Sunday Night Journal — August 7, 2011
I’m still thinking about the questions raised by Walter
McDougall’s piece that I linked to a week or two ago. Not long
after that came the news that the Vatican’s envoy to the U.S.,
Archbishop Pietro Sambi, had died, and his obituary contained these
remarks from a 2008 interview, in which he reflected on his
reassignment from Jerusalem to the United States:
In the Holy Land, everything is small, and every small thing can
become a big problem. In the United States, everything is huge: the
country, the people, the possibility, the opportunity and the
responsibility.
Responsibility. What sort of responsibility, I wonder? There are some obvious
answers to that, which the nuncio mentioned in another part of the
interview: moral and cultural responsibility. But what about other,
more concrete responsibilities? As the most powerful nation in the
world, the U.S. is obviously obligated to use that power for the
greater good. And in some situations it’s obvious what that
means: to assist Haiti after a devastating earthquake, for instance.
In others it’s not so obvious: should the U.S. intervene to
defend another country from invasion, or to depose a tyrant, or to
stop the advance of tyranny? I’ve never been one of those
who think the answer to those last questions is an automatic “no.”
But nor do I think it’s an automatic “yes.” I never
unequivocally declared either support or condemnation of the war in
Iraq, because I could see the arguments on both sides. I thought I
understood in part what the Bush administration hoped to do—to
cut the Gordian knot of Middle Eastern politics by introducing a
reasonably free regime in one important country. (I also thought they
had much more reliable information about those now-infamous WMD than they did.) But I was worried
that the attempt would not only fail but do more harm than good. It
is difficult to argue now that—as is so often the case—the
fears were not more accurate than the hopes. Still, I’m haunted
by something an Iraqi human-rights activist said while the war was at
its height: that if the U.S. had deposed Saddam some years earlier
the troops really would have been met by people rejoicing in the streets. (That was in
The Atlantic, and is probably
available online, but it would take me a while to find it.)
Whatever the ultimate resolution
of these issues may be, and whatever the verdict of history may be—I
don’t say the ultimate
verdict of history, because historians change their minds—it
seems that such conundrums may arise less often in the coming years,
because this period of global American responsibility is going to
end. We can’t afford it any longer.
I doubt very many people really
understand our financial situation. And even the supposed experts
disagree violently with each other about the causes and possible
solutions. But it seems to be a generally agreed-upon fact that we
are spending far, far beyond our means, and have been doing so for
some time. The twenty years or so following World War II, in which
the U.S.A. was vastly more wealthy than almost all of the rest of the
world, and in absolute terms more wealthy than any people had ever
been, were anomalous in many ways, because the war had devastated so
much of the industrialized world. It was real wealth, and we expected
its growth to continue. We thought we could have everything, at both
the individual and national level, and as our desires outstripped our
resources we started borrowing. We lived in a fantasy in which we
couldn’t accept that anything in the way of material goods or
government services (including the maintenance of an enormous military force deployed throughout the world) that we really
wanted was out of our reach. So we started borrowing.
Through the 1980s I worked for a
growing computer company and was fairly well paid. I think my salary
at the time was somewhat above the national median for families with
children. But we lived modestly because my wife didn’t have an
outside job, because we had several children, and because we didn’t
like borrowing money. Other than the mortgage on our very
unimpressive house, we just didn’t owe a great deal of money.
We never bought new cars, we never took expensive vacations, we spent
negligible amounts on clothing and entertainment, and we weren’t
saving a lot. I used to wonder how it was that other people who
probably made somewhere around the same amount of money seemed to be
able to afford so much more.
In 1990 I left the corporate job
for a support position at a small college, and took a significant pay
cut. At that point I think our income was somewhere a little below
the national median. Things were tighter, and our house even less
impressive, and I often took part-time work in addition to my main
job, but we were certainly far from poor. We were also far from rich,
though, and I wondered even more, as I saw what appeared to be most
of the world driving nicer cars and living in nicer houses, where all
the money came from. If we were somewhere around the median, that
meant that half the country was poorer than us and half the country
richer. But it looked
more like a 25-75 ratio.
The answer, of course, was that
an awful lot of these people were and are very deep in debt, not just
paying their living expenses from paycheck to paycheck, but minimal
payments on their debt as well. Several years ago, before the crash
of 2008, I listened to the conservative financial advisor Dave
Ramsey’s radio show, and was amazed at the amount of
credit-card debt many of his caller’s confessed to.
A lot of people who were barely
getting by before the recession found themselves in serious financial
trouble through no fault of their own. Others who were caught pretty
far out on a limb where they had crawled of their own free will and
against common sense. And they’ve paid the price.
The federal government is not
subject to the same sort of encounter with unbending reality, because
it can simple create more money, at least up to a point. The recent
battle over raising the debt ceiling was the result of an attempt by
some members of Congress to insist that we can’t go on this
way. Depending on whose version of the events and numbers you
believe, there may or may not have been a real and binding commitment
to cut spending in a significant way. Right now there is a furious
debate as to whether defense or “entitlement” spending
(Social Security etc.) should be cut, but surely a reasonable
approach would involve cutting both (as well as raising taxes or eliminating tax breaks). I can’t prove this, but I
feel pretty sure that both could be cut significantly without doing
severe damage to the really important work of both spheres.
But is there any reason to think
that the reasonable will win out? I started this piece with the
intention of saying that the necessity of pulling back from our
fiscal irresponsibility would inevitably mean a withdrawal of much of
our presence in the rest of the world. Does it really make sense, for
instance, that we still have military installations in Europe?
Undoubtedly that would be better for some people, worse for others.
But it’s probably more
likely that rather than take large visible steps that make a
significant difference, we’ll have a slow hollowing-out,
pretending to do what we used to do while doing less.
I moved into an office in a new
building in 2004. It was a great improvement over my old one, which
was a grungy and cramped corner. The new building cost millions, and
in many ways it’s great. It certainly looks
great. But the roof leaks, chronically, and has since the beginning.
(Mobile, Alabama, has the heaviest rainfall of any city in the United
States—over five feet, 1.7 meters, per year. Why do they put
flat roofs on buildings in Mobile, Alabama?) On the other side of my
office wall is a men’s room. One of the fixtures in it has a
tendency not to stop running when it’s flushed. The noise this
makes is pretty noticeable in my office, and once or twice a day I
realize that something is getting on my nerves, and that it’s
the sound of the water running much longer than it should. It’s
done this since the beginning, and no attempt to fix it has ever made
much difference. So when the noise gets my attention I go give the
pipe in question a few hard chops with the edge of my hand and it
stops. A few weeks ago this happened, and apparently the outlet pipe
was not draining normally, because when I went to stop the flow there
was water running out from under the door. Someone found a mop and we
cleaned up as best we could. It wasn’t until we had it under
control that someone observed that there was a drain in the middle of
the floor, as there would normally be, but that the water was flowing
away from it. Whoever the contractor hired to install the tile for
the floor had made the drain slightly higher than the rest of the
room, rendering it perfectly useless.
I think there were efforts early
on to fix the known problems, like the leaking roof, but whether by
negligence or incompetence the problems persisted. Whatever legal
obligation the construction company had for fixing these things has
probably long since expired. I wish I didn’t find so much significance in this.