The Fallows Effect

Having considered the legistors who represent my town in the New Hampshire legislature, having endured 8 years of listening to George W. Bush, and now Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, I have begun to despair about the existence of intelligent life on planet America.

But lately, at the instigation of a good friend, I remembered the Fallows.

I first met James Fallows and his wife, Deb, in Washington, D.C. in the early 1980's. A doctor friend invited me and my wife to his home in Cleveland Park. I happened to have just read a book called, "More Like Us" by James Fallows and had been quite taken with it. The basic premise was the contrarian idea that the United States should stop trying to be like Japan, which in those years seemed to be rocketing past the US in every way, destined to become an economic power which would surpass both the US and China, not to mention Europe. Fallows, who had spent some years in Japan said, "Actually, no. We ought to do what we do well and let the Japanese do what they do and we'll meet that challenge quite well." ( Only a few years later, the Japanese economy collapsed and has not yet quite recovered.) 

We were ushered into the living room of this vast house--the doctor's wife was an heiress of the Coca Cola fortune-- and there we were introduced to Deb and Jim Fallows.

Of course, when I discovered I was talking to the author of my new favorite book, I could hardly contain my frothing enthusiasm. (My wife told me on the drive home--"You sounded like a groupie. They will probably never invite us back. Okay, so it was a good book. If you read more books, you might have a little more perspective.")
But Mr. Fallows apparently forgave me, and continued, off and on, a cordial correspondence relationship.

Recently, I asked him about the risks and benefits of Americans trying to live in China, and he was, typically gracious about replying. 

Of course, had I been more resourceful, I would have had my answer over the internet: It  never have occurred to me to search the Fallows out on youtube, until my more resourceful friend steered me there.  There,  I was able to watch Deb talking about the difficulty for an American learning Chinese. She has a PhD in linguistics, but typically, she was most humble about her own difficulties with the language and the culture. I could have watched her for hours.

Deb mentioned how rarely the Chinese say "Please" in conversation, as in "Please pass the salt," as opposed to "Pass the salt." They consider "please" too formal and find it distances people. If it's a friend, you just say, "Pass the salt."  I have noticed a variant of this in New England, where people are just so polite it has the effect of creating a wall of formality. When we learn about others, we learn about ourselves.

 I stumbled upon Jim's  interview with Bill Maher, and was transfixed as he talked about his new book about the U.S. military. He mentioned  American servicemen who come home to people who say, "Thank you for your service" and how many servicemen told him, "If you really want to thank us, trying being a citizen and do something to prevent morons from sending us to fight wars with no mission, wars  we cannot possibly win. Go vote."

He went on to say both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were, by any reasonable measure, defeats for the United States, for the same reason Vietnam had to result in defeat: We cannot win wars of occupation and Empire. We do not want to establish a raj anywhere. Americans want to do business with other countries, not subjugate them. 

So, there you have it: Two manifestly intelligent, American human beings who can actually talk about what we ought to be doing in the world, i.e., the difficult things (learning another language and culture, engaging the world rather than bombing it) people who think clearly about what our own government is doing, and who are willing to disagree with President Obama and call him out for a major failing, when necessary.

The fact is, we should have killed Osama Bin Laden and got out of Afghanistan as quickly thereafter as humanly possible. Instead, we have sacrificed the lives of our youth, not to mention our treasury, pursuing the elusive goal of "nation building" in a part of the world where we need more anthropologists not more soldiers.

We will never win the hearts and minds of certain peoples. We have not made ourselves safer by spending money on bombs which explode rather than bridges (of all sorts, physical and cultural) which endure.

The best Americans we have are working to bridge those divides and to think with merciless clarity about how we use our military.

There are people out there who could help us, but none of them appear interested in running for office. Can you imagine if Paul Krugman, Jim Fallows and even Bill Maher were given the keys to the kingdom, for just a year?