A Certain Idea of America, page 19
You can’t allow yourself to be reduced to just repeating things that were revolutionary forty or fifty years ago but no longer seem fully pertinent to the country we’re in, or its circumstances.
You have to be sensitive to cultural vibrations. Republican politicians treat social issues as something to be spoken of now and then, mostly when the public brings them up—in part because such issues divide, in part because they don’t know how to speak of them. They’re not philosopher kings. But a politician with a sense of how people are thinking would observe that when the conversation turns to marriage and family formation, the best commercial for both in the past decade was the recent celebration of the life of Barbara Bush. A marriage of seventy-three years, the idea of marriage as both love affair and partnership, was burnished and made new for everyone who passed a screen. What was being celebrated was the pleasure and sacrifice that go into building something that endures.
And you have to know what time it is. Life moves, things change. So much depends on reality, on what is. All of politics does.
WISDOM OF A NON-IDIOT BILLIONAIRE
May 10, 2018
An occasional preoccupation in this space is that young people have no particular loyalty to or affection for free-market capitalism, the economic system that made America a great thing in history and a magnet for the world. There are two reasons. One is that in their short lives they’ve witnessed and experienced only capitalism’s scandals—the 2008 crash, inequality. The other is that they’ve never heard capitalism defended—not in K through college, not in our entertainment culture. When you don’t especially admire something you feel no inclination to protect it, which will have serious political implications down the road.
We should all make the case for capitalism, especially our idiot billionaires and especially those in Silicon Valley. Some, by which I mean Mark Zuckerberg in particular, act as if America is special mostly because it provided a stage for their fabulousness, otherwise not so much. During a hearing last month Senator Dan Sullivan referred to Mr. Zuckerberg’s dorm-room invention and said, “Only in America, would you agree with that?” Mr. Zuckerberg seemed taken aback and mumbled around. “You’re supposed to answer ‘yes’ to this question,” Mr. Sullivan explained.
But let’s get to a non-idiot billionaire. Ken Langone, eighty-two, investor, philanthropist, and founder of Home Depot, has written an autobiography that actually conveys the excitement of business—of starting an enterprise that creates a job that creates a family, of the joy of the deal and the place of imagination in the making of a career. Its hokey and ebullient name is I Love Capitalism!, which I think makes his stand clear.
Why did he write it? I asked him by phone. He wanted to show gratitude, to inspire the young—“If I can make it, everyone can!”—and he wanted young voters to understand that socialism is not the way. “In 2016 I saw Bernie Sanders and the kids around him. I thought, This is the Antichrist! We have the greatest engine in the world.” The wealthy have an absolute obligation to help others: “Where would we be if people didn’t share their wealth? I got thirty-eight kids on Bucknell scholarships. They’re all colors of the rainbow; some are poor kids, rough around the edges. It’s capitalism!” He famously funds NYU/Langone Medical Center.
He worries about the future of economic freedom and sees the selfishness of some of the successful as an impediment. “Are there people who are greedy, who do nothing for anyone? Yes.” They should feel shame. If the system goes down they’ll be part of the reason. “But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water!”
Can capitalism win the future? “Yes, but we have to be more emphatic and forthright about what it is and its benefits. A rising tide does lift boats.”
Home Depot has changed lives. “We have four hundred thousand people who work there, and we’ve never once paid anybody minimum wage.” Three thousand employees “came to work for us fresh out of high school, didn’t go to college, pushing carts in the parking lot. All three thousand are multimillionaires. Salary, stock, a stock savings plan.”
Mr. Langone came up in the middle of the twentieth century—the golden age of American capitalism. Does his example still pertain to the twenty-first? Yes, he says emphatically: “The future is rich in opportunity.” To see it, look for it. For instance, “Look, people are living longer. They’re living more vibrant lives, more productive. This is an opportunity to accommodate the needs of older people. Better products, cheaper prices—help them get what they need!”
Mr. Langone grew up on blue-collar Long Island, New York. Neither parent finished high school. His father was a plumber who was poor at business; his mother worked in the school cafeteria.
They lived paycheck to paycheck. He was a lousy student but he had one big thing going for him: “I loved making money.” He got his first job at eleven and often worked two at a time—paperboy, butcher-shop boy, caddie, lawn work, Bohack grocery clerk. He didn’t mind: “I wanted to be rich.”
He got into Bucknell University when the registrar saw something in him despite his grades. He scraped through, enjoyed economics class. His mother prayed every day to Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost things, that he’d find good sense and self-discipline. He met a beautiful Long Island girl named Elaine, they married; he looked for work on Wall Street, found some after struggling, and went to New York University at night for a business degree from what’s now called the Langone Program.
By the spring of 1965 he was not yet thirty and earning $100,000 a year in commissions alone. He loved mergers and acquisitions. For his first initial public offering, he nailed down Ross Perot and EDS. By his midthirties he was Mr. Perot’s banker and quite full of himself. Naturally his business soon wobbled, almost cratered, and righting the ship took years.
