Books! Actual books!
"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... his comic timing never fails"
-- The Wall Street Journal
"Pulls you in like a good sports story"
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Endearingly frank... jubilant... lighthearted and fast-paced"
-- New York Newsday
"A surprisingly touching memoir"
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Snappy and informative"
-- Associated Press
"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."
-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."
-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life
"A surprisingly intimate, entertaining book."
-- Orson Scott Card, 4-time Hugo Award winner, author of Ender's Game
"Funny, enlightening -- and just might help you win a million bucks on Jeopardy!"
-- A. J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All
"A masterful job of describing the feel of Jeopardy! in the heat of battle... I knew Bob was a great guy and a fantastic Jeopardy! player. Now I've found that he's also a wonderful writer. I think I'm starting to hate him."
-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history
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“Revelatory... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”
— Boston Globe
"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."
— New York Observer
"Only Bob could make a user’s guide to our increasingly hostile world this absorbing, this breezy, and—ultimately—this hopeful.”
— Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs
“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING. A gimlet-eyed look at the world we endure that’s also suitable for enjoying with a gimlet.”
— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."
— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review
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Sydney: Like A Prisoner Episode, But Better |
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Monday, 13 December 2004 |
January, 2004
Apologies for the delay in posting this, but I was down for a few days with
a case of "Bali Belly," a common malady for tourists to that fair island, caused
by the unfortunate circumstance that the public water and public waste streams
are often one and the same.
It's a lot like Montezuma's Revenge for Mexican tourists, although speaking
as one with both experiences, I can now vouch for the notion (once said to me
by a misty-eyed ex-girlfriend with a taste for flowery skirts) that "Bali never
really leaves your system."
This might be the truest thing she ever said to me.
But that's not a criticism of Bali per se; much of the third world faces
similar circumstances, and a birthplace-fortunate first-worlder inconvenienced
for a few days really has little business complaining. Hell, truth is, I've
really just sampled the native cuisine in full glory, and gotten a teensy reminder
of just what hell the world really is like for at least (and this is really
the number) two billion people.
So I spent a few days trying to keep an enlightened worldview about my own intestines
attempting to secede from my union.
But now, back to the travel-o-rama, specifically, Sydney:
I didn't realize it when arranging the trip, but in a way it always really ended
here in Sydney, at least the high-adventure part. After the exotica of South
Africa, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, how alien can Sydney possibly
be to an American? I realized even in Africa that the tarmac in Australia was
going to feel much like coming home.
What I didn't realize was just how much Sydney would feel like home --
in some ways, more than I've ever felt inside the United States.
That's not quite as nice a feeling as it sounds.
How's this for a first impression? Taking a cab from the airport, right away
I noticed something missing: the inch-thick bulletproof glass.
There wasn't any. Nothing.
How strange. Why, I could have whipped out a machete and gutted the driver,
or possibly dropped a grenade in his lap, or garroted him and dumped the body
in a swamp if I wanted. And that's just off the top of my American-cab-trained
head. There's still gassing, stabbing, and immolation to consider.
I didn't, actually. But still. How odd. How... trusting.
How nice.
Matter of fact, you're actually expected to sit up front, right next to the
driver, since, gosh, it's just more polite, and a happy little chat is a friendly
way to pass the time. And tipping is minimal -- rounding up to the nearest dollar
is common -- because cabbies are actually paid a decent wage.
I learned this from my friend (and former Jeopardy! Masters opponent)
Leslie, who lives in Sydney and met me at the airport, sharing the cab ride
back. Leslie's as bright and fun as you'd expect a Jeopardy! Master to
be, and about to leave Sydney (with mixed feelings) for a better job in Helsinki,
and thus eager to say goodbye to her adopted home just as I was saying hello.
So I got the nickel tour and a chance to hug somebody, which is like oxygen
after a good while on the road.
(Leslie's was the first familiar face I'd seen in a while, and I attribute some
of my gosh-this-feels-like-home-y-ness to that simple fact. You should, too.
But only some. Read on.)
Sydney waitstaff are also paid like actual human beings. In restuarants, I was
stunned to discover charge-card forms with no place even to enter a tip. If
you want, you can put a couple of bucks in change down (easy when the country
has dollar and two-dollar coins instead of bills, which saves the treasury a
boatload), but the service people are gonna eat OK one way or another.
It's hard to explain just how strange and different -- how much more, um, liveable
-- stuff like this feels. Which is heightened, not lessened, by the California-like
climate, English language, and ubiquitous familiar American brand names. Part
of you thinks you're home -- and then, when something is actually easier
than you're used to, you have to realize sadly that home isn't always quite
this nice.
This is probably a lot harder for Americans, given our national state of self-persuaded
perpetual universal bestness, than it is for folks from other countries.
