Omnibus: The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment

by A. J. Jacobs

  She was not happy. I called to apologize, which was the Washingtonian thing to do: he could be great at saying sorry.

  “Hello, Barbara. It’s your son-in-law calling to apologize.”

  “This is not working out,” she says. “We have different standards of cleanliness. You’re going to have to find somewhere else to work.”

  “Well, I know I made a mistake, but—”

  Damn. My cell phone cut out. I dial her back. She answers.

  “Hi, Barbara. Sorry about that, my cell phone seems to have died.”

  “No, it didn’t. I hung up.”

  “You hung up on me?”

  “I said what I wanted to say, and then I hung up.”

  “Wow.”

  Now, normally, my reaction would have been mild annoyance mixed with amusement. She’s a character, my mother-in-law. The first words I ever heard her utter were “I need a drink.” (She’d had a bad parking experience.) So generally I’m able to enjoy her quirks.

  But I’m hyperaware of manners right now. And to get hung up on? That was rude. Highly uncivil. I’ve been treated better by parking cops.

  I start to sweat. I punch in her number, ready to reproach her and curse and revile. Wait. I can’t do that. Follow George Washington’s lead. I click off.

  That afternoon, I sit down to write a letter to Barbara. I love the Colonial style of writing—the roundabout phraseology. “It is not without reluctance that I bring this up,” I start. “But I wanted to endeavor to elucidate my concern.”

  The beauty part is, this formal, repressed language actually makes me less angry. How can I be foaming at the mouth when I use words like elucidate?

  I sign it “A. J. Jacobs.”

  Julie laughs at me. “You probably don’t need the last name.”

  At least I didn’t write “Your humble and obedient servant,” the way Dean signs his e-mails.

  I drop the note off at Barbara’s apartment building. The next day, Barbara comes over to talk.

  “I’m sorry if I offended you,” she says.

  “And I am sorry about the cleanup.”

  “I just thought it was better to get off the phone quickly so nothing escalated.”

  “You liked the letter?”

  “It was very formal.”

  “Thank you.”

  It’s possible you could call the letter passive-aggressive. But the Rules encourage passive aggression. And I have to say, passive aggression gets a bad rap nowadays. It may not be appropriate in all occasions, but it’s a lot better than aggressive aggression.

  IGNORE GOSSIP LIKE GEORGE WASHINGTON

  Remember how Dean said George Washington has sensitized him to just how uncivil these times are? I think about that a lot.

  These are some seriously uncivil times. It’s been two weeks, and I made the mistake of looking at some comments about myself on the Internet. It’s a terrible habit, and I’ve been trying to kick it for years. But I keep sneaking back on.

  Today, I clicked on a YouTube video of me speaking about my Bible book. Among the comments:

  “His voice is sooo annoying.” (I’m a tad nasal, sort of Truman Capote without the drawl. Or maybe late-model Arnold Horshack.)

  “Does he remind anyone else of Beaker from the Muppets?”

  Another called me a “rabbit man” (a reference to my slightly buck teeth, I think, or maybe my love of lettuce).

  I read the comments with my finger on the QUIT button, so that if I get to a particularly harsh one, I can zap the window off my screen.

  These are brutal times. But the question is, Are they any more brutal than Washington’s era? I’m not so sure. There was some scurrilous, nasty stuff going on. Consider James Callender, a sleazeball journalist would have done quite well as an Internet troll. Thomas Jefferson hired Callender to write nasty articles about John Adams. When Callendar felt he didn’t get paid properly by Jefferson, he turned on Jefferson, writing a scathing article about Jefferson’s private life. He was the first to expose Jefferson’s affair with Sally Hemings.

  Luckily for me, of all the Founding Fathers, George Washington does seem the most civil. He wasn’t much of a gossip. And he didn’t believe others’ gossip, to the point of naïveté. In Washington’s second term, Thomas Jefferson started spreading nasty rumors about Washington—including that he was senile. Washington was told, but refused to believe Jefferson would say such things. Washington looked for the best in people. He was no Machiavellian.

