In “Darth Vader Vents” MoDo says when you have a delusion that you’re Captain America, it’s easier to let yourself do things that hurt America. The Moustach of Wisdom has a question in “All Together Now:” With the world experiencing so much change at once, will America get its act together? Tommy, that won’t happen as long as there are folks like Eric Cantor and John Boehner in charge of anything other than the dog pound. (Which would be profoundly unkind to dogs.) Mr. Kristof also raises a question in “Did We Drop the Ball on Unemployment?” He says in small-town Oregon, it’s easy to spot the country’s most pressing problem. Nicky, the fact that you even have to ask the question shows us how out of touch you’ve been. Mr. Bruni, in “The Fall This Summer,” says for Americans, it’s been a mean season, with lessons in limits and humility. Here’s MoDo:
Why is it not a surprise to learn that Dick Cheney’s ancestor, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, was a Civil War soldier who marched with Sherman to the sea?
Scorched earth runs in the family.
Having lost the power to heedlessly bomb the world, Cheney has turned his attention to heedlessly bombing old colleagues.
Vice’s new memoir, “In My Time,” veers unpleasantly between spin, insisting he was always right, and score-settling, insisting that anyone who opposed him was wrong.
His knife-in-her-teeth daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, helped write the book. The second most famous Liz & Dick combo do such an excellent job of cherry-picking the facts, it makes the cherry-picking on the Iraq war intelligence seem picayune.
Cheney may no longer have a pulse, but his blood quickens at the thought of other countries he could have attacked. He salivates in his book about how Syria and Iran could have been punished.
Cheney says that in 2007, he told President Bush, who had already been pulled into diplomacy by Condi Rice: “I believed that an important first step would be to destroy the reactor in the Syrian desert.”
At a session with most of the National Security Council, he made his case for a strike on the reactor. It would enhance America’s tarnished credibility in the Arab world, he argued, (not bothering to mention who tarnished it), and demonstrate the country’s “seriousness.”
“After I finished,” he writes, “the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”
By that time, W. had belatedly realized that Cheney was a crank whose bad advice and disdainful rants against “the diplomatic path” and “multilateral action” had pretty much ruined his presidency.
There were few times before the bitter end that W. was willing to stand up to Vice. But the president did make a bold stand on not letting his little dog be gobbled up by Cheney’s big dog.
When Vice’s hundred-pound yellow Lab, Dave, went after W.’s beloved Scottish terrier, Barney, at Camp David’s Laurel Lodge, that was a bridge too far.
When Cheney and Dave got back to their cabin, there was a knock at the door. “It was the camp commander,” Cheney writes. “ ‘Mr. Vice President,’ he said, ‘your dog has been banned from Laurel.’ ”
But on all the nefarious things that damaged America, Cheney got his way for far too long.
Vice gleefully predicted that his memoir would have “heads exploding all over Washington.” But his book is a bore. He doesn’t even mention how in high school he used to hold the water buckets to douse the fiery batons of his girlfriend Lynne, champion twirler.
At least Rummy’s memoir showed some temperament. And George Tenet’s was the primal scream of a bootlicker caught out.
Cheney takes himself so seriously, flogging his cherished self-image as a rugged outdoorsman from Wyoming (even though he shot his Texas hunting partner in the face) and a vice president who was the only thing standing between America and its enemies.
He acts like he is America. But America didn’t like Dick Cheney.
It’s easier for someone who believes that he is America incarnate to permit himself to do things that hurt America — like torture, domestic spying, pushing America into endless wars, and flouting the Geneva Conventions.
Mostly, Cheney grumbles about having his power checked. It’s bad enough when the president does it, much less Congress and the courts.
A person who is always for the use of military force is as doctrinaire and irrelevant as a person who is always opposed to the use of military force.
Cheney shows contempt for Tenet, Colin Powell and Rice, whom he disparages in a sexist way for crying, and condescension for W. when he won’t be guided to the path of most destruction.
He’s churlish about President Obama, who took the hunt for Osama bin Laden off the back burner and actually did what W. promised to do with his little bullhorn — catch the real villain of 9/11.
“Tracking him down was certainly one of our top priorities,” Cheney writes. “I was gratified that after years of diligent and dedicated work, our nation’s intelligence community and our special operations forces were able on May 1, 2011, to find and kill bin Laden.”
Tacky.
Finishing the book with an account of the 2010 operation to put in a battery-operated pump that helps his heart push blood through his body, he recounts the prolonged, vivid dream about a beautiful place in Italy he had during the weeks he was unconscious.
“It was in the countryside, a little north of Rome, and it really seemed I was there,” he writes. “I can still describe the villa where I passed the time, the little stone paths I walked to get coffee or a batch of newspapers.”
Caesar and his cappuccino.
Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:
Hold onto your hats and your wallets. Since the end of the cold war, the global system has been held together to a large degree by four critical ruling bargains. Today all four are coming unstuck at once and will need to be rebuilt. Whether and how that rebuilding happens — beginning in the U.S. — will determine a lot about what’s in your wallet and whether your hat flies off.
Now let me say that in English: the European Union is cracking up. The Arab world is cracking up. China’s growth model is under pressure and America’s credit-driven capitalist model has suffered a warning heart attack and needs a total rethink. Recasting any one of these alone would be huge. Doing all four at once — when the world has never been more interconnected — is mind-boggling. We are again “present at the creation” — but of what?
Let’s start with the Middle East, the world’s oil tap. Libyans just joined Tunisians, Egyptians and Yemenis in ousting their dictator, while Syrians and Iranians hope to soon follow suit. In time, virtually every Middle East autocrat will be deposed or forced to share power. The old model can’t hold. That model was based on kings and military dictators capturing the oil revenue, ensconcing themselves in power — protected by well-financed armies and security services — and buying off key segments of their populations. That lid has been blown off by an Arab youth bulge that today can see just how everyone else is living and is no longer ready to accept being behind, undereducated, unemployed, humiliated and powerless. But while this old Middle East system — based on an iron fist and a fistful of petro-dollars holding together multiethnic/multireligious societies — has broken down, it will take time for these societies to write their own social contracts for how to live together without an iron fist from above. Hope for the best, prepare for anything.
Farther north, it was a nice idea, this European Union and euro-zone: Let’s have a monetary union and a common currency but let everyone run their own fiscal policy, as long as they swear to work and save like Germans. Alas, it was too good to be true. Large government welfare programs in some European countries, without the revenue to finance them from local production, eventually led to a piling up of sovereign debt — mostly owed to European banks — and then a lender revolt. The producer-savers in northern Europe are now drawing up a new deal with the overspenders — the PIIGS: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. It is unlikely that the Germans would just break out of the European Union, since a good chunk of their exports go to those overspending, uncompetitive countries. Instead, the northern Europeans are trying to force stronger, rule-based discipline on the PIIGS. But how much more austerity can these countries absorb, especially if there are further social stresses from deeper recessions? More than Londoners will take to the streets. One way or another, the European Union is going to get smaller or tighter, but in the process it could go through a chaotic, world-shaking transition that is not priced into the market yet.
Going East, China has been relying on a model built on a deliberately undervalued currency and export-led growth, with low domestic consumption and high savings. This has allowed the Communist Party to sustain a unique bargain with its people: We give you jobs and rising standards of living, and you give us power. This bargain is now under threat. Persistent unemployment in China’s American and European markets is making Beijing’s undervalued-currency/low-consumption/high-export model less sustainable for the world. China also has to get rich before it gets old. It has to move from two parents saving for one kid, to one kid paying for the retirement of two parents. To do that, it has to move from an assembly-copying-manufacturing economy to a knowledge-services-innovation economy. This requires more freedom and rule of law, and you can already see mounting demands for it. Something has to give there.
As for America, we’ve thrived in recent decades with a credit-consumption-led economy, whereby we maintained a middle class by using more steroids (easy credit, subprime mortgages and construction work) and less muscle-building (education, skill-building and innovation). It’s put us in a deep hole, and the only way to dig out now is a new, hybrid politics that mixes spending cuts, tax increases, tax reform and investments in infrastructure, education, research and production. But that mix is not the agenda of either party. Either our two parties find a way to collaborate in the center around this new hybrid politics, or a third party is going to emerge — or we’re stuck and the pain will just get worse.
When the world is experiencing so many wrenching changes at once — with already high unemployment and weak economies — the need for America, the most important pillar of all, to be rock solid is greater than ever. If we don’t get our act together — which will require collective action normally reserved for wartime — we are not going to just be prolonging an American crisis, but feeding a global one.
Now here’s Mr. Kristof:
When I’m in New York or Washington, people talk passionately about debt and political battles. But in the living rooms or on the front porches here in Yamhill, Ore., where I grew up, a different specter wakes friends up in the middle of the night.
It’s unemployment.
I’ve spent a chunk of summer vacation visiting old friends here, and I can’t help feeling that national politicians and national journalists alike have dropped the ball on jobs. Some 25 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed — that’s more than 16 percent of the work force — but jobs haven’t been nearly high enough on the national agenda.
When Americans are polled about the issue they care most about, the answer by a two-to-one margin is jobs. The Boston Globe found that during President Obama’s Twitter “town hall” last month, the issue that the public most wanted to ask about was, by far, jobs. Yet during the previous two weeks of White House news briefings, reporters were far more likely to ask about political warfare with Republicans.
(I’m an offender, too: I asked President Obama a question at the Twitter town hall, and it was a gotcha query about his negotiations with Republicans. I’m sorry that I missed the chance to push him on the issue that Americans care most about.)
