

Mesa is a big city now, with an estimated population of about 450,000 people, and more than a quarter of its residents are Mexican or of Mexican descent. It’s also the home of State Senator Russell K. Pearce, the sponsor of Arizona’s recently enacted – and hugely controversial – immigration bill. A recent New York Times article reported that Pearce told journalists that he had promoted the bill to “give the police a tool to weed out criminals before they act and help foster a climate of toughness that would discourage more immigrants from coming.” And a climate of toughness is exactly what the bill has delivered.

The new legislation has been blasted by critics for its Gestapo-like approach to the problem of illegal immigration. The idea that police in Arizona are now authorized to demand identification from anyone they suspect might be an illegal immigrant has outraged civil liberties and human rights activists, and provided fodder for late-night comedians.

Here’s Seth Myers on Saturday Night Live:

“Could we all agree that there’s nothing more Nazi than saying ‘Show me your papers’? There’s never been a World War II movie that didn’t include the line ‘Show me your papers.’ It’s their catch-phrase! Every time someone says ‘Show me your papers,’ Hitler’s family gets a residual check.”

But the problem of illegal immigration is real, and though Arizona’s approach is cruel, unfair – and probably unconstitutional – there’s no doubt that a comprehensive, national solution to the challenge of illegal immigration is desperately needed.

What’s also needed is some sense of empathy from those of us who already enjoy the privilege of US citizenship. In 2010, it’s easy to forget that the United States is a nation of immigrants, and that it’s the grit, determination, energy and imagination of those immigrants that has made America strong and mighty. Way back when, we all (Native Americans, of course, excepted) came here from somewhere. And we need to remember that the circumstances that drove our ancestors to seek a better life in the United States are still priming the immigration pump today.

I don’t know how I would have felt about the immigration issue if my parents had decided to stay on in Mesa and raise our family there. As the city grew and the percentage of Mexicans – legal and illegal – increased, I hope I would have welcomed the new immigrants to the land of freedom and opportunity. I hope I would have understood the desperate circumstances – the crime, the violence and the poverty – that drove so many of them to risk everything for a better life in the US. And I hope I would have been a tireless defender of their human and civil rights.

But who knows? Life in Mesa might have made me intolerant and hard-hearted. I could have turned out like Russell K. Pearce. Worse, I could have found myself wearing a police uniform, walking a beat and enforcing the law… and asking some poor Mexican on the street to show me his papers.

O'Reilly and Me

The Hundred Years’ War, fought in the late Middle Ages between two royal houses for the French throne, actually lasted 116 years. America’s Culture Wars could last longer.

For readers under fifty who might be unfamiliar, a history of the Culture Wars might go like this: the Beats, as they were called (proto-Hippies in Greenwich Village, LA and San Francisco), challenged the country’s prevailing Ozzie-and-Harriet cultural norms in the mid-1950s. They were succeeded by the Counterculture, which was a grab bag of Hippies and Civil Rights and Vietnam War protesters, in the mid-to-late 1960s. The Counterculture (the Civil Rights movement in particular) then inspired the Women’s Movement and the Gay Rights Movement in the 1970s, and the Civil Rights movement gave way to more radical groups like the Black Panthers.

Those who participated in these various anti-establishment movements were mostly young people who had been born between the end of WWII and 1960, otherwise know as the Baby Boom generation (then the largest demographic cohort in America’s history). But not every Boomer was a Hippie or a demonstrator. A lot of young people supported their parents’ social values and the war, and were skeptical or even threatened by the various rights movements that advanced the interests of blacks, women and homosexuals. Which side of the fence you were on was usually determined by where you grew up, your socio-economic status, and where – or if – you went to college.

Bill O’Reilly and I were on opposite sides of the divide. I grew up in a Republican household in Pennsylvania and became an anti-war protester when I went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Bill grew up on Long Island and kept his distance from the Counterculture during his years at Marist College in Poughkeepsie.

Our paths crossed when we enrolled in the Broadcast Journalism master’s degree program at Boston University in the fall of 1973. There were only about two-dozen students in the two-year program, so Bill and I got to know each other fairly well. And even though I’d marched on Washington and celebrated the Age of Aquarius at Woodstock, and Bill had played college sports and kept his nose clean, we had a friendly relationship. I was an amateur photographer and Bill occasionally asked me to shoot pictures for him to accompany articles he was writing for the school newspaper. I remember taking a photo of Bill interviewing Eli Wallach; another time Bill and I took pictures of each other with the porn star Linda Lovelace when she won Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Award.

If you had asked anyone in our program what they thought Bill O’Reilly would do with his career, I think most of us would have said that he would end up as a TV sports or entertainment reporter. Bill was fascinated by Hollywood celebrities, and he loved the New York Knicks. But though he’d studied history in college, he seemed to have almost no interest in the burning issues of the day. The Senate Watergate hearings, which had riveted the nation and exposed the duplicity and criminality of the Nixon White House, had taken place the summer before we arrived in Boston. The Vietnam War was still raging, and racial tensions in Boston and other northern cities were high. Bill seemed untouched by any of it.

