February 4, 2010--Snowbirding: What I'm Learning On My Winter Vacation

Some of my New York City friends continue to ask what I'm up to down here in South Florida. They think of me as someone who has Big City etched in my DNA and thus would wilt in this small-town environment as much from the smallness as from the heat. It hit 84 degrees here the other day and for me that usually spells discomfort. "Maybe it's my advancing age," I tell them, "But I'm fine with the heat."

"But don't you need at least a dose of winter cold," they ask, "to keep you alert and stimulated?"

"I'm fine with the weather here," I say, "In fact, I like it. I assume it must be an aging thing, but in Florida I don't have as many pains in my joints as I do up north at this time of year."

How could they not understand this? By not pressing me they may be showing sensitivity about my age or at least recognition of the inevitability of aches and pains that are more common to someone as old as I. And, in truth, some New York friends, almost of my generation, from personal experience know well about this since they are at the moment where it is 28 degrees and are feeling some of the very same cold-induced aches.

Thus, shifting the subject, they press on, "But," they wonder out loud, "you seem to be spending a lot of time with people who are politically very conservative." I nod. "And doesn't that make you crazy? All that Obama bashing? All those anti-science doubts about global warming? All that suspicion about anything governments do? Aren't you taking your coffee every morning among Teabagger?"

"Well, maybe not exactly Tea Party folks; but yes, many of my friends here are proud Republicans and for the most part much more conservative than I. In fact,” I paused, “I like that at least as much as I enjoy the warm winter weather.”

I can hear their incredulous silence. I know they must feeling that the hot temperatures have not only sapped my physical energy but also wilted my ability to think analytically. They are surely saying to themselves, “He’s trying too hard to fit in in an alien culture. Sad, he used to be so tough minded and true to his convictions.”

To this I would say, “Quite the contrary. On a daily basis, as a result of encountering these, to me, contrarian points of view I am frankly feeling more politically and ideologically challenged than, don’t bite my head off, from what I usually experience in New York where we all tend to agree with each other. Yes, you may have preferred Hillary and I Obama, but there was never any question that we would support whoever won the nomination. Isn’t it true that our major disagreements have been about movies? Is Avatar really a remarkable movie as a movie or is it merely a technological wonder. Things of that sort. Is this not true?”

More silence.

So I suspect either I am right about this and that my downtown friends prefer to let it remain an unspoken acknowledgement that this is true or, more likely, they’re not buying any of it.

“So,” I say, “let me give you an example.”

“Fine. That would be helpful. About what?”

“About military equipment.”

“What?” This I can hear loud and clear.

“Well, jet fighter planes.”

“What?” comes through even louder.

“You heard me. F-16s, F-22s, F-35s.” I wonder from the static on the phone line if perhaps they have hung up. But then I hear ice cubes rattling around in a glass I realize they went for a drink to help them get through this.

“There’s this guy here. Harvey. He’s really smart about a lot of things. He had a terrific college education, then went to law school, and now runs a family insurance business. His father was a jet pilot during the Korean War. Sounds like quite a guy. Unfortunately he died a few years ago. I would have loved to have met him. Well, Harvey is not only a conservative Republican of the libertarian stripe—a real one (he does for example support a woman’s right to have an abortion)—but also quite a space and military buff.

“As he puts it, he likes to pull my chain by bringing up all sorts of subjects about which we disagree. As much to provoke me as to get a discussion going. Sometimes he succeeds at both. His skepticism about the science regarding global warming always gets me worked up. He says the case is not yet made that humans contribute to it. The science, he says, is not ’settled.’ I respond that the atomic theory wasn’t settled when we embarked upon the Manhattan Project and yet we proceeded. We go back and forth about things of this kind.

“Currently, we’re fighting about fighters. Jets. He knows so much about this that I don’t see the need to check his facts. The other day he was giving me a hard time because I had written a blog a few months ago about the Obama administration’s decision to reduce production of the ultra state-of-the-art stealth fighter, the F-22, claiming it was too costly to build more than we currently have and was not needed considering the dangers we face. In addition, they cut back the number being ordered since we were also spending hundreds of billions on developing the F-35, the so-called Joint Strike Fighter, which could be adapted for use by the Army, Navy, and Marines.

“This made Harvey crazy,” I continued with friends up north, “in part because with little knowledge I was poaching on his territory. But more because he felt this was a shortsighted decision by the Pentagon. This represented cost cutting for the sake of cost cutting without taking into consideration the long-term threats we might face when China begins to flex its own military muscle. I pooh-poohed this, claiming that China was too smart to bankrupt themselves, as we have, to become a military juggernaut. They are doing just fine as it is and are figuring out non-military ways to dominate the rest of the world. Us included.

“He not only told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about but also that I hadn’t done my homework about the fighter planes we would be left with if we didn’t complete our original F-22 plans. ‘For example,’ he said, ‘did I know about the Russian-built fighter, the Su-30MKI?’ My blank stare told him that I of course knew nothing about it. In fact, I had never even heard of it. Noting this, he continued, ‘Well, if you had done your research before typing up that blog of yours you would have discovered that both our current F-16s and the projected F-35s are no match for it.’

“I looked at him skeptically, since my image of Soviet or Russian aircraft is that they are clunky and have never been a match for ours and, what’s more, their pilots are ill trained by comparison to ours and that, God forbid, if it ever came to combat with them, our guys would have no trouble shooting them out of the air.”

When I said all this to my New York friends, especially the reference to the dogfights and the mention of the image “shooting them out of the air,” I could hear them taking big swigs of their gins and tonics and saying, “You need to come home. Back to New York. And I mean now!”

“Hear me out,” I said, “I haven’t been transformed into a gung-ho type. I’m trying to tell you that by being here and encountering good guys such as Harvey, I’m learning a lot. Really. I’m having some of my assumptions challenged. So let me finish about the fighter planes. I’m almost done. Then you can hang up and go back to whatever.”

“OK, but hurry up, we’re about to go uptown to the theater.”

“So Harvey said to me, ‘Do a little reading, will you, because the Indians have been buying Su-30s from the Russians and in a war game situation with the Indians not too long ago, our guys, flying F-16s, were wiped out. Those Russian fighters are much hotter than ours and are able to turn on a dime. Our boys didn’t have a chance. They’d look out of their canopies and on their tails they’d see their Indian “adversaries.” They called the games off before they were scheduled to end since there was no contest.’

“Shook up by what he was saying, I said to Harvey, ‘You need to get me stuff to read about this. Not that I necessarily doubt you, but I need to do my own reading about this.’ Later that day by e-mail I had a whole lot of stuff from him. (A sample is linked below.) And sure enough, Harvey is right. The Russians are making these planes and they are superior to our best existing jets.

“So, I don’t know how to think about this,” I confess to my Manhattan friends, “Nor do I know what to do. The Cold War is over; but long run, who knows what’s going to happen in the world? Am I certain, are you certain that we have nothing to fear from the Russians or the Chinese? I don’t mean now but maybe 20, 30 years from now? If not, why are the Russians building these planes? Perhaps out of national pride? They lost the Cold War and so maybe this is one way for them to regain stature. But are you sure about this?” I paused and then added, “Well, I’m not.”

With this they hung up and raced up to the theater district.

If they had remained on the line, I would have said, “I don’t like being confused. I admit that I don’t really like having my assumptions challenged or, worse, shaken, but if I’m wrong about certain things, shouldn’t I be open to learning?”

I hope so. Thus, thanks to Harvey for getting me to think more about this. Though he continues to be dead wrong about global warming, across-the-board tax cuts, what to do about Iran, the gold standard . . .