by Bill Moyers
Since we last talked there’s been a spike in private contractors in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
What we’re seeing under President Barack Obama is old wine in a new bottle. He is sending one message to the world, but the reality on the ground, particularly when it comes to private military contractors, is that the Bush policies are still in place. Right now there are 250,000 contractors fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s about 50 percent of the total U.S. fighting force, which is very similar to what it was under Bush. Having said that, when Barack Obama was in the Senate he was one of the only people willing to take up this issue. And he put forward what became the leading legislation on the part of the Democrats to reform the contracting industry. I give him credit for doing that, because he saw this as an important issue before a lot of other political figures did. He spoke up at a time when a lot of people were deafeningly silent on this issue. As president, he has tried to implement greater accountability structures. We now know, in a much clearer way than we did under Bush, how many contractors are on the battlefield. He’s attempted to implement some form of rules governing contractors, including greater accountability when they do commit crimes. All of these things are a step in the right direction. But, ultimately, these companies are still carrying out inherently governmental functions, and that includes carrying a weapon on battlefields.
Obama inherited a quagmire from the Bush administration. What’s he to do?
There’s no question that Obama inherited an absolute mess, but the reality is that he is escalating the war in Afghanistan and maintaining the occupation of Iraq. If Obama was serious about fully ending the occupation of Iraq, he wouldn’t allow the United States to build a colonial fortress that they’re passing off as an embassy in Baghdad. Bill, this place is the size of eighty football fields. Who do you think will run the security operation for this eighty-football-field-sized embassy? Mercenary contractors.
You’re suggesting that we will be leaving a large mercenary force there.
Absolutely. In fact, you’re going to have a sizable presence of U.S. forces in the region. We’ve seen reports from Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News’s Pentagon correspondent, quoting military sources saying that they expect to be in Iraq fifteen to twenty years in sizable numbers. Afghanistan is going to become Obama’s war. If the United States, as President Obama says, doesn’t want a permanent presence in Afghanistan, why allocate a billion dollars to build a fortress-like embassy, similar to the one in Baghdad, in Islamabad, Pakistan, and another complex in Peshawar? Obviously there will be an increase in mercenary forces, expanding the U.S. military presence there.
Walter Pincus, an investigative reporter at The Washington Post for thirty or more years now, also reports that these contracts indicate how long the United States intends to remain in Afghanistan. He pointed, for example, to a contract given by the Corps of Engineers to a firm in Dubai to expand the U.S. prison at Bagram in Afghanistan.
Right. Look, even as President Obama regularly says, “We’re going to have Guantánamo closed by early next year,” we see an expansion at Bagram. They’re spending $50 million on it. You have hundreds of people held without charges. You have people being denied access to the Red Cross in violation of international law. And you have an ongoing position by the Obama administration, formed under Bush, that these prisoners don’t have the right to habeas corpus. There are very disturbing signals being sent with Afghanistan as a microcosm. Not to mention these regular attacks that we’re seeing inside of Pakistan that have killed hundreds of civilians with robotic drones since 2006.
Afghanistan underscores the fact that the military is actually stretched very thin. Do you think the American people have any idea how their tax dollars are being used in Afghanistan?
No. No idea whatsoever. We’ve spent $190 billion on the war in Afghanistan, and some estimates say that within a few short years, it could end up at half a trillion dollars. I think most Americans are not aware that many of their dollars being spent in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to for-profit corporations there. These are companies that are simultaneously working for profit and for the U.S. government. That is the intricate linking of corporate profits to an escalation of war that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address.
The rise of “the military-industrial complex.” You wrote that the Defense Department paid the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR more than $80 million in bonuses for contracts to install what proved to be very defective electrical wiring in Iraq. Senator Byron Dorgan called that wiring shoddy and unprofessional. Why did the Pentagon pay for it when it was so inferior?
This is perhaps one of the greatest corporate scandals of the past decade, the fact that Halliburton, which was once headed by former vice president Dick Cheney, was essentially given keys to U.S. foreign policy and allowed to do things that proved dangerous for U.S. troops. This was a politically connected company that won its contracts because of its political connections.
The army hired a master electrician, according to congressional testimony, to review electrical work in Iraq. He told Congress that KBR’s work in Iraq was “some of the most hazardous, worst-quality work” he’d ever inspected. And that his own investigation found improper wiring in every building that KBR had wired there.
And we’re talking about a huge number of buildings. This should be an utter scandal that should outrage every single person in this country. And yet you find little mention of this in the corporate media.
Do you get discouraged writing about corruption that never gets cured?