A study by National Journal in May found something similar: newspaper articles about “unemployment” apparently fell over the last two years, while references to the “deficit” soared.
When I’m back on the family farm in Yamhill, our very closest neighbor is one of those 25 million. Terry Maggard worked on a crew detecting underground gas, electrical or cable lines, and after 15 years on the job he was earning $20 an hour. Then at the outset of the recession in late 2008 his employer fired him and the other old-timers, and hired younger workers — who earned only $9 or $10 an hour.
Terry has been knocking on doors everywhere, including at McDonald’s, but nobody wants a 56-year-old man. “The only call I got in two years was one asking if I could be a French chef,” he recalled, laughing. “I said ‘Oui.’ ”
Mais non, the chef’s job did not come through. So although Terry earns some money breeding Pomeranians, his wife is now the main income earner. She worries that her job at a community college may be in jeopardy as well, and their standard of living has plummeted.
“It’s been a 100 percent change in my lifestyle,” Terry said. “I used to grill rib-eye steaks on the barbecue. Now I grill hot dogs. And I can’t tell you the last time I went out for a meal.”
My next neighbor beyond the Maggards is Elmer McKoon, 64, who used to work full time in construction, and more recently as a janitor. His company slashed the staff in 2008, but a kind boss kept Elmer working one night a week so he could keep his health insurance.
Another friend, Jeff, who was fired this year after 28 years in his job, notes that the biggest impact isn’t the economic hit but the psychological one. Jeff, who didn’t want his full name used for fear it would hurt his job hunt, said he wakes up and feels a stab in his gut as he realizes that he has nowhere to go that day — and has lost his family’s health insurance as well.
“I don’t have the career that I know, and if someone gets sick then I’m homeless as well,” he said.
Unless more people are working, paying taxes and making mortgage payments, it’s difficult to see how we revive the economy or address our long-term debt challenge. While debt is a legitimate long-term problem, the urgent priority should be getting people back to work. America now has more than four unemployed people for each opening. And the longer people are out of work, the less likely it is that they will ever work again.
President Obama is saying the right things lately about creating jobs. But he is saying them far too meekly, and his jobs agenda seems anemic — while the Republican Congress is saying the wrong things altogether.
There are no quick fixes to joblessness, but Washington could temporarily make federal money available to pay for teachers who are otherwise being laid off. We could increase spending on service programs like AmeriCorps that have far more applicants than spots.
We could extend the payroll tax cut, which expires at the end of December. Astonishingly, Republicans in Congress seem to be lined up instinctively against this basic economic stimulus. Could the Tea Party actually favor tax reductions for billionaires but not for working Americans? Could we have found a tax increase the Republican Party favors?
Mr. Obama, with 25 million Americans hurting, will you fight — really fight! — to put jobs at the top of the national agenda?
Last but not least here’s Mr. Bruni:
Did insects hire a new publicist for the summer of 2011? Or have I scrambled the question, and should I be asking if they lost the publicist who had shielded them until now?
Either way, seemingly everywhere I turned, I was being told to eat them. An article in the New Yorker floated the notion, framed as easy on the budget and good for the overstressed environment. So did a piece in the newspaper you’re reading now. Before this odd, disquieting season, cicada banana bread wasn’t in my vocabulary. Time magazine put it there with a story dated, fittingly, the very first day of summer.
I begin with bugs partly because some levity is in order, given the gloom to come. But more than that, mealworm pilaf as an answer to our dwindling resources strikes me as a reasonably apt metaphor for these last few months. It suggests a decline in our lots, a reckoning with our limits, a grasping for solutions and a humility in the absence of truly palatable ones. And that’s what the summer of 2011 has been all about.
A “ceiling” defined the season, and there was no skylight in this one, no sunshine filtering through. “Down” was the dominant syllable, a suffix and prefix both. On the second day of summer President Obama assured us there would be a “drawdown” of troops in Afghanistan, because we could no longer afford our onetime degree of intervention and needed to be “as pragmatic as we are passionate.”
Economists talked ceaselessly of the “downturn,” so prolonged that it has come to seem less a dip than the new normal. Then of course there was the “downgrade,” courtesy of Standard & Poor’s, which rewarded our galling political constipation with an unprecedented demotion to AA+ from AAA. We could mock the inept arithmetic en route to it. We could quibble with the reasoning and motivations behind it. But none of that changed the symbolism — or the symbol. We were one vowel shy of what we used to be.
And we were under siege, by not just the economy but also the elements. Extraordinary flooding gave way to severe drought. The earth trembled where it wasn’t supposed to. And then, to top it all off, a hurricane drew near, screaming toward some of the country’s densest population centers and threatening a magnitude of damage we were hard pressed to afford. Nature hammered home the message that the Dow was sending as well. We had only so much control over our fates, and better hunker down.
