My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2, #23, December, 1996

BAXTER IN CHARGE

You may have heard that President Clinton is running a bit short on cabinet members. Between the ones who've jumped, and the ones who've been pushed, it's getting so that if our attorney general, Janet Reno, shows up at a cabinet meeting, she's a quorum.

Clinton's most immediate problem is to find a new secretary of state. This will have to be a person with remarkable intellectual and personal skills, someone with a glittering resume, experience in diplomacy or the military, and the ability to convince Jesse Helms, the rabidly conservative head of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, that he is sufficiently hard on Communists.

What I would like in a secretary of state is a little different. I think it would be nice if we had a historian in the job.

History is something that Americans have never been all that good at. We don't grow up surrounded by it, the way you in Europe do--our oldest churches and historic buildings are a bit more than 300 years old. We are always focusing on the present, or, better yet, the future. For a lot of us, history just isn't all that real. It's the kind of cutesy, self-conscious quaintness we see in trendy restaurants and antique shoppes, the Hollywood-set sort of history we see at Disneyland.

This, I think, does a lot to explain some of the dumber things we have done in our foreign policy. We got into Vietnam in spite of the fact that France had been fighting a losing battle there for years, had been humiliated, and had given it up as a lost cause. After World War I was over, Woodrow Wilson apparently drove the other statesmen nuts with his idealism and his total failure to understand the historical hatreds and rivalries of the countries whose destinies and boundaries he wanted to rearrange.

We are such a young country, perennially adolescent, maybe, with that utter conviction that we have a purer, less corrupt vision than our elders, and that it is our job to save the world and remake it in an image of ourselves.

During the cold war, I think it must have been very difficult for countries on the sidelines to have their own fates held hostage as the two super-powers played with other governments like so many pawns in a chess game. Because the Soviet Union was very comfortable with raw power--there's a reason tthat the traditional cartoon characterization of the Soviet Union was the Russian bear. And the United States--well, I think of the United States as Baxter.

Baxter was my sister's dog. When he stood on his hind legs--which was WAY too often for comfort--he was well over six feet tall. He was so eager to see you that he'd rise up on his hind legs and embrace you; if he knocked you over in the process, that was part of the fun. His front end never understood what his hind end was doing; he never made the connection between his frantically wagging tail and the sound of smashing glass and the vases and knick-knacks lying on the floor. When he bounded through the house--the only way he knew how to move--chaos and destruction followed him, but he never noticed. He not only was ignorant, he didn't know enough to KNOW he was ignorant.

He fondly believed he was a lapdog. He would sit on the floor, staring beseechingly into your eyes. Then he would put his paws up onto the couch. Then he would climb up. And he'd start to noodge you. You'd move over. Then he'd noodge a little closer, and you'd move again. Pretty soon, you had Baxter on your lap. If you valued your person or your clothing, you'd get up. Either way, on top of you or in place of you, Baxter now occupied the entire couch.

Now, there wasn't a shred of harmful intent in Baxter's body. He was a cheerful, slobbering hunk of canine energy, who adored everybody. He couldn't help it if the letter carriers and newspaper boys misunderstood his thundering bark and jet-propelled approach. If people were scared to death of him, it was just because they didn't understand how good his intentions were.

Still, you wouldn't want him in charge of your household. Or your country. Especially if he wasn't even your own dog.

So for 43 years, the Russian bear and the dumb dog wrestled with each other, and the rest of the world stood on the sidelines, trying not to get caught between them, moving the fragile stuff out of the way, and hoping to God neither of them would knock over the nuclear weapons.

You must have been really glad when the Berlin Wall came down, and the Russian bear, tired and grievously wounded, went off into the corner. Now all you have to worry about is that over-enthusiastic puppy.

That's why I'd like a little historical knowledge in our next secretary of state. Better yet, a whole lot of historical knowledge, with a fair sprinkling of humility about America's place in the world. Goodheartedness is not a bad starting place for a country's relationship with the world. But absence of malice is not enough. In foreign relations, clumsiness matters.

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