  It makes me like George Washington a lot more. And Jefferson? Maybe I’m just falling for the pro-Washington propaganda, but he does seem seriously flawed.

  WEEP LIKE GEORGE WASHINGTON

  It’s late October, just a couple weeks until the election. As a moderate New York liberal, I’m legally required to vote for Obama. But I have to say, I’m looking forward to my two minutes behind the curtain, unlike voting for John Kerry four years ago, which felt like wiping the inside of the microwave oven—something I needed to do, but I knew wasn’t going to be much fun.

  Everyone compares Obama to his fellow Illinois man Abe Lincoln. But since I’m doing this project, I see everything through Washington-colored lenses.

  And to me, Obama is the political offspring of our first president. Consider:

  • Obama (aka No-Drama Obama) is famous for his mastery over his emotions. In true Washingtonian style, Obama even controls his facial muscles.

  • He’s deliberative. Like our first president, he doesn’t lead from his gut. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “perhaps the strongest feature in [Washington’s] character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration was maturely weighed.” Obama got slammed as indecisive for not voting on a bunch of U.S. Senate bills. But I have a soft spot for reasoned indecision.

  • He says he plans to surround himself with a cacophony of voices. Before Lincoln’s team of rivals, there was Washington’s team of rivals. I’m surprised the agrarian idealist Jefferson and the industrial realist Hamilton didn’t claw each other’s eyes out.

  • He styles himself a postpartisan president. Washington was prepartisan. He was appalled when the country split into political parties.

  I know. I’ve been swept away by this Obama thing. I’ve lost all perspective. I feel like the poet in the 1789 New Hampshire Recorder who wrote:

  Behold the matchless Washington—

  His glory has eclips’d the sun;

  The luster of his rays so bright

  ’Tis always day, there’s no more night.

  The next day, I call Dean to give him an update. I tell him that I had been skeptical of George Washington early on, but now I’m liking him more and more.

  “I remember I was reading Washington’s Secret War by Thomas Fleming,” he tells me. “I was on vacation at Villa del Sol in Mexico—that’s the beach in Shawshank Redemption, by the way. It’s where they always dreamed of going. I must have had a couple of Coronas. I put the book down in my lap. And I started to cry.

  “And my wife says, ‘What’s wrong?’

  “And I said, ‘It’s not what’s wrong. It’s what’s right.’

  “This man is amazing.”

  I’m glad Dean feels comfortable enough to tell me about his crying jags. Maybe it’s because his hero was also a weeper. I wouldn’t have thought it, seeing as he’s so famously stoic. But Washington wept in public several times. At the end of the Revolutionary War, Washington gave a speech to his men about how proud he was of them, and had tears streaming down his face.

  A few days later, at 11 P.M., Julie and I are watching TV in bed. John McCain has just given a highly civil and decent concession speech.

  Barack Obama strides onstage in Chicago’s Grant Park.

  “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” he tells the nation.

&
nbsp; Julie is crying. Jesse Jackson is crying. I’m having trouble controlling my face muscles as well.

  This is an amazing moment. Even if Obama did run for president instead of stand for president, it’s still an amazing moment. I hope Obama turns out to be a Washingtonian leader in the original sense and not Washingtonian in the Beltway sense. We’ll see.

  EVOLVE LIKE GEORGE WASHINGTON

  As my project wraps up, I’ve got a hankering to see George Washington in action again. Dean isn’t performing this weekend. But another reenactor is slated to appear at a French and Indian War battle near Pittsburgh. It’s where George Washington first tasted the military life, fighting on the side of his future enemies, the British.

  I get to the field right in time for battle. French forces, about a hundred of them, dressed in white uniforms with tall black hats, advance slowly from the left side of the field. The British forces advance even more slowly. It’s an organized and polite battle—the two sides take turns shooting at each other, never letting the affair descend into unpleasant chaos. The muskets—which are loaded with gunpowder but no bullets—sound like very loud microwave popcorn. Pop, pop, pop! The guns blow smoke rings that float up and disappear in the trees.