I don’t believe that it necessarily doesn’t get cured. I’m very heartened by the fact that we have a very vibrant new independent media landscape developing right now. I once put in the tagline of an article that I wrote early on in the Obama administration that I pledge to be the same journalist under Barack Obama that I was under President Bush. It’s time to take off the Obama T-shirts. This is a man who’s now in charge of the most powerful country on earth. The media in this country has an obligation to treat him the way we treated Bush in terms of being critical of him. I feel like many Democrats have had their spines surgically removed these days, as have a lot of journalists. The fact is that when you are killing civilians, even unintentionally with these robotic drones, in what is perceived to be an indiscriminate way, you’re going to give rise to more people who want to attack the United States.
The argument is that these drones are enabling the United States military to kill the bad guys without exposing Americans to danger. There’s truth in that, right?
These drones sanitize war. It means that we increase the number of people who don’t realize war is hell on the ground. And it means that wars are going to be easier in the future because it’s not as tough of a sell.
You will find agreement among people who say war is hell, but you’ll also find a lot of people in this country, a lot of Democrats and Republicans, who say Jeremy Scahill is wrong. That we need to be doing what we’re doing in Afghanistan because if we don’t, there’ll be another attack like 9/11 on this country.
I think that what we’re doing in Afghanistan increases the likelihood that there’s going to be another attack, because we’re killing innocent civilians regularly. When the United States goes in and bombs Farah Province in Afghanistan and kills civilians, it has a ricochet impact. The relatives of those people are going to say maybe they did trust the United States, maybe they viewed the United States as a beacon of freedom in the world, but you just took that guy’s daughter, you just killed that guy’s wife. That’s one more person who is going to line up and say, “We’re going to fight the United States.” We are indiscriminately killing civilians, according to the UN Human Rights Council. That should be a collective shame that we feel in this society.
SARA LAWRENCE-LIGHTFOOT
The sociologist and educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot has dubbed that quarter century of life between the ages of fifty and seventy-five “the third chapter.” Ther
e are 76 million Americans in that category, with more arriving all the time: reportedly, another baby boomer turns fifty every 7.6 seconds. For her book The Third Chapter, Lawrence-Lightfoot traveled the country gathering the stories of men and women who have taken new paths in the penultimate chapter of their lives and discovered that it can be a real page-turner—an exhilarating time of passion, risk, and adventure.
Her own life has been a continuing course in adult education. I first interviewed her for my series World of Ideas when she was a young professor at Harvard. During her thirty-nine years on the faculty there she has earned an international reputation as a teacher, researcher, and writer, winning the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (popularly known as the “MacArthur genius award”) and Harvard’s George Ledlie Prize for research that makes the “most valuable contribution to science, or ... the benefit of mankind.” Among her several other books are I’ve Known Rivers, which explores creativity and wisdom through the lens of “human archaeology”; The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other; and my favorite, Balm in Gilead, about her mother, the pioneering child psychiatrist Dr. Margaret Lawrence.
When Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot retires she will become the first African American woman in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named for her.
—Bill Moyers
Here you are now, writing about aging. What are you trying to tell us?
Several years ago at almost every cocktail party, dinner party, professional conference, and meeting, someone would lean into me for what I began to call confessional moments. Something they were truly excited about, passionate about—a new adventure for them. Their voice held both extraordinary passion and excitement, but at the same time some reticence. It was as if they weren’t sure we should take too seriously what they were talking about. Yet it couldn’t be denied—they felt deeply about it. I began to wonder what these moments were about. The closer I listened, the more I realized they were talking about new learning in their lives, new adventures they were taking, new risks. And here’s the thing—their commentary about these moments was so much more excited than talking about their work, or even, at that particular moment, talking about their family. I wanted to know the text and the subtext of these confessional moments. I decided to investigate, and I realized they were on a search for meaning, for purposefulness, in the penultimate chapter of their lives. Something resonated with me about this, and I began to research what I call “the third chapter”—the years between fifty and seventy-five.
And what did you find?
That we’re ready for something new; that all of us, to some degree, experience burnout. Burnout is not about working too hard, or working too diligently, or being overcommitted. Burnout is about boredom. In some ways it’s about moving beyond the boredom to compose, to invent and reinvent the path that we’re on.
Yet you say that while they would talk excitedly and with passion about this vision, this confessional moment, there was a note of fear in their voices.
Right. I think two things are happening there. One is that we are still a youth-obsessed culture, and we tend to think we should be in retreat at this stage of life. But these stories that I was hearing were about moving out, taking an adventure, going against the cultural norms embedded in most of our lives. The other thing is that it’s hard to leave these roles that have given us status, responsibility, maybe also influence and power. Those roles have become comfortable. To go on this new journey feels terrifying at first.
One of the interesting revelations in your book is your emphasis on how the pendulum has swung back and forth toward aging. There was a time, in the early days, when Americans powdered their wigs in order to look older. Then came a time when aging was considered an incurable disease, to be treated in old folks’ homes. But now you describe this growing old—aging—as a time of great excitement and adventure and passion. What’s happened to bring about this change in our perception of the elderly?
