The Olive Tree, Lexus, and Voting in November

From his English village church, Reverend William Spooner stirred up unusual snapshot images in parishioners' minds on many a Sunday morning. He became the namesake for "spoonerisms."

A famous Spooner saying is, "Every one has a half-warmed fish in his heart," for "Every one has a half-formed wish in his heart."

A dramatic Spooner-like mishap happens when a speaker extends arms far outward and then pulls them in, hands pointing toward the chest, to illustrate the expression "...so near, and yet so far."

"Every one has a half-warmed fish in his heart" and backward gestures for "so near and yet so far" do not prevent the images of hope they carry. Swapped words or gestures do not prevent our getting the message or the picture. 

Thomas Friedman presented an important message by combining two powerful images in his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which I have often misspoken as "the olive and the Lexus tree." The Lexus-and-olive-tree concept frames an interesting picture of hope. It stirs up contrasts between the growing global economies on one side and up-close community ways and traditions on the other. Global economies, free trade, and wealth do not always abide easily with olive tree scenes, which feature home, family, and tribal ways at the center of the picture.

I do not remember if Friedman used the word "tribe" in his book. I remember, though, that when I first imagined the olive tree he used to represent an idea, I recalled photographs of a man or woman posed in an oasis of rare shade somewhere in North Africa or Southern Spain, from a long ago time. One could imagine a small group gathering there. Such a snapshot of the assembled family or neighbors sharing a meal and enjoying a shady rest would lessen the glare of impersonal competition for at least some moments. If part of such a close and familiar scene, many of us would want to freeze the time, if possible.  

I like the word "tribe," which suggests the people, age-old customs, and lasting places of daily life. Tribal places are those of our familiar contours, landscapes, and perspectives. They help us manage a collection of thoughts, feelings, and dreams.

Tribal  terrain includes vistas of the village, small town, or urban neighborhood where we grew up. It also, as the term "culture shock" suggests, applies to the national place and people that we think of as "home." Tribal terrain, the olive tree place for us, keeps in memory collective history, reasons, and traditions. There, unspoken understandings live in a vibrant still-life. It is a place of deepest color, of rich loyalties, and of belonging. It is anywhere in the world we have always called "home," from near or far, wherever we are.

Tribal terrain does not imply harsh shadings against the outside world. It can be a collection of scenes in memory where we welcomed the stranger approaching in peace.

Olive tree connections can be almost destroyed. When people say that the material world citizens "take so much for granted," they picture things and conveniences. Modern invention and the relative wealth now  points every day to a material landscape that, unchecked, leads to overexposure and careless competitions that disconnect communities at the core and often displace them. 

Perhaps this is, in part, what Beijing faces now as it prepares for the 2009 Olympics. I heard recently on the news that more hutongs, the alleyways of low city dwellings and courtyards, are being torn down for modern high-rise buildings in time for the Olympics. That means more than a changing physical landscape; it points to a changing way of people relating to each other.

One Beijing native, Liang Bingkun*, wrote that what he missed most when away from his family home or away from China, were "the ancient, elegant, familiar, lovable and plain lanes….unless I am back in the lanes, I have not returned home. Home is inseparable from them. To a certain extent, the alleys and lanes are the soul of Beijing."

To borrow from Thomas Friedman's term, that is an olive-tree point of view. If you go to the Beijing Olympics next year, will you be able to see Beijing's olive tree places, up close and personal? Will you glimpse some of its "soul" or, instead, drastic intentional displacements like those already in place in other parts of the world? The future beckons, and the places change over time. How will Beijing and other locations manage to balance the "tribal" focus that makes people know each other in deeply personal, meaningful ways and the material, which envisions increased independence, personal "space," and improved basic standards of health, work, and opportunity?

I was in Beijing exactly 10 years ago, and a friend remarked that there were fewer bicycles and far more cars than when she was there two years prior. When I was there, many hutongs remained as they had been for a very long time. They squatted, lowly, alongside tall building cranes and completed high-rises. At the time, the new buildings formed one of the most amazingly modern panoramas I had seen anywhere in the world, including downtown Singapore. Singapore, eight years before that, had been in the throes of starting over in older communities, tearing down block after block of home-business neighborhoods in the city's center. Snapshots of older men with game board tables on the sidewalks or curb-sides would soon be impossible to take.

The highly competitive, changing world view is increasingly a non-tribal world. It is erasing traces of being up-close with tradition and the personal. In fact, it often cuts off traditions in order to thrive. This includes more than sociological and economic traditions; unchecked, it can destroy solid tenets of morality and faith that have been like glue for civil and neighborly life. The new ways also tend to cast off historical perspectives.

We are in a political season, a presidential election year moving toward a close. We are asked to look homeward and we are asked to look outward. We are asked to "think local" then we are asked to "think global."

As I watch election reports, read accounts and editorial views, and listen as well as I can, I find myself looking beyond candidates. I am thinking of my family and town, of over-exposure and sometimes brutal change. I am also thinking of risks I think we must face and perhaps take in order to move forward. Yet, sometimes the word "deterioration" comes to mind. I am thinking of a country that is one national "tribe" for every American.

I know my national place of being has made and likely yet will make gross errors. Yet, by far to stop there would be like blacking out a multitude of good and real parts of the picture, to give an intentionally misleading impression. I choose to carry and look at the entire album, an often brave extension of history. There are good reasons why free countries are the hope of many beyond their shores. I know that today's free societies hold precious citizenship rights and privileges that multitudes of people yearn to experience.

Thinking of the olive tree does not mean that we do not care about "national security," "jobs," or "health care" and other pieces of the picture. It does mean, I believe, that we hold to the values attached to people knowing each other, giving mutual help, and making time to share memories and life.

In the midst of creating an overly romantic picture of  what the past has been, the present is, and the future can be, there appear glimmers of palpable olive tree beauty and meaning. To ruin or destroy priceless opportunities, hopes, and shared times would leave an unfinished record, a false picture.

There is no neatly tied package of answers to the strain between the olive tree and national or global economy designs. I have decided who I will vote for in November, yet I continue to listen to both presidential candidates. I want to know more about how each one sees this Lexus-Olive Tree world.

On Election Day, I will drive to a neighborhood retirement home across a busy intersection about a five minute drive from my home. I will vote in my new assigned voting place that has replaced my old one in the elementary school my daughters attended down the street, a short walk from home. Wherever my community meets to vote, I believe that "every one of us does have a warmed fish in his heart" and our dreams that sometimes seem so near and yet so far are worth the trouble of paying attention to what is of home, what honors home, and what guards home.

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*Life in Hutongs: Through Intricate Alleyways in Beijing. 1997. Liang Bingkun. © Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, China.