Bobo’s got other people’s work for us today. In “Life Reports II” he squeals that positive lessons from the senior set continue to pour in. Here are a few takeaways. Bobo, sweetie, I don’t do takeaway food, and I’d just as soon not do takeaway crap from you either. Mr. Cohen addresses the “Doctrine of Silence” and says on U.S. strategic policy, Obama has gone covert — and made the right call. So why am I uneasy? Mr. Nocera says “Germany Cuts Off Its Nose,” and that self-righteousness is blinding Germans, and Americans, from making sensible policy decisions. Mr. Bruni, in “Silvio’s Deluded Postscript,” says Italy must move far beyond the farce of the Berlusconi era. Here’s Bobo:
A few weeks ago, I asked people over 70 to send me “Life Reports” — essays about their own lives and what they’d done poorly and well. They make for fascinating and addictive reading, and I’ve tried to extract a few general life lessons:
Divide your life into chapters. The unhappiest of my correspondents saw time as an unbroken flow, with themselves as corks bobbing on top of it. A man named Neil lamented that he had been “an Eeyore not a Tigger; a pessimist, not an optimist; an aimless grasshopper, not a purposeful ant; a dreamer, not a doer; a nomad, not a settler; a voyager, not an adventurer; a spectator, not an actor, player or participant.” He concluded: “Neil never amounted to anything.”
The happier ones divided time into (somewhat artificial) phases. They wrote things like: There were six crucial decisions in my life. Then they organized their lives around those pivot points. By seeing time as something divisible into chunks, they could more easily stop and self-appraise. They had more control over their fate.
Beware rumination. There were many long, detailed essays by people who are experts at self-examination. They could finely calibrate each passing emotion. But these people often did not lead the happiest or most fulfilling lives. It’s not only that they were driven to introspection by bad events. Through self-obsession, they seemed to reinforce the very emotions, thoughts and habits they were trying to escape.
Many of the most impressive people, on the other hand, were strategic self-deceivers. When something bad was done to them, they forgot it, forgave it or were grateful for it. When it comes to self-narratives, honesty may not be the best policy.
You can’t control other people. David Leshan made an observation that was echoed by many: “It took me twenty years of my fifty-year marriage to discover how unwise it was to attempt to remake my wife. … I learned also that neither could I remake my friends or students.”
On the other hand, some of the most inspiring stories were about stepparents who came into families and wisely bided their time, accepting slights and insults until they were gradually accepted by their new children.
Lean toward risk. It’s trite, but apparently true. Many more seniors regret the risks they didn’t take than regret the ones they did.
Measure people by their growth rate, not by their talents. The best essays were by people who made steady progress each decade. Regina Titus grew up shy and sheltered on Long Island. She took demeaning clerical jobs, working with people who treated her poorly. Her first husband died after six months of marriage and her second committed suicide.
But she just kept growing. At 56, studying nights and weekends, she obtained a college degree, cum laude, from Marymount Manhattan College. She moved to Wilmington, Del., works as a docent, studies opera, hikes, volunteers and does a thousand other things. She acknowledges, “I did not have the joy of holding my baby in my arms. I did not have a long and happy marriage.” But hers is a story of relentless self-expansion. I wonder how we can measure that capacity.
Be aware of the generational bias. Many of the essayists have ambivalent attitudes toward their parents. Almost all have worshipful attitudes toward their children. I’m not sure how to explain this pattern, but I don’t think it’s pure egotism. Many writers mentioned that given their own flaws, they are astounded that their kids turned out so well.
Work within institutions or crafts, not outside them. For a time, our culture celebrated the rebel and the outsider. The most miserable of my correspondents fit this mold. They were forever in revolt against the world and ended up sourly achieving little.
There are other patterns running through the essays. I was struck by the fact that almost nobody mentioned whether or not they were good-looking, though this must have been an important factor, especially when they were young. Many people lament the fact that they had to make the most important decisions in their 20s, at the age when they were least qualified to make them.
People get better at the art of living. By their 60s many contributors found their zone. Metaphysics is dead; very few of the writers hewed to a specific theology or had any definite conception of a divine order, though vague but uplifting spiritual experiences pepper their reflections.
