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.

The People's Capitalist

Probably few Times readers caught the update on the Khodorkovsky trial on the inside pages of last week’s paper. The former Russian oil magnate was first arrested in late 2003 – for tax evasion on YUKOS Oil sales – and has been in a Siberian jail for the past five years. He was scheduled to be released in 2011, but the Russian government brought new charges of embezzlement against him last year. In a development worthy of Orwell or Kafka, the Times reported that Khodorkovsky is now charged with stealing the same oil he was formerly charged with selling.

When I met Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2002, he was the president of YUKOS and one of the richest men in the world. The circumstances of our meeting were interesting. Jacob Rothschild, of the famous European banking family, had invited Khodorkovsky to Waddesdon Manor, the palatial Rothschild estate in Buckinghamshire, England for a high-level, three-day conference designed to drum up business for a private jet company called NetJets.

The Waddesdon Conference was presented as an elite international business gathering where global leaders would discuss world affairs – a sort of a mini-Davos – but its real purpose was to interest wealthy European business leaders in buying shares of NetJets planes. The idea was to put happy NetJets owners (Lord Rothschild owned a share of a NetJets plane) together with prime NetJets prospects and hope that the former would persuade the latter to become NetJets customers. The guest list included Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway company owns NetJets, as well as Paul Volcker, Barbara Walters, Jim Wolfensohn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bono, David Frum, and some wealthy European business leaders whose names are less familiar (except to other wealthy European business leaders). I served as the Director of Communications for NetJets Europe in those days, and I was privileged to serve as the Master of Ceremonies for the conference.

Khodorkovsky arrived on the first day, and he was friendly but very shy. He spoke little English and his translator was constantly by his side. He was invited to address the conference and I remember that he talked briefly about the history of YUKOS Oil and the current business environment in Russia. Knowing what happened later, I wish I’d taken notes, but I was busy preparing an introduction for the next speaker and I didn’t pay careful attention.

The next time I met Khodorkovsky was in October of the following year. I was attending a World Economic Forum meeting in Moscow and was asked to chair a session on the outlook for global business in the “new Russia.” Khodorkovsky and two other prominent Russian businessmen were on the panel.

Relations between Khodorkovsky and Russian president Vladimir Putin had soured since I’d seen the Russian billionaire at Waddesdon Manor. The Russian president was angry about the fact that Khodorkovsky had donated money to several opposition parties in the run-up to the State Duma elections in 2003. Even worse, Khodorkovsky had publicly criticized Putin’s “managed democracy” economic model in the international media.

“It means that theoretically you have a free press,” he told the New York Times, “but in practice there is self-censorship. Theoretically you have courts; in practice, the courts adopt decisions dictated from above. Theoretically there are civil rights enshrined in the constitution; in practice, you are not able to exercise some of these rights.”

During our panel discussion in Moscow, Khodorkovsky complained that the Russian economy was not structured in a way that allowed the poor to move up to the middle class, a problem that he identified as critical to Russia’s future. After the session ended, I asked him what he’d meant by that.

“I recently returned from a vacation with my family to South Africa,” he said, “and I was struck by the fact that the wealthy people there all live behind high walls, with armed security guards. The rich people are constantly afraid that the poor people will climb over the walls and take what they have. It’s not healthy, and it’s not good for democracy. I don’t want my own children to grow up in a country like that.”

The next morning, Russian president Vladimir Putin was scheduled to deliver remarks at the Forum’s final plenary session, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky was seated in the audience. Putin was uncharacteristically late and I could see the Forum organizers fidgeting and making calls on their cell phones. A rumor spread that Putin had decided that he would not address the gathering if Khodorkovsky were in attendance.

As the minutes dragged on, Khodorkovsky’s cell phone rang and he hurriedly left the hall to take the call. His offices, he was told, were being ransacked by the secret police. The billionaire jumped into a waiting car and sped to the YUKOS headquarters. Several minutes later, Vladimir Putin entered the hall and delivered his prepared remarks.

Three weeks after the Forum’s Moscow meeting, Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested at Novosibirsk airport and charged with fraud. Anticipating the worst, he had arranged to have his YUKOS shares transferred to Jacob Rothschild in the event he was arrested, but in a matter of days, the government froze YUKOS’s assets and the value of the shares plummeted.

I really don’t know whether Mikhail Khodorkovsky was a legitimate businessman or a thief. There was a Wild West quality about Russia in the early, post-Soviet days and a lot of people got very rich, very fast – Khodorkovsky among them – so it’s certainly conceivable that the oilman cut corners and took advantage of a lax regulatory system to build his empire. But it’s equally possible that Russia’s rulers felt threatened by the country’s newly wealthy oligarchs and just decided to take Khodorkovsky out, Soviet-style, to send a message. Given the Russian government’s aversion to transparency, I suppose we’ll never know the truth.

But whatever the source of Khodorkovsky’s billions, he seemed to understand a basic truth that often eludes less thoughtful business leaders. Any system that allows the rich to get richer while the poor get poorer is ultimately bad for the rich and the poor. Khodorkovsky learned that in South Africa, and it helped make him a “people’s capitalist.” Other wealthy businessmen I’ve met, like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, seem to have learned the same lesson as they’ve made their own fortunes.

Over the years I’ve followed Khodorkovsky’s trials and tribulations with interest, but with little hope for his eventual freedom. He’s already spent almost seven years in prison and the new charges he’s facing carry a 27-year sentence. He was eligible for parole in August of 2008 but the presiding judge dismissed his application. Khodorkovsky, the judge said, had “refused to attend jail sewing classes.”

What's in a Name?

“Charles” does not play well in America. It’s too formal-sounding, like Reginald or Humphrey. Too butler-ish, maybe, or too British. And probably for that reason, it gets more nicknames than any name I can think of. Charlie, Chuck, Chip and Chaz are the most common, but there are plenty more. I have an uncle named Charles who has been called Buster all his life (he just turned 89). His daughter, my cousin, named her son after her father. He’s also a Charles, but they call him Chad. My grandfather was Charles Donald Maclean, but he was called Mac. My father is Charles Donald McLean, but he has always gone by Don. I was born Charles Donald McLean, Jr., but was called Skip as a boy (and well into my adult life).

When people address me by a nickname I don’t like – Chuck, for example – I usually correct them, casually and politely, and say, “I go by Charles.” And if they persist in calling me Chuck, or Chaz, or some other name I don’t like, I assume they’re deliberately trying to provoke, offend, or antagonize me. Or maybe they’re hard of hearing. But in any event, it’s my name and I get to pick how I’d like to be addressed.

