American pie, sliced up

One of the nicest things about America has been, at least for me, the fact that civic society had the courage to move on to building for the future rather than looking in the rear-view mirror and endlessly revisiting the past. That is not what I see today. Americans seem to be becoming like Indians, at least with respect to wrestling with the past. Just like there have been 30,000 books and articles in India on why or how partition could or should have been avoided, the Americans have inaugurated a new industry churning out millions of words about what went wrong in New Orleans. Local government corruption, racial discrimination, discrimination against the aged, federal government ineptitude, a president who represents greedy insensitive plutocrats, insufficient money for construction over 40 years, poor quality control in civil engineering processes, concrete walls that were not high enough, wicked developers destroying the fragile environments of river-fronts and sea-fronts, hungry persons who justifiably stole, terrible persons given to looting on account of innate evil tendencies, the fraying of the safety net, a reminder that the social contract is fragile, a direct result of engagement with Iraq rather than with the domestic poor… the verbal diarrhea is unbelievable.

And a direct result of this loud media over-reach is that everybody has instant and grandiose prescriptions. The government wants to spend 60, 70, or is it 600 billion dollars, with each actor adding to the mountain of pork. The president cannot talk of sober reconstruction. Doing so would only provide ammunition to political opponents. The essence of modern spindoctoring is that every disaster, man-made or God-ordained is a PR opportunity. So let us launch a great American urban homesteading new deal, whatever that may mean. We have not had the time to think through anything. But that does not matter. The media demands not action, but a semblance of action. The Moloch of today will not be denied. It is not only easy, it is obligatory to measure everything in short-hand. Money is the best short-hand.

So we all need to put a few billions of dollars on the table. Where there is honey, there are bees. Where there is money, particularly government money, there are contractors, consultants, more contractors and more consultants. And in this day and age there are lawyers and lawsuits, malpractice judgments and punitive damages, juice and more juice. The lackadaisical and fiscally irresponsible throwing of money at the problem will not only not solve the problem but will be seriously corrosive of the civic landscape. A vested interest will develop in exaggerating the impact of natural calamities in the future and reinforce the already growing tendencies of self-indulgent victimhood. A nation where entrepreneurship is defined by the production of goods and services demanded by ordinary people by the private sector, can easily deteriorate into a nation where the most successful entrepreneur is the contractor who lives off government largesse and who develops an ability to manipulate public opinion to force the government to spend more and more in the pursuit of its new-found role of providing insurance against the acts of God. Alexander Hamilton must be turning in his grave!

My perceptive friend Pinto said to me: “Jerry, they have a horoscope problem. Their stars are ill-placed. They are going through a hard time.” Pinto may, in an uncanny way, have hit upon it. For what is a horoscope problem, but a matter of character. And character, as the ancient Greeks knew, determines destiny. Americans can become whiners and complainers on the lookout for doles and relief payments, asking their government to do for them what their forefathers would have done for themselves. They can abandon their belief in individual initiative and enterprise and make government contractors their new heroes. They can paralyse themselves with inquiries, commission and committees in endless blame-games. They can even fall into the trap of totalitarian promise-makers that the state can insure its citizens against nature itself. Or, oddly enough, they can take a lesson in resilience from the dignified poor of India who do not whine when earthquakes or tsunamis hit them, who accept help with grace and carry on to rebuild their lives with calmness and courage.

Will America continue on this slippery path of a media-induced world where everyone is a victim and is in search of a nanny-state to bail himself or herself out? Or, by a supreme effort, will they go back to their traditions of self-help and civic action and recover their heritage? New Orleans has posed these questions starkly. Those who wish America well must be concerned as to whether the prognosis will indeed be a sanguine one or not.

The writer is chairman and CEO, Mphasis. Write to him at jerryrao@expressindia.com