  Here in the spectator section, I’m standing among the members of the Boy Scout troop from Allegheny County.

  “Two AK-47s is all they need,” says one Boy Scout. “Mow those Frenchies right down.”

  The Brits have a kilt-wearing bagpipe player who walks behind the soldiers blowing a mournful tune. War was still brutal back then, but at least it came with a lovely soundtrack.

  The soldiers on both sides start dropping to the ground. Every few seconds, another one slumps and splays on the field. They are good splayers, these soldiers, arms and legs bent in all sorts of acute and obtuse angles.

  The Brits are almost wiped out. The head British officer surrenders to the French, who take him away for a vigorous pedicure, or whatever they did to their fellow gentlemen/officers.

  It’s been forty-five minutes and so far, no George Washington in sight. I ask the Boy Scout leader where the colonel is.

  He tells me Washington wasn’t in this particular battle, but is around somewhere.

  “You know where he’s camped?”

  “He might know,” says the Scout leader.

  He points to a stout reenactor in a green jacket and a brown felt hat. He’s a Pennsylvania infantryman.

  “Excuse me!” I call out. “I’m looking for George Washington.”

  The Pennsylvania soldier stomps over to me.

  “Colonel George Washington? You’re looking for Colonel Washington?”

  “Yes.”

  “The brash, arrogant young man?” He shakes his head. “He got us into this war. Brash and arrogant he is.”

  I laugh. I haven’t heard such blatant anti-Washington rhetoric. It seems almost sacrilegious. I’ve had my issues with George Washington, but this soldier seems unduly harsh.

  The soldier, I find out, is Mike, a veteran reenactor.

  “Did you fight in the battle today?” I ask.

  “No, I hurt my knee and figured the mud is slippery, so maybe I should sit this one out.”

  Mike’s been doing French and Indian and Revolutionary War reenactments for forty years, a survivor of about eight hundred events. He buys gunpowder in bulk, he tells me.

  “So that’s real gunpowder?”

  He nods.

  “You ever use live ammunition?”

  “No,” he says. Most reenactors are exceedingly careful with their guns—you’re not even supposed to jam the gunpowder down with a ramrod.

  “Someone might forget about it and leave the ramrod in there,” explains Mike. “And then it’ll fly downfield and spear a soldier on the other side. It happens.”

  He pauses. “Especially with Civil War reenactors. Those guys have no idea what they’re doing. Horrible. Horrible.”

  I wasn’t aware of this—the cold war between the Civil War and Revolutionary War reenactors. But Mike assures me the Civil War troops are a problem.

  “We’ve had converts,” Mike tells me.

  I return to the subject of Colonel George Washington.

  “I’m not a fan of the young Washington,” Mike says. “He turned out to be a good man when he was older. But as a young man? He was subversive. He tried to undermine his superiors. Watch what you read about him, because he’s glorified.”

  Mike didn’t know where the brash colonel was, so I wandered off. Finally, the wife of a French soldier pointed out the young officer a few hundred yards down the path. He had the red hair of a young George Washington, and a blue long coat. I approached.

  “Colonel Washington?” I said.

  “Yessir.”

  “I’m from a gazette in New York called Esquire.”

  “Oh,” he says. “How can I help you?”

  “I talked to a man just now who called you brash and arrogant.”

  Washington laughs.

  “That’s got to be Mike,” he says.

  “Yes, that’s who it was.”

  He scoffs. “He’s just jealous he has to wear that ugly green uniform.”

  The young George Washington—who, when not commanding troops, spends his time as a geologist named Bryan Cunning—is jovial and chatty. He doesn’t have Dean’s gravitas, and certainly breaks character more often than Dean. I thank him for his time. He tries to shake my hand, but I bow instead.

  “Oh yes,” he says. “Right.”

