Falling to Earth

Falling to Earth

I spent much of my drive yesterday through Utah listening to Ben Rhodes, the DeputyNational Security Advisor to Barack Obama, reading his newest book, After the Fall. It is a set of tremendously insightful vignettes from his post-White House years traveling around the world interacting with consulting clients. The specific theme is that democracy is not so much about to fall apart, but actually has begun the process of falling apart. His stories about Hungary, Russia and Myanmar are intended to show how democracy has been dismantled elsewhere in the world and are guideposts for what we are undergoing in the United States over the last five years. It is a deeply sobering book that is both wonderfully written (I listen to my books on Audible, so I should say it is beautifully read ….especially great since Rhodes himself does the reading, making it all the more impactful). The book is trying to be a non-partisan primer on what we must do now that the destruction of democracy is a reality if we want democracy to remain as the guiding governing light of the world. Few Republicans are likely to think anything coming out of Ben Rhodes can possibly be non-partisan, but I assure you he is trying to keep politics more aside than central to the lessons of the book.

Today I spent nine hours listening to a novel that I have always meant to read, Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth. I may have read it in high school, but I can’t be certain. Something came over me recently and I downloaded the Audible version of the book and started it just before this trip. I’m glad I took the time to give it a serious listen on a long drive like I had today. It doesn’t get much longer, straighter and flatter than going across the length of Kansas, as we did today. The drive gave me the chance to bring out some old favorite trivia bits like why the Interstate Highway system has so many perfectly straight sections. During the Eisenhower administration when the Interstate Highway System was designed and implemented, there were still lots of fresh memories and concerns about invasion by hostile forces. It led to the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC) and the Distant Early Warning Antiballistic Missile system (DEW line), but it also caused the Interstate Highway System to get designed so that the country would be covered from one end to the other by makeshift emergency runways should they ever be necessary. That still left most of nine hours to listen to this Pearl Buck gem.

Let me be clear since I am so late to the Pearl Buck party. This was the bestselling book in America in 1931 and 1932 during the Great Depression. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and led to Buck winning the Nobel Prize for literature. If that wasn’t enough, Oprah Winfrey rediscovered the book in 2004 and put it on her Oprah’s Book Club list. However, in my defense, I believe that we may be living in times that are even more in need of the lessons from The Good Earth than Americans did during the Great Depression. It is fascinating to think through and list the societal issues faced by the Chinese peasant in the early Twentieth Century. I was struck by how many of those issues are still with us a century later. In fact, one might be driven to suggest that there is nothing new under the sun and that human nature doesn’t change, just the details and circumstances do. The frailties and strengths of man are as they always have been and perhaps he hasn’t evolved so much as we would like to think.

We pretend that mankind is becoming more enlightened with the passing millennia, and that as he moves further from his dependence on and subordination to nature and concomitantly closer to a state of grace. Atrocities and cultural ills are thought to be diminishing as the technology and productivity improvements push the means of production to sustainable and sufficient levels to minimize scarcity, poverty, hunger and injustice. Instantaneous and ubiquitous information and knowledge is thought to be a savior rather than a societal irritant. It would, however, be hard to find any of the generic foibles or plagues in early Twentieth Century rural China which are not universally recognizable in the modern world…anywhere on Earth.

In The Good Earth, the commentary that is most poignant is that “when the wealthy get too wealthy and the poor get too poor” there is bound to be a reversal of fortunes. That is what gives the Chinese peasant farmer the wherewithal to rebuild his life and become like the wealthy man who’s wealth he was able to grab when he climbed over his wall to rob and kill him. And, of course, it is what makes him the problem and less the solution in the next phase of Chinese social evolution. What a pernicious and circular path man tends to follow as he stumbles his way towards enlightenment.

This morning I have engaged in a text dialogue with two Republican friends who have not yet “seen the light” as I see it about the the necessary long-term value to be had through more evenly distributed wealth. Needless to say, this provided lots of discussion by short-hand text between us three. I felt like I was being tag-teamed, but it was fun. It was all about how the majority is voting for their own comfort to take the money out of the pockets of the minority so that they don’t have to work as hard. The disparity in views was stark and evidenced the deep and genuine divide in thinking that exists in our country “after the fall” of democracy, as Ben Rhoades might say. The dialogue ended with one of the two tag-teamers saying that he had to go play golf with his other rich friends who don’t give a damn about any of this. Furthermore, he felt that the only solution was better education so that people could “deserve” better wages and a bigger share of the wealth. I reminded him that it was a chicken and egg problem that has to start somewhere and can only really start with the man who has more eggs than he needs. Furthermore, I told him to remind his rich golf-playing friends that they had better start thinking more long-term about the problems that their grandchildren will doubtlessly face as they struggle to level the playing field of the world as the bad and downtrodden forces of nature will surely climb the bejeweled high walls of their castles. That is when I reminded him to be sure to yell FORE!!! for his friends on the golf course, because their games of today will mean a falling to earth for their grandchildren.