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Greenppeace and Hustlers |
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For a year after I got out of college, I worked for Greenpeace in Washington, D. C. People often seem impressed by this tidbit of information, although their newfound respect usually lasts only until the inevitable follow-up question: “What did you do for them?” I know what they’re thinking—maybe I was writing ecopropaganda, or lobbying Congress, or getting myself arrested in some media-grabbing demonstration—and I always feel I should apologize when I tell them I was just a canvasser. Even the term “canvasser” is a stretch, because it conjures images of petition drives, letter-writing campaigns, voter education and other grassroots action. If I did any of that, it was only in service to my sole objective, which was to collect checks and make quota. A successful evening of canvassing was measured not in signatures but in dollars. Because our entire pay was commission-based, there was a Darwinian process of selection in the office that rewarded people whose primary focus was lining their own pockets. The most successful canvassers were rarely the dedicated environmentalists, who had a tendency to spend too much time talking about the issues or arguing with people philosophically opposed to Greenpeace. One smooth-talking guy who regularly brought in double quota was a hustler of the first order, a man who peppered his rap with phrases like “ozone layer” and “corporate greed” in between pleas for money but had no particular attachment to environmental issues whatsoever; I later heard he’d become a door-to-door meat salesman (who knew there was such a thing?) because it paid more. Another legendary figure in the office was a former junkie and habitual liar who liked to tell people he’d recently spent some months on the Rainbow Warrior trying to stop French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. (He went to tanning salons to maintain a well-bronzed, just-off-the-boat look.) The best canvasser I ever saw, the former director of the Ann Arbor Greenpeace office and someone I would not be surprised to see sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office someday, almost never brought up environmental issues; instead, he talked to people about the art on their walls. “People know why you’re there,” he said to us once. “You just need to find something in common with them. Get them to like you. If they like you, they’ll give you anything.” I got to thinking about these and many other colorful characters from my canvassing days as I read Walter A. McDougall’s new American history, Freedom Just Around the Corner. McDougall’s take on the United States is that it was from the beginning a collection of renegade colonies, founded and forged by a motley crew of “self-promoters, scofflaws, occasional frauds, and peripatetic self-reinventers” who grew it into the greatest nation of hustlers, in both the positive and negative sense, the world has ever seen. He introduces us to several dozen of these bootstrappers, some well known and even canonized (George Washington, Ben Franklin, Andrew Jackson) alongside many less celebrated figures who shaped American culture over 250 years, as Americans flouted England and launched their experiment in republicanism. Throughout, McDougall continually returns to his theme of America as a place of “permanent revolution,” where endemic “creative corruption” and “honest graft” continually fuel the engines of progress in ways that are frequently ugly but nearly always fruitful. The central irony of McDougall’s book is that while there may be no nation on Earth more committed to individual self-fulfillment and the accumulation of material comforts (what other nation’s leader would equate shopping with patriotism in a time of crisis?), there also may be no other country so wedded to a religious vision of itself as a “shining city upon a hill” where everyone is “created equal” and guaranteed “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Nor is there another national culture—save perhaps that of our direct ancestor, England—that so freely flogs itself for failing to live up to its own best intentions. McDougall notes that every generation of Americans is newly “disappointed” by the realization that “worldly ideals cannot be advanced except by worldly means.” For a nation of so-called pragmatists, we spend an inordinate amount of time asserting the purity of our motivations and impugning the intentions of others. We question the sincerity of uber-hustler Bill Gates’ philanthropy and ascribe base motives to anyone in power. We root for our favorite American Idols and Apprentices and would-be Survivors, then savage the winners. Our literary heroes, from Huck Finn to Holden Caulfield, see charlatans and “phonies” wherever they look, and like them we vow to never sell our souls, never compromise, never make a life-altering decision for the “wrong reasons.” Inevitably we let ourselves down. Gregg Easterbrook of The New Republic recently wrote a book, The Progress Paradox, on the question of why Americans are healthier, wealthier and more secure than ever before, yet no happier. But as McDougall illustrates, such an observation could have been made about Americans of any era: we “are freer than other peoples to pursue happiness and yet are no happier for it” because the standards we have set for ourselves are impossible. It took me a long time, long after I’d left Greenpeace, to accept the notion that it didn’t ultimately matter whether my fellow canvassers were out to save the world or pay the rent. Either way, the result was the same: Greenpeace had more money to keep its ships afloat and its lobbyists whispering in Congressional ears. To hear Walter McDougall tell it, my cohorts were giving me a first-hand demonstration of the spirit that made America so successful. Who knows? Maybe the hustlers can save the world yet. A2P Email
Drew Franklin at deep@annarborpaper.com. |
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