But damn. Here it is.
(What are you feeling right this minute, as you read this? It's worth thinking
about. I'll get back to some thoughts on that, below.)
It's more than just clean air, clean water, and the best public transit system
I've ever seen (including buses, a light rail and tram system, ferries, a subway,
an extensive suburban rail system, and even -- yes! -- a monorail. Which is
just as useless, actually, as the monorail on The Simpsons. But still.)
These things seem to be just aspects of a fundamental difference in culture
from the U.S. which manifests in a hundred tiny ways. If I'm reading things
right: the social contract in Australia has yet to be denounced as a communist
plot quite the way that it has in America.
How naive.
Moreover, the idea of a collective good is still considered, yes, a collective
good.
Imagine.
So massive amounts of prime waterfront real estate -- land that in the U.S.
or many European countries would long ago have been sold off to a high-rise
hotel chain after some politician got his wallet sexed -- remains public and
green and gorgeous and open to all.
So you have a culture that measures itself not on the wealth of its richest,
but of its middle class. "Tall poppies" -- people who are "up themselves" a
bit too much -- aren't objects of admiration here, but scorn. The cars are modest.
The houses are modest. The people don't walk around quite so often wearing corporate
logos like a bunch of assimilated human billboards.
So the streets are remarkably clean -- not because you'll get your ass paddled
and wallet lightened otherwise (as in Singapore), but because people usually
actually pick up after themselves, and sometimes even after total strangers.
And large street signs ask Sydneysiders to do even better -- not with threats
or fines, and not with empty slogans, but with (get this!) actual hard data
concerning how much waste is being produced and what better targets might be
achieved.
So recreation areas actually have barbecues powered by coin-operated propane
tanks, which in the United States would be converted by teenagers into handy
high explosives in a matter of minutes, but which sit open and unguarded here
for years at a time.
I kid you not.
Speaking of recreation, the work-vs.-life priorities here seem relatively sane.
As an American traveling abroad, I'm constantly asked how long I'll be staying
somewhere, along with a pitying look. The two weeks of annual leave we get pales
next to the four or six that are customary in most of the developed world. (Is
our way better? Maybe, if a four-percent increase in work is worth a fifty-percent
reduction in vacation time, and the extra output isn't just lost in exhaustion...)
In any case, back in Hollywood, it's impossible to go anywhere without seeing
people working on laptops. Work isn't just for work anymore -- it's for eating,
relaxing, and possibly sleeping time, too, if anyone figures out the appropriate
WiFi/HumanSpine interface. But here in Sydney, I promise you this is true: I
haven't seen a single person working on a laptop. Not one. Free time,
by all appearances, is actually free time. Maybe I'm missing the backroom sweatshops
where Aussie drones are fingerbashing their Toshibas in near-sexual frenzy.
But somehow I don't think so.
It's also incredibly easy to talk to people here. Just say, "where are you from?"
Chances are, you'll hear about a part of the world you've never been. I don't
remember the exact numbers -- you can Google if you're interested -- but a hell
of a lot of people here are either immigrants themselves or their parents were.
Which also means you see every variety of skin, everywhere you look. I've read
of some racial incidents, and a few locals have uttered resentments (mostly
toward the Chinese, it seems), but the large majority of those I've spoken with
seem sincerely to take great pride in the city's multiculturalism.
And freedom of speech means something here in a way it simply doesn't back in
the States. Case in point: John Howard, the prime minister, is by most accounts
(and like many prominent politicians, anywhere) a lying ass. The difference:
unlike America's lying ass, Howard has already been censured by the legislature,
and has been roundly booed several times in public appearances, including the
opening ceremony of the Rugby World Cup, where 60,000 nigh-orgasmic rugger fans
wheeled from cheering to jeering when said ass dared to rear his head, forcing
him to stand silently for several moments.
Can you imagine something similar in the United States, land of the Best Free
Speechiest Freedom There Is? Hell, no. Try for yourself. Boo Bush in public,
and you're hauled away by security at a minimum, if you're lucky. At major appearances
and political conventions, protesters are shunted off to "Free Speech Zones"
out of the Praetor's eyesight and earshot (and thus that of the press, which
is to Bush as Jenna Jameson is to any actor at eye-level), defeating the entire
purpose of the first amendment.
Which country, pray tell, is freer?
If this place was one speck nicer, I'd half-expect my hotel room to include
the disembodied voice greeting Number Six in The Prisoner.
It actually started while passing through customs, believe it or not. Instead
of the standard frowny-faced inkpad-banging passport-slamming suspicious-glaremeisters
I'm used to in most countries, the Aussies greeted me with glad smiles and pleasantries.
I know that sounds like nothing, but you climb through customs on four
continents and see if you're not shocked when people call you by your first
name while checking your visa status.