Which brings me to politics.

If you listen to John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, or almost any other Republican spokesperson, you’ll notice that they commonly refer to their political opponents as members of the “Democrat” Party. Not Democratic. Democrat.

Now these are all career politicians, and most of them (Ms. Palin excepted) have spent virtually all of their adult lives in Washington, DC, where politics is the big game in town and they get to suit up with the varsity. They know that Democrats belong to the Democratic Party (it’s in the dictionary!), but they persistently refuse to use the proper adjective for the Party’s name.

I think this is a case of Chuck for Charles, and I blame Bob Dole. Back in 1976, when Dole was running for Vice President, he debated his Democratic challenger, Walter Mondale, and blasted the “Democrat” wars of the 20th Century. Republicans loved Dole’s skewed take on history, and were apparently even more pleased with how his use of “Democrat” as an adjective riled their opponents.

Frank Luntz, the long-time spinmeister for the Republican establishment, actually road tested the adjectival use of “Democrat” with a focus group in 2001. As Hendrik Hertzberg reported in The New Yorker a few years later, Luntz concluded that “the only people who really dislike it are highly partisan adherents of the – how you say? – Democratic Party.”

Not all modern-era Republicans have been guilty of this gratuitous insult. “Ronald Reagan never used it in polite company,” Hertzberg reported, and neither did George Bush senior. William F. Buckley, Jr., often called the Father of Modern Conservatism, was also no fan of the “Democrat” slur. “I have an aversion to ‘Democrat’ as an adjective," he wrote in a National Review column in 2000. “It has the effect of injecting politics into language, and that should be avoided.”

But Buckley’s heirs – at the Weekly Standard and the National Review, at Fox News and the conservative think-tanks, and, of course, in the halls of Congress – don’t seem to share Buckley’s reservations. In fact, George W. Bush, the most recent Republican president, was a chronic offender, routinely referring to “the Democrat Party” in his press conferences and weekly radio addresses. And the “Democrat” slur has, if anything, become even more popular among Republicans – and now with the Tea Party Movement – since Democrats won control of the White House and Congress two years ago.

So next time you hear a Republican lawmaker on Meet the Press or Face the Nation talking about how the “Democrat Party” refuses to reach across the aisle and negotiate in good faith with the minority, you might want to say, “Excuse me?” Because if Republicans really want to do business with the Democrats, they should start by showing some respect. They should get the name right.

Democratic, not Democrat.

Charles, not Chuck.

Tano

On the spur of the moment I decided to adopt a baby elephant. Actually, I took out the adoption papers in my daughter’s name, so Tano (who will celebrate her first birthday in May) is technically and officially my daughter Olivia’s foster daughter, and my wife and I are, technically and officially, Tano’s foster grandparents.

She is adorable and spirited, and watching her romp in a mud bath with her 19 orphaned playmates, as I had a chance to do in Nairobi last week, you couldn't imagine the hell she’s been through.

Tano is one of the lucky baby elephants whose lives have been saved by the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi, Kenya, which rescues baby elephants orphaned by poachers. Elephants are delicate creatures, and many of the orphaned babies die before they reach the age when they can be returned to life in the wild. But Tano looks like a good bet for survival. The Trust’s records contain the following entry about her:

“Tom Silvester, the Ranch Manager of Loisaba, rescued this tiny female who was only about 2 ½ months old. She had been located near ‘Boma Tano’ (the 5th Cattle Enclosure on the Ranch) and was suspected to be a poaching victim. The baby was too young to understand fear, and was trusting of humans from the start, instantly capturing the hearts of the Ranch Staff and the Manager’s children. They asked that she be named ‘Tano.’”

I visited the Sheldrick elephant orphanage last week during a business trip to Kenya and I was enormously impressed by the care and attention paid to these beautiful and intelligent animals. Dozens of Keepers tend to the elephants’ needs – feeding them a special, imported milk formula every three hours and even sleeping next to them at night. “No elephant is ever without a Keeper,” we were told. And the Keepers know the names and histories of every elephant in their care.

“That’s Turkwel over there,” the Trust’s spokeswoman told us. “A Park Warden risked his life by taking a team into a dangerous area around the South Turkana National Reserve, where warring tribes were constantly fighting over grazing lands for their livestock. With gunfire all around, he managed to get Turkwel safely to a landing strip and they flew him out to Nairobi.”

“And that’s Olare. A safari tourist in the Masai Mara spotted her clambering over her mother, who was stumbling, half paralyzed by a poacher’s bullet that had shattered her femur. Despite her excruciating pain, she struggled to protect her panic-stricken calf. Sadly, we had to euthenaze the mother, but we were able to save Olare.”

“And that’s little Shaba over there. He’s named for his homeland, the Shaba National Reserve in the northern part of the country. The drought has been tough on the local Samburu herdsmen who live there, and many of them have taken to grazing their cattle on the Reserve. Some of the tribesmen have also taken to poaching elephants in order to sell their ivory. Last September, a young schoolboy named Jacob noticed that a baby elephant, just days old, was trustingly following him as he walked home. The elders in his village alerted the Rangers, who called us. We were able to arrange a flight to rescue Shaba and bring him here the next day.”

And so it went. Story after story, and usually with a common thread: poachers killing elephants for their ivory, and calves, too young to have tusks of their own, left wandering in the bush. About half a million elephants remain in Africa, but conservationists estimate that poachers take the lives of as many as 60,000 of these extraordinary animals every year. Without restrictions on the ivory trade, they predict, African elephants could become extinct as early as 2020.

The 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) imposed a ban on the ivory trade in 1989, but granted permission to Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe to sell limited stocks of ivory to Japan in 1997 and 2002, when African elephant populations appeared to have stabilized. Not surprisingly, the easing of restrictions on ivory sales resulted in a dramatic up-tick in poaching throughout Africa. As the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust note in their literature, “As long as there is a demand for ivory, and a legal market for it, the story will not end. But the existence of the elephants will.”

Tanzania and Zambia recently petitioned CITES to lift the ban on ivory sales once again, but just yesterday, at the CITES meeting in Doha, the Convention’s delegates – led by the US, the EU, and courageous conservationists in Kenya – voted against lifting the ban.

“It’s welcome news,” Dr. Ian Douglas-Hamilton of Save the Elephants told reporters. “But my anxieties remain about the increased levels of poaching in Africa.”

The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust does great work. If you would like to adopt an elephant of your own, you can do so by visiting the Trust’s website: www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org. A minimum donation of $50 will get you a “fostering certificate” with a profile and photograph of your adopted orphan, plus regular e-mail installments of a “Keeper’s Diary,” charting the progress of your baby elephant. Most important, you’ll have the satisfaction of helping save an endangered species. And speaking as Tano’s foster Grandpa, I can tell you, it’s a pretty good feeling.