Finally, the essays present disturbing quandaries. For example, we are told to live for others. But one savvy retiree writes, “Don’t stay with people who, over time, grow apart from you. Move on. This means do what you think will make you feel okay — even if that makes others feel temporarily not okay.”
Is that selfishness or hard-earned realism? That one you’ll have to answer for yourself.
Bobo, that’s selfishness. That you even asked the question is more telling than you realize. Here’s Mr. Cohen, writing from London:
The Obama administration has a doctrine. It’s called the doctrine of silence. A radical shift from President Bush’s war on terror, it has never been set out to the American people. There has seldom been so big a change in approach to U.S. strategic policy with so little explanation.
I approve of the shift even as it makes me uneasy. One day, I suspect, there may be payback for this policy and this silence. President Obama has gone undercover.
You have to figure that one day somebody sitting in Tehran or Islamabad or Sana is going to wake up and say: “Hey, this guy Obama, he went to war in our country but just forgot to mention the fact. Should we perhaps go to war in his?”
In Iran, a big explosion at a military base near Tehran recently killed Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, a central figure in the country’s long-range missile program. Nuclear scientists have perished in the streets of Tehran. The Stuxnet computer worm has wreaked havoc with the Iranian nuclear facilities.
It would take tremendous naïveté to believe these events are not the result of a covert American-Israeli drive to sabotage Iran’s efforts to develop a military nuclear capacity. An intense, well-funded cyberwar against Tehran is ongoing.
Simmering Pakistani anger over a wave of drone attacks authorized by Obama has erupted into outright rage with the death of at least 25 Pakistani soldiers in a NATO attack on two military outposts near the Afghan border.
The Pakistani government has ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to end drone operations it runs from a base in western Pakistan within 15 days. Drone attacks have become the coin of Obama’s realm. They have killed twice as many suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda members as were ever imprisoned in Guantánamo.
One such drone attack, of course, killed an American citizen, the Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen a few weeks ago.
The U.S. government says precious little about these new ways of fighting enemies. But the strategic volte-face is clear: America has decided that conventional wars of uncertain outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan that may, according to a Brown University study, end up costing at least $3.7 trillion are a bad way to fight terrorists and that far cheaper, more precise tools for eliminating enemies are preferable — even if the legality of those killings is debatable.
The American case for legality rests on the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force act, which allows the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against persons, organization or nations linked to the 9/11 attack, and on various interpretations of the right to self-defense under international law.
But killing an American citizen raises particular constitutional concerns; just how legal the drone attacks are remains a vexed question. And Iran had no part in 9/11.
In general, it’s hard to resist the impression of a tilt toward the extrajudicial in U.S. foreign policy — a kind of “Likudization” of the approach to dealing with enemies. Israel has never hesitated to kill foes with blood on their hands wherever they are.
This is a development about which no American can feel entirely comfortable.
So why do I approve of all this? Because the alternative — the immense cost in blood and treasure and reputation of the Bush administration’s war on terror — was so appalling. In just the same way, the results of a conventional bombing war against Iran would be appalling, whether undertaken by Israel, the United States or a combination of the two.
Political choices often have to be made between two unappealing options. Obama has done just that. He has gone covert — and made the right call.
So why am I uneasy? Because these legally borderline, undercover options — cyberwar, drone killings, executions and strange explosions at military bases — invite repayment in kind, undermine the American commitment to the rule of law, and make allies uneasy.
Obama could have done more in the realm of explanation. Of course he does not want to say much about secret operations. Still, as the U.S. military prepares to depart from Iraq (leaving a handful of embassy guards), and the war in Afghanistan enters its last act, he owes the American people, U.S. allies and the world a speech that sets out why America will not again embark on this kind of inconclusive war and has instead adopted a new doctrine that has replaced fighting terror with killing terrorists. (He might also explain why Guantánamo is still open.)
Just because it’s impossible to talk about some operations undertaken within this doctrine does not mean the entire doctrine can remain cloaked in silence.