I've been wondering if maybe I'm just happy to be back in the developed world,
and thus fabulizing the ordinary. But no. It really is different here.
A few nights ago, Leslie and I went to an outdoor movie screening in one of
Sydney's enormous beautiful public parks. I was carrying a plastic bag with
some food and books in it. So naturally, when we got to the entry, I started
fumbling between the bag and my ticket, trying to open the bag to show the ticket-taker
that I didn't have, I dunno, a bomb or an Uzi or perhaps a Predator Unmanned
Aerial Vehicle hidden beneath my corn chips.
Both Leslie and the ticket-taker looked at me, puzzled, not understanding my
"see the inside of my bag?" gesture. Oh. Um. They, uh, don't do that here. Right.
There's sort of this constant assumption in America -- never spoken, but omnipresent,
visible in almost every public space, if you pay attention -- that somebody,
somewhere, is about to commit a crime, right this minute -- and it might
even be you. So watch it, buddy.
From this assumption flow a thousand things; make your own list. But it runs
directly opposite to the spirit of the constitution, not to mention freedom
itself. Maybe America was always like that, and I just didn't notice when I
was a kid while they were teaching me a vast set of comfortable lies in school.
(And unless you learned that Columbus was genocidal, the pilgrims wore multicolored
garb, Lincoln was shot as part of a fairly large consipriacy for which several
people were hanged, etc., you were getting the lies, just like everyone else.)
Or maybe things changed. If so, I can't pinpoint when this happened. It wasn't
the aftermath of 9-11, certainly; we've all had bags searched at public events
for so long that I'm not even sure when it started.
But it's an amazing thing to suddenly sit in open air, free of the assumption
of guilt.
And so then Leslie were suddenly surrounded by hundreds of other people whose
bags might well have contained Sidewinder missiles for all we knew.
And then we sat down on the grass, ate our Predators and chips, and watched
as enormous flying fox bats circled lazily overhead.
And we watched an excellent movie -- "Japanese Story" -- in which the male hero
dies quite pointlessly, the heroine grieves, and nobody is redeemed in the end.
In other words: a movie that Hollywood would never consider (for nearly every
American movie includes the protagonist's redemption, usually through single-combat
in the third act), and which American audiences have been trained never to embrace.
The next morning, the TV in my hotel showed Tom Ridge clenching his face into
a smile and reassuring all of America that a) they were about to blow up, and
b) they should go about their business. Both. Simultaneously.
Is there a better demonstration of Orwell's doublethink?
And -- forgive me, any reader whose sense of American Bestness is offended;
I'm just being honest with you, my only true obligation -- the United States
didn't look quite like home anymore. Not the one I remember and have tried to
believe in my whole life.
So gee -- suddenly I'm in an actual nation of immigrants, one which values
equality, freedom, and the environment -- instead of a pretend one, where civic
leaders routinely utter soothing virtuous bullshit, and the people go along
because it feels a lot better than actually confronting the serious, urgent,
even deadly problems facing them.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the air in Sydney is filled with magic
flying wallabies dropping pixie dust from their kiesters.
I haven't seen them, anyway.
And in a few weeks I'll be back in Los Angeles.
There are friends and family I wouldn't trade for anything. There are also things
America does supremely well. (Retelling the exact same story of cinematic redemption,
for example.)
But I will miss the night Leslie and I watched a movie in the park, and what
was in my bag was my own business, not a threat to be assessed and managed.
One last thing.
Finally, now that I've written this, I also realize that in praising a place
as preferable in some respects to America, I will incite wounded anger in American
readers. My inbox is about to go apeshit.
I know this the way I know my name, since I've been writing for years. I've
been trying to sort out why it's about to happen. And this is my best guess:
Being honest about ongoing racial troubles in South Africa or the pollution
in Bangkok gives readers the chance to feel superior, even as they also get
to feel concern.
But being honest about the incredible beauty of Sydney Harbour, for example,
doesn't let readers feel superior. It doesn't reinforce our sense of collective
national bestness, as virtually every public utterance in America is expected
to.
(Not that we realize that, or might admit it once pointed out. Since we have
free speech and all, why, that's completely impossible.)
This blind spot about ourselves is precisely the sort of problem America ought
to be discussing with itself right now.
But instead, I'm just gonna get angry email from fellow Americans whose outrage
should be much better directed to improving the nation.
I don't hate America; I have loved it all my life. And it saddens me beyond
expression to see it not reach its potential, and to feel my own ability to
change its course dwarfed into near-impotence by an onslaught of near-criminal
mindlessness.
Sitting here, watching the grand show... like I said. Home doesn't feel like
home right now.
And the reponse to those words I'm surely about to get isn't exactly gonna help...
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