But O’Reilly fooled us all. He managed to build a successful broadcasting career by tapping into the anger and resentment that all of those jocks and straights felt toward the Hippies and the demonstrators, and in the process became a spokesman for the sons and daughters of Nixon’s “silent majority.” The rest of us took our places in the much-maligned Mainstream Media, serving witness to history-in-the-making and searching for the next government conspiracy or social injustice.

I recently came across a quote I copied from a New Yorker profile of the late Yale chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, who was a significant figure in the anti-war movement. Coffin said, “Not to share in the activity and passion of your time is to count as not having lived.” As a young man, I shared in the activity and the passions of my time. Now, as I look at the Tea Party movement and the demonstrations on the right, I suppose Bill is sharing in the activity and passions of his.

Playing for Time

Every New York school child learns the story of Peter Minuit and the handful of Dutch settlers who, it’s said, purchased the island of Manhattan from the Indians for $24 worth of beads and trinkets.

The original record of the transaction, dated 5th November 1626, says that they “purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders,” which, as Russell Shorto explains in his wonderful history of Manhattan, The Island at the Centre of the World, amounted to the going rate for real estate in the New World at that time. The settlers didn’t pay cash, which, as Shorto notes, “the Indians would have found useless.” Instead, they gave the natives goods worth 60 guilders. The actual merchandise isn’t specified, but in a similar deal for Staten Island, Peter Minuit gave the Tappans tribe “Duffels, Kittles, Axes, Hoes, Wampum, Drilling Awls, Jews Harps and diverse other small wares.” This merchandise sounds more useful than beads and trinkets, but however you calculate it, there can be no doubt that in 1626, New York real estate was a steal.

And, in fact, the idea of theft has become a common theme in discussing the European colonization of the New World. I think most Americans now accept the notion that the natives who originally inhabited North and South America were either cheated out of, or forcibly driven from their lands by the Europeans who arrived on their shores. But though most of us would probably acknowledge this – perhaps with a touch of politically correct regret – few of us, Native Americans excepted, would even consider the idea that the descendants of the original European settlers should ever give the land back to its original inhabitants.

Why?

Because too much time has passed, too much history has unfolded and too much change has taken place. However morally just the claims of the original Manhattan Indians, it’s been too long and there’s simply no rolling back the clock.

Now contrast the European colonization of the Americas with the colonization of Africa. Many of the same players were involved (the English, the Dutch, the French and, to a lesser extent, the Germans, the Portuguese and the Italians), but the results, historically speaking, were completely different. In Africa, the European colonists first took control of the continent, as they had the Americas, and then, beginning in the early 1960s, gave it back.

A lot of factors contributed to Europe’s decolonization of Africa in the second half of the 20th Century, but I’d venture to guess that the biggest factor was demography. There were just too many Africans and never enough Europeans to make European domination stick.

South Africa was one of the last redoubts of European colonial rule, and I distinctly remember a conversation I had with an Afrikaner at a dinner party shortly after I’d moved there in 1988. As I recall, I was full of righteous (and justifiable) indignation about the plight of the Africans who were suffering under the yoke of apartheid, and it was clear that my dinner companion, a descendent of the Dutch settlers who had colonized the country, had heard it all before. I remember that he listened patiently to my rant and then said, “Yes, I’m sure you’re right. I guess we should have just killed them all, like you did in America.”

But, of course, the Europeans didn’t “kill them all” (though, in fact, they killed many). Instead the European “masters” used the Africans for cheap labor, to work the fields and the mines. From the European point of view, this proved to be a short-term success but a long-term failure as, in country after country, it became impossible for a tiny minority to dominate and suppress the overwhelming majority. Demography, it turned out, was destiny. The Africans had the numbers and the Europeans were shown the door.

Which brings us to the Middle East.

I’ve often wondered why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been so resistant to a peaceful resolution, and I’ve decided that the problem is that both sides believe time is on their side.

The Israelis have adopted the Dutch-in-Manhattan mindset. They know that between half a million and a million Palestinians were displaced when Israel was created in 1948, but rather than argue the morality of their national existence, they’ve decided to play for time. At some point in the future they figure that 1948 will become like 1626, and Israel’s right to exist will no longer be challenged. So I think that the Israelis figure that any comprehensive peace agreement with the Palestinians now would only work to their long-term disadvantage. In their view, the more history they can put between 1948 and an eventual settlement with the Palestinians, the better.

The Palestinians, too, think time is on their side. And their logic, as you might expect, follows the African model. Yasser Arafat once famously said that the “womb of the Palestinian woman” was the best weapon of the Palestinian people. In his view, it was inevitable that the Israeli position in Palestine would become untenable as the number of Palestinians rose relative to the number of Jews. For Arafat, demography was destiny, and the longer a peace agreement with Israel could be delayed, the better terms the Palestinians might expect.

Most of the political conversations about Middle East peace revolve around endless arguments about who’s right and who’s wrong, who built the first temple and who fired the first shot. Dialogue like that supports the delay-and-get-a-better-deal strategies of politicians on both sides, but in the end I think it's immoral to pretend to talk about peace when innocent Israelis and Palestinians are being killed. It was probably right to create a homeland for the Jews, and it was probably wrong to displace the Palestinians. But a comprehensive peace agreement that accommodates that messy reality will be hard to achieve. What's needed, of course, is a serious plan for peace. But that seems unlikely when both sides are playing for time.