Then came Home Depot. You’ll have to read the book to hear the story. Ross Perot decided not to invest.
Mr. Langone’s book is not only helpful, it’s fun. He doesn’t offer rules for living but you can discern some between the lines.
Take your religious faith seriously. His Catholicism gave him safe harbor in storms and left him “sensitive to the plight and needs of others.”
Marry for the long run. He and Elaine have been wed sixty-three years. When things were good she cheered him on; when they weren’t she let him know “she would always be there for me—win, lose or draw.”
You teach values by living them. Don’t say—do. People absorb eloquent action.
“Pray at the feet of hard work.” Be ravenous in reading about your field, whichever you wind up in and for however long.
Money solves the problems money can solve. Don’t ask more of it, and don’t be ashamed of wanting it. “A kid once said to me, ‘Money doesn’t buy everything.’ I said, ‘Well, kid, I was poor, and I can tell you right now poverty doesn’t do a very good job either.’ ”
Stay excited. Don’t be sated.
Admit the reality around you, then change it. When Mr. Langone couldn’t get an entry-level job at Goldman Sachs, Kidder Peabody, or White Weld, an executive took him aside: “Let me tell you the lay of the land. We have Jewish firms for Jewish kids and we have WASP firms for WASP kids. The Irish we make clerks, and put them on the floor of the stock exchange, and Italian kids like you we put in the back office.” When Mr. Langone began to succeed, he started to hire—and brought in the sons of cops who went to St. John’s. This contributed to “the democratization of Wall Street.”
When you’re successful you’ll put noses out of joint, even among colleagues who benefit from your work. Be careful about jealousy but in the end roll with it, it’s human nature. When you “piss off the old guard,” become the old guard—and help the clever rise.
“There’s no defeat except in giving up.” You’re going to fail. So what? Keep going, something will work.
Billionaire tech gods should read it, emulate it, and start celebrating the system that made them mighty.
“WHICH WAY TO POINTE DU HOC?”
May 23, 2019
A friend trying to help me work through a problem once told me that the story of life is competition: Everyone’s trying to beat everyone else, and I should give more weight to this fact. There’s some truth in what he said, yet I thought his comment contained more autobiography than wisdom: He was the most competitive person I’d ever known, and he usually won. I lean toward the idea a lot of us are running our own races, trying to rise to the occasion and beat some past and limited conception of ourselves by doing something great. The paradox is that you’re running your own race alongside others running theirs, and in the same direction. You’re doing something great together.
This holiday weekend I find myself reflecting again on the boys who seized back the continent of Europe, and the boys and girls now graduating college and trying to figure out what history asks of them.
The week after next marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Normandy invasion. People will be thinking of D-Day and seeing old clips of the speechifying that marked its anniversaries. I will think of two things. One is what most impressed Ronald Reagan. He spoke at the fortieth anniversary, on June 6, 1984, at the U.S. Ranger Monument, and seated in the front rows as he spoke were the boys of Pointe du Hoc.
“Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here,” he told them. “You were young the day you took those cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys.” Many were old now and some wept to remember what they had done, almost as if they were seeing their feat clearly for the first time.
Reagan spoke with each of them afterward, and what moved him most wasn’t all the ceremonies. It was that a bunch of young U.S. Army Rangers had, the day before, reenacted the taking of the cliffs, up there with ropes and daggers, climbing—and one of the old Rangers who’d been there on D-Day and taken those cliffs forty years before got so excited he jumped in and climbed along with the twenty-year-olds.
“He made it to the top with those kids,” Reagan later told me. “Boy, that was something.” His eyes were still gleaming. Doesn’t matter your age, if you really want to do it you can do it.
A second thing I think of: My friend John Whitehead once told me, in describing that day, of a moment when, as a U.S. Navy ensign, he was piloting his packed landing craft toward Dog Red sector on Omaha Beach. They’d cast off in darkness, and when dawn broke they saw they were in the middle of a magnificent armada. Nearby some light British craft had gone down. Suddenly a landing craft came close by, and an Englishman called out: “I say, fellows, which way to Pointe du Hoc?”
Jaunty, as if he were saying, “Which way to the cricket match?”
On John’s ship they pointed to the right. “Very good,” said the Englishman, who touched his cap and sped on.
John remembered the moment with an air of “Life is haphazard, a mess, and you’re in the middle of a great endeavor and it’s haphazard, a mess. But you maintain your composure, keep your spirit. You yell to the Yank, ‘Which way to Pointe du Hoc?’ and you tip your hat and go.”
He would think of the Englishman for the rest of his life, and wonder if he’d survived. But of course he survived in John’s memory, then in mine, and now, as you read, in yours.
Now to the young today, the college graduates beginning their hazardous climbs. I was with some of them last weekend, at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. They were so impressive. They have grown up in a fairly strange country in a fairly strange era, yet their personal joy and optimism were almost palpable. The students of architecture wore on top of their graduation hats foot-high buildings, rockets, and what looked like a cathedral; when their school was called they shot off sparkling confetti, and everyone cheered.