Foreign policy has been Obama’s strongest suit. He deserves great credit for killing Osama bin Laden, acting for the liberation of Libya, getting behind the Arab quest for freedom, winding down the war in Iraq, dealing repeated blows to Al Qaeda and restoring America’s battered image.
But the doctrine of silence is a failing with links to his overarching failure on the economy: it betrays a presidential reticence, coolness and aloofness that leave Americans uncomfortable.
Now here’s Mr. Nocera:
“Lords of Finance,” Liaquat Ahamed’s magisterial 2009 history of the events that led first to the Great Depression and then to the Second World War, is, necessarily, a book about policy mistakes. Central bankers and Treasury secretaries, presidents and prime ministers: all of them are locked into their own economic and political orthodoxies. Each is certain that his is the only sensible course of action. Crippled by their blinders, they consistently make economic choices that appear to us, nearly a century later, to be insane but to them seemed completely sensible.
Perhaps the worst of the policy errors during the post-World War I period was the insistence of the Allies that Germany pay war reparations — reparations that went far beyond anything that the defeated Germans could afford. As the victors, the Allies felt that it was only fair for Germany to pay for the terrible war it had waged, and they didn’t much care about whether such payments would cripple the German economy.
Which, of course, they did; by the early 1930s, the country was effectively bankrupt. And the Allies’ unrelenting demand for reparations bred immense resentment among the German people. There is not much doubt that this combination of public anger and economic distress helped facilitate the rise of Adolf Hitler.
Today, it is Germany that is making policy moves that seem insane. Locked into their modern-day orthodoxies, German politicians look at Greece with something akin to contempt. Aid to Greece — aid that is given grudgingly, when it is given at all — must be accompanied by severe austerity measures, the Germans believe, because the Greeks need to learn how to live within their means, the way Germans do.
For months, Germany has strongly supported the European Central Bank’s unwillingness to do the one thing that might have stemmed the euro crisis: buy and guarantee large amounts of distressed sovereign debt. When I asked Martin Wolf, The Financial Times columnist whose crisis coverage has been indispensible, why the E.C.B. was reluctant to act, he theorized that it “accepts the German view that monetizing government debt is inherently immoral.” As a result, though, what should have been a small crisis centering on Greek debt has turned into a full-fledged European contagion.
Can’t the Germans see, one wonders from afar, that their economy was the great beneficiary of the bubble economy that caused Greece — and the other peripheral euro-zone countries — to get in over their heads, because they were buying German exports? Don’t they understand that their banks should share the blame for lending to countries that couldn’t repay the debts? Don’t they realize that the collapse of the euro zone — unthinkable a year ago; perhaps inevitable now — will hurt Germany much more than Greece? Other currencies will be devalued against Germany’s, making German exports more expensive. And German banks — woefully undercapitalized and stuffed with sovereign debt — will face a major solvency crisis when other sovereigns devalue or default.
You would think that all of this would be obvious to the Germans. But it is not. Germany can’t get past the fact that it is being asked to bail out “club med” countries where no one pays taxes and everyone retires at the age of 50. From the German perspective, it doesn’t seem fair. And that overwhelms even the most powerful economic arguments that bailing out Greece and the other distressed countries also helps Germany.
The Germans, of course, are hardly alone in allowing their sense of righteousness to get in the way of sensible policy. Earlier this month, I wrote a column advocating principal reduction as a way of stemming foreclosures. My view is that housing, historically, has led most recoveries and that the foreclosure crisis is one of the things preventing the economy from truly reviving. Never-ending foreclosures cause housing prices to continue swooning and risk a deflationary spiral that could be devastating. They cause more homeowners to suddenly find themselves “underwater.” They hurt not just those losing their homes, but everybody. My argument is rooted not in morality, but in economics.
Yet the response I got from that column was, for the most part, fiercely negative. Why should people who took out loans they couldn’t afford get bailed out — while those who lived within their means get nothing? What about moral hazard? One reader wrote: “We should reward people who took large loans or refinanced their homes to go on vacations? Sorry, but correct ethical choices are more important.” In other words, it didn’t seem fair.
