LEARNING FROM HISTORY

I’ve nearly finished just one of the four volumes of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. At 1000 pages it’s a marathon experience and because everything is described in such painstaking detail you feel as though you are really there on stage. Most notably you become increasingly conscious of the need to understand the numbers because in a democracy you rely on the votes not just the oratory.

It’s a world of smoke filled rooms, whisky, men and horse-trading. It feels horribly old fashioned with the Southern States intransigent in their position towards and deep rooted hatred of the black population. It’s hard to warm to the key players who with a few exceptions are unprincipled and unscrupulous. This hasn’t the warmth of a West Wing but it’s completely gripping.

LBJ is himself a conundrum. He’s a mixture of passion and pragmatism with pragmatism, the need to get the votes, always coming first. As politicians go he was regarded by Richard Nixon as alongside the two Roosevelts as the most accomplished politician of the 20th century - that’s tricky Dicky’s analysis.

Gripping it may be but these 1000 pages have tarnished my idealism. One by one the Liberals were driven to tears of frustration by the Senate voting against laws on lynching on the grounds it was illogical to legislate against a specific form of murder and by their refusing to allow a vote on civil rights. But I’ve also a grudging regard for the seriousness of the players. Their politics was all about the “art of the possible” with a scrupulous avoidance of the uncertain.

And when Johnson became President after the assassination of John Kennedy he introduced ground breaking Civil Rights legislation albeit against a backcloth in the previous years of implacable racial hatred.

So what’s changed?

Not as much as we’d like to think. We have the makings of Civil War in Spain, right wing resurgence in Austria, Germany and Italy and widespread corporate corruption. If this is modern civilisation you can keep it.

In America we have a President who remarkably makes George Bush (of blessed memory) look like an urbane liberal intellectual. Race riots are on the cards and “giving the knee” on the playing of the National Anthem is vividly descriptive of a torn nation.

What would LBJ have made of all this? He’d have wondered what on earth had happened to the Democrats, what had happened to democracy and how America could regain the respect of the rest of the world. He’d also I imagine be fancying his own chances of being the Democratic candidate in 2020 and of winning.

And what of the  “mother of parliaments?” Nicholas Hytner in Saturday’s Times excoriates the “frivolity, vanity and self-indulgence” of amateur mischief-makers like Boris and Gove in unleashing the forces of hell in Britain.

In the 1950s we had racism and intolerance everywhere but also an overwhelming caution about mischief-making and the unleashing of uncontrollable change.

We could learn from that.

WHERE DO WE LIVE?

What interests me is how we feel; where our true north is. Where we live, live in our head as opposed to where we physically sleep or where we work are different things. I know people who think nothing of commuting a thousand miles a week, or who camp near their place of work before driving home.

After the wall came down in East Germany someone hailed a cab to go home. He said to the Taxi Diver:-
“Can you take me to …”
“No need to ask,” replied the Cabbie “I know where you live.”

Apparently most of the Stasi became taxi drivers when their security role ended. But where they lived had changed in their heads.

I was talking about football to my grandson when he said there was a boy at his school who was exceptionally gifted at it.  In talking about this success he said that this boy came from a different country.

“Oh where does he come from?” I asked. To which he replied without missing a beat.
“Manchester”.

Yes, Manchester a different country,  all on its own, full of great footballers - nothing to do with the rest of us.

It was Christopher Marlowe in the Jew of Malta who said “The past is another country”.  And you realise the truth of this in listening to UKIP. This other country is one of nostalgia, when summers were always sunny, when steam engines drove our trains, when cricketers wore white flannel, when business lunches were fuelled with claret and cigar smoke.

I simply don’t do nostalgia. I think the future is a different country and, if we choose to make it so, a better one.

I am currently doing work across Europe. Sweden, Poland Germany, Greece, Italy, France, Britain, Ireland are all terrific, bright, different but united (in the English language and in in an attitude to doing business). These people are not defined by where they come from but by where they live in their heads.

Unashamedly I’m pro EU albeit anti-Euro bureaucracy. My philosophy of life is the same as one-time US President Lyndon Johnson’s (cynical as it may sound). He was talking about an obstreperous colleague who was thinking of resigning:

“It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

That’s how I feel about Europe - the biggest economy and most civilised in the world. The more I work in Europe the more I think of it as one country.

The most changed country is America whose view of the world swung eight years ago. They gave up on old Europe and swung their attention west to the Asian powerhouse. I don’t blame America - that’s probably right for them.

But it leaves an opportunity for us. We can and should be the key portal for the rest of the world into Europe…it’s something we do really well - because it’s where most of us working really live and do business intellectually.

Colourful Thinkers