We’re living longer. That’s one big piece. The arc of our lives has changed enormously. We’re not dying at fifty. We are, if we’re lucky, living to eighty, eighty-five, ninety. So this period that I’m talking about, between fifty and seventy-five, is a penultimate period. It offers us the opportunity and the challenge of doing something meaningful. This is perhaps the transformative time of our lives, the most exciting, in terms of new learning. Limitless in its opportunities.
A lot of people don’t experience it this way because the cultural shifts and the institutional shifts haven’t yet happened to encourage them, meaning that most people really do see this time, as I said earlier, as a time of retrenchment. They don’t enjoy the beauty, the wisdom, the experience that come with aging. We continue to look at younger people as those who have the energy and drive and new ideas, right? Now, I must say that Erik Erikson, my favorite developmental psychologist from way back in the early 1950s, talked about the stages of life across time. He talked about this third chapter as the penultimate of eight stages, the next to the last. And he said, even back then, that each one of these stages is characterized by a crisis, a crisis of whether we’re going to move forward, progress, or whether we’re going to move back, regress. This is always the tension at each of our developmental stages, between progression and regression. And in our third chapter the crisis is between what he calls “generativity” and “stagnation.” Sounds very dramatic, right? Generativity has to do with using your energies to serve, teach, mentor, express yourself through art, to innovate, give something to society, and to leave a legacy. Stagnation, on the other hand, means stasis, redundancy, caution. I’m going to stay right here and make my mark in an individual pursuit.
There’s something of a cultural and political factor in this. It was in 1935, during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, that the Social Security Act was passed, and people were told they have a “right to retire.”
And a lot of people have experienced quitting work as a kind of death. But the forty people whose lives I trace in the book did not decide to retire but to go on doing meaningful work, figuring out ways to be productive, creative, innovative, and purposeful.
You acknowledge that these forty people do not represent the majority of people in this country. They’re affluent. They have the means to make choices, to go this way and not that way. But there are six, seven, eight million people over fifty-five in this country who are living in poverty. They don’t have choices.
Right. Well, we think they don’t have choices. I do talk about perceived abundance, how we experience the choices in our lives. A factory worker who’s been laid off from his job in Madison, Wisconsin, tells me that he and his wife went to the flea market every single Saturday with their stuff, trying to trade it or sell it, so that they could put food on their table and continue to feed their family. One Saturday, he saw these strange and interesting sculptures and pieces of art made by artists who were bringing their creations to the flea market. And he said, “You know what? I could do that. I’m a welder. I’m good with metal. I can do that.” And he went home and began playing around with the metal in his house. It so happens that he has loved dinosaurs ever since he saw Jurassic Park. And he begins to create these animals, these sculptures. He takes them back to the flea market. People become interested. He sells them for almost nothing. It catches on. And by the time he’s talking to me, he’s telling me that he’s gotten his first gig with an art gallery. So his innovation, his resourcefulness, and ultimately his pride in his own creativity come through. This is a factory worker.
You say there’s a difference between this new learning we have to do when we enter the third chapter and the old, narrow cognitive learning of the classroom. What’s the difference?
Almost everyone that I talked to for this book, even if they had been very successful students in school, even if they had very successful careers by traditional standards, talked about the fact that the learning that goes on in the third chapter is often contrary, a contradi
ction to the ways in which they were taught and excelled in school. School taught us to move quickly with speed, to be singular in our ambitions, to be competitive, not waste time, not show failure or weakness. And in the third chapter, they talk about risktaking and collaboration as cultural aspects of learning. We need to fail in order to discover the best way that we can learn. As one person said to me, “I’ve had to unlearn old school habits.”
To make a fool out of ourselves, in your words.
Absolutely. To be willing to fail and make a fool out of ourselves, at least in the short run. And, of course, the ingredient that’s so important, which is humor, being able to laugh at ourselves. Lighten up. Not worry about our facade and our persona, but really just get into the process.
One of these people tells you that she’s learned that patience is a major gift of life. That it’s so important to do things slowly. She says she had forgotten this over the course of her life.
That’s right. She’s a filmmaker. And she talked about the fact that it was always rush, rush, rush. And her parents had insisted on “quickly, quickly, quickly.” Always being the best by shooting your hand up first, by making it to the front of the class.
And what she realized in her third chapter was how glorious it was to slow down. How glorious it was to be able to be reflective, to be meditative. My favorite thing about this period is restraint. How wonderful it is—this is my own revelation—how wonderful it is to know when not to talk, when not to move forward. When it’s best to listen and sit back. When it’s best to just witness and observe. That slowness of pace offers us the opportunity to see things newly, to discover things that we hadn’t seen before, to take the small, incremental steps rather than expect the large leaps forward.