A Disease of the Soul

My return trip from Nairobi, Kenya took about nineteen hours, airport to airport, and I was exhausted by the time I arrived home. But I was delighted to sit down to a home-cooked meal with my family and share my experiences. Over a fresh salad, chops, vegetables and rice, we talked about hunger in Africa.

I’d flown to Nairobi to meet with a non-profit called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Their mission is to modernize agriculture on the continent and, in so doing, help end the chronic hunger and starvation that claim millions of lives there every year.

At this point – the beginning of paragraph three – you’re probably tempted to stop reading this column. Please don’t. These are problems that you might think you understand, or think you’ve heard enough about, but you don’t and you haven’t.

For five years, back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I served as Africa Bureau Chief for NBC News, and during that period I covered famines in Ethiopia and Mozambique, and visited rural farming communities in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and South Africa. It was clear then that Africa was losing the battle against hunger. But in the past two decades, things have gone from bad to worse.

UN health and food organizations estimate that 25,000 people in the developing world die every day from hunger, malnutrition and related diseases. As Wall Street Journal reporters Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman point out in their book, Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, that’s the equivalent of sixty jumbo jets crashing every day. And fully half of these hunger victims are in sub-Saharan Africa, where close to half a billion people are undernourished.

The statistics are numbing, and that’s part of the problem. Like so many challenges in Africa, it’s tempting to put hunger and malnutrition in the “Too Hard” basket and move on to more tractable problems. Fortunately, powerful organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and African organizations like AGRA aren’t moving on. They’re tackling the challenge head on.

The Green Revolution began with the work of an agronomist named Norman Borlaug, who received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1942. Two years later, Borlaug was recruited by the Cooperative Wheat Research Production Program to help Mexico increase its grain production. During his fourteen years with the program, Borlaug developed new varieties of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat that helped Mexico go from a net wheat importer to a net wheat exporter. In 1963, the Rockefeller Foundation sent Borlaug to India, where he replicated his success. Wheat production there increased from 12.3 million tons to 20.1 million tons in just five years. Borlaug moved on to Pakistan, and then to China, adapting the techniques of the Green Revolution to the specific soil and climate conditions he found in each country and region.

But Borlaug’s efforts foundered in Africa, where smallholder farmers, mostly women, struggled against both the natural elements (primarily drought) and an economic infrastructure that stymied efforts to improve crop production and profitability. To make matters worse, misguided environmentalists campaigned against Borlaug’s utilization of genetic crossbreeding and use of inorganic fertilizers and pesticides, the very techniques and products that had saved so many lives in Mexico, India, Pakistan and China.

“If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things,” Borlaug said of his critics.

The folks I met with at AGRA are trying to re-start the Green Revolution Borlaug began decades ago, but this time, they say, it will be a revolution with an African face. Led by its chairman, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and the organization’s president, Dr. Namanga Ngongi, AGRA is looking to reduce food insecurity by 50% in at least 20 African countries and double the incomes of 20 million smallholder families in the next decade.

These are ambitious goals, and it will take more than Gates and Rockefeller money for AGRA to achieve them. It will take a genuine commitment by Africa’s fifty-two nations to work together to defeat hunger and end starvation, and it will require the cooperation and collaboration of countries around the world – especially with regard to tariffs and farm subsidies – for Africa’s Green Revolution to succeed.

I left Africa on Wednesday evening convinced that AGRA’s goals were achievable, at least on paper. They’ve assembled a talented group of smart and experienced people to meet the challenge, and they have some powerful allies and champions. But it’s also clear that success will require a level of selflessness, generosity and commitment from nations and political leaders that has been, sadly, in short supply.

Volli Carucci, who works for the United Nations World Food Program in Ethiopia, observed that starvation is “something people in Europe and the United States have forgotten about." But Carucci, working on the front lines in the battle against hunger, said he couldn't forget. "Looking into the eyes of someone dying of hunger," he said, "becomes a disease of the soul.”

Norman Borlaug, the founder of the Green Revolution, died six months ago, at age 95, after a life of extraordinary achievement. When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, it was estimated that he had saved more than a billion people from starvation. In accepting his award in Oslo he said, “Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of famine, as he has so often done in the past.” He concluded, “We will be guilty of criminal negligence, without extenuation, if we permit future famines.”

Forty years later, our criminal negligence continues.

It needs to stop.

Lessons from the Pinewood Derby

My favorite possession is a wooden racecar about eight inches long and about two and a half-inches wide, plastic wheel to plastic wheel. It was originally glossy black, but it’s pretty scuffed up now and the paint is chipped and worn at the edges. An orange number 3 is painted on the tail.

My Dad and I made the car more than fifty years ago, when I was a Cub Scout. It was our entry in the Pinewood Derby, a father-son event that began in 1953 and has been an annual tradition ever since. Every spring, tens of thousands of Cub Scouts around the world enter their cars in local Derby matches, racing them down carefully constructed, regulation-grade wooden ramps in elimination heats that culminate in a final showdown race to determine the Pinewood Derby champ.

Our car started out as a block of pine, two wooden cross axles, four narrow plastic wheels and four one-inch steel nails. Our job was to shape the block of wood and the various bits and pieces into a racecar, then paint it and prepare it for competition. The Pinewood Derby kit came with a set of rules. You had to use the wheels supplied with the kit, for example, and the final weight of the car could not exceed a certain number of ounces.

My Dad and I knew what a real racecar should look like. Every September we’d go to the midget car races at the Allentown Fair and watch young hot shots drive scaled-down Indy cars around the fairground’s dirt track. It was loud and dusty for the spectators and frequently dangerous for the drivers (we usually saw a spinout or two, and sometimes a crash). But it was really, really fun. And it was something I did with my Dad.

So we tried to make Number 3 look like a real racecar, at least in its basic proportions. My Dad was a dentist (we lived upstairs, above his office) and he was good with his hands. He kept a few basic tools around the house, including a power drill. To shape the racer, he fitted a sanding disc to the drill and had me hold the drill steady while he pushed the pine gently against the abrasive surface.

We ended up with a handsome car, streamlined and sleek. We put a drop of oil on the hub of each wheel and tested it by racing it up and down the hallway. Then my Dad had a thought. He asked me to take the car down to Rader’s Market, a block and a half away, and ask the butcher if he’d mind weighing it. I probably made it there and back in under ten minutes.