Such a view is understandable — in America and in Germany. But if we — and they — can’t stop obsessing about what is fair, we’re never going to get out of our current messes. The only thing that should matter is what works. Even if it means bailing out club med nations or underwater homeowners.
And lastly here’s Mr. Bruni, writing from Rome:
The direness of Italy’s financial situation forced him from office, and his country has been teetering on the precipice of default, with the euro on the line and the whole world holding its breath.
But Silvio Berlusconi still doesn’t get it. On Sunday, the deposed prime minister re-emerged in public and reopened that font of self-aggrandizing fantasy otherwise known as his mouth, and what do you suppose came out of it?
Not regret, not remorse and certainly not anything constructive.
Instead, Berlusconi ranted about the Communist menace and how he had long stood — and would forever stand — as a bulwark against it.
The Communist menace! That’s the bogeyman he has used his entire political career, with shockingly dependable success, and though it has nothing to do with Italy’s current predicament, he won’t let go of it.
In Berlusconi’s version, the story of Italy over the 17 years that he toggled in and out of power isn’t one of a country frittering away its lavish blessings under the ostensible leadership of a solipsistic oligarch. It’s of a country spared the red menace thanks to a knight in tangerine armor, that hue being the odd color he achieves through some amalgam of sun and makeup.
Among the many European leaders felled by the Continent’s debt crisis, Berlusconi will perhaps have the most sustained claim on the spotlight, because of his wealth, extensive media holdings, continuing criminal trials and sheer flamboyant Berlusconi-ness.
But for such a larger-than-life figure, he’s an awfully small man, and I don’t mean physically, though if he were to read this sentence, that’s the interpretation he’d worry about.
Back in 2003, when I interviewed him over a long dinner, he complained that he had been disparaged on Italian television as a dwarf.
“I’m as tall as Aznar,” he volunteered, referring to the Spanish prime minister at the time, José María Aznar.
“I’m the average Italian, right?” he added, seeking reassurance from an aide seated near him. It came right away.
“Certainly,” the aide said.
Just over two weeks ago Berlusconi finally surrendered the reins of the Italian government, and he pretty much stayed mum until Sunday, when he spoke to political allies at a gathering in Verona.
His tone was defiant, and he predicted that after the conclusion of the technocratic government expected to guide Italy until early 2013, the center-right political party that he started, the People of Liberty, would rise anew. (He himself has already pledged not to seek re-election.)
He vowed to continue the fight against a center-left coalition that didn’t really want people to be free. He mentioned a police state. He mentioned his trusty Communists.
He did not mention the country’s sovereign debt, which is now about 120 percent of its gross domestic product; its growing inability to secure loans at endurable interest rates; or all the young Italians who can’t find meaningful work.
These problems, to be fair, aren’t principally of his making. But he did too little to forestall them or to modernize Italy’s economy, even as he did plenty to serve his business, legal and libidinal needs.
And he cheapened Italian discourse, along with the country’s image, contributing to a sort of silliness and civic amorality that hold Italy back. An operator as crass and shady as Berlusconi was never, for example, going to be the leader to get all Italians to pay their full share of taxes.
He could now make amends for at least some of that if he lost his tired script, stopped fanning the flames of partisanship and exhorted Italians to shared purpose and sacrifice. Such a high-minded message from him of all people would underscore the seriousness of Italy’s situation, and might have real impact. It’s probably ludicrous to wish for that.
But it’s not unreasonable to hope that Italians take advantage of his ouster and start to prepare — really prepare — for the future.
Over the Berlusconi era they seemed to grow strangely resigned and even accustomed to him; he was reliable kindling for anger and an easy target for ridicule. And they adopted the refrain that there was no release from his chokehold on Italian life because no one had a comparable megaphone and there was no plausible alternative to him.
It’s incumbent on them now to create one. They no longer have any excuse not to. And they should treat those instances when he pops up in public — and pops off about this, that or whatever — as useful reminders of the kind of farce they can no longer afford and must leave far behind.
He popped up again on Monday, in a Milan courtroom, where he was facing bribery charges that, because of trial delays, may expire before any verdict is reached.
“It was very hard to stay awake,” he told reporters. He really needn’t try.