Some perspective: weather is weather and storms are storms, not the galloping horsemen of the apocalypse, as the half-in-jest hysteria in cyberspace would have us believe. (I tripped across one Twitter message prophesying the revelation of Bear Mountain, just 50 or so miles north of Manhattan, as an active volcano.) And America, for all its troubles, remains by far the wealthiest nation in the world, its G.D.P. more than twice that of China, our nearest competitor. In many of our cities you can look in many directions and not see much evidence of hardship, but rather restaurants and hotels, stadiums and parking lots, airport terminals and movie theaters full to the brim.
Still, this summer crystallized a growing sense that our country’s can-do spirit was being replaced by a make-do resignation, and that our best days might well be behind us. I kept finding myself in the same conversation, over and over, and only occasionally was I the one to initiate it. It concerned whether children in America today were likely to enjoy lives as privileged as their parents’.
The usual conclusion — that they weren’t — represented an unsettling erosion of American confidence and a pivot in the nation’s psyche from a swaggering optimism to something more subdued. It wasn’t pessimism, not just yet. But it recognized real parameters around our will and wherewithal.
We watched Europe’s debt nightmare and waited, somewhat helplessly, to see if it would exacerbate our own. We watched the Syrian insurrection and waited, somewhat meekly, to see if we’d have to weigh in. We lent a hand of sorts in Libya, helping to effect the outcome we wanted, but we were “leading from behind,” as one of the president’s advisers so memorably put it. Leading from behind? What a concept, and what a perfect expression of America’s conflicted, befuddled new role in the world: still wanting to feel exceptional, less and less able to act that way.
The numbers were awful. The numbers are awful. Just last week the Congressional Budget Office predicted that unemployment would stay above 8 percent until at least 2014. It has been almost consistently above 9 percent for more than two years now. The budget office also projected a $1.3 trillion budget deficit for 2011 and a growth in G.D.P. of just 2.3 percent.
That’s a pittance in comparison with growth in Brazil, Russia, India or China, known in aggregate as BRIC. I mention the acronym because I heard it constantly this summer. “The BRIC countries are coming on strong.” “You should invest in one of the BRIC indexes.” There was a fascination with economies that were surging because ours so emphatically wasn’t, and they were a rebuke to it. America the sluggish. America the envious.
America the broken. A bipartisan group called Building America’s Future released a report this summer, “Falling Apart and Falling Behind,” that presented a staggering compendium of our transportation woes. It also noted that between 2005 and 2010, the country plummeted from No. 1 to No. 15 in the world in terms of the economic competitiveness of our infrastructure.
So are we hastening to catch up? Hardly.
“The biggest crime in the stimulus package was that infrastructure money should have been tripled or quadrupled,” former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, one of the leaders of Building America’s Future, told me during a recent telephone conversation. He was reflecting on the two-year period, before the 2010 midterm elections, when the president had both the political capital and Congressional calculus for real action, and he sounded depressed.
“We should be talking about high-speed rail in the Northeast corridor and along the California coastline,” said Mr. Rendell, a Democrat. “We should be talking about big things.”
Instead we import big things from China, which this summer shipped the last of the enormous steel modules for the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, to be assembled in America, though it wasn’t manufactured here.
What do we make? Movies, but this summer the major ones were more bereft of originality than ever, a sadly familiar crop of sorcerers, sequels, Smurfs and superheroes. And the superheroes were foreign or second-rate. Thor? The Green Lantern? Where are Batman, Superman and Spidey when the economy is in free fall, the president needs an emergency gumption infusion (and maybe spinal replacement surgery) and Grover Norquist must be vanquished? Don’t say Broadway. Its “Spider-Man” couldn’t even hold his own against theater critics.
Examples and allegories of diminishment were absurdly, comically pervasive. In the wake of the quake, the Washington Monument was cracked. A cash-strapped school district in Pennsylvania was saving $15,000 a year by entrusting the landscaping to livestock. (“Nothing says ‘21st century global superpower,’ ” wrote Rachel Maddow in a Twitter message, “like schools turning to sheep” because they can’t afford lawnmowers.)
Restrooms off the Coney Island boardwalk in New York were rationing squares of toilet paper, or so the New York Post insisted. And according to posters in the subways, a former producer of the television series “Sex and the City,” a paean to conspicuous consumption, was about to unveil a new show. It’s called “2 Broke Girls.”
Bill Clinton, once the very embodiment of raging appetite and expansive id, was chatting about his restrained, vegan diet. And Steve Jobs, who personified American entrepreneurial genius as well as anyone else in the last quarter century, was saying goodbye. More than a few scribes characterized his surrender of the reins at Apple as the end of an era.
His stewardship of that company and Clinton’s of the country overlapped in the late 1990s, when our economy soared and we actually had a budget surplus. Remember that? It wasn’t so long ago. But this summer, it seemed like ancient history.