  As I drive back to New York, I think more about Mike’s unexpected rant than about Bryan’s Washington interpretation. Many of my books talk about how Washington evolved for the better as he got older. But no one had put it as succinctly as Mike. Washington was a selfish twit who turned into one of the greatest men of his time.

  The authors James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn come close in their book George Washington.

  In 1772, they write, Washington was a “military leader who had met with more failure than success. An acquisitive planter, a harsh slave owner. A politician more interested in local roads and hogs than international affairs. An ambitious, self-made man hungry for notice. A class-conscious member of gentry who enjoyed dancing, cards and fox hunting.…Could this elitist southerner with aristocratic inclinations fathom and embody the hopes of revolutionary Americans and reformers around the world?”

  In a word: yes.

  By the end of his life, as Joseph Ellis says, Washington was defined not by his selfishness but by his sacrifices. He sacrificed his cushy life on the farm to take the presidency. And after eight years, he sacrificed the chance for absolute power by walking away from it (a move that Britain’s King George III said made him the greatest man on earth).

  In my more cynical moments, I think that people can’t really change. In these moments I think: once a jerk, always a jerk. But Washington proves me wrong. He went from being self-centered to, if not a saint, then certainly a mensch. Maybe there’s hope for us all.

  CODA

  The biggest impact of this experiment was to drive home the point: be wary of first impressions. And second impressions. And third. I learned this in my Rationality Project, but no one shows it better than Washington.

  The more I read about him, the more fascinating he became. So complex, so full of contradictions, so continuously evolving. He seems torn between his two sides. The aristocratic side of him was highly aware of class distinctions. (Earlier in his life, he complained about the poorer farmers, whom he called “barbarians.”) And yet, the democratic side rejected the title of king and treated commoners with respect. He was distant, but friendly. He was full of rage but rarely expressed it. And he was inspiring. He was so inspiring, there’s a chance that, if I’d been around in the eighteenth century and had drunk enough Madeira, I’d actually have joined the patriots to follow him.

  Did this project change my life forever? Certainly not like the experiments in living by the Bible or attempting total rationality. W
ashington’s Rules had a lesser impact. They never sunk into my bones.

  That said, I do think about this experiment often. I like Richard Brookhiser’s point that our society overvalues “authenticity,” the notion that we have to be true to ourselves. “Well, that’s just human nature,” we say when excusing some atrocious action.

  If Washington had been true to himself—or at least his baser instincts—he’d have been an angry brat all his life. The results would have been disastrous. We’d all be eating bangers and mash, and July 4th would be just another day without fireworks or Will Smith movies.

  Whenever I’m true to my basest instincts, I’m a schadenfreude-loving, rumor-mongering, selfish son of a bitch. That’s the easy road. The hard part is trying to stand up straight, refrain from injurious words, refuse to be glad at the misfortune of others, remain skeptical of flying rumors, and, of course, shift not your private parts.

  Chapter Eight

  My Life as a Beautiful Woman

  PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY F. SCOTT SCHAFER

  I’ve been a beautiful woman for fifty days, and no one has compared me to a summer’s day. No one has said my lips are like rose blossoms or my throat is as smooth as alabaster.

  Men don’t have time for that anymore. We live in the age of transparency. Say what you mean and mean what you say. As in:

  “You are a very pretty lady.”

  “I think you are very attractive.”

  “You look hot.”

  I’ve been approached by more than six hundred men, and that’s one of the big themes I’ve discovered in their method: cut to the chase.

  The directness has its charms, but like everything else about being a beautiful woman, it has its dark side as well. One suitor tried to seduce me with this line: “I would like to stalk you.” Another said, “I am in a committed relationship but am looking for a girl on the side.” Are these guys honest? Sure. To the point? Yes. Creepy? As hell.

  I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up. I stumbled into this experiment as a hot woman. This one wasn’t premeditated. As a general rule, I dislike female impersonation. I have too many bad associations of men in skirts—Benny Hill, Uncle Miltie, Idi Amin. But sometimes there are good—or at least excusable—reasons to pose as a female.