extra money, could you send me a wristwatch?” Delivering our cash to a dictorial and silly government was bad, but even worse was delivering our big ideas about centralization, economic planning, and social justice to a country that had 120 university graduates at the time of independence. Not that the Tanzanians didn’t understand our big ideas; they understood them too well. They just had no experience with how bad most big ideas are. They hadn’t been through Freudianism, Keynesianism, liberalism, www.heavensgate.com, and “Back to Africa.” They don’t have 10,000 unemployable liberal-arts majors sitting around Starbucks with nose rings. There’s even some evidence that getting ahead in the world comes from a lack of big ideas. Call this the Bell-Dip Theory. The United States is arguably the most-successful nation in history, but not—by any argument—the smartest. Japan, even in a recession, is an economic powerhouse, but we’re talking about a people in love with Speed Racer, whose most sophisticated art form is the haiku, an itty-bitty poem on the order of: An old pond. A frog leaping in. Sit on a pickle. Tanzania is one of those places called “developing countries,” as if the Family of Nations had teens, as if various whole geographical regions were callow, inarticulate, clumsy, but endearing, of course—you know, going through an awkward phase. And that’s about right. Every twenty-four hours of Tanzania is like a crib sheet on adolescence. There’s the dewy-aired, hopeful dawn. All is beautiful. All is fresh. Then, as the day goes on, the dust rises. The noise builds. Everything is seen in a too-vivid light. The glaring inadequacies of life are revealed. Enormous confusion develops. There’s a huge stink. And just when you’ve really had it— when you’re ready to call for the International Monetary Fund’s equivalent of “grounding,” when you’re about to take the keys to the goat or something—the whole place goes to sleep for eighteen hours. ¶¶¶ Robert McNamara (1916-2009), Secretary of Defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson and one of the architects of the policy of escalation in the Vietnam War. May he rot in hell. **** Lest anyone think 2008 was something new under the sun, between 1986 and 1989 1,043 out of America’s 3,234 Savings and Loan Associations went out of business. These small financial institutions had one thing in common with the big banks that would collapse twenty years later: Bad loans. But there was
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