After America полностью

I mentioned earlier that I always advise aspiring writers to not only write but do something. I have a particular respect for fellows who are brilliant at one thing but nevertheless like to potter at something else entirely. Frank Loesser was one of the greatest figures in American popular music, a man whose songs include “Heart And Soul,” “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and the score for Guys and Dolls. That would be enough for most of us. But I remember being very impressed to discover that he was also a prodigious carpenter and cabinetmaker whose home was filled with amazing pieces of his own design and construction. He once got one of those pompous letters from some Hollywood vice-president or other headed “From the Desk of….” So he went into his shop and spent the weekend crafting a beautiful life-size desk corner complete with inlay and moldings, and put it in the mail with a sheet of paper headed “From the Desk of Frank Loesser.”

On a broader socio-cultural point, people who don’t know where stuff comes from or how it works are more receptive to bigger government. That’s one reason why Canada and much of western Europe, both of which are more urbanized and in which more people live in small apartments, vote leftier than America. In my part of New Hampshire, we have to drill our own wells and supply our own water. Obviously, that’s not feasible on Fifth Avenue, or not without greatly spoiling Central Park. So water becomes just another thing that government takes care of for you.

The aforementioned John Ratzenberger isn’t merely an actor. He’s also the founder of the Nuts, Bolts & Thingamajigs Foundation, dedicated to reviving the lost art of tinkering.¹⁴ Familiar with the word? Messing about with stuff—taking it apart, figuring out how it worked, putting it together again with some modification of your own. What boys (and a few girls) used to do in the garage or the basement before the Internet was invented. “If we give up tinkering,” says John Derbyshire of National Review, “we might survive, but only as a bureaucratic empire of paper-pushers and lotus-eaters.”¹⁵ Tinkerers built America. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, all were tinkerers in their childhood. Everything from the airplane to the computer started in somebody’s garage.

Go back even further: the Industrial Revolution was a revolution of tinkerers. The great scientific thinkers of eighteenth-century England couldn’t have been less interested in cotton spinning and weaving. Why would you be? It was left to a bloke on the shop floor who happened to glance at a one-thread wheel that had toppled over and noticed that both the wheel and the spindle were still turning. So James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, and there followed other artful gins and mules and frames and looms, and Britain and the world were transformed. By tinkerers rather than thinkerers. “Technological change came from tinkerers,” wrote Professor J. R. McNeill of Georgetown, “people with little to no scientific education but with plenty of hands-on experience.”¹⁶ John Ratzenberger likes to paraphrase a Stanford University study: “Engineers who are great in physics and calculus but can’t think in new ways about old objects are doomed to think in old ways about new objects.”¹⁷ That’s the lesson of the spinning jenny: an old object fell over and someone looked at it in a new way.

In 2008, America elected a man with no “hands-on experience” of anything who promptly cocooned himself within a circle of advisors with less experience of business, of the private sector, of doing than any previous administration in American history. You want “change,” so you vote for a bunch of guys who’ve never done nuthin’ but sit around talking?

That letter from the post-American world a few pages back was addressed to those Americans of 1950. By the beginning of the new century, “1950s” had become a pejorative. Conservative pundits are routinely accused of wanting to turn the clock back to the Fifties. Not me. There is, after all, no need to turn the clock back because, fiscally and geopolitically, America’s clock is stuck in the Truman administration. At the U.S. Treasury, the State Department, the Pentagon, it’s forever chiming 1950. At the dawn of the American era, Washington was the last man standing, the victor of the Second World War and with its cities and factories intact, unlike Europe.