The Missing Grey Zone

Following in the footsteps of President George W. Bush, U.S. News and World Report columnist Michael Barone managed to classify Americans into two camps. A May 12 column entitled "A tale of two nations" identified all Americans as either "hard" or "soft." According to Barone's overly simplified generalization, U.S. citizens apparently find themselves at a Frostian fork in the road when they turn 18. At this blessed age, they are no longer coddled, and they must decide to become the "hard" productive citizens that drive this nation, or seek shelter as "soft" bureaucratic free-riders who earn a pay check while benefiting from the sweat and toil of those "hard" Americans.

This piece had to have more to it than a juvenile analysis of American society. Not so. Apparently Americans, after overcoming the initial shock and joy of new rights gained upon turning 18-specifically buying cigarettes and pornography, along with voting privileges and military service opportunities-pursue one of two roads over the next 12 years. Those who recover from the jolt of newfound responsibility go on to form the upper crust of global society. As Barone states, "â_|by the time Americans are 30, they are the most competent people in the world."

This last sentence shocked me a bit and it took me two weeks to recover from such a bold, baseless statement. It took me several more readings to make sure that I understood him correctly. Unfortunetely, I understood him perfectly. His column was another example of the American arrogance that has lately become commonplace not only in other nations' impression of the U.S., but in our self-image as well. Granted, Americans accomplish many accolades, but to say that we are more capable than every other populace on the planet is foolish and another simple statement meant to play to American readers, who like to be able to complement themselves when they read.

Barone does not address many issues that stand to contradict his argument. He does not address the brain drain from India, Africa and Asia to the United States that fills many top positions in fields ranging from medicine to emerging technologies. Nor does Barone explain why the many intelligent people I've met in Africa, Australia, Europe and Canada couldn't compete for jobs with Americans. Then again I don't know him, so I haven't had the opportunity to tell him stories about "competent" people living abroad. He'd probably say that he meant the aggregate population. I couldn't really counter that since I've not met every one who inhabits the places I mentioned, but then again he, a Harvard and Yale educated columnist, hasn't met all that many of the 260 million Americans he so readily classifies. If he did he'd find that they don't really fit all that easily into his oversimplified dichotomy.

At this point, we're at an impasse. Thankfully, I've read Primo Levi's The Grey Zone which provides me a little support. Levi illustrated that not even Nazi concentration camp prisoners were all victims. There was a gradient between victims and perpetrators, where some prisoners dwelled to better themselves often aiding the SS. This Grey Zone certainly is not unique to the concentration camps. People are much too unique and too differently motivated to neatly fit into simple generalizations of good and evil, soft and hard. Americans are not different and cannot be placed at opposite poles.

These simplifications play well to audiences though because this is the technological age, where attention spans are as short as 45s and people get their news from lunch emails or tickers below the screen. The print media must uphold a responsibility to providing details and avoiding these over-generalizations. It is difficult to effectively approach any topic with only several hundred words, but columnists must opine carefully and not pander to audiences that crave brevity without detail or beliefs without true substance. Barone effectively played to his audience without inciting any objections to his model. Not a single letter countered his simple classification of Americans as "soft" or "hard." Maybe his readers took the piece as a complement believing that they fit in the latter category and that they drive America, or maybe the readers who fit in the former category are to lazy to object. Maybe, in a world where no longer can male and female serve as the only sexual classifications does the grey zone get ignored by the media. It's lurking out there, waiting to be examined rather than shuffled away in favor of oversimplifying analyses that does not aid in solving any problems; rather the preferred Barone method creates many problems through confusion, misunderstanding and alienation.

Besides writing for US News, Barone appears on the McGlaughlin Group, so he's accustomed to hearing "you're wrong." This is just another time for him to listen to those words. When more people understand that analyses like Barone's are simply wrong, then dilemmas will go unsolved and misinformation will spread, while academic inquiry suffers. Mr. Barone, Americans do comprise two nations, by my count they populate five.