The young men were vibrant, smart. The young women have a 4.0 in neuroscience, are on their way to Cambridge, and look like movie stars.
But they’re earnest, all of them, like people who can surprise you—can surprise themselves—by meeting a historical test. And surely they’ll be given one, given many.
I’d been invited to give the commencement address, and for me this had a certain weight. I had never been to Notre Dame, but it has lived in my head since I was a child watching on television the movies of the 1930s and ’40s. And so in my mind Notre Dame is Knute Rockne and the Four Horsemen, it’s the Hail Mary pass and Touchdown Jesus. It is the Golden Dome.
The day before commencement I went over to see the intended stage, and walked through the shadowed Rockne Tunnel with the banners above marking the championship years. To emerge from that tunnel and walk out onto that field—all I could say was: Wow.
In the unseen circularity of life, Notre Dame is a place deeply associated with my old boss, who early in his career played George Gipp, and ever after was called the Gipper. It is the first school he visited, in May 1981, after he was shot in March. Notre Dame that day, having a sophisticated sense of what he’d been through, wore its heart on its sleeve.
In his speech he had touched on great themes of twentieth-century conservatism—America was economically bound down and needed unleashing. I would speak on twenty-first-century conservatism—America is culturally damaged and needs undergirding.
Before I spoke a friend teased me: Reagan would be proud. I said I thought so but actually I thought of Nancy, who would have given me a look with three layers in it and said, “Good.”
Shortly before the ceremonies I met with scholars at the university’s Center for Ethics and Culture, which is devoted to the Catholic intellectual tradition within all disciplines. The students and teachers were learned, steeped in the meaning of things. I told the students the most important thing to remember as they enter the rough old world: Keep your faith. If you lose it, get it back. It is the thing you will need most, the thing without which nothing is real. “Everything good in your life will spring from it.
“You were born into a counterculture. It is the great gift of your life. The world needs this counterculture because even the world knows it needs something to counter itself.” Halfway through I realized I didn’t have to say this, because they already knew.
Now they push off, into whatever challenges history gives them. And what’s inside them, from sheer attitude to mere style, will affect all outcomes.
Which way to Pointe du Hoc? It’s the question for them and for all, isn’t it? What will our great achievement be? And who will be there with us, climbing alongside, as we seize crucial terrain together?
AN AMERICAN SONG, AN AMERICAN CRISIS
August 8, 2019
Moon river, wider than a mile
I’m crossing you in style someday
I’m in the waiting area of the doctor’s office and it comes on the Muzak system and I’m sitting peacefully, not scrolling or looking at headlines, and I hear the music and remember the lyrics and my eyes start to fill.
That old American song, mid-twentieth century, and those words…
Someone once said a hallmark of good music is that it is confident of the values it asserts. In this case those values include tranquility, order, harmony. But really it’s a song about yearning.
It has always seemed to me such an American song. I see a lot of songs as “such an American song.” Here are two examples off the top of my head. Al Jolson’s “She’s a Latin from Manhattan,” is about a 1920s vaudeville hoofer. Sultry, glamorous Latins are all the rage on the stage, so she’s changed her name and walks around with a tambourine passing herself off as a mysterious lady from Madrid or Havana. A guy in the audience falls in love but then thinks, Wait, I remember her! “Though she does a rumba for us / And she calls herself Dolores / She was in a Broadway chorus / Known as Susie Donahue.” It’s about wanting to make it in America and being whatever you have to be to do it.
Another “such an American song”: “TiK ToK,” by Kesha. “Wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy / Grab my glasses, I’m out the door; I’m gonna hit this city.” I guess it’s about a pretty worldly person, but in my imagination she’s a fifteen-year-old kid from Jersey, she’s on the Route 4 bus from Paramus, she’s from a beat-up family, no one’s taking care of her, she’s on her own, but she’s imagining an alternative self, this tough, careless, glamorous self she’s going to turn into when she gets to New York. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves to keep going, the worlds we imagine to keep up our morale.
But “Moon River”—I’ve always thought it such an American song because there’s not only yearning in it but loneliness. This comports with my sense of America as a vast place settled by people from somewhere else, most of whom were on a losing strain—no money, no prospects. Bandits who hadn’t been caught, adventurers, dreamers, earnest younger brothers who stood to inherit nothing, lost girls on their own. They got a chance and left families behind, left centuries of a certain way of being behind. In this way our parent-forgetting country was born and invented itself. They got to America, pushed west, lit out for the territories, searched for Sutter’s gold. Or, dragged from Africa, lived in the South, joined the great migration North. Always on the move, all of us.
“Moon River” is about how you’re going to move. It’s a promise to yourself: “I’m crossing you in style someday.” It’s not enough you’ll cross that river, you’ll cross it in style. “I will rise and everyone will see it, everyone will know. I’m going to make money and be respected.”