“We’re light,” my Dad said, looking at the numbers the butcher had scribbled on a piece of paper. “If we can put some weight on this car, she’ll pick up speed down the ramp and we’ll have a better chance to win.”

My Dad took the sanding head off the drill and fitted a fat, quarter-inch bit in its place. He drilled four or five holes in the bottom of the car, then went down to the lab in his dental office and mixed up some amalgam. I just had some fillings replaced and I know that the material used today is a lot stronger, lighter, and safer than the amalgam my Dad used in the ‘50s. But this stuff was absolutely perfect for a block of pine in need of an extra ounce or two.

Again I raced down to Rader’s, but the car was still way too light. Another half dozen holes. More amalgam. Another trip to the market. Then more holes, and yet another dash to Rader’s.

When Number 3 was placed on the scale on Derby day, she weighed in at a fraction of an ounce under the maximum allowable weight. If you’d flipped her over, you would have seen seventeen neatly-filled “cavities,” still visible under a thin coat of black paint. She was fast and she was beautiful, and in heat after heat, she proved to be a winner.

What I remember most about that experience wasn’t winning the Derby, but the pleasure I had making that car with my Dad. He was young then, much younger than I am now, and he was busy building his dental practice and putting food on our table. But he always seemed to have time for me.

As the years went by, we put together electric train sets in the basement, and built gas-powered model planes that we flew in circles on the baseball field. We threw a softball in the backyard in the spring and a football in the fall.

I’ve been a father myself for about twenty years now, and I often reflect on all I learned from my Dad. He did so many things right, and I know I’ve often come up short by comparison. But I’ve always tried to be there for my daughters, the way he was there for me. It’s a lesson I learned from him and one I’m reminded of every time I glance over and see Number 3, chipped and worn, on the corner of my desk.

Don McLean, co-champion of the Pinewood Derby, will turn 88 on Sunday. He’s a great man and a great father. And twentysome years into his retirement, he’s still pretty good with his hands.

Happy Birthday, Dad.

Playing for the Devil

Dwayne Carter is headed to prison and, I have to say, I won’t miss him. “Lil’ Wayne,” as he’s known – or “Weezy” to his friends – is a rap artist whose album, “Tha Carter III,” was the top selling album in 2008. Carter pleaded guilty to felony gun charges for possession of an unlicensed handgun in New York City and was sentenced to a year in prison at Manhattan Supreme Court on Monday. He’s also wanted for felony drug possession and weapons charges in Arizona, so he may have more legal troubles ahead of him.

I have a wonderful relationship with my two daughters – I’m incredibly fortunate – but the biggest arguments I’ve had with them, hands down, have been about rap music. I think it’s toxic, and they think… well, it’s probably better for me not to characterize their points of view. Suffice it to say, they like to go to parties and dance, and rap music has been a big part of the dance scene for a decade or more. I understand that. But – and here’s where the arguments start – I think that rap music, apart from its dance beat, conveys messages that are misogynistic and anti-social. The lyrics, as far as I can tell, celebrate gun violence, drug use, criminal behavior and sexual exploitation of women. And based on what I’ve seen and read, it appears that the financial and social success that rap artists have enjoyed as a result of their popularity has made them role models for a generation of young African American men, many of whom have turned their backs on education and responsible relationships with women for the “hip hop life.” But then I’m a middle-aged white guy from the suburbs, so my credibility on this subject is probably somewhere close to zero.

As I’ve reflected on my arguments with my daughters about rap music, I’ve come to believe that my disapproval, and parental disapproval in general, is probably an important part of rap’s appeal. Rap wouldn’t be very exciting for my kids if mom and dad played it at home. And not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s plainly hypocritical for those of us in the Woodstock generation to complain about the music our kids enjoy. (I don’t think my own parents were too thrilled to turn on the radio and hear “Let’s Spend the Night Together” or “One Toke Over the Line”). Music provided a soundtrack for rebellion in my generation, and there’s no reason to suspect that things have changed much for kids today.

When you’re young, there’s something irresistible about things that are dangerous. I picked up on this when I was a little boy growing up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, listening to early Rock ‘n Roll playing on the loudspeaker at the local swimming pool. Pat Boone was boring. Jerry Lee Lewis was dangerous.

I recently found a clip of Jerry Lee on You Tube and played it for my younger daughter, who is a senior in high school. The video featured “The Killer” performing on a British television show in the early to mid-sixties, several years past his heyday and looking fairly ridiculous as he pounded out “High Heeled Sneakers” in the midst of the proper-looking British kids who were dancing around his piano. My daughter thought the performance was somewhere between gross and laughable, but I thought it was terrific.

Jerry Lee has led a colorful, and not always happy life. He’s almost 75 now, and he’s been married six times, once, notoriously, to his 13 year-old first cousin, once removed. One of his wives drowned in a swimming pool and one died of a drug overdose, and one of his six children drowned when he was only three years old, and another son, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jr., was killed in a car accident at age 14.

Lewis envied the greater success and popularity of Elvis Presley, and was once arrested when he showed up drunk and disorderly at 3 a.m. at the gates of Graceland, waving a loaded gun and demanding to see The King. Later that same year, The Killer made news again when he was playing around with a loaded gun and accidentally shot his bass player in the chest. So when Jerry Lee sings “I’m gonna take my pistol Baby, cause some cat might wanna fight” in High Heeled Sneakers, he has some credibility.

Jerry Lee Lewis had grown up as a poor but God-fearing southern boy in eastern Louisiana. In a story I found on the Internet, a friend of Lewis’s, Peary Green, remembered him getting expelled from school after he played some “worldly” music at a church assembly. Years later, Green asked Lewis, “Are you still playing the devil’s music?” And Lewis said, “Yes, I am. But you know it’s strange, the same music that they kicked me out of school for is the same kind of music they play in their churches today. The difference is, I know I’m playing for the devil and they don’t.”

Casablanca Quiz Answers:

In a previous post I included a trivia quiz for fans of the movie Casablanca. Answers below:

1. Rick’s last name
Answer: Blaine
2. The bartender’s name at Rick’s Café Americain
Answer: Sascha
3. Maiden name of Ilsa
Answer: Lund
4. Ilsa’s home town
Answer: Oslo
5. Amount Louis bets Rick that Victor Laszlo will not leave Casablanca
Answer: 10,000 francs (Rick proposes 20,000, but Louis insists they bring it down to 10,000 because “I’m just a poor corrupt official.”)
6. Color dress Ilsa was wearing when the German’s marched into Paris
Answer: blue (“The Germans wore grey, you wore blue,” Rick remembers).
7. Name of Signor Ferrari’s bar
Answer: the Blue Parrot
8. Name of Rick’s bar in Paris
Answer: Le Belle Aurore
9. City where Victor Laszlo was arrested by the Germans and put in a concentration camp
Answer: Prague
10. The kind of water Louis drinks
Answer: Vichy
11. The winning roulette number for the lucky Bulgarian refugee
Answer: 22
12. Name of the town Louis suggests he and Rick retire to at the end of the film
Answer: Brazzaville (currently the capital of the Republic of the Congo, but then the capital of French Equatorial Africa)

We'll Always Have Casablanca

If you saw the movie Shakespeare in Love you might have been struck by how popular "the theatre" was to the commoners back in the late 1500s. Similarly, if you saw Amadeus you might have reflected on how important the opera was to the hoi polloi in Europe back in the late 1700s. The theater in Shakespeare's era, and the opera in Mozart's, were the popular art forms of their day. And as you were watching Joseph Feines, Gwyneth Paltrow and Tom Hulce up on the big screen, you might have reflected on the fact that you were enjoying the popular art form of our day: the movies.

And tonight, of course, is Movie Night. The Academy Awards.

I have my own favorites -- for Best Picture (The Hurt Locker), Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker), Best Actor (Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart) and Best Actress (Carey Mulligan in An Education) -- but I suspect the Motion Picture Academy will think differently about at least some of these choices. It doesn’t matter. It’ll be a good show and we’ll all be talking about it tomorrow morning.

Thinking about the movies got me to dusting off a list of Favorite Films that I’ve kept on my computer for years. It’s too long to reprint here (more than 90 films), and it contains a lot of titles that would probably appear on almost everyone’s Top 100 (The Godfather, Saving Private Ryan, Citizen Kane, It’s a Wonderful Life, etc.). But it also contains some quirky films and some smaller films that I consider gems, like The Great Santini (with a tour de force performance by Robert Duvall), and Nightmare Alley (maybe Tyrone Power’s best work). My list includes what my wife and daughters call “guy films,” like Gladiator, The Right Stuff, Tombstone and Braveheart, but it also contains movies we all enjoy, like Top Hat, Jerry McGuire, Father of the Bride and Little Miss Sunshine.

My list of favorite films includes a few that you might have to go to an art-house theater to see, like Fellini’s La Strada, and Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, but most of the titles are shamelessly middlebrow and mainstream. The movies are the people’s art form, after all.

As I’m looking down my list I realize that it includes some movies that were undeniably great, but that I’ll probably never watch again (The Deer Hunter and Gangs of New York come to mind), as well as a few films I’ll watch almost anytime they pop up on one of the movie channels, like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Cinderella Man, and Get Shorty.

But there’s one film I know I’ve seen more than any other, and that’s Casablanca. I first saw it when I was a sophomore in college and I’ve probably seen it twenty times since then. I remember that I was hooked on it from frame one. As the film opens, a globe spins in the mist and an announcer’s voice intones…

“With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas. Lisbon became the great embarkation point. But not everybody could get to Lisbon directly, and so a tortuous, roundabout refugee trail sprang up… Paris to Marseille… across the Mediterranean to Oran… then by train, or auto, or foot, across the rim of Africa… to Casablanca…”

Casablanca is a great war movie, a terrific love story and (by the end, at least) a classic buddy picture. Bogart’s Rick is a character right out of Hemingway, and Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa is one of the most beautiful leading ladies ever to appear on the silver screen (and it was silver back then). Sure the movie is corny and clichéd, but that’s part of its charm. Millions and millions of people have seen Casablanca, and millions of us have seen it more than once. It won Best Picture, Best Director (Michael Curtiz) and Best Screenplay in 1943, and in my view it might be the best picture of all time.

Every Casablanca lover knows that neither Rick nor Ilsa ever actually said, “Play it again, Sam.” But even dedicated fans might not know that the film's writers, Philip and Julius Epstein, are the only twins to ever win an Academy Award. (I had to look that one up).

So for all of you who think you know all there is to know about Casablanca, here’s a not-ridiculously-difficult trivia quiz to test your knowledge. If you’ve seen the film ten or more times, you should get all of these right. If you’ve seen it fewer than ten times, well, then I guess you’ve got some catching up to do…

1. Rick’s last name

2. The bartender’s name at Rick’s Café Americain

3. Maiden name of Ilsa

4. Ilsa’s home town

5. Amount Louis bets Rick that Victor Laszlo will not leave Casablanca

6. Color dress Ilsa was wearing when the German’s marched into Paris

7. Name of Signor Ferrari’s bar

8. Name of Rick’s bar in Paris

9. City where Victor Laszlo was arrested by the Germans and put in a concentration camp

10. The kind of water Louis drinks

11. The winning roulette number for the lucky Bulgarian refugee

12. Name of the town Louis suggests he and Rick retire to at the end of the film

Answers will be posted in my next column. No prizes will be awarded, but everyone who answers all twelve questions correctly is entitled to a smug and well-deserved sense of self-satisfaction.

Final note: Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman never made another movie together. But as every Casablanca lover knows, they always had Paris. And we’ll always have Casablanca.

Field Notes of a Hotel Warrior, Part IV

Below is the last in a short series of posts about my experiences in Riyadh during the Gulf War. As I noted in previous entries, my assignments during the war took me to Baghdad, Amman, Damascus, Dharan, and Kuwait City, but I spent most of the war (about three months) in the Hyatt Hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Today's post focuses on a talented young reporter named Katie Couric...

Part IV: Katie and Me

At the height of the Gulf War, the Today Show took several stories about the conflict for each of its major news blocks, and I often got the chance to do a live report on the information I’d gathered from Central Command’s daily briefing and from my sources in Riyadh for either the 7:00 a.m. or 8:00 a.m. news.

I hated it. Not the reporting – which I really enjoyed – but the live shots. There was something about talking to a round piece of glass that made me extremely uncomfortable.

This was not a problem for our Pentagon reporter, Katie Couric. Katie – actually, I think they were still calling her “Katherine” on the air at that point – was new to the network, and the news division had assigned her to back-up the regular Pentagon correspondent, Fred Francis, who was off covering the war in the field. And as we all soon discovered, Katie was a natural.

Most mornings the show would ask one of us to do a live shot for the 7:00 o’clock news block and the other to do one for the 8:00. But Katie and I would be on the phone to each other hours earlier, comparing notes. She would always quiz me about what I’d learned at the briefing, and I’d ask her what she was hearing at the Pentagon. It was all very collegial, but it didn’t take too long for me to realize that Katie had no compunction about using my material in her live-shot if she went on the air before me. And – equally sneaky – I would listen to her live shots and hear about important Pentagon developments that she’d somehow forgotten to brief me about on our morning call.

But you had to love her. She was a charmer, and she was just so damn good on the air.

One morning I said to her, “Katie, you’ve got to tell me. How do you communicate so naturally and confidently on your live shots?”

She said, “It’s easy. I just look at the camera and imagine I’m talking to my family back home.”

Right.

Well… I’m here to tell you: it’s not as easy as it looks.

Postscript:

I lost touch with Katie when I left NBC News, and she has, of course, moved on to great things at CBS. But I do remember answering a solicitation on the popular TV news gossip site, TVNewser, back in September of 2008 that said, “Katie Couric Wants to Know: ‘What Would You Ask Sarah Palin?’” Under the pen name “Letsgetreal,” I wrote, “If I were Katie, I'd say: ‘Governor, we live in a complicated world. And it's clear you lead a very busy life. So how do you get your information about what's going on? What do you read, and watch, and listen to? What have you read recently that has informed or influenced your views on the direction America is taking?’" I don’t know if my suggested question ever made it to Katie’s desk, but I was delighted when she used a similar question in her interview with Palin later that week. Katie's Palin interviews were a political game-changer, and she received numerous awards for them. All well-deserved.

Field Notes of a Hotel Warrior, Part III

This is the third in a series of posts about my experiences as NBC's "Man in Riyadh" during the Gulf War. As I noted in the first post, my assignments during the war took me to Baghdad, Amman, Damascus, Dharan, and Kuwait City, but I spent most of the war (about three months) in the Hyatt Hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Today's post deals with communications strategy, something I thought very little about when I was a journalist, but which I've thought about a lot in the second half of my working life...

Part III: Bovine Scatology

General Schwarzkopf is well remembered for the strategic and tactical brilliance he demonstrated as the military commander of Coalition forces during the Gulf War, but his skills as a communications strategist are not as widely known. I can tell you from first-hand experience: he was a first-class communicator.

I don’t remember the exact dates, but sometime before the commencement of ground operations against Iraqi forces in Kuwait there were a number of air and sea operations that made news. One of these was a firefight in a town called Khafji, just over the Iraqi border in Saudi Arabia. As I remember the sequence of events, Coalition troops who had taken up positions in the town were ambushed by Iraqi troops in a cross-border raid, but the Iraqi advances were then reversed when Coalition forces counter-attacked and re-took the town. It was the first real ground battle of the war, and the casualties included a number of US and Saudi soldiers. With the whole world watching developments in the Middle East, it was big news, and the US military command in Riyadh scheduled a press briefing with General Schwarzkopf for the following day.

At about the same time as the Battle of Khafji, a Coalition air assault on an Iraqi oil storage facility had succeeded in destroying a strategic target, but had also, inadvertently, created an oil spill that was fouling a several-square-mile patch of the Persian Gulf. An American newspaper had picked up the oil spill story and claimed that the US Navy had been asked to help manage the spill but had refused. Khafji would certainly be Topic A at the press briefing, but the oil spill story would probably also get a mention.

The night before the General’s press conference, I got a phone call in my hotel room from Schwarzkopf’s press attaché, Ron Wildermuth.

“The General would be very grateful if you would ask a specific question at tomorrow’s briefing,” Wildermuth said.

“Whoa, Ron…” I said, “You know I can’t ask a planted question…”

“I know, I know,” Wildermuth said, “But the General would really appreciate it if you would ask this question.”

I didn’t like the sound of this, but I also figured that it was important to stay in the General’s good graces. I suggested a compromise.

“Well, if I ask the General’s question, will I get a chance to ask a question of my own?”

“No way,” Wildermuth said. “Nobody gets a second question at a Schwarzkopf briefing.”

“Then I can’t do it,” I said.

About ten minutes later I was getting ready for bed when the phone rang again. It was Captain Wildermuth.

“OK,” he said. “You get your second question.”

I had to figure that he’d tried and failed to get some other stooge to do the General’s bidding, which made me feel even more like a sell-out for agreeing to this scheme. But, I told myself, at least I’d get to ask my own question as a follow-up.

“So what does the General want me to ask?”

“He’d like you to ask him whether the US Navy refused a request to help with the oil spill,” Wildermuth said.

“OK,” I said. “That’s a legitimate question. I’m sure somebody would have asked it anyway, but I’ll make sure the General gets a chance to put it on the record.”

At the press conference the next day, General Schwarzkopf put on his standard, impressive performance. He added new details to what had previously been reported about the Battle of Khafji, and he brought the press corps up to date on the air war.

“I’ve got time for a few questions,” he said, and pointed to me.

“General,” I said, “As you know, there have been media reports that the US Navy refused a request to assist with cleanup of an oil spill that took place recently in the Gulf. Would you care to comment?”

Schwarzkopf looked at me as if I were either incredibly stupid or possibly insane. Then he rocked back on his heels and said, “That’s the most ridiculous piece of bovine scatology I’ve ever heard in my life!” He’d found a PG way of saying “bullshit,” and he got a good laugh from the press and his fellow officers. He then went on to correct the record of events in the Gulf, and moved on to other questions.

I thought about our brief exchange afterwards and I realized that I’d been just a small piece in a neat little bit of military communications strategy. Schwarzkopf was angry about a report that criticized – and in his view, misrepresented – the actions of a naval vessel under his command, and he wanted to correct the record. He knew that most, maybe all of the questions he’d be asked at the briefing would be about Khafji – the big story of the day – but he wanted to make sure that he made his point about the Navy and the oil spill.

So he got his press attaché to find a stooge (me) to ask a question about the incident so he would be sure to get his answer on the record. But then he must have thought, “What if I answer the question but they don’t put my answer on the news?” At which point – and this was the “genius” part – he came up with a clever soundbite he knew we couldn’t resist.

The result? All three networks used the “bovine scatology” clip that night, and CNN played it on the hour for most of the day.

I’ve learned a lot about communications strategy in the second half of my working life, and I’ve often used this Schwarzkopf story as a “teachable moment” in media training seminars. I summarize it this way: the General had a communications goal (set the record straight on a piece of battlefield misinformation), and he devised a strategy (use the Khafji press conference as a platform to reach a wide audience), and specific tactics (find a stooge, develop a compelling message, etc.) to achieve his goal. And in this case, everything went to plan. In military terms: mission accomplished.

I could only admire the General’s skills, even if I ended up playing the stooge in his communications strategy. And oh yes, I did get my second question. All these years later, I can’t remember what it was. But I do remember that it never made the news.

Postscript:

General Schwarzkopf's press officer, Captain Ron Wildermuth, retired from the Navy shortly after the Gulf War after 23 years of distinguished service. I located him in Carson, California, where he's now the Manager of Public and Government Affairs for the West Basin Municipal Water District, and shared a draft of this post. "Boy does this bring back memories," he wrote. Mission accomplished, Ron.

Field Notes of a Hotel Warrior, Part II

Yesterday I began a series of posts on my experiences as a journalist during the Gulf War. As I noted then, my assignments during the war took me to Baghdad, Amman, Damascus, Dharan, and Kuwait City, but I spent most of the war (about three months) in the Hyatt Hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Today's post deals with the impact of round-the-clock television news coverage on war reporting...

Part II: Fighting CNN's War

After the air war began, the US military created a daily briefing for the press. I’m guessing that they modeled their briefing plans on the “5 o'clock Follies” in Vietnam, but the Gulf War was a different kind of conflict, taking place in a different media environment, and the Vietnam model didn’t work. This was war in the age of satellite television, waged under the watchful eye of CNN and its non-stop, 24/7 news cycle.

All of which created serious problems for the military briefers. Day after day they appeared at the podium with “battle summaries” of yesterday’s news, then got hammered with questions about fresh battlefield developments they knew nothing about – developments that had been reported moments earlier on CNN. As a reporter, I was embarrassed for these guys. And the General in charge, I soon learned, was furious.

One evening, during the early days of the air war, I got a call in my hotel room shortly after 11 p.m. from Captain Wildermuth, General Schwarzkopf’s press liaison. He asked me if I could round up three or four other reporters and proceed to Central Command’s headquarters across the street (“the bunker”) for a meeting at midnight with the General.

I made some quick phone calls, and a half hour later, four colleagues and I were escorted to the military’s underground headquarters. Schwarzkopf entered the room at exactly midnight and he had steam coming out of his ears.

“You guys are beating up on my guy every day in the briefing room and I want to know what we need to do to put a stop to it,” the General said.

“The problem,” we explained, “is that the briefers are showing up with old news. We’re asking them about stuff we’re seeing on CNN and they don’t seem to have a clue…”

“Well, it’s making us look bad, and I’m not about to have the US military looking bad on American television. I want to know how we can fix this.”

“How about having a senior level officer come directly from the War Room to the briefing room?” we suggested. “That way we’d know that the information was accurate and up-to-date…”

“Done,” Schwarzkopf said. “Ron, I want this fixed by tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, Sir,” the Captain said, as Schwarzkopf left the room.

It was like a scene out of The King and I. “So let it be done!” Yul Brenner commanded. And it was.

The next morning we were briefed by Schwarzkopf’s Deputy of Operations, Marine Corps General Richard “Butch” Neal, who, as promised, came to the hotel directly from the War Room. Butch did a terrific job, that day and for weeks to come. And to his credit, he always tried to give us at least one piece of news that we hadn’t seen yet on CNN.

Postscript:

The daily briefings made Butch Neal a star. In an interview with Northeastern University’s alumni magazine in 2004 he said, “I didn’t understand the magnitude of the exposure at the time. I remember my wife saying to me, ‘You can’t realize what it’s like – you’re on every TV station all the time, every radio all the time’.” Butch got more than his fifteen minutes of fame. But in my opinion, he deserved it.

Field Notes of a Hotel Warrior, Part I

Over the next few days I plan to post some of my recollections of the Gulf War. My assignments during the war took me to Baghdad, Amman, Damascus, Dharan, and Kuwait City, but I spent most of the war (about three months) in the Hyatt Hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

So here's the Gulf War, as I remember it...

Part I: “Call Me Skip”

The Coalition ground offensive against Iraq’s occupying army in Kuwait began nineteen years ago this week. It was a beautifully planned and brilliantly executed military operation, and I was privileged to watch most of it from a second-row folding chair in a conference room in the Hyatt Hotel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

A fellow journalist called us “hotel warriors,” which seemed apt until the first Scud missiles landed in Riyadh and we had to suit up in our chemical protection outfits and drive around the city looking for bomb damage. Still, Riyadh wasn’t the front line for either the ground war or the air war. The front lines were, respectively, in neighboring Kuwait, where US-led coalition forces were pushing the Iraqis out of the country, and in Iraq itself, where US planes were bombing strategic targets and “lighting up Baghdad” on CNN.

But Riyadh was the headquarters for Central Command, where the coalition’s Commander-in-Chief, US Army General Norman Schwarzkopf, oversaw every aspect of the war’s design and prosecution. And it was an exciting place to be in February of ’91… and not least because it gave reporters a chance to see the war from the “C-in-C’s” (sounds like “sinks”) point of view.

Many reporters who covered the Gulf War faulted the US military for its tight restrictions on war coverage and its "selectivity" when it came to releasing information to the public, and some of their criticisms were certainly legitimate. But I personally felt that I had great access to the military brass in Riyadh and that they were, for the most part, responsive to my questions and requests for information.

I think that was partly a result of a fortunate incident that took place in early January, when the coalition initiated the air campaign that preceded the ground offensive in Kuwait. The war had been months in the planning at that point, but despite repeated requests, Schwarzkopf had given no interviews and held no press conferences. We were told that the C-in-C was “busy planning the war” and didn’t have time to speak to the press.

I was pleased, then, to finally hear from the General’s press officer, Captain Ron Wildermuth, that General Schwarzkopf would be available to do a series of round-robin interviews with the American TV networks for our Sunday morning public affairs shows. He was also planning to give his first press conference the following day, Ron said, in time for our Monday morning programs.

Shortly after the call, representatives from ABC, CBS, and CNN joined me in a meeting in the Hyatt conference room to draw straws to determine the order of the interviews. We won. Schwarzkopf would speak first to Garrick Utley, who was then the host of Meet the Press.

Because NBC was first in the rotation, we were given responsibility for the technical arrangements. On the designated Sunday morning, we created a makeshift “set” in a hotel function room, and laid the cable we needed to connect with our satellite uplink. The General, we were told, would arrive on set at about 6:00 pm, a half hour before broadcast time (Riyadh is eight hours ahead of New York), so we could set our lights and mike levels.

Surprise. Schwarzkopf showed up at 5:00 pm instead of 6:00.

“Ron, I hope I haven’t gotten things confused here, but we don’t go on the air for another ninety minutes. We were expecting you and the General in an hour.”

“I know,” Wildermuth said. “It’s a security issue. The General’s staff decided it was wise to bring him over early, rather than when he was expected to arrive.”

Which was fine by me. As our camera crew set up our equipment, I had an hour to sit and chat with the C-in-C, one-on-one.

I asked Schwarzkopf every question I could think of about developments in the air war and his plans for the ground campaign. He parried most of my questions diplomatically, but he did give me some new insights that I was able to pass along to NBC headquarters in New York.

But we also talked about personal stuff. Schwarzkopf was based in Florida, which was headquarters for the military division responsible for the Middle East, and I had recently spent three years as a producer in NBC’s Miami bureau, so we swapped Florida stories. I’d also covered the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, which was another point of common interest.

At about 6:15, our NBC cameraman interrupted us and said it was time for the General to take his position on the set. As I escorted him to his chair, I said, “General, I wonder if you could do me a favor. If you call on me at tomorrow’s press conference, I wonder if you could call me ‘Skip.’ It was my childhood nickname, and I know my mother back in Pennsylvania will be watching the Today Show and it will make her very proud.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll remember that…”

The Meet the Press interview went off without a hitch, and the General gave his first press conference, as scheduled, early the next afternoon. It was a big show. Colin Powell and Dick Cheney had flown in from DC for the event, with most of the top American and Saudi military brass flanking the podium. And General Schwarzkopf made a comprehensive presentation, complete with maps and videos and detailed “bomb damage assessments.”

When he was finished, he said, “OK, I have time for a few questions.” I raised my hand and the General pointed his index finger at me.

“Skip?”

I asked my question, got an answer, and NBC used the exchange on the Today Show. And yes, my mother and my father, back in Allentown were very pleased.

But the most interesting thing about this story is what happened in the weeks after that first press briefing. I found that I was almost always called on first at press conferences, no matter who was briefing. I was like the Helen Thomas of Riyadh. It confused me at first, but then I figured out that the military brass who had attended that first press conference all assumed that because the C-in-C had called on me by name – and a nickname at that – I must be a personal friend of the General’s.

I think my press corps colleagues got the same impression. I always got my favorite seat in the briefing room. Second row left, on the aisle.

Weeks later, I remember, a CNN producer came up to me and said, “Hey, I gotta ask you. You know, at every press conference, these military guys call on you first, and they all seem to know your name. Did you, like, cover the Pentagon or something?”

I took a moment to think about my answer.

“No,” I said. “I’ve just been working my sources.”

The Bolt-hole Dilemma

We've been enjoying the Winter Olympics. The skating, the downhill, the half-pipe -- all great. And we've also enjoyed the commercials, especially the ones for Vancouver and British Columbia. What a beautiful place! -- and, I'm thinking, maybe the perfect bolt-hole.

Merriam-Webster defines a bolt-hole as "a place of escape or refuge" (think of a hole in a fence or a hedge that a rabbit can bolt through when it's being chased). I first heard the term back in the '80s when I was covering "the troubles" in Northern Ireland. A Protestant businessman I met in Belfast told me that he loved his country, but that he was saving up for a "bolt-hole back in London" in case things got really bad.

Well, nowadays we've got troubles of our own here in the States, and I'm guessing that for more than a few Americans, a bolt-hole like Vancouver is looking better and better. Lauding Canada's virtues in a recent New York Times piece, columnist Timothy Egan wrote, "Their murder rate is just a third that of the United States. They have universal health care... And when our financial system caused the world economy to tank because of reckless deregulation, Canada's banks were steady as they go, boring and mostly health." Egan called Vancouver, "Manhattan with mountains."

"Boring and mostly healthy" probably sounds pretty good to a lot of people down in the real Manhattan, where the US economy is struggling to dig itself out of the Great Recession. And if you still don't think our economic problems are serious, Don Peck's cover story in this month's Atlantic will have you Googling Canadian real estate agents faster than you can say Vancouver. In "The Recession's Long Shadow," Peck, the magazine's deputy managing editor, assesses the long-term impact of what many economists predict will be prolonged and widespread unemployment in the US. After laying out the grim statistics ("The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012 and even 2014, it will have declined only a little"), Peck writes:

"All of these figures understate the magnitude of the jobs crisis. The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s."

Peck then cites a recent survey showing that 44 percent of American families have experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year. "If it persists much longer," Peck concludes, "this era of high joblessness... is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years."

If Peck's story depresses you, don't open today's New York Times. Reporter Peter Goodman begins his front page, above-the-fold story, "Despite Signs of Recovery, Chronic Joblessness Rises," by declaring that "Even as the American economy shows tentative signs of a rebound, the human toll of the recession continues to mount, with millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits." Maurice Emsellem, a policy director for the National Employment Law Project, told Goodman that "The system was ill prepared for the reality of long-term unemployment... Now, you add a severe recession and you have created a crisis of historic proportions."

Up in boring and mostly healthy Canada, unemployment, though up compared with pre-recession levels, has actually declined for four of the past six months. The national unemployment level stands at 8.3 percent -- unacceptably high, yes, but still about 1.7 percent below the US figure. And for those of you keeping a bolt-hole list, unemployment in British Columbia is at 8.1 percent, slightly below the Canadian national average.

Setting economics aside, Canada also looks good to Americans who are depressed about our hyper-partisan, paralyzed and dysfunctional political system. I'll save my comments about politics for a later post, but in the interim I highly recommend David Barstow's chilling report on right wing groups affiliated with the Tea Party movement in last Tuesday's Times ("Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right"). If groups like Arm in Arm, which "aims to organize neighborhoods for possible civil strife by stockpiling food and survival gear, and forming armed neighborhood groups," and Oath Keepers, which "recruits military and law enforcement officials who are asked to disobey orders the group deems unconstitutional" continue to grow, a lot more Americans will be shopping for bolt-holes in the near future.

But as attractive as a "bolt-hole strategy" might be, it doesn't feel quite right. The United States is a great country, with a long and proud history as a beacon of liberty and opportunity for the rest of the world. You don't have to be a cry-on-cue, right wing television personality to love this place: it's blessed with breath-taking natural beauty and it's full of decent, hard-working, honest, kind, and generous people. It really is a tough place to turn your back on.

And despite its current struggles, it's important to remember that the United States has been an engine of progress for the entire global economy for almost a century. Which means that the failure of the American economy isn't just bad for America; it's bad for the whole world. "We are the indispensable nation," former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said. Or as an Australian friend of mine put it: "The world needs a strong America."

Which begs the question: who will keep America strong and great if -- when the going gets tough -- the tough "get going" to Canada, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand?

Is it right to stay and fight, or is it smarter to know when to pack and go?

It's a world-class, bolt-